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He did not mention how little he’d looked up to his own father. He didn’t have to; it was obvious every time he did not beat his own son to a pulp. Every time he did not go off on a rampage and use his fists as punctuation.
Every time he did not have to try to love his son and his wife—he just did, and well, despite the lack of any parental role models in that area.
Because when Leonidas Betancur decided to do something, he did it well.
Susannah had stood beside him as he’d handled his mother these past years after he’d cut her off from the Betancur fortune, as promised. The world had watched Apollonia’s dramatic response to that, played out in as many tabloids as would listen to her tales of woe.
“If you want to see your grandchild,” Leonidas had told her the last time she’d showed up where she wasn’t welcome, “you have a great deal of work to do to convince me that you deserve it.”
The names his own mother had called him then had been disgusting, but unsurprising. And the last they’d heard of Apollonia, she’d shacked up with one of her many lovers in Cape Town. Where Susannah hoped she’d stay, nicely hidden away, for as long as possible.
Meanwhile, the arrival of Adonis had cracked something open in the heart Susannah would have said Martin Forrester didn’t have.
“I suppose you don’t have to be a good man to love a baby,” she’d said to Leonidas in wonder not long after Adonis was born, when her father had not only insisted on a visit but had chastised Annemieke for her dour attitude during it. Because if she wasn’t mistaken, her crusty father had fallen head over heels in love with his grandson.
“No,” Leonidas had agreed. “But if you’re lucky, loving a child can show you how to be a better one.”
Leonidas was more than a good man, Susannah thought. He loved his son so wholly and obviously that it could have lit up the world, if he’d let it.
He loved her the same way.
So much, so deep, it was almost funny to imagine that five years ago, they’d stood in the Betancur offices in Rome and vowed to try to love each other.
“Do you know what today is?” she asked him now.
“A Tuesday,” he replied at once, drawing patterns on her belly as if sending secret, encoded messages to the twin girls within. “In Sydney, Australia, where I am happy to say we are both on the same side of the international dateline.”
“Five years ago today I hunted you down in your office in Rome, pregnant with Adonis and very, very unhappy with you,” she reminded him.
“Surely not, when I am in all ways the very best of men. Isn’t that what you were moaning into your pillow just this morning?”
Susannah made a face at him. Then reached out to put her hand on his rock-hard thigh beside her, letting his heat and strength seep into her. He made her feel safe and strong. He made her feel as if they were dancing, around and around, when they were sitting still. She was huge with this pregnancy, ungainly and slow, and he made her feel beautiful.
“If all of this is you trying to love me, and our son, and these babies we haven’t met yet, I can’t imagine what succeeding at it will look like,” she told him softly. “Or how my heart will take it.”
Leonidas turned to her then, his hard and beautiful face in shadow—but she could see him. She could always see him.
“I love you, Susannah,” he said, very gravely, so it lodged in her heart like the best kind of steel. “You saved me five years ago. And you’ve saved me every day since. And your heart can take it, I promise. I’ll make sure of it.”
“I love you, too,” Susannah whispered, as his lips claimed hers.
She felt him smile against her mouth.
“I know that,” he told her. “Haven’t you heard? In some places, I am worshipped as a god.”
But no one could possibly worship this man as much as she did, Susannah thought, even as she laughed. This remarkable, formidable, perfect man. Her husband. Her other half. The man she’d loved since she was a girl, and loved so much more now she was a woman.
So she showed him, right there on their patio while the wind blew in from the water with hints of summer in it.
The way she showed him for the rest of their life, day after day.
It turned out Leonidas was right. Her heart was just fine, if bigger and brighter than she ever could have imagined when she’d walked up the side of a mountain so long ago and located the husband she hadn’t lost, after all.
And never would again, as long as they lived.
* * * * *
