A Baby to Bind His Bride

This was the truth of Leonidas Betancur. Susannah had absolutely no doubt. Ruthless, bordering on grim, seeming practically to burn with all that power he carried around so effortlessly inside him.

This was the man she’d married. This was the man she’d given her innocence to, then made a baby with.

And she had no one to blame but herself, because he’d never hidden any of it. He was a Betancur. This was who he was and always had been.

“I am your cage,” he told her, in the kind of voice it didn’t surprise her at all had led men to abandon their lives and follow him up the side of a mountain “The marriage, the Betancur name, all of that is noise. The only prison you need worry about is me, Susannah. And I will hold you forever.”

She wanted to shake. She wanted to cry—put her head down and sob until her heart felt like hers again. She wanted to scream at him, beat at him with her fists, perhaps. Pound on him until something made sense again, but she didn’t do it. That same impossible grief—because it couldn’t be joy, not here, not now—rocked through her again.

She sucked in a breath and tried to straighten her shoulders. “If that was meant to make me feel better, it failed.”

“You are carrying my child,” he blazed at her, and it took everything she had not to jump. “I don’t know what kind of man you think I am, but I don’t give away what’s mine, Susannah.”

It was possible the top of her head exploded. She surged forward, recklessly taking her finger and poking him in the chest with it. “I am not yours.”

Leonidas wrapped his hand around hers, but he didn’t pull her finger away from him. He kept her hand trapped against his chest.

“I will not debate you on that, my little virgin. But it doesn’t change the fact that only I have ever had you.”

“I was the widow of one of the most famous men in the world.” She tugged at her hand, but he didn’t release it. “I couldn’t exactly pop into a club and pick someone up to have sex with, could I?”

“But you would have, you think. Had you been a less identifiable widow.”

She frowned at his sardonic tone. “I would have divested myself of my virginity before the end of your funeral if I could have. Happily.”

She threw that at him, but he only laughed, and she hated him for it. Or she hated herself for feeling so unsteady at the sound.

“I don’t believe you,” he told her. “You pride yourself on your control, little one. It’s obvious in everything you do. The only place you cede it is when you are beneath me.”

She shook at that, and she knew he saw it. Worse, he could likely feel it in the hand he still held against the steel wall of his chest.

“I’m an excellent actress. Ask anyone in your company. Or your family.”

“Deny it if you wish, it makes no difference to me.” This time when she tugged on her hand, Leonidas let her go. And it didn’t make anything better. He regarded her with that dark stare of his that she was sure could see all the things she wanted to hide. All those feelings she didn’t want to name. “But do not imagine for even one second that I will let you wander off with my child. Do not fool yourself into some fantasy where that could ever happen, prison or no prison. It won’t.”

“You can’t keep me here.” Her voice didn’t even sound like hers. Susannah supposed she sounded the way she felt—frozen straight through.

Or at least that’s what she thought she felt. The longer she spent around this man, the less she seemed to know. Because there was a perverse part of her that almost liked the fact that he wasn’t letting her swan off, out of his life. The way everyone else in her life had if she’d proved less useful than they’d imagined she’d be.

“I can,” he said quietly.

“You’ll have to spend your every waking hour trying to keep me locked up if you want me to stay here,” she warned him. “Is that really what you want?”

“I think you’ll find that I won’t need to expend any energy at all,” Leonidas told her. Almost happily, Susannah thought, which she knew damned her even before he went on. “The geography takes care of that. It is an island, after all, in an unforgiving sea.” He shrugged, clearly amusing himself. “All I have to do is wait.”

CHAPTER TEN

SUSANNAH DIDN’T SPEAK to him for a week.

In that time, she explored every inch of the island. She had access to one of the vehicles parked in the garage if she wanted, but it wasn’t as if there was anything to do but drive back and forth along the same dirt road that led from one end of the island to the other, about a fifteen-mile round-trip. There was a dock or two, but they were clearly for swimmers when the weather was fine. No boats were moored at them, or even pulled up on the beaches.