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Nothing that could make it across the brooding Ionian Sea, anyway, even if Susannah had been a sailor.
There were olive trees everywhere, growing too wild to be considered a grove. There were beaches, more rock than sand. It was a sturdy island, with no village to speak of and only a few homes clustered together around one of the coves. What few people lived on the island worked in the big house that sprawled over the top of the highest point of the island. It rambled this way and that, a jumble of open atriums and windows that let the sea in and then flirted with the nearest cliff.
She might have loved it, wild and raw something far more intense than the usual whitewashed Greek scenes that cluttered up the postcards, if she hadn’t wanted to escape so badly.
“You cannot keep this up forever,” Leonidas said a week into her prison sentence.
She’d wandered into the villa’s surprisingly well-stocked library without realizing he was within. He usually worked in the office that was tucked away on the far side of the house, which meant she’d gotten used to avoiding him easily when she was inside.
Susannah spent her days driving aimlessly around the island as if she expected a magical bridge to the mainland to appear at any moment. She sunned herself on the rocks if the weather was fine, though it was always too chilly for swimming. Or she took quiet walks among the olive trees, trying to keep her head clear. When she felt sufficiently walked out, she usually moved inside and rummaged around the books that were packed onto the library’s shelves, smelling faintly of age and water.
If she hadn’t been trapped here, this might have been the most relaxing holiday she’d ever had.
Today she’d gone straight for the huge stack of German novels that had caught her eye yesterday. And she cursed herself for not looking around before she’d wandered into his vicinity.
Leonidas was sprawled back in one of the deep, comfortable chairs, his feet propped up on the table before him and a cup of coffee at his elbow. He had a laptop open on the wide arm of the chair, but he wasn’t looking at the screen. He was studying Susannah instead, with an amused, indulgent look in his eyes that drove her mad.
“Why would I speak to you?” she asked, making no particular attempt to keep the challenge from her voice. Or the dislike. “What can you imagine I could possibly have to say to the prison warden?”
Leonidas shrugged. “I told you before that you can be as stubborn as you like, Susannah. It will make no difference.”
“I know you think you can wait me out,” she seethed at him. “But you have no idea who you’re dealing with. You never actually met the Widow Betancur.”
He laughed at that, raking a hand through his dark hair and reminding her, against her will, how much she’d liked sifting her fingers through it herself.
“I’m not afraid of my own widow, little one.”
And she didn’t know why the way he said that, his gaze trained on her though he didn’t rise from that chair, should have echoed in her like a promise.
“You should be,” she told him coldly, snatching up her book and heading for the door again—and faster than she’d come in. “You will be.”
But the truth was, she thought that evening as she readied herself for another one of the long, dangerous nights she tried so hard not to think about during the day, she was very much afraid that he could indeed wait her out. That he was already halfway there.
Because Leonidas was relentless.
He didn’t argue with her. If he saw her throughout the day, he rarely said anything. Maddeningly, he would most often offer her a slight smile, nothing more, and leave her to it while he carried on running the Betancur Corporation remotely. The staff served food in the villa only at specific times, so there was no avoiding him when she wanted to eat, but if she didn’t speak to him he did nothing about it. He only smiled and ate, as if he enjoyed his own company immensely.
More, as if he already knew how this would end.
Every night, Susannah readied herself for bed and resolutely climbed into the four-poster in the guest suite she’d tried to claim as her own. And every night she would fight to stay awake, but she never managed it. She fell asleep, and sometimes dreamed of being lifted into a pair of strong arms. Or being carried through the villa with only the moon peeking down into the open atriums to light the way. But the dreams were never enough to wake her.
And every morning she woke up in Leonidas’s bed, because they weren’t dreams at all.
Not just in the same bed, another massive king bed like the one she’d never slept in back in Rome, but curled around him as if she couldn’t get enough of him. As if she wanted to be a part of him.
