A Baby to Bind His Bride

He stood there and watched her sleep for a moment, aware that his heart was pounding at him and that he should probably be concerned that it was so easy for him to slip back into the sort of headspace the Count had always occupied. But he wasn’t. The truth was that the Leonidas Betancur who had got on that plane and the man who had been dragged from its ashes weren’t so different. Neither one of them had believed in much besides themselves. The Count had possessed a version of morality, but it had all been arranged around the fact he’d believed he was at the center of everything.

Susannah had changed that, as well. She’d knitted him together and made him care about her, too. It should have outraged him. Maybe on some level it did. But more than that was the deep, abiding notion that she belonged with him and anything else was intolerable.

Especially now that she was carrying his child.

It was the beginning and the end of everything, and he’d be happy to fight with her about it on his favorite private island, where she could scream into the impervious ocean if she liked and it wouldn’t do a single thing to save her. If he was honest, he was almost looking forward to watching what she’d do when she realized she really was stuck there. With him.

Leonidas smiled, then tucked a strand of her golden hair behind her ear. He had to order himself not to bend closer and put his lips to her sweetly flushed cheek, because he knew he wouldn’t stop if he did.

But he forced himself away from her, out into the hall.

Then he called for his staff and his plane, and methodically set about kidnapping his wife.

* * *

Susannah jolted awake when the plane touched down and she had no idea where she was.

She knew she was on one of the Betancur jets, though it took her a moment to recognize the stateroom she was in. She clung to the side of the bed as the plane taxied in, frowning as she tried to make sense of the fact that she’d apparently slept through an entire flight to somewhere unknown.

Paris gleamed in her memory. And the doctor’s visit. Her pregnancy, confirmed.

And what had happened after that announcement, there before the fire.

But everything else following it was a blur. She had the vague recollection of a car moving through the city in the dark, her head pillowed on Leonidas’s shoulder. Then the spinning sensation of being lifted into his arms.

She might have thought she’d been drugged but she’d felt this way before, and more than once these last weeks. This powerfully exhausted. The good news was that she knew it was the pregnancy now, not something that required a hospital stay, or that allergy she’d been half-convinced she had to Leonidas.

When the plane came to a full stop she stayed where she was for a while, then rolled out of the bed, surprised that no attendant—or confusing, breathtaking husband—had come looking for her.

She stepped out into the corridor, blinking in the light that poured in from the plane’s windows in the common areas. It told her two things—that the shades had been pulled in her stateroom and that wherever they were, it was morning.

And when she looked out the windows, she could see the sea.

She made her way to the front of the plane and stepped out onto the landing at the top of the jet’s fold-up steps. She blinked as she took in the soft light, then looked around, realizing after a beat or two that she was on a small landing strip on a rocky island. She saw silvery olive trees in all directions, solid hills covered in green, and the sea hovering in the distance on all sides, blue and gray in turn.

And Leonidas waited at the foot of the stairs, leaning against the side of a sleek, deep green Range Rover.

It was only then that she became aware of what she was wearing. The long-sleeve shirt she slept in and a pair of very loose yoga pants. And there was only one way that she could have come to be wearing such things, she thought, when she had no recollection of putting them on. When the last thing she knew she’d been wearing was that green dress at the ball.

Although she hadn’t been wearing much of anything in front of the fire.

And maybe that was what shivered through her then. The sheer intimacy of the fact he’d dressed her. She imagined him tugging clothes into place over her bare skin, then pulling her hair out of the way…

It wasn’t heat that moved through her then, though she thought it was related in its way. It was something far more dangerous. She tried to swallow it down, but her feet were moving without her permission, carrying her down the metal stairs whether she wanted to go or not.

And she could feel Leonidas’s dark gaze on her all the way.

She made it to the bottom of the steps, then crossed over to stand in front of him, and the silence was what got to her first. She was so used to Rome. Paris. Great cities filled with as many people as cars. Foot traffic and horns, sirens and music. But there was nothing like that here. There was a crisp, fresh breeze that smelled of salt. No voices. No sounds of traffic in the distance. It was as if they were the only two people left on the earth.