A Baby to Bind His Bride

“Where are we?” she asked, and was not surprised to hear how hushed she sounded, as if the island demanded it.

“Greece,” Leonidas replied. Perhaps too readily. “More or less.”

“What are we doing in Greece?” What she meant was, Why are we so clearly not in Athens near the Betancur offices if we’re in Greece? But she didn’t say that part out loud. It was as if some part of her thought the island spoke for itself.

Leonidas’s hard mouth kicked up a little bit in one corner, but something about that smile of his didn’t exactly make her feel easy. He did not cross his arms, or straighten from where he continued to lounge against the side of his vehicle. And something a little too much like foreboding moved through her then.

“In one sense, we are in Greece because I am Greek,” he said, and his conversational tone only made the foreboding worse. Susannah felt the itch of it down the length of her spine. “My mother is Greek, anyway. This island has been in her family for many generations. There are very few staff, and all of them are some relation to me.” That curve in the corner of his mouth deepened. “I mention this because you are very enterprising, I think, and you do not wish to frustrate yourself unnecessarily with fruitless escape attempts.”

She blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“I will not insult you by giving you a list of rules, Susannah. That is the beauty of an island such as this. There is no way off. No ferries land here. The plane will leave tonight and you will not be on it, and there is a helicopter that flies only at my command. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“I assume I’m still asleep,” she said tightly. “And this is a terrible nightmare.”

“Alas, you are wide awake.”

“Then I do not understand,” she managed to say, though she was very much afraid that she did. “It sounds as if you’ve just imprisoned me.”

“I prefer to think of it as an opportunity for you to embrace the realities of your life.” Leonidas inclined his head. “An opportunity to spend some time accepting what is and let go of what cannot be.”

“That sounds suspiciously like cult talk.”

“If that is what you wish to call it, I cannot argue.” One arrogant shoulder rose, then fell. “I would encourage you to recall that I was not a follower of any cult. I was the leader.” He smiled at her. “I can be very persuasive.”

“You need to take me back to civilization,” she snapped at him, because that smile lit her up inside and she didn’t know which one of them she hated more for it. “Immediately.”

Leonidas shook his head, almost as if he pitied her. “I’m afraid I’m not going to do that.”

And it was as if everything that had happened and everything she’d seen since she’d stepped off that plane into the wilds of Idaho slammed into her then. The compound itself, after that steep climb. The barbed wire, the cameras, the ugly weapon pointed at her with a few threats besides. Not to mention what had happened inside with her long-lost husband.

There’d been the press storm when they’d left, when Leonidas had been returned to the world that had thought him dead. And these weeks of close proximity, always so scrupulously polite and careful not to touch too much, as if she wasn’t spending entirely too much time with the man she meant to leave. The Betancur Ball. His cousins and his mother and then worse, her parents.

And that dance in the middle of all the rest of it, like some bittersweet nod to a life she’d only ever dreamed about but had never seen. It had never existed and it never would, and the fact that she discovered she was pregnant and then fell all over him like some kind of wild animal didn’t change that.

She wanted her baby. She didn’t want the Betancur baby and the circus that went along with that. She didn’t want Leonidas.

Because she couldn’t have him, not the way she wanted him, and all of this was just delaying the inevitable. Why couldn’t he see that?

“I told you that I didn’t want to live in a prison,” she said when she was sure that she could speak again, and she didn’t care if she sounded distinctly unlike her usual serene self. She didn’t care if he saw her fall apart right there in front of him. “I told you that our marriage already felt like a cage. Your name is the key in the lock. I told you. And your response to that was to pack as I was sleeping and strand me on some island?”

Leonidas finally stood. He straightened from the side of the Range Rover, unfolding to his full height, and then loomed there above her. His arms dropped to his sides and his face took on that granite, lethal expression that she somehow kept forgetting was the truth of him. She’d seen it when he was the Count. And she’d seen it last night in Paris. And there been glimpses here and there, across these past seven weeks, of a different side to the man—but she understood now that they were flashes, nothing more.