A Baby to Bind His Bride

Leonidas looked more than merely predatory, then. Something in his starkly beautiful face edged toward cruel, but it wasn’t intimidating. Or it was—of course it was, because this was a man who couldn’t help but intimidate as surely as he breathed—but Susannah was more focused on the melting sensation that swept over her, then settled low in her belly like a greedy pulse.

And the fact that she was almost 100 percent positive that he knew it.

“It sounds as if we have a deal,” he said.

And then Leonidas smiled.

CHAPTER SIX

A LONG AND exhausting month later, Susannah sat in the back of a car careening through the wet streets of Paris, wishing her head would stop feeling as if it might split into pieces at any moment.

She wasn’t particularly optimistic. A long evening loomed ahead of her, and she would have given anything to leap out of the car, race through the rain and the crowds of fashionable Parisians to tuck herself up in her bed and hide beneath the covers—but she knew that wasn’t possible. Tonight was the Betancur Foundation’s annual charity ball that this year would serve as Leonidas’s formal reintroduction to society after all his time away.

That Leonidas had survived the crash had not been known to anyone at first, they’d told the press. His funeral had been a sincere gesture of grief and mourning, not a cynical spectacle while they waited to find out if he’d live. And when his survival had become known to them, his condition had been so extreme that everyone involved had kept it quiet rather than throw the corporation into turmoil.

“Of course, I wanted nothing more than to race to his side,” Susannah had told a concerned American interviewer. “But my husband is a Betancur. I knew he would want me to take care of his company while the doctors took care of him.”

His assumed widow’s refusal to hand over the reins looked much less stubborn through this lens, of course, which had led to any number of think pieces celebrating Susannah’s “iron will” and “clear-eyed leadership” from publications that had addressed her in far less friendly terms a few months back.

But the ball was a different animal. It was overwhelming at the best of times, so filled was it with the members of the Betancur family and all their usual drama and intrigue. Susannah expected that the return from the dead of the Betancur heir himself would make it all…insane.

Surely the prospect would make anyone tired. At least this year she wouldn’t have to deal with marriage proposals over canapés and several attempts at a coup before dessert. Or so she hoped.

Leonidas sat beside her in the car’s comfortable backseat as the driver navigated the Paris traffic, talking into his mobile in dark, silky tones that didn’t require Susannah’s fluency in German to realize were menacing in the extreme. His tone did it for him. It was something about one of the resorts the corporation ran in the South Pacific, but she couldn’t quite summon up the energy to care about that the way she might have normally. She stared out the window as Paris gleamed in the wet dark and plucked a bit listlessly at the dress she wore. Not that it was the dress’s fault. It was a stunning creation in a deep, mesmerizing green that had been presented to her like a gift by Leonidas’s Milanese tailors when she knew very well it hadn’t been a gift at all. It had been a command.

Leonidas didn’t have to say that he didn’t want her to wear black any longer. That she was no longer the Widow Betancur, but his wife, and should allow her wardrobe to reflect that reality. She’d understood the message.

It was the first time she’d worn a bright color—or any color other than the darkest of navys and the deepest of charcoals—since her wedding, which seemed appropriate for their anticipated debut as an actual married couple, a whole four years later than planned.

No wonder her head felt so tender.

The city blurred into one long gleam of frenetic light outside the car windows, and Leonidas’s voice was that same low murmur, all power and command, that Susannah could feel as much inside her body as with her ears.

The trouble was, she was just so tired these days.

It wasn’t the dress. Or the rich shade of green that flattered her so well she’d been forced to consider the fact that Leonidas had selected it because he’d known it would, which made her…uncomfortable. Restless in her own skin. She’d have liked to blame something so relatively innocuous as her wardrobe, but she knew better.

Susannah told herself it was the charade itself that exhausted her. The difficulty of keeping one foot in the Betancur world when she planned to escape it as soon as possible. That would exhaust anyone, surely. The weeks since she and Leonidas had made their bargain had seemed to creep by, every day somehow harder than the last. After all those years of playing the Widow Betancur so well, it should have been easy enough for Susannah to continue along in the same role just a little while longer. But for some reason, this last month had been more difficult than any she could remember.