A Baby to Bind His Bride

And now risen from the dead, as if he needed to add to his mystique.

She told herself these things over and over, until it was like cold water in her face.

But it didn’t change the way he’d touched her. Or the fact that somehow, the worst of the Betancurs—her husband—had managed to comfort her when no one else could. Or ever had.

Or had bothered to try.

Somehow he’d managed to soothe her on the night of the annual gala, when Susannah was used to facing nothing but fanged smiles and knives to the back all around. She would have said it was impossible.

“Ready, then?” he asked, in that low voice that did upsetting things to her pulse. And that look in his eyes was worse. It made something deep inside her melt.

“Ready,” she said, as briskly as she could, but it didn’t stop the melting.

Susannah was beginning to think nothing could. That she’d been doomed since the moment she’d walked up that mountain in farthest Idaho and had demanded to see the man they called the Count.

That the Count had been easier, because he’d simply kissed her. Taken her. Done as he wished. Which had allowed her to pretend that under other circumstances, she’d have resisted him.

When what these weeks had taught her was that she didn’t want to resist this man, no matter what he called himself.

Leonidas inclined his head and offered her his arm, and Susannah took it. And for the first time since they’d entered their wedding reception four years ago, she entered a glittering, gleaming ballroom packed to the chandeliers above with the toast of Europe not as the rigidly composed, much-hated, always solitary Widow Betancur.

This time, she was no more and no less than Leonidas’s wife.

And he was right there with her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THAT SUSANNAH WAS used to the endless pageant and conspiratorial drama of the Betancur clan was immediately obvious to Leonidas—and likely to the whole of the gala, he thought as he stood near the high table some time later, because she remained so composed in the face of their antics.

He was the one having some trouble adjusting to life back in the fold.

Only a scant handful of his relatives actually stirred themselves to do anything resembling work, of course, so he hadn’t seen much of them since his return as he’d been focused on the company and getting up to speed on everything he’d missed. But this was a widely publicized, celebrity-studded charity ball where they could all do what they liked best: lounge about in pretty clothes, exchange vicious gossip, and carry on theatrical affairs with whoever struck their fancies—from lowly valets to exalted kings as it suited them. Usually in full view of their spouses and the press.

Leonidas was used to the offhanded debauchery his cousins practiced with such delight. He remembered it all in excruciating detail when really, his cousins’ behavior was something he’d happily have forgotten.

The Betancurs gathered the way they always did at functions like this one, sulky and imperious in turn, making Leonidas wish he could rule here as he’d done in the compound. His cousins usually did as he asked because it was bad for their bank accounts to get on his bad side, but only after great productions of pointless defiance. Meanwhile, Apollonia held court the way she liked to do, carrying on about her only child’s return from death when it suited her, and then ignoring him entirely when it amused her to harangue the guests instead, likely in search of her next lover.

That his mother valued only the fact that she’d borne him because of the access that granted her to the Betancur fortune and consequence should no longer have had the power to hurt him. He’d gotten over that when he was still a boy, he would have said. But it rubbed at him tonight even so.

“It would not kill her to at least put on a decent show of maternal devotion, surely,” he said in an undertone to Susannah at one point.

And then asked himself what the hell he was doing. The woman wasn’t his friend. She wasn’t even his date. She was the wife he’d never wanted who, it turned out, didn’t want him, either. Whatever else she was—including the only woman he could recall being so obsessed with it was becoming an issue he feared his own hand wouldn’t cure—she was certainly no confidante.

“This is no show, it’s what Apollonia’s maternal devotion looks like,” Susannah replied in that cool way of hers that he found he liked entirely too much, all smooth vowels and that little kick of archness besides. She stood beside him as they watched his mother berate a minor duchess, and Leonidas tried to channel a measure of her untroubled amusement. “It is only that she is devoted to herself, not you.”

And that was the trouble, Leonidas knew. He’d been on that mountain too long, perhaps. But he hadn’t expected to like the sweet little virgin his mother had insisted he marry to best honor his late father’s wishes that the stodgy Martin Forrester be recognized for his hard work in turning at least three small Betancur fortunes into remarkably large ones, and then adding to them every year. Even from beyond the grave, his father’s orders carried the weight of his fists.