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Leonidas smiled at him the way he always did, but this time, he saw what the Count never had. That Robert thought he was the leader here, for all his noisy, public piety. That perhaps he was, as he was the one who had found Leonidas and doctored him back to health. That Robert needed a prophet—because a prophet could so easily become a martyr.
Information he imagined American law enforcement might find useful when he got out of here.
“You should be more certain,” he told Robert, enjoying the way the man’s gaze turned defiant, though he kept his mouth shut tight in the presence of the Count. “Or perhaps you do not belong here.”
And then Leonidas walked right out of this life he’d never chosen and didn’t want, back out into the world he’d never meant to leave.
“The moment the press discovers you’re alive, I expect they’ll descend on us like locusts,” Susannah said in that cool way of hers that made him wonder exactly what had changed her from the sweet little princess he recalled into this quiet powerhouse who walked beside him, out of the compound and down the mountain to where a local waited in a four-wheeled truck covered in mud. “If they discover you’ve been held here, that will be bad enough. But that you lost your memory? Forgot who you are and thought you were a—”
“Do not say ‘god,’” he warned her in an undertone as they approached the waiting vehicle, because she wasn’t the only one who worried about optics. And the press. And the consequences of these lost years, now that he could remember what he’d lost. “Not when there is the slightest possibility that someone else might hear you.”
“We can’t let anyone paint you as weak,” she told him, with only a nod at the man waiting for them. Her blue gaze met Leonidas’s and held. “That would have entirely too many repercussions.”
She sounded like a perfect little bloodthirsty Betancur, not the hesitant schoolgirl he remembered. It reminded him that while he’d been stuck in amber for years, she hadn’t been. She’d been thrust into the middle of his family and all its tiresome intrigue and squabbling.
And Leonidas couldn’t tell if that chafed at him—or if he liked that she was no longer so fragile. So frothy and breakable, all big white dress and wide eyes.
All he knew was that he wanted more. He wanted everything he’d missed. More of Susannah. More time with her, to probe that fascinating head of hers and take a whole lot more time exploring that perfectly lush little body. Just more.
He wanted back the four years he’d lost. He wanted to clear away all the shadows in his head, once and for all. He wanted to feel even an ounce as invulnerable as he had before that plane had gone down, or as he had as the Count—a man who knew his exact place in the world.
He wanted to be certain, and he could start with his wife, he thought. Because she was a sure thing. She was already married to him. She’d come and found him.
But first he had to play Lazarus and rise from the dead.
* * *
Just over three weeks later, Leonidas stood in Rome.
Where he belonged.
The Betancur Corporation offices were chrome and steel packed into a historic building in the bustling heart of the ancient city. He could glimpse his reflection in the glass of the great windows that rose before him, making one entire wall of his vast office a view of Rome spread out at his feet. He remembered this view just as he remembered the company and all the years he’d spent here, bolstering the family fortune and living up to his name.
But what he couldn’t quite remember was the man who’d stood here four years ago, seeing what he saw.
He knew who he was now. He remembered the before, the after. His childhood, one vicious beating after the next as his father “prepared” him for life as the Betancur heir. His mother’s carelessness and total lack of interest in protecting her child from these rampages, as none of it concerned her directly, she’d told him once.
“Your father is your problem,” she’d said.
He was that all right. And more. Whether Leonidas had wanted everything that came with his position as the Betancur heir or not hadn’t signified. No one had ever asked him what he wanted. His mother had abandoned him to his father’s tender mercies, and Leonidas hadn’t had any choice but to become the man his father wanted him to become.
He could remember everything now. The child who’d stopped crying out, hoping someone might save him, because no one ever had. The adolescent who had never bothered to step outside the lines drawn for him because the consequences couldn’t possibly be worth surviving just to engage in a little pointless defiance. He’d grown into the life he’d lived according to his father’s every harsh dictate until the old man had died—possibly after poisoning himself with his own evil, Leonidas had always thought, despite the medical authorities who’d deemed it an aneurysm.
