A Baby to Bind His Bride

She forgotten that. He’d disappointed her on her wedding night, then he’d died, and she’d forgotten. She’d lost herself in the scandal and intrigue of the Betancur Corporation and all its attendant family drama, and she’d completely failed to remember that when it came to Leonidas she had always been a very, very silly girl.

Back when she was one, and again now. Clearly.

Say something, she ordered herself.

But then he was laying her down on the bed in the next room, and following her down to the mattress, and Susannah didn’t have it in her to care if she was silly.

She’d been promised a wedding night. Four years ago, she’d expected to hand over her innocence to the man who’d become her husband and instead, she’d been left to years of widow’s weeds and seas of enemies—not all of whom had come at her as opponents.

Susannah couldn’t count the number of men who’d tried to seduce her over the years, many related to Leonidas, but she’d always held firm. She was the Widow Betancur and she mourned. She grieved. That little bit of fiction had protected her when nothing else could.

But Leonidas wasn’t dead. And more than that, as he sprawled out above her on that firm mattress and pressed her into it, all his lean, solid strength making her breathless with a dizzy sort of joy, it made her forget that he had ever disappeared in the first place.

As if this was their wedding night after all.

“This has been four years overdue,” he said, his voice a low growl against her neck, and she could feel him just as she could hear him. There was something in his tone she didn’t like—a certain skepticism, perhaps, that pricked at her—but it was swept away when his mouth fixed to hers again.

And Susannah did nothing to dig her feet into whatever ground she could find. She let Leonidas take her with a fervent joy that might have concerned her if she’d been able to think critically.

She didn’t think. She kissed him instead.

His hands dug into her hair, tugging slightly until he pulled it out of the knot she’d worn the heavy mass of it in. He muttered something she couldn’t quite hear, but she didn’t care because he was kissing her again and again.

When he moved his mouth from hers to trace a trail down the length of her neck, she moaned, and he laughed, just a little bit. When he tugged on her cashmere coat, she lifted herself up so he could pull it from her body. He did the same with her shift dress, tugging it up and over her head. She had the vague impression that he tossed both items aside, but she didn’t care where they landed.

Because she was lying beneath him with nothing on but a bra and panties and her knee-high boots, and the look in his dark eyes was…savage.

It made Susannah shake a little. It made her feel beautiful.

Raw. Aching and alive.

As if, after all this time, she really was more than the shroud she’d been wearing like armor for all these years. As if she wasn’t the little girl he’d married, but the woman she’d longed to be in her head.

“You are the perfect gift,” he said, as if he really couldn’t remember who she was. As if his amnesia game was real and he really believed himself some or other local god, tucked away here in the woods.

But Susannah couldn’t bring herself to worry about that. Because Leonidas was touching her.

He used his mouth and his hands. He found her breasts and cupped them with his palms, then bent his head to tease first one nipple, then the next. Through the soft fabric of her bra, his mouth was so hot, so shocking, that she arched off the bed. To get away from him—or get closer to him—she couldn’t quite tell.

He stripped the bra from her, then repeated himself, but this time there was no fabric between the suction of his mouth and her tender skin. Susannah had never felt anything like it in her life. She felt…open and exposed, and so bright red with too much sensation she might as well have been a beacon.

Her head thrashed against the mattress beneath her. She gripped him wherever she could touch him, grabbing fistfuls of the flowing white garments he wore at his sides, his hips, and not caring at all when her own gasps and moans filled her ears.

Then he moved lower. His tongue teased her navel, and then his big hands wrapped around her hips.

And he didn’t ask. He didn’t even move her panties out of his way. Leonidas merely bent his head and fastened his mouth to the place where she ached the most.

Susannah thought she exploded.

She was surprised to find, between one breath and the next, that she was still in one piece. That every bit of suction he applied between her legs made her feel like she was breaking and fusing back together again—over and over again.