A Baby to Bind His Bride

He staggered back as if she’d hauled off and hit him. Some part of him wished she would. He knew how to take a blow. He’d learned that young, at his own father’s hand—

And the thought of a son of his own taking the kind of beatings he’d weathered sickened him, down deep into his bones, until he felt something like arthritic with the force of his own disgust at the very idea.

“I told you before,” he threw at her. “I don’t know how to love. I don’t know what it is.”

But she kept coming. This woman who had saved him. This woman who never saw a monster in him. This woman who called him the worst of the Betancurs, an unparalleled monster, but made love to him as if he was only and ever a man.

“Neither do I,” she told him as she drew closer. “But I want to try. Try with me, Leonidas.”

He didn’t mean to move, but he found himself down on his knees, though he was a man who did not kneel. He was on his knees and she kept coming, and then he was wrapping her in his arms—or she was the one wrapping him in hers—and he kissed her belly where their future grew. Once, then again.

And when he looked up into her face again, tears were leaving tracks down her cheeks and her eyes were as blue as all the summers he wanted to show his son. As clear as a promise. As perfect as a vow.

“I will try, Susannah,” he whispered. “For you—for him—I will spend my whole life trying.”

“I will love you enough for both of us, Leonidas,” she told him, her voice rough with emotion. “And this baby will love you even more than that.”

“And I will love the two of you with every part of me,” he replied, aware as he said it that she’d changed him. That he was a different man.

Not the invulnerable Leonidas Betancur who had gone down in that plane. Not the Count who’d believed himself a prophet at the very least, but more likely a god. But both of those men and more, the husband who had been loving this woman since he’d kissed her in a faraway compound and she’d brought him back to life.

Life. Love. With Susannah, they were the same thing.

“I will try until I get it right,” he told her. “No matter how long it takes. I give you my word.”

“As a Betancur?” she asked, but her mouth was curved as if she already knew the answer.

“As the man who needs you, and wants you, and never wants to be apart from you,” he replied, smoothing his hands up the line of her back as he knelt there before her. “As the husband who cannot imagine a world without you. As the fool who lost his memory and now sees nothing at all in the whole of this world but you.”

And he tugged her mouth down to his, his beautiful Susannah, and showed her what he meant.

Forever.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ADONIS ESTEBAN BETANCUR came into the world with a roar.

He had a shock of dark hair and fists he seemed to think were mighty as he waved them all around him in a great fervor.

And Susannah had never seen anything more beautiful, heartbreaking and gorgeous at once, as the way one tiny baby boy with an outsized personality wrapped his ruthless, intimidating father around his perfect little fingers.

Though their life together came close.

Leonidas found he didn’t much care for running the Betancur Corporation alone, and especially not when he could have Susannah by his side to do it with him. Leonidas on his own had been a force to be reckoned with. The Widow Betancur had wielded her own inexorable power.

Together, there was nothing they couldn’t do.

She was pregnant with twin girls when he came to her, late one night after he’d put four-year-old Adonis to bed with tales of brave Greek gods and stories of grand adventures. Susannah watched him from where she sat, out by the quiet pool in the soft Australian night, in the same Darling Point house in Sydney where he’d sent her to live on her own once upon a time.

Leonidas smiled as he came to her, lit by the soft lights that hung in the trees, and sat beside her on the outdoor couch that was tucked up in the shade during the hot days and offered a fire pit for the cooler evenings.

He rested one arm on the back of the sofa and twisted to kiss her as he rested his other on her huge belly, laughing against her mouth when one of his daughters kicked at him. This was how they danced now, Susannah thought. This was the best dance of her life.

“When you tell Adonis stories of gods, do you mention that you were one?” she teased him.

Leonidas took the kiss deeper for a moment, letting her taste that hunger that had only intensified across all these full, bright years. And when he pulled back his smile had gone wolfish in a manner that boded well for the rest of the evening.

“That is a story he will appreciate more when he is older, I think,” he murmured. “When he has forgotten how much he looked up to me when he was small.”