It had taken every bit of self-control she had to act as if the loss of her virginity didn’t affect her. But she was terribly afraid she’d used it all up back there in that compound she fervently hoped American law enforcement had since dismantled. Because the longer she was around this man, the less she thought she would be able to keep that control intact.
She wanted out before she broke. She wanted an escape at last from what she’d never wanted to accept would be the rest of her life, and she didn’t care if her parents were disappointed. She refused to be a pawn any longer. She wanted no part of Apollonia’s theatrics and schemes. She didn’t want to be a bargaining chip between the grasping Betancur cousins. She was tired of all this corrosive power and all the greed everyone around her had for more and more and more.
All this time, she’d believed she had a responsibility to the husband who had died so suddenly. Maybe because of all her girlish fantasies about what could have been. Whatever the cause, Susannah had taken that responsibility seriously, and one of the reasons she’d been so successful was because she’d felt nothing. She’d understood exactly who her parents were on her wedding night when they’d had the opportunity to try to comfort her and had instead made her feel small. Soon after, she’d come to understand the intricacies of the Betancur family and its businesses in repulsive detail. The plane crash and its wake had showed her everything she needed to know about her in-laws.
She’d filed it all away, felt nothing besides the loss of her dreams that she’d convinced herself weren’t real, and that had helped her become perhaps the most powerful widow in the world.
But then she’d walked into a cult leader’s compound after all these numb, safe years, and she’d felt entirely too much.
The entire plane ride back she’d tried to convince herself that it had been a geographic problem, that was all. That what had happened in that compound had been a thing that could happen only in the Rocky Mountains out there in the midst of that unnervingly huge continent. And still she woke every night to find herself barricaded in her room in the penthouse, swaddled in her bedclothes with her heart gone mad and a deep wildness between her legs, alive with too much yearning. With too much intense hunger.
It wasn’t going away. It wasn’t getting better.
And Susannah had realized that the only thing worse than spending the rest of her life as the Widow Betancur was this. Longing for a man who she knew, even if he didn’t—not yet, anyway—would grow out of his need for her. Fast. The way her mother had coldly told her men did, in her version of “the talk” the night before Susannah’s wedding.
“Leonidas Betancur is a man of tremendous wealth and taste,” Annemieke Forrester had told her only daughter that night, sitting on the edge of Susannah’s bed in the hotel suite where they’d all been staying in anticipation of the grand ceremony. “You would do well to assume his sexual tastes are equally well cultivated.” Susannah must have made some kind of noise to match her immediate reaction, a flush of confusion and something like shame, because Annemieke had laughed. “You are an untried, untouched teenager, child. You cannot hope to interest a man like Leonidas.”
“But…” Susannah had been so young. It hurt to remember how young. How sheltered. “He is to be my husband.”
“You will quickly learn that your power comes from the grace with which you ignore his dalliances,” her mother had told her matter-of-factly. “It will make him respect you.”
“Respect?” she’d echoed.
“Your job is to produce an heir,” her mother had continued. “Your virginity is your wedding gift. After that, you concentrate on getting pregnant and staying pretty. Think grace, Susannah. No one values a shrill, embittered woman en route to a nasty divorce. You will live a life filled with comfort and ease. I’d advise you to make the best of what you have.”
“I thought that marriage would be—”
“What?” her mother had interrupted scornfully. “A fairy tale? Leonidas will tire of you, girl, and quickly. Let him.” She’d waved her hand in the air impatiently. “It doesn’t matter where a man roams. What matters is the home he returns to. Over time, he will return to you more than he will leave you, and he will do this far more cheerfully if you have spared him the scenes and remonstrations.”
Susannah had tried to take that to heart when her brand-new husband had left her on their wedding night, apparently already tired of her, though she’d been crushed. She wasn’t as foolish these days as she’d been then. And the only reason he wanted her around now, she’d thought even before he’d told her that there were gaps in his memory, was because she was the one who had found him. The only one who knew where he’d been.