A Baby to Bind His Bride

“Dark colors are very slimming.”

“The world is not prepared to let go of such an icon as their favorite widow, Susannah. Surely you must know this. Where will you go? Your past will follow you as surely as a shadow. It always does.”

“Says the man who took a four-year break from his.”

“I’m not going to argue with you.”

She recognized that voice. It brought her back to the conversation they’d had in the car that had delivered them from the church to their reception four years ago. To the pitiless way her new husband—a perfect stranger with a cruel mouth she’d found fascinating despite herself—had gazed at her from his seat.

It was not unlike the way the Count had gazed at her from his white seat in his bright white throne room.

“There will be no honeymoon,” he had told her four years ago. “I cannot take that kind of time away from my business.” And when she had reacted to that, when she had allowed some or other emotion to color her face, he had only grown colder. “I understand that you are young, but in time you will thank me for giving no quarter to your childishness. We all must grow up sometime, Susannah. Even spoiled little girls must turn into women.”

She hadn’t thought about that conversation in years.

And he was still talking now.

“You obviously hold a bargaining chip,” he was saying, but in that merciless way as if no matter what she held, he was the one in total control. “I do not wish anyone to know that I lost my memory in the first place, much less that I have not yet gotten parts of it back. For all the reasons we discussed in Idaho that make what happened there so precarious. Optics, my cousins. All of the above.”

“I sympathize, but that doesn’t make any difference—”

“I’m not finished.”

And there was no reason Susannah should feel duly chastised, but she did. And worse for her self-esteem and the strides she’d been so sure she’d made in his absence, she fell quiet.

On command, like a dog.

“If you wish to divorce me, Susannah, I have no objection to that.”

His voice was so cool, so even and without inflection, that she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly for one jarring beat of her heart. Then another. But then his words sank in.

And she had no idea why there was some perverse thing in her that very nearly wanted to…argue, perhaps? Or make him take it back. Almost as if…

But she didn’t let herself think that through. She should never let him touch her, that was all. That was the beginning and the end of it, and that was what she kept returning to while she sat here, her fingers laced together lest they take it upon themselves to touch him again.

“Oh. I mean, good. We agree.”

“I will give you a divorce,” Leonidas told her. “But not now.”

As if it was entirely up to him. Again, as if he was the god of everything.

“You can’t bargain me into staying,” she said, with entirely too much intensity once more.

It was a mistake. She knew it when something flared in that gaze of his, and the way he stood there, all that arrogance in a bespoke suit, seemed to blur a bit. Less a pointed weapon, somehow.

Leonidas only shrugged, but the tenor of everything had changed and seemed…almost lazy.

“You want to be free. I want your help and am willing to free you after you give it.”

“Why does my freedom come with a price tag?” she demanded, because she couldn’t seem to help herself.

“Because that is the world we live in, little one.” He didn’t shrug again, but the look in his dark eyes seemed to suggest it, all the same. “I don’t see why we can’t help each other. But if that is not possible, I will have no choice but to use what leverage I have.”

She didn’t ask him what leverage he had. Susannah knew that it didn’t matter. He would come up with something, and if he couldn’t, he would manufacture something else. Hadn’t she seen this in action time and again these last years? That was what these people did. It was in their blood.

“This is a good thing,” she told him after a moment, when she was absolutely certain that she would sound and look nothing but in complete control. As if she was made of the same stone he was. “I was tempted to forget, you see. I was tempted to think that you were a victim. I almost felt sorry for you, but this clears it up, thank goodness. It reminds me who you are.”

“Your beloved husband?” he asked sardonically. “The one you have grieved with such dedication all these many years?”

“Not just a Betancur,” she said, as if it was an epithet. It was. “But the worst of them by far.”