A Baby to Bind His Bride

It didn’t matter what she told herself the night before. It didn’t matter what promises she made. Every morning it was the same. She woke up feeling rested, warm and safe, and only gradually became aware that she was sprawled over him. Or curled on her side, with him wound tight around her, holding her to him with one heavy arm.

And every morning she fled as soon as she woke. And he let her go, his arrogant laughter following her as she went.

It was an insidious kind of warfare, and he was far too good at it.

Tonight, Susannah sat on the edge of the bed in her room she kept trying to sleep in, but she was running out of steam. More to the point, she was growing tired of her own defiance.

It did nothing to Leonidas if she ignored him, or tried. He didn’t care if she stormed off or if she snapped at him. He was like a mountain, unyielding and impassable, and she’d been battering herself against him for much too long now.

Meanwhile, all he did was smile and go about his business, and he got what he wanted anyway. What was the point?

She moved over to the French doors that led out to her terrace, and threw them open. It was too dark tonight to see the sea, but she could hear it, crashing against the rocky shore down below. She’d always loved the waves. She’d always admired the inexorable push of the sea, over and over, tide after tide. But tonight she found that she felt significantly more sympathetic to the shoreline. Battered over and over by a ruthless, unyielding force, whether it wanted it or not.

She let the night air slap at her, chilling her from the stones beneath her bare feet all the way up to where her hair moved against her shoulders. She hugged her arms around her middle, noticing with a touch of awe and wonder the changes that were happening to her every day. She was a little thicker. A little bit different all over despite her best efforts to pretend none of this was happening.

As if her body had picked sides a long time ago.

She turned back toward the bedroom and stopped, the buttery light from within gripping her. She could see the rest of the villa, built to look almost haphazard as it claimed the top of the cliff with bright windows glowing against the dark night, too cloudy for stars. But she didn’t need light to see the island any longer.

It was one more thing that was becoming a part of her no matter how little she wanted it. She remembered when that had happened four years ago. The first day she’d walked into the Betancur Corporation offices had been intense. Awful, even. She’d been a nineteen-year-old with nothing going for her but her ability to hold the gazes of angry men and smile politely until they finished ranting. But every day she’d gone back had been easier. Or she’d gotten used to it.

And one day she’d found herself sitting in the office she’d claimed, going through some files, and it had struck her that it was all…normal. She’d made the impossible normal.

Leonidas was right, she realized then, pulling in a breath of the cold night air. He was going to win. Because she could apparently adapt to anything, and would without thinking about it.

That night she fell asleep almost before her head hit the pillow the way she always did. But when she felt his strong arms around her, lifting her up and carrying her through the dark halls, she forced herself to wake up. To become more alert with every step. And when he laid her down in his wide bed, she waited for him to sprawl out beside her, and then she propped herself up on one hand and gazed at him.

“Sleeping Beauty is awake at last,” Leonidas said in a low voice. “That’s when the trouble starts, I’m told. Historically.”

There were no lights on in his bedroom, only the last of his fire glowing in the grate. Susannah was grateful for the reprieve. In the almost total dark, there was no need to worry about what expression she might have been wearing. There was no need to hide if he couldn’t really see her. So she forgot about her own masks for a moment, and let herself marvel at the lack of his.

In the dark, he seemed approachable. Not soft—he could never be soft—but all those bold lines and harsh edges seemed muted, somehow. And though she knew his scars were there, stamped into his rangy body, she couldn’t see them either.

It was as if the shadows made them both new.

“If you didn’t want trouble,” she whispered, “you should have let me go.”

“At some point, Susannah, you will have to face the fact you didn’t really want to leave,” Leonidas said, his voice barely more than a thread in the dark. “Or why go to such lengths to find me at all?”

“I thought it was what you would have wanted,” she said before she thought better of it.

But she knew the truth then. When her words were lying there between them, so obvious once spoken. It was what she would have wanted if her plane had gone down. She would have wanted someone to find out what had happened, and when the answers didn’t make sense, to dig deeper. She would have wanted someone to send investigators. She would have wanted someone who refused to give up until the truth came out.