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“Your people?” She shook her head as if he wasn’t making sense. Worse, as if he was hurting her, somehow. “If you mean the cult on the other side of these doors, you can’t really think they’re anything but accessories to a crime.”
“I’ve committed no crimes.”
But he threw that out as if he was defending himself, and the Count had no idea why he would do such a thing. Nothing in his memory had prepared him for this. People did not argue with him. They did not stand before him and hurl accusations at him.
Everyone in this compound adored him. The Count had never been in the presence of someone who didn’t worship him before. He found it…energizing, in a strange way. He recognized lust, but the form it took surprised him. He wanted to drag his hands through her neat, careful hair. He wanted to taste the mouth that dared say such things to him.
He wanted to drag out the broken glass inside him and let her handle it, since he might not know how or why she was doing it, but he knew it was her fault.
“You swanned away from the scene of an accident, apparently,” she was saying, with the same fearlessness he couldn’t quite believe, even as it was happening. And she was carrying on as if he was about as intimidating as a tiny, fragile female should have been. “Your entire family thinks you’re dead. I thought you were dead. And yet here you are. Hale and healthy and draped in bridal white. And hidden away on the top of the mountain, while the mess you left behind gets more and more complicated by the day.”
The Count laughed at her. “Who is it that you imagine I am?”
“I am not imagining anything,” the woman said, and she seemed to bristle as she said it. Maybe that was why the Count found his hands on her upper arms, holding her there before him. Then dragging her closer. “I knew it was you when I saw the pictures. I don’t understand how you’ve managed to hide it for so long. You’re one of the most recognizable men alive.”
“I am the Count,” he repeated, but even he could taste the faintly metallic tang of what he was very much afraid was desperation. “The path—”
“I am Susannah Forrester Betancur,” she interrupted him. Far from pulling away from his grip, she angled herself toward him, surging up on her toes to put her face that much closer to his. “Your wife. You married me four years ago and left me on our wedding night, charmer that you are.”
“Impossible. The Count has no wife. That would make him less than pure.”
She let out a scoffing sound, and her blue eyes burned.
“You are not the Count of anything. You are Leonidas Cristiano Betancur, and you are the heir to the Betancur Corporation. That means that you are so wealthy you could buy every mountain in this range, and then some, from your pocket change alone. It means that you are so powerful that someone—very likely a member of your own family—had to scheme up a plane crash to get around you.”
The pain in his temples was sharpening. The pressure at the base of his skull was intensifying.
“I am not who you think I am,” he managed to say.
“You are exactly who I think you are,” she retorted. “And Leonidas, it is far past time for you to come home.”
There was the pain and then a roaring, loud and rough, but he understood somehow it was inside him.
Maybe that was the demon that took him then. Maybe that was what made him haul her closer to him as if he was someone else and she was married to him the way she claimed.
Maybe that was why he crushed her mouth with his, tasting her at last. Tasting all her lies—
But that was the trouble.
One kiss, and he remembered.
He remembered everything.
Everything.
Who he was. How he’d come here. His last moments on that doomed flight and his lovely young bride, too, whom he’d left behind without a second thought because that was the man he’d been then, formidable and focused all the way through.
He was Leonidas Betancur, not a bloody count. And he had spent four years in a log cabin surrounded by acolytes obsessed with purity, which was very nearly hilarious, because there was not a damned thing about him that was or ever had been pure.
So he kissed little Susannah, who should have known better. Little Susannah who had been thrown to him like bait all those years ago, a power move by her loathsome parents and a boon to his own devious family, because he’d always avoided innocence. He’d lost his own so early.
His own, brutal father had seen to that.
He angled his head and he pulled her closer, tasting her and taking her, plundering her mouth like a man possessed.
She tasted sweet and lush, and she went straight to his head. He told himself it was only that it had been so long. The part of him that had honestly believed he was who these crazy people thought he was—the part that had developed the conscience Leonidas had never bothered with—thought he should stop.
