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Susannah made a sound, small and raw, and the look in her eyes changed. Still electric, though the storm seemed to deepen. Soften.
She stopped holding herself so tightly upright and apart from him, and melted against him. And it was only the fact that it might hurt her that kept Leonidas from hurling her away from him. Throwing her across the room, before that melting softness could tear him apart the way he knew it would.
He knew it.
“You do,” she told him, as if it was a self-evident truth, blazing like a fire in the corner of his office. “You have everything to give. You’re a good man, Leonidas.”
He let out a laugh, harsh and short. “Not only is that not true, but you wouldn’t know it if it was. You don’t know me, Susannah. I might as well be a stranger on the street.”
“I do know it,” she retorted, fiercely. “Because I walked into a room in a scary compound on the side of a mountain and met a stranger who had no reason at all to treat me kindly. You could have hurt me then. You didn’t.”
“I took your virginity.”
“I gave it to you and even then, you didn’t hurt me,” she said hotly. “You didn’t remember me and you weren’t abusive. And you could have been. Who could have stopped you?” She shook her head at him. “I want you to think about that, Leonidas. When you thought you were a god, you didn’t abuse your power. You tempered it.”
He felt his grip tighten on her and made himself loosen it. “None of this matters now.”
“Of course it matters.” She sounded something like frustrated. And raw with it. “You think that you’re the same as your parents. Leonidas. But you’re not. You think you’re just like your cousins, but there’s no comparison. You’re nothing like any of the people we know.”
“That is nothing but a mask,” he gritted out.
“The mask wasn’t the Count, who lived by his ideals and stayed true to his vows,” Susannah retorted. “The mask is this, here. The Betancurs. Not you.”
He let her go then, before he did something else he’d never be able to forgive or undo. Like pull her closer.
He put the distance between them then that he should never have allowed her to close and straightened his suit as if he was making sure his costume still fit—but no. She was wrong. This was his life, not a mask. That was the trouble.
“I will support you and this child,” he said briskly, ignoring the thickness in his voice. “Neither one of you will ever want for anything. If you wish to remarry, nothing will change. If you wish to retain the Betancur name, you can do that as well with my blessing. It is entirely up to you, Susannah. All that I ask is that you do it far from here, where there is none of…this.” And his voice was too rough then. He knew it. But he couldn’t seem to stop it. “None of these lies, these games. Make the child a better class of Betancur.”
“Him,” Susannah said. Very distinctly.
When Leonidas only stared at her, as if everything in him had turned to ice where he stood, she aimed that heartbreaking smile of hers at him. Straight at him as if she knew, at last, what a weapon it was.
“It’s a boy, Leonidas. We’re having a little boy.” And she didn’t wait for him to process that. Instead, she twisted the knife and thrust it in deeper. “And you have a choice to make. Will you treat your own son the way your father treated you? Or will you prove that you’re the better man? Will you behave like your mother—so terrible that when her only son found out she’d arranged to have him killed he wasn’t all that surprised? Or will you make certain that your own child will never, ever believe that you could be capable of such a thing?”
“You’re making my point for me, Susannah. Look at where I come from.”
“I know exactly where you come from, because I come from the same place,” she said fiercely. “And I’ve been in love with you since the moment I learned that I was to be yours.”
And it wasn’t the first time in his life that Leonidas had shattered, but this time, he thought the damage might be permanent.
“That’s nothing but a schoolgirl’s fantasy,” he managed to say past the noise inside him.
“Maybe so. But it’s still here. And it’s only grown, you foolish man. I don’t think it’s going anywhere.”
“You need to go,” he said, but his voice hardly sounded like his own.
“I’m going to do something radical, something our parents never did for either one of us, and love this baby. Our son.” Susannah’s gaze held him as if she was pinning him to a wall. “Will you?”
