A Baby to Bind His Bride

But she didn’t dare put a finger on this man.

She kept her hands from curling into impotent fists by flattening them on her own lap.

“My headache is gone,” she told him. “Thank you. You are a miracle worker, no matter where you learned it.”

“The benefits of living off the grid, far away in the woods and high up on a mountaintop,” he told her after a moment, when she’d thought he might not speak at all. “No one can run out to the nearest pharmacy to fetch some tablets every time someone feels a bit of pain. We learned other methods.”

“I’m stunned,” she managed to say. And she was aware as she spoke that she didn’t sound nearly as calm as she should have. “I would have thought it would cause a full-scale revolt if you’d healed someone with anything other than the force of your holiness.”

Leonidas let out only a small laugh, but to Susannah it sounded like nothing less than a victory parade.

“It’s possible I was a terrible disappointment as a resident god,” he said, his voice rich with something it took her entirely too long to realize was humor. At his own expense, no less. And she felt that like a new, different sort of touch. “But in the habit of most gods, I will choose not to inquire.”

And it was lucky Susannah didn’t have to summon up a response, she thought as the car pulled up to the entrance of the desperately chic Betancur Hotel. They had to get out of the car and acknowledge the waiting paparazzi. She had to steel herself against Leonidas’s hand at her back when she’d barely survived the car ride over. And still, she could only count her good fortune that she was able to stand and walk at all—because the sound of real laughter in her husband’s dark voice was enough to make her knees feel weak.

She was very much afraid of the things she might have said—or worse, done—if that car ride had lasted another moment.

And none of that could happen, because she wasn’t staying. Not only wasn’t she staying, she needed to hurry up her departure, she told herself as they walked into the hotel in a flurry of flashbulbs and the typical shouting of their names. The lobby was a riot of color, golds and marbles and sultry onyxes, but all Susannah could see with any clarity was Leonidas as he led her to the grand ballroom.

She needed to hurry up and leave before she couldn’t. She needed to go before she found herself addicted to these small moments with him and stayed. Like an addict forever chasing that dragon and never, ever finding it.

“You look appropriately somber at the prospect of a long night with my family and all their works,” Leonidas said as they made their way toward the gala, smiling and nodding at Europe’s elite as they passed in the gilded hallways.

Susannah let out a small laugh. “I can handle your family. It’s mine that makes me anxious.”

“I don’t remember much about our wedding,” he said then, angling a look down at her as they reached the doors of the ballroom. She thought she could see too much in his gaze, that was the trouble. She thought there was more in all that dark gold than there was or ever could be.

And Susannah didn’t understand where the forced calm she’d wielded like a sword these last years had gone. She only knew it had deserted her completely tonight.

“I don’t think that’s the memory loss acting up again,” she said quietly, but not at all as calmly as she’d have liked. “I think it’s that you didn’t much care.”

“I didn’t care at all,” Leonidas agreed, and whatever had afflicted her, she thought it was gnawing at him, too. And there was no reason that should bring her any sort of comfort. What did it matter what happened between them? This was temporary. This had to be temporary. “But I remember you. And your mother.”

“Mother prides herself on being memorable, but only for the correct reasons. Namely that she is Europe’s foremost gorgon.”

She’d meant that to be funny. But her words hung there between them, and even Susannah could tell that they were something else entirely.

The hand at her back smoothed down an inch or two, then rose again. And all the while, Leonidas’s gaze was fixed to hers as if he could see every last part of her. Because of course, he knew what it had been like to come of age in that chilly, remote boarding school, aware at all times that her only use to her parents was as a pawn to further their ambitions. To have no sense of family the way others did. To be so utterly and terribly alone, always.

Until now, something in her whispered.

He knew exactly what that was like.

But she reminded herself harshly that there was no now. There was no them. Leonidas wasn’t simply a Betancur, he was the worst of them. He was what happened when greed and ambition was chiseled over generations into aristocratic blood and entirely too much power. If inconceivably wealthy families could create an avatar, Leonidas was the perfect choice to represent his. Hard and dark and utterly lethal.