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He didn’t stop moving through the crowd, inexorable and swift, towing her toward the doors though the party was still in full swing.
“Everyone gets headaches, Leonidas,” she gritted out at him from between her teeth. “There’s no need to jump to dramatic conclusions. It’s as likely to be a brain tumor as it is that I’m pregnant.”
But Leonidas only threw her a dark, glittering sort of look that made everything in her pull tight and then shiver. He didn’t reply, he just slipped his phone from his pocket with his free hand, hit a button, then put it to his ear and kept walking.
Sweeping her along with him whether she liked it or not.
And everything after that seemed to happen much too fast, as if she was watching her own life catapult off the side of a cliff in front of her.
Leonidas whisked her from the ballroom without seeming to care overmuch that they had been expected to stay for the whole of the gala. He didn’t even bother to make their excuses to his family. He had her in the back of his car and headed back to the soaring townhome he kept in Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement, steps from the Avenue des Champs-élysées, without another word to her on the drive back.
And worse than that, when they arrived back in the glorious nineteenth-century dwelling in the sought-after Haussmann style, a doctor waited there in the foyer.
“This is ridiculous,” Susannah all but sputtered, forgetting any pretense of calm, and who cared that the doctor was standing there as witness.
“Then it costs you nothing to indulge me,” Leonidas replied, that same glittering thing in his gaze while he continued to hold the rest of his body so still.
As if he is lying in wait, something in her whispered. She repressed a shudder.
“I can’t possibly be pregnant,” she snapped at him.
“If you are so certain, you have even less reason to refuse.”
Susannah realized he’d turned to stone. That there was no give in him at all. This was the Leonidas of stark commands and absolute power, not the man who’d touched her back, held her hand and made her heartbeat slow. She didn’t understand how he could have both men inside him, but clearly he couldn’t be both at the same time.
And she knew she’d surrendered to the inevitable—that it must have showed on her face—because the doctor smiled his apologies and led her from the room to take the test.
More astonishingly, she followed him.
Susannah had worked herself into a state by the time she found Leonidas again, waiting for her in his private salon filled with priceless antiques and bristling with evidence of the Bettencourt wealth at every turn. But she could hardly pay attention to that sort of thing when her life was slipping out of her grasp right there in front of her. He stood at the fireplace, one arm propped up on the mantel as he frowned at the flames, and he didn’t turn to look at her when she came in.
“You are going to feel very silly,” she told him. Through her teeth. And opted not to notice how absurdly attractive he looked without his coat and tie, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck so his scars showed. Or the way she melted inside at the sight of him, until she could feel that dangerous pulse between her legs. “This is embarrassing. That doctor will sell the story to every tabloid in Europe.”
“I am not the least embarrassed,” Leonidas replied, still not looking at her. “And if the good doctor dares, I will destroy him.”
She felt dizzy at the mild tone he used, or perhaps it was the unmistakable ferocity beneath it. Either way, she took a few more steps into the salon and gripped the back of the nearest settee. She told herself it wasn’t to keep her balance, because nothing was happening that should so unsettle her that she’d lose her footing. Because she wasn’t pregnant. Her mother was waspish because she enjoyed it, but Susannah had long ago stopped listening to her when she was being provoking.
Leonidas would learn to do the same, she told herself piously.
Or not, a voice inside her remarked. As you are so intent on leaving him.
“I’m not pregnant, Leonidas,” she said for the hundredth time, as if she could finally make it so if she said it fiercely enough. As if she might finally light upon the right tone that would make him listen.
Leonidas stood then. He turned from the mantel and regarded her for a moment in a manner that made every part of her shiver. And keep right on shivering.
“You are so certain, little one,” he said after a moment. “But I can count.”
Susannah flushed at that, as if he really had slapped her this time. She felt feverish, hot and then cold, and she gripped the high back of the settee so hard she could see her knuckles whiten in protest. She wanted to tear that damned Betancur sapphire off her finger and hurl it at him. She wanted to run down the grand staircase and out into the Paris streets, and keep on running until her legs gave out.
