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But it had not occurred to Leonidas to revolt. Not then.
“Besides,” Apollonia had said while sunning herself on one of the family yachts as the Côte d’Azur gleamed in the distance, some years before his wedding, “it will make you look more relatable.”
“I hope not.” Leonidas had been reading complicated work emails on his mobile instead of waiting attendance on his mother, but that was when he’d still shown up when she’d called—when he’d still felt some measure of obligation. “Why would I wish to relate to anyone?”
“Most men in your position marry cadaverous actresses or shriveled little heiresses, all of whom are notable chiefly for the breadth of their promiscuity,” Apollonia had told him, glaring at him over the top of her oversize sunglasses. If the fact that she had been a Greek heiress with something of a reputation when his father had met her years ago struck her as at all ironic, she didn’t show it. “This one is a merchant’s daughter, which makes you look benevolent and down-to-earth for choosing her, and better yet, she’s a guaranteed vestal virgin. People will admire you for your keen character judgment in choosing someone so spotless, and better yet, you won’t be forced to make desultory chitchat with every man who’s been beneath her skirts.”
In truth, Leonidas hadn’t expected to spend much time with her at all. What access he had to the offhanded memories of the man he’d been back then assured him that he’d envisioned a comfortably Continental sort of arrangement with his new wife. He’d assumed they’d handle the matter of his heirs as quickly and painlessly as possible, appear at an agreed-upon number of social events together each season, and otherwise retreat to whichever Betancur properties they preferred to live out their lives as they saw fit, with as many lovers as they could handle as long as they were reasonably discreet about it.
This was the world they’d both grown up in. People organized their lives around money, not emotion.
But Leonidas found that as he watched his spotless wife navigate the toothsome sharks masquerading as the crème de la crème of Europe—to say nothing of the far more unpredictable members of his own family—he hated it. All of it.
The notion that they were destined to end up like all these people here tonight, full of Botox and emptiness. The idea that she was one of them, this forthright creature with the cool smile and the faraway eyes. Even the faintest possibility that the woman who’d gazed at him as if he’d cured her outside these very doors tonight could ever become a master manipulator like his own mother.
He hated this.
He was nothing like these parasites any longer. That was the trouble. The compound had changed him whether he liked to believe that or not. The Count had believed in something—and no matter if it was crazy, Leonidas couldn’t seem to get past the fact that he didn’t.
He’d done what was expected of him. But did he know what he wanted?
Susannah wasn’t like the vultures in this hard, brittle world either, he reminded himself fiercely. She’d told him who he was and given him the one thing he’d never had in his whole life of excess. Her innocence. As a gift, not a bargaining chip.
In fact, unlike every other person he’d ever known, in this life or the one he’d thought was his for four years across the planet, she hadn’t bartered with it. She hadn’t even mentioned it, before or since. If he didn’t know better—if he couldn’t see her reaction every time his hand brushed hers—he might have thought he’d imagined the whole thing.
Most people he met used whatever they had as leverage to make him do something for them. Give them power, money, prestige, whatever. In the compound, access to the Count had been doled out like currency. It was no different in the Betancur Corporation. There was literally nothing people wouldn’t do to get a piece of him.
Susannah was the only person he’d ever met who didn’t appear to want anything from him.
And he found he could think of very little else but keeping her, whether she wanted to stay or not.
“What a glorious resurrection,” his cousin Silvio interjected then, smiling to cover the sharpness in his voice and failing miserably as he came to stand beside Leonidas. Yet his gaze rested on Susannah. “You must be so happy to have your beloved husband back, Susannah. After you mourned him so fiercely and for so long.”
Leonidas understood from his cousin’s tone, and Susannah’s deliberately cool response, that Silvio had been one of the cousins desperate to marry her himself. To take control of the Betancur Corporation, of course—but it was more than that. Leonidas could see it all over Silvio. It was Susannah herself. She got under a man’s skin.
