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.
But he didn’t.
He kissed her again and again. He kissed her until the rest of her was as soft and pliable as her mouth. He kissed her until she looped her arms around his neck and slid against him as if she couldn’t stand on her own feet. He kissed her until she was making tiny noises in the back of her throat.
He remembered her in a confection of a white dress and all the people their families had invited to the ceremony on the Betancur family estate in France. He remembered how wide her blue eyes had been and how young she’d seemed, the virgin sacrifice his brute of a father had bought for him before he’d died. A gift tied up in an alliance that benefited the family.
One more bit of evidence of the insupportable rot that was the Betancur blood—
But Leonidas didn’t care about that.
“Leonidas,” she whispered, tearing her mouth from his. “Leonidas, I—”
He didn’t want to talk. He wanted her mouth, so he took it.
Susannah had found him here. Susannah had brought him back his life.
So he swept her up into his arms, never moving his mouth from hers for an instant, and Leonidas carried her into the bedroom he couldn’t wait to leave at last.
But first, Susannah owed him that wedding night.
And four years later, Leonidas was ready to collect.
LEONIDAS’S MOUTH WAS on hers, and she couldn’t seem to recover from the sweet shock of it. He kissed her again and again and again, and the only thing she could manage to do was surrender herself to the slick, epic feel of his mouth against hers.
As if she’d spent all these years stumbling around in the dark, and the taste of this man was the light at last.
She should stop him. Susannah knew that. She should step back and draw some boundaries. Make some rules. Demand that he stop pretending he didn’t remember her, for a start. She didn’t believe in amnesia. She didn’t believe that someone like Leonidas, so bold and relentless and bright, could ever disappear.
But then, he’d always been larger than life to her. She’d known who he was since she was a child and had been thrilled when her parents had informed her she was to marry him. He’d been like a starry sky as far as she’d been concerned on her wedding day, and some part of her had refused to believe that a man that powerful could be snuffed out so easily, so quickly.
And before she’d had a chance to touch him like this, the way she’d imagined so fervently before their wedding—
She needed to stop him. She needed to assert herself. She needed to let him know that the girl he’d married had died the day he had and she was far more sure and powerful now than she’d been then.
But she didn’t do any of the things she imagined she should.
When Leonidas kissed her, she kissed him back, inexpert and desperate. She didn’t pause to tell him how little she knew of men or their ways or the things that lips and teeth and that delirious angle of his hard jaw could do. She met his mouth as best she could. She tasted him in turn.
And
