A Baby to Bind His Bride

But he didn’t.

He kissed her again and again. He kissed her until the rest of her was as soft and pliable as her mouth. He kissed her until she looped her arms around his neck and slid against him as if she couldn’t stand on her own feet. He kissed her until she was making tiny noises in the back of her throat.

He remembered her in a confection of a white dress and all the people their families had invited to the ceremony on the Betancur family estate in France. He remembered how wide her blue eyes had been and how young she’d seemed, the virgin sacrifice his brute of a father had bought for him before he’d died. A gift tied up in an alliance that benefited the family.

One more bit of evidence of the insupportable rot that was the Betancur blood—

But Leonidas didn’t care about that.

“Leonidas,” she whispered, tearing her mouth from his. “Leonidas, I—”

He didn’t want to talk. He wanted her mouth, so he took it.

Susannah had found him here. Susannah had brought him back his life.

So he swept her up into his arms, never moving his mouth from hers for an instant, and Leonidas carried her into the bedroom he couldn’t wait to leave at last.

But first, Susannah owed him that wedding night.

And four years later, Leonidas was ready to collect.

CHAPTER THREE

LEONIDAS’S MOUTH WAS on hers, and she couldn’t seem to recover from the sweet shock of it. He kissed her again and again and again, and the only thing she could manage to do was surrender herself to the slick, epic feel of his mouth against hers.

As if she’d spent all these years stumbling around in the dark, and the taste of this man was the light at last.

She should stop him. Susannah knew that. She should step back and draw some boundaries. Make some rules. Demand that he stop pretending he didn’t remember her, for a start. She didn’t believe in amnesia. She didn’t believe that someone like Leonidas, so bold and relentless and bright, could ever disappear.

But then, he’d always been larger than life to her. She’d known who he was since she was a child and had been thrilled when her parents had informed her she was to marry him. He’d been like a starry sky as far as she’d been concerned on her wedding day, and some part of her had refused to believe that a man that powerful could be snuffed out so easily, so quickly.

And before she’d had a chance to touch him like this, the way she’d imagined so fervently before their wedding—

She needed to stop him. She needed to assert herself. She needed to let him know that the girl he’d married had died the day he had and she was far more sure and powerful now than she’d been then.

But she didn’t do any of the things she imagined she should.

When Leonidas kissed her, she kissed him back, inexpert and desperate. She didn’t pause to tell him how little she knew of men or their ways or the things that lips and teeth and that delirious angle of his hard jaw could do. She met his mouth as best she could. She tasted him in turn.

And she surrendered.

When he lifted her up in his arms, she thought that was an excellent opportunity to do…something. Anything. But his mouth was on hers as he moved, and Susannah realized that she’d been lying to herself for a very long time.

She could hardly remember the silly teenager she’d been on the day of her wedding after all that had happened since. She’d known she was sheltered back then, in the same way she’d known that her father was a very high-level banker and that her Dutch mother loathed living in England. But knowing she was sheltered and then dealing with the ramifications of her own naïveté were two very different things, it turned out. And Susannah had been dealing with the consequences of the way she’d been raised—not to mention her parents’ aspirations for their only child—for so long now, and in such a pressure cooker, that it was easy to forget the truth of things.

Such as the fact that when her parents had told her—a dreamy sixteen-year-old girl who’d spent most of her life in a very remote and strict Swiss boarding school with other heiresses to various kingdoms and fortunes—that she was destined to marry the scion of the Betancur family, Susannah hadn’t been upset. She hadn’t cried into her pillow every night the way her roommate did at the prospect of her own marriage, scared of the life spooling out in front of her without her permission or input.

On the contrary, she’d been delighted.

Leonidas was gorgeous, all her school friends had agreed. He was older than them, but much younger than some of her friends’ betrothed, and with all his hair and teeth as far as anyone could tell. And she’d met him, so she knew firsthand that he was merciless and forbidding in ways that had made her feel tingly all over. Moreover, every time they’d interacted—as few and far between as those times might have been over the years, because he was an important man and she was just a girl, as her mother chastised her—he’d always treated her with a great patience even she’d been able to see was at complete odds with the ferocity of his dark gaze.