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Leonidas had let out a hoarse sound. A laugh, he’d told himself. “What grief? To my recollection we barely knew each other.”
Her blue eyes had been frank. Assessing.
“But no one knew that,” she’d said quietly. “Or if they did, it was their word against mine. And I was your widow, with your fortune and your power at my fingertips. So it didn’t matter what people speculated. It mattered what I said. And I said my grief was too intense to even think about naming your successor.”
He tried to imagine the company—his family—after his death. His scheming cousins would have seen it as divine intervention and a chance at last to take what they’d long believed was theirs. His manipulative mother would have moved to consolidate her power, of course, but would also have grieved him, surely. If only in public, the better to attract the attention she always craved. And Apollonia Betancur’s public emotional performances tended to raze cities when she got going. Meanwhile, his greedy board of directors, each one of them so determined to squeeze every last euro out of any potential deal, would have formed alliances and tried to pulverize the competition in their race to take what had been Leonidas’s.
All of them were jaded sophisticates. All of them were deeply impressed with their ability to manipulate any and all situations to their benefit. They were among the most debauched and pampered of the wealthy elite in Europe, and they exulted in the things they owned and the lives they ruined along the way.
And it seemed they’d all been bested by a nineteen-year-old.
He’d smiled at that. “So you mourned my untimely passing. You grieved for much longer than anyone could have expected after a marriage that lasted less than a day. Judging by your somber attire, you continue to do so.”
“Grief squats on a person and stays until it is finished,” Susannah had said softly, as much to the mug between her hands as to him. Then she’d lifted her gleaming gold head and she’d smiled at him, her clever blue eyes gleaming. “And who among us can say how another person grieves? Or when that grief should be finished?”
It had been clear to Leonidas that she’d outsmarted them all.
An impression that his weeks back here in Rome had done nothing to dissipate.
As if she could feel his eyes on her then, all the way from his end of the long hallway, she looked up. Her stride didn’t change. Her expression didn’t alter. Still, Leonidas felt sure that something in her had…hitched.
She pushed through his door when she reached it, letting it fall shut behind her. And then they were enclosed in the hushed quiet of his soundproofed space. A big smile took over her face and Leonidas felt that strange hitch again, but in him this time.
It took him longer than it should have to remember that his wife was entirely about optics. She was only putting on a show, he told himself sternly. She was smiling for the benefit of the people in the office around them who could look in through the glass of his wall and watch them interacting. This was for everyone out there who gossiped and wondered and whispered among themselves about the kind of relationship a man who should have been dead had with the wife he’d left behind.
He knew better than to give them anything. But keeping his expression impassive was harder than it ought to have been.
“Your secretary said you wished to see me,” Susannah said. She didn’t wait for his answer. Instead, she walked over to the sitting area nearest the big window with the sweeping views of Rome and settled herself on one of the low couches.
“I did indeed.”
“I think it’s going well, don’t you?” She folded her hands in her lap, and Leonidas had the strangest flashback to the compound. To the way she’d sat there then, in that little cell with cameras trained on her, as calmly as she was sitting before him now. Exuding serenity from every pore. “I think your cousins found it a bit difficult to pretend they were excited by your resurrection, but everyone else is eating up the story like candy.”
“By everyone else, you mean the world. The tabloids.”
“Not just the tabloids. You are a major story on almost every news network in Europe. Returning from the dead, it turns out, is a feel-good crowd-pleaser for all.”
He knew she was right. But something in him balked at her cynicism—or maybe it was something else. Maybe it was the fact that when she was close to him, all he wanted to do was touch her the way he had when he’d been the Count and hadn’t known better.
And all she wanted to do was talk about narratives. Optics. Campaigns and complicated plots to secure his place here again.
She had been the virgin. But Leonidas was the one who couldn’t seem to let go.
