He could see her nostrils widen and her pupils dilate. He saw her pulse go mad in her neck. There was a faint flush turning her skin hot and red at once, and she wasn’t doing a particularly good job of restraining her shudders.
But she didn’t speak. It was as if she knew better. As if she knew exactly what it would do to him—to them both—if she did.
Instead she nodded once. Jerkily. Her gaze fixed to his as if she didn’t dare look away.
And without another word, Leonidas turned and led her from the dance floor, like the gentleman he wasn’t, not anymore.
Before he threw her over his shoulder and carted her off to his lair, the way he wanted to do more than he wanted to draw his next breath.
And might do still, he told himself grimly.
The night was young.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SUSANNAH HAD FORGOTTEN about her parents.
The truth was, Leonidas had taken her into his arms and she’d forgotten everything. The charity ball all around them. The fact they were the furthest thing from alone. That there were smiling business rivals and leering paparazzi and everything in between, with his family’s treachery and the inevitable appearance of her own parents, just to make everything that much more fraught.
It had all disappeared.
There was nothing but Leonidas. The music soaring and dancing along with them. And all the sweet and terrible things that swelled between them, making it entirely too hard to breathe.
She’d felt this way only once before, and it had been far more muted in comparison. What kept racing through her like a different sort of heat was that she was positive Leonidas knew it.
She had been such a confused jumble of feelings on their wedding day. She’d still had such high, silly expectations, of course, no matter how many chilly lectures her parents had given her to prepare her—but he had taken the knees out of each and every one of them. She’d been trembling as she’d walked down the aisle, but the cool, assessing look he’d given her when he’d swept back her veil hadn’t assuaged her nerves any. And then when he’d pressed a kiss to her mouth at the front of the church, it had been little more than a stamp of acknowledgment. As if he was affixing a halfhearted seal to one of his lesser possessions. The things he said to her in the car, the way he’d called her a child, had rocked her. And his total disinterest in her at their own reception, too busy was he talking to his business associates, had hurt her feelings more than she’d wanted to admit even then.
A wise girl would have armored herself a little after all these clear indications that this man did not and would not care about her, and she’d tried. Susannah really had tried—but she’d been so young. So frothy and silly, looking back.
But then there had been that dance. That single dance. When Leonidas had held her in his arms and gazed down at her, something arrested and yet stern on his face that seemed to match the wildfire raging inside her. There had been nothing in all the world but the feel of his intensely strong arms around her and the easy way he’d moved her around the floor, as if he was giving her a preview of the way their life would go. Him, in complete control. Her, a little too captivated by the way he handled her and everything else.
And all of it distressingly breathless and dizzyingly smooth.
She shouldn’t remember it the way she did, in vivid and excruciating detail. And it certainly shouldn’t have played out in her head the way it had all these years, over and over. That dance had made her wonder about him, the man she’d lost so swiftly, more than she’d ever admitted to anyone. It had made her wonder what would have happened between them if they’d ever had a proper wedding night. If he hadn’t gotten on that plane.
Now she knew.
And this dance tonight had made her heart hurt all over again, if for different reasons. Because she knew too much now. She knew him and she knew herself and she knew that no matter how precarious it all felt when she was in his arms or how badly she wanted to stay there, she had to go.
Or she wouldn’t.
She was still sorting through the clamor inside her as Leonidas led her from the dance floor. His hand was still wrapped around hers, all that fire and strength making her feel entirely too hot and something achy besides. And Susannah knew she needed to jerk her hand away and step away from her husband.
Now.
Before she spent any more time noticing how perfectly her hand fit in his and how the enveloping heat of it seemed to wrap itself around her and hold tight—
But before she could do the right thing, they stepped into the throng and the first people she saw were her parents.
Her parents, who had not supported Susannah’s transformation from biddable pawn into powerful widow—because they couldn’t control her and oh, how they’d hated that. They’d urged her to remarry with all possible haste, preferably to a man of their choosing, and hadn’t liked it when she’d told them that one marriage of convenience was enough, thank you. They hadn’t much cared for it when she’d ignored their arguments in favor of various suitors anyway.