A Baby to Bind His Bride

But he had every intention of walking out of his.

He rolled out of the bed, leaving her there in this chamber of his that had somehow become most of his world, despite how tempted he was to taste her all over again. All her flushed and sweet flesh, his for the taking, as she’d curled up there and breathed unevenly into his pillows.

God, how he wanted more.

But he’d remembered who he was. And that meant he couldn’t stay in these mountains—much less in this prison of a compound—another day.

He braced himself against the sink in his bathroom and didn’t allow himself to gaze in the mirror that hung there above it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see what he’d become, now that he knew the difference. Now that he could remember what he had been like unscarred, unscathed.

When he’d been a different sort of god altogether.

He took a quick shower, trying to reconcile the different strands of memory—before and after the accident. Leonidas Betancur and the Count. But what he kept dwelling on instead was Susannah, spread out there in his bed with her blond hair like a bright pop against the cheerless browns and grays he’d never noticed were so grim before. She’d looked delicate lying there, the way he remembered her from their wedding, but his body knew the truth. He could still feel the way she’d gripped him, her thighs tight around him and the sweet, hot clutch of her innocence almost too perfect to bear.

Leonidas shook it off. He toweled dry, expecting he’d have to cajole her out of his bed. Or dry her tears. Or offer some other form of comfort for which he was entirely unprepared and constitutionally ill-suited. Leonidas had no experience with virgins, but conventional wisdom suggested they required more care. More…softness. That wasn’t something he was familiar with, no matter who he thought he was, but he assumed he could muster up a little compassion for the young, sweet wife who had tracked him down out here in the middle of nowhere and returned him to himself. Or he could try, anyway.

But when he returned to the bedroom, Susannah wasn’t still curled up in a replete, satisfied ball, like a purring cat. Nor was she sobbing into his sheets. She was on her feet and putting herself back together as if nothing had happened between them.

Nothing of significance, anyway.

That pricked at Leonidas. He opted to ignore it.

“We have to think about the optics of this, of course,” his immensely surprising wife told him as she pulled her shift back on and then smoothed it over her belly and thighs with quick, efficient jerks that reminded him how she’d tasted when she’d come apart beneath him. “We can’t have the lost, presumed-dead president and CEO of the Betancur Corporation shuffling out of a mountain hideaway like some kind of victim. And we can’t allow anyone to suggest there was a mental break of any kind.”

“I beg your pardon. A mental break?”

Susannah only looked at him over her shoulder, her blue gaze somehow mild and confronting at once.

Leonidas didn’t know why he had that sour taste in his mouth. Much less why his body appeared not to mind at all, if his enthusiastic hardness at the sight of her was any guide.

His voice was stiff to his own ears when he spoke. “I have no intention of telling another soul that I lost my memory, if that’s what concerns you.”

“What concerns me is that we have to construct a decent narrative to explain where you’ve been for the past four years,” she said evenly, turning around to face him as she spoke. “If we don’t, someone else will. And surely you remember that you are a man with a great many enemies who will not exactly greet your return by dancing in the streets of Europe.”

He didn’t know who this we was. He hadn’t known who he was for four years, and he certainly didn’t know who Susannah was. His memories of her were so vague, after all, especially in comparison with the vibrant creature who stood before him in this room that had never held anything but his thoughts. He had a faint flash of their wedding, or the pageantry of it, and a flash of her blond hair above that theatrical dress she’d worn. He could hear the distant echo of the lectures he’d received from his mother on the topic of why it was necessary he marry a woman he had not chosen himself and what he owed the family as the acting head of it after his brutal, controlling father’s death. His mother, selfish and deceitful and lavish in turn, who’d never sacrificed a thing for any reason—who had given her violent husband the son he’d demanded and then done nothing to protect Leonidas from the old man’s rages. His mother, whom he’d loved despite all the evidence across the years that he shouldn’t, and whom he’d obeyed because he hadn’t had it in him to break her heart.