A Baby to Bind His Bride

Leonidas Betancur was not a sentimental man. She knew that. Neither with his memory nor without it. The scars on his body hadn’t made him into someone new, they’d chiseled him into a harder sort of perfect marble, that was all. He was more beautiful, somehow, for being tested—and surviving—but he was still made of stone.

She knew. She’d felt him surge inside her and send her shattering into pieces.

And Susannah wasn’t a teenager anymore. She’d grown out of the fairy tales that had colored her youth because she hadn’t known any better.

She knew better now. She wanted only to be free.

“You must know there can be no divorce,” Leonidas said now. Darkly, that gaze of his still fixed on her. “Not so soon after my return.” His hard mouth moved into something only an optimist would have called a smile. “Think of the optics.”

“I’m sensitive to optics, certainly.” She was proud of how even her voice sounded. How controlled. “But I also want my life back.”

“What life do you mean, exactly?” He tilted his head slightly to one side and she felt that sense of disconnection again. As if they were in two places at once, and one of them was the compound where he had ruled supreme. “If memory serves, and of course it may not, the life you led before marrying me was little better than a prison. A pretty one, I grant you. And that was the appeal, of course. Your promised naïveté. You were more sheltered than the average nun.”

She’d gone stiff and she didn’t even know why. “What you talking about?”

“It is amazing what things stay in the memory, even when the chief financial officer’s name has gone up in smoke.” Leonidas wandered across the office, and that should have taken a bit of that predatory focus off her. He wasn’t even looking at her, after all. But somehow, Susannah did not feel at all at her ease. “Your father promised you to me when you were very young, you must know this.”

“Of course I know it. I never forgot it in the first place.”

She regretted her petulance the instant she spoke, but if it bothered him, he ignored it. Which only made her regret it more.

“Your father is not a kind man, as I’m sure you’re aware,” Leonidas said in that same dark way. He poured himself a measure of something from his personal bar, dark and amber, but he didn’t drink it. He only swirled it in its tumbler and stared at it as if he was studying it. “Nor is he a good one. He sought to sweeten the pot, you see, when I was less interested in the match than he wished me to be.” His gaze rose from the crystal and met hers, and it took everything Susannah had not to flinch. “He wasn’t simply selling his daughter, you understand. He promised me you would be untouched. Completely and wholly unsullied. That was meant to sweeten the deal. A virgin sacrifice, all for me.”

There was no reason why Susannah’s mouth should have gone dry. Why her heart should have pounded too hard and her eyes feel too bright. It wasn’t as if any of this was a surprise, not really.

But on the other hand, he was talking about her life. And all those years she’d spent in her overly strict boarding school, forever fielding intrusive questions about her virtue. When there had been no moral reason for her to remain pure, the way her parents had pretended there was.

When there had never been anything to it but leverage.

“Whatever my father is or isn’t is immaterial.” She shrugged, and hoped she was managing to keep her expression clear, because there was no point mourning her parents when she already knew exactly who they were. “This is about me. This is not about what a teenage girl thinks she owes her parents. It’s about what I want.”

Again, he didn’t appear to move. And still Susannah found it difficult to pull in a breath.

“And what is it you want?”

“Freedom,” she replied at once. Perhaps a touch too intensely. “I want my freedom.”

“And what do you imagine freedom looks like for a woman who was the Widow Betancur?” he asked quietly. “Where do you think you can hide from the influence of my name?”

She heard the trap around her. It was as if she could feel iron closing in on her from all sides, and the funny part was, though she knew she should get up and run while she could, she didn’t move. There was something about that sardonic lash in his voice. There was something about the way his dark gaze met hers, and held.

“I am no longer a widow,” she reminded him. “You are standing right in front of me.”

“And yet you are still dressed in dark clothes that might as well be fully black, as if you anticipate a second funeral at any moment.”