For him.
Leonidas’s return had changed everything, just as she’d imagined it would.
The world had gone mad when the fact he’d been found alive had hit the wires. Reporters and law enforcement and his board of directors had been in fits all around him, his family had hardly known how to process it and had acted out as they always did, but beneath all of that, the truth was that this homecoming was Leonidas’s. Not hers. This had nothing to do with her.
Susannah had been a widow for all of her marriage. And she’d deliberately maintained that position these past four years because it was that or succumb to a far worse situation.
But with Leonidas home, she was free.
No matter that he was looking at her now with an expression she could only describe as predatory.
“I appear to have misheard you.” His voice was nothing but cold warning, but she made herself meet his gaze as if she couldn’t hear it. “Would you repeat that?”
“I think you heard me perfectly well,” she said, as if that trembling thing wasn’t taking her over. As if she didn’t feel there was a very good chance it might sweep her away. But she told herself he couldn’t possibly see that, because no one ever saw her. They saw what they wanted to see, nothing more. “I want a divorce. As soon as possible.”
“We’ve barely been married for any time at all.”
“Perhaps it feels that way to you because you can’t remember it. But I can.” She forced a smile and kept it cool. “Four years is actually a very long time to be a Betancur.”
“That sounds as if you do not wish to be part of my family, Susannah.” He inclined his head in that way of his that reminded her that there were people out there in the world who considered him a god. And it wasn’t a metaphor. “No one can blame you in this, of course. They are an unpleasant, scavenging, manipulative lot, and that is on a good day. But they are not me.”
“Leonidas—”
“You are married to me, not them.”
“That argument might have worked four years ago,” she said faintly, because the truth was, it was working now and that was the last thing she wanted. She didn’t understand herself. She’d worked tirelessly all these years to find him so she could escape and now she could do just that, her body was staging a rebellion. Her breasts hurt when she was with him. They ached so much it echoed low in her belly, and the fire of it made her feel entirely too hot. So hot she was afraid he could see it all over her. “I was a very malleable teenager, but that was then.”
“And this is now.” She didn’t think he moved or did anything in particular, and yet somehow, there was no more air in the room. As if he’d taken it all and was holding it ransom right there in front of her. “And my need of you is dire. Would you refuse me?”
“I would like to,” she told him, smiling to take the sting out of it. But the way he regarded her suggested she had succeeded.
“Tell me, Susannah, why did you track me down?” he asked after a moment. When the gold of the city outside had long since blended into the gold of his eyes and she worried she’d be eaten alive by the gleam. “Why did you come all the way to Idaho and climb up that mountain when it would have been so easy to stay right here? Everyone believed me dead. You could have left me there and no one would have been the wiser. Not even me.”
“I really, really want that divorce,” she told him as blithely as she could, but she could hear the catch in her voice. The breathlessness.
What she didn’t want was this conversation. She’d naively assumed that there wouldn’t be anything to discuss. Leonidas didn’t know her. He couldn’t possibly want any kind of relationship with her, and the truth was, he likely hadn’t wanted one back when. She doubted that he was even the same man who had left on that plane four years ago. And it wasn’t as if she would note the difference, because they’d been strangers thrown together in a marriage convenient to their families, and no matter that she’d had teenage fantasies to the contrary.
This was the perfect time to draw a line under their strange, doomed marriage, and go on with their lives. Separately.
Before she was forced to face the fact that after saving her virginity all this time—after turning away Leonidas’s cousins one after the next and after shutting down each and every delusional suitor who’d tried to convince her that they’d fallen in love with her smile, or heard her laughter across a room, or found her unrelenting use of black clothing seductive—she’d thrown herself at this man.
Leonidas hadn’t known who he was. But she’d known exactly who she was, and that was what she couldn’t forgive.