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“Susannah.” His lips felt thin enough to cut glass. “I am still an extremely busy man, as you must surely be aware. This harangue could have been put into letter form and sent by post, surely. Why did you fly some sixteen thousand kilometers to do it in person?”
She studied him for a moment, and there was still that fine trembling all over her. Her mouth. Her fingers. He could even see it in her legs. But she didn’t appear to notice.
“Everyone was deeply invested in my remarriage, Leonidas. I was bullied and manipulated, pushed and prodded. No one took me seriously. No one wanted to take me at all, unless it was to the altar. But I persisted.”
“Yes, and your persistence makes you a great hero, I am sure,” Leonidas said drily. “Given that it made you perhaps the most powerful woman in the world. My heart bleeds for your sacrifice.”
“I persisted because of you, you arrogant—” She cut herself off. He watched her pull in a breath, as if she needed it to steady herself, and then her blue eyes were hard on his again. “I persisted because of you. Because I had an idea of you in my head.”
“Based on tabloid nonsense and too many fairy tales, I have no doubt.”
“Because you danced with me at our wedding reception,” she corrected him, her voice as quiet as it was firm. “You held me in your arms and you looked at me as if I was…everything. A woman. Your wife. Just for one moment, I believed I could be. That it would all work out.”
Leonidas could say nothing then. He remembered that dance, and he didn’t know if it was memory or longing that moved in him now. The urge to hold her again, to sweep her into his arms without having to pretend it had anything to do with dancing or weddings or galas, swept over him. It was like an itch, pushing him to the limit.
But Susannah was still coming toward him, that wildness in her blue eyes.
“I carried this company for four years,” she told him matter-of-factly. “I made myself into an icon. The untouchable widow. A Betancur legend. And all the while, I looked for you.”
“No one asked you to do this,” he growled back at her. “You should have left me on that mountaintop. No one could possibly have blamed you. Hell, they would have celebrated in the streets.”
“I looked for you and then I found you,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard him say a word. “I took you out of there. I even sweetened the deal with the virginity I’d been holding on to for all these years. But like everything else, you didn’t seem to realize that it was a gift.”
“I beg your pardon.” He stood as tall as he could without breaking something, and his voice was so scornful he was surprised it didn’t leave marks. And he couldn’t seem to stop it. “Have you come all this way to remind me that I owe you a thank-you note? I’ll instruct my secretary to type one up as soon as possible. Is that all?”
Susannah shook her head at him, as if he’d disappointed her. Again. “You know your cousins. You can imagine the lengths they were willing to go to get control of me, and by extension the company.”
The truth was, Leonidas did know. And he didn’t want to know.
“I refused to drink out of an open glass that wasn’t first tested by someone else for years,” she told him. “Because I didn’t want to wake up to find myself roofied and married to a random Betancur, then declared unfit and packed off to a mental institution before ten the next morning so I couldn’t object. Do you think that was fun?”
“So that’s a yes, then,” he said after a moment, feeling more and more certain that if she didn’t leave, and soon, he was going to do something he might truly regret. Like forget why he’d sent her away in the first place. “You do want a thank-you note.”
But this time, Susannah closed the distance between them. And then she was standing there before him, within touching distance. She was still trembling, and it slowly dawned on Leonidas that that faint little tremor that shook all over her wasn’t fear or emotion.
It was temper.
She was furious. At him.
“I wanted to leave when we brought you home from Idaho, but you begged me to stay,” she reminded him.
“Begged?” He laughed. Or made himself laugh, more like. “Perhaps your memory has as many gaps as mine.”
“The funny thing is that I knew better. I knew that nothing could come of it. That we would always end up in the same place.” That storm in her eyes seemed to get wilder. More treacherous. “Right here.”
He said nothing. He could only seem to stand there before her, undone in ways he refused to investigate because he didn’t think he could be fixed. He didn’t think he’d ever put himself back together—but he didn’t want to think about that, either.
