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She thought it was grief that swept over her then. Grief for the girl she’d been and grief for the woman she’d been forced to become. Grief for the years she’d lost, and grief for the years he’d had taken from him.
Susannah told herself it had to be grief, this wild and unwieldy thing that ravaged her, turning her inside out whether she wanted it or not. She told herself it could only be grief.
Because the possibility that it was joy, ferocious and encompassing, might be the end of her.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly, her voice sounding as rough as she felt. “I didn’t believe the plane could go down like that. I certainly didn’t believe it was an accident. And the more I looked into it, the less I believed you’d died.”
“But you don’t need me. You don’t want me.”
He wasn’t asking her a question. He was taunting her. Leonidas shifted then. He pushed away from the fireplace and he stalked toward her, making everything inside Susannah shake to hold her ground.
And then he kept right on coming, until he was standing over her and she was forced to tilt her head back to meet his gaze.
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t want you. I want to be free.”
He took her face in his hands, holding her fast, and this close his eyes were a storm. Ink dark with gold like lightning, and she felt the buzz of it. Everywhere.
Inside and out.
As complicated as that mad thing that could not possibly be joy.
“This is as close as you’re going to get, little one,” he told her, the sound of that same madness in his gaze, his voice.
And then he claimed her mouth with his.
CHAPTER NINE
WHEN SHE KISSED him back, shifting her body so she could press closer against him and dig her hands into his chest, something deep inside Leonidas eased.
Even as something else burned anew, harder and wilder at once.
He kissed her again and again. He dug his fingers into the sweet, shining gold of her hair and he let it tumble down over her shoulders, and still he took her mouth, claiming her and possessing her and marking her the only way he could.
She was his. His.
And he was tired of keeping himself on a leash where his woman—his wife—was concerned.
She wasn’t going anywhere. Never, ever again.
He had never been much of a gentleman, and then he’d become a god. He was the one who’d been acting as if he was in a cage these last seven weeks, but that time was over now.
She was pregnant. His beautiful Susannah was ripe with his child even now. A child they’d made when she’d surrendered her innocence to him in that compound where he hadn’t known his own name until he’d tasted her. A child she’d already started building inside her when she’d walked with him through the gates and back into the world.
Leonidas had never felt anything like this in his life.
Triumph pounded through him, wild and ruthless in turn, and he wanted to shout out his savage joy from the rooftops of Paris until the whole world trembled before the child that he would bring into it.
And this woman whom he had no intention of letting out of his sight, ever, was a miracle. His miracle. She had not left him on that mountain. She hadn’t left him the moment she’d delivered him home. She hadn’t left when she’d wanted to do it a month ago, and despite what she’d said on the dance floor, she hadn’t left him tonight, either.
And now she’d missed her chance, because he would see to it that she never would.
She was his wife. She carried his child.
Nothing would ever be the same.
Leonidas devoured her mouth, and when her sweet little moans began to sound like accusations, greedy and hungry against his mouth, he lifted her against him and then bore her down onto the thick rug that stretched out before the fire on the floor of his salon. The flames crackled behind their grate, and he laid her out there before the fire like some kind of offering, determined that this time he would go slow.
This time, he would learn her. This woman who had consented to be his right hand all these weeks, when she so easily could have left him to fend for himself. This woman who was not only the wife who had waited for him and stayed dressed in black years after his death, but who was also the mother of his child.
The child who would not grow up the way he did, with a cruel father and a selfish mother, beaten into becoming the Betancur heir they’d wanted.
He would die before he let that happen and for good this time.
But first he intended to imprint himself on Susannah. He wanted her to taste him when she licked her own lips. He wanted her to feel him as if he was inside her, even when he wasn’t.
He wanted to wreck her and redeem her, over and over, until the very idea of leaving him was what made those tears spill from her eyes.
