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Or whatever passed for her heart, that was.
The actual woman he’d agreed to wed had been an afterthought. A placeholder. The truth was, he’d thought more about Susannah today than he ever had during the whole of their engagement or even the ceremony and reception where they’d united their two wealthy and self-satisfied families and thereby made everyone involved a great deal wealthier.
And he was thinking more about her right now than he should have been when there was a cult yet to escape and a whole life to resume. Almost as if he was the one who required cajoling and care, a notion that appalled him. So deeply it nearly made him shake.
Susannah twisted her hair back and secured it by simply knotting it there, and she frowned slightly at him when she was done. Her eyes moved from the towel knotted around his waist to the scars that tracked across his chest, and only after that did she meet his gaze.
“You’re not planning to stay here, are you?” she asked, and though Leonidas looked, he couldn’t see the note of doubt he heard in her voice on her face. “Not now that I’ve found you, surely.”
And Leonidas didn’t spare a glance for this room he’d spent entirely too much time in over the past few years. This room where he’d recovered from a plane crash and failed completely to recover his own mind. This room where winter after winter had howled at the walls and barricaded him inside. This room he’d once called a perfect place to clear his mind of everything but what mattered most. He’d thought he knew what that was, too. If he let it, the knowledge of how lost he’d been might bring him to his knees.
He didn’t let it.
“I think not,” he said.
He took his time dressing in what his followers—though it made Leonidas uneasy to call them that now that he remembered everything and found it all more than a little distasteful—would call his “out there” clothes. Meaning, something other than all that flowing white. Boots and jeans and a sweatshirt as if he was an interchangeable mountain person like the rest of them.
When he was Leonidas Betancur and always had been, no matter what the people here had told him about prophets falling from the sky.
But he remembered who he was now. And the fact that his wife—his wife, after all these years of chastity—stood opposite him in clothing far more suitable to their station than his…gnawed at him. The fact she’d put herself back together with such ruthless efficiency after what had happened between them, almost as if she was attempting to erase it, on the other hand, bit deep.
Leonidas didn’t want her in tears, necessarily. But the fact Susannah seemed utterly unaffected by handing over her virginity to him in a cult’s compound rankled. If he hadn’t been watching her closely he might have missed the faintest tremor in her fingers. The hint of vulnerability in that mouth of hers he already wanted to taste again.
But he couldn’t focus on that. He couldn’t focus on her the way he wanted to do. Not in a place like this, where she could never be safe.
They needed to walk out of this compound before anyone in it discovered that the Count had remembered his true identity. And Leonidas needed to keep himself from burning it down on the way out. Somehow.
“Follow me,” he told her when he was ready. “Do as you’re told and we might just make it out without incident.”
She looked startled. “Do you think there could be a problem?”
“Not if you do exactly what I tell you to do.”
Leonidas cast an eye around the room, but everything in it belonged to the Count, not him. He wanted nothing that had been here.
His long, agonizing recovery. His acceptance of his role in this place. His acquiescence to the followers here, allowing them to make him into the god of their choosing. His cooperation. He wanted none of those things.
Leonidas wanted to be himself again.
And once he left the bedchamber, everything went as seamlessly as he could have wished. The people here had no idea that everything had changed. That their Count had woken up from the spell he’d been laboring under at last.
Leonidas told his followers that Susannah was chastened and humiliated after making such absurd claims against him, something she made believable by walking several steps behind him, her head demurely lowered, as if she really was. So chastened and humiliated, in fact, that the Count was taking her down off his mountain himself in one of his rare excursions from his sanctuary.
“In the future,” he told Robert as the other man walked beside him, “we should not allow women making false claims behind our walls.”
“She seemed so certain,” the other man said, with that little gleam in his dark eyes. “And you seemed so intrigued, Count.”
