A Baby to Bind His Bride

She would have wanted someone to care. Just once.

“I always get what I want,” Leonidas said, his voice as dark as the room around them. “Sooner or later.”

And Susannah had spent entirely too much time working this through in her head. On all those drives, walks through the olive trees, and afternoons on the rocks with a wool sweater wrapped tight around her to ward off the cold while the sea spray made her face damp. Or when she’d sat out by the heated pool near the house and had pretended the sun might warm her more than it did, there where she could smell flowers and dirt and the salted crispness of the bright Greek air. She’d been so furious, and she hadn’t wanted to see what was on the other side of it, because fury felt like a destination all on its own.

The island slowed her down. It made her think even when she didn’t want that. It had defeated her even if he couldn’t.

But it had also given her a new resolve.

“Always?” She reached across the wedge of space between them and traced that hard, unsmiling mouth of his with her fingers. “I know that’s what you tell yourself. But I think we both know you don’t always get what you want. I saw the compound, remember. I know how you lived there. And how quick you were to leave a place they worshipped you outright.”

“Eventually,” Leonidas said, but there was an edge to his voice then. He stilled her hand, drawing it away from his mouth. And he didn’t let go. “I always get what I want, eventually.”

And this was what had happened to her four years ago. First the shock, and a kind of grief that the life she’d been training for all those years was no more. She’d let it take her down. But then she got up again, and when she did she’d taken action.

It was what Susannah always did.

So she would do it here, too. And if there was a part of her that mourned the man who’d held her in his arms while they’d danced at that gala, well. That had only been a fantasy, after all. A fairy tale. This was gritty. This was a baby she hadn’t planned for and a complicated life with a husband whose name she knew better than she knew him.

She’d had a fairy-tale wedding with a man who’d scoffed at all her silly dreams and crushed them while he did. She’d lived through widowhood, pretending to mourn a man she’d hardly known and a love that had never existed, except possibly in her head. She’d hunted down a stranger who hadn’t known her when he’d seen her, and she’d won back the husband she barely knew with a kiss. And her virginity. Then she’d spent seven short weeks pretending to be a devoted wife and business partner while sleeping by herself in a lonely guest room.

But she had never done this.

Susannah had never been his wife in act and deed as well as word. And she decided that she was tired of punishing herself. She was tired of hiding. Most of all, she was tired of fighting wars she wasn’t sure she even wanted to win.

If he could do exactly as he pleased, kidnap her and confine her on this island simply to make a point, there was no reason she couldn’t do what she liked, as well.

And it was time to stop pretending that she didn’t like him, because she did. He was a flame and she was a desperate sort of moth, but there was no need to batter herself to pieces when she could choose instead to simply land. And burn as she wished.

“Eventually will be a long time coming,” she told him softly. She moved closer to him then, tangling her legs with his. “If at all.”

He let out a laugh that was more warning than anything else.

“I’ll have you eating out of my hand sooner than you can possibly imagine,” he promised her, perhaps a little roughly. “It’s inevitable, little one. You might as well fold now.”

“You can’t have me,” she told him then, her voice as simple as it was stark. A part of the shadows, somehow. “That’s how this works, don’t you understand? When you keep something against its will, you can hold on to it, but it’s never yours.”

Then she leaned in close, because it was what she wanted. Because she could do as she liked, surely, since he always did. Because she was much too fascinated with him and her heart went silly whenever he was near, and she’d resolved to embrace that.

To burn of her own volition on that lethal flame of his, again and again, until he tired of her and this game and all the rest of it. The way she knew he would.

She got even closer, pressing herself against him in the dark, and sealed her doom the only way she knew.

With a kiss.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I TRUST YOUR cage grows more comfortable by the day,” Leonidas said, his voice hardly more than a growl, shoving his mobile into his pocket as he strode out to the pool in the atrium. “You almost look as if you’re enjoying it.”