she managed to say, her head tipped back and her eyes shut tight.
“That’s what they call me,” he agreed, laughter and need in his voice and his words like separate caresses against her soft heat.
He scraped the neediest part of her with his teeth, then sucked at her, hard—and that was it.
Susannah thought she died, but there was too much sensation. Too much. It broke her into pieces, but it didn’t stop. It didn’t ever stop. It went on and on and on, and she couldn’t breathe.
She didn’t want to breathe.
And she was still spinning around and around when he pulled away from her. She managed to open her eyes and fix them on him, watching in a dizzy haze as Leonidas stripped himself of that flowing white shirt at last.
Susannah couldn’t help the gasp she let out when she finally saw all of him.
His muscles were smooth and tight, packed hard everywhere in a manner that suggested hard labor instead of a gym. She might not have seen him naked four years ago, but she’d certainly spent time researching him online. She thought he was bigger now than he’d been when that plane went down. Tougher, somehow.
Maybe she thought that because he was covered in scars. They wound all over his chest and dipped below his waistband.
“So many scars...” she whispered.
Leonidas froze. And Susannah couldn’t bear it.
She wasn’t sure she’d thought much at all since the moment she’d walked through the doors to this chamber and had seen Leonidas sitting there as if he belonged on this godforsaken mountaintop. As if he wasn’t a Betancur. Or her husband. Her mind had gone blank while her mouth had opened, and she saw no reason to reverse the not-thinking trend now.
Susannah reached up and traced the scars that she could touch. Over the flat plane of his chest. Across the ridged wonder of his abdomen. On the one hand, he was a perfect specimen of a male, lean and strong and enough to make her mouth water. On the other, he wore the evidence of the plane crash that everyone had said was too deadly for anyone to survive. It was as if two pictures tried to collide in her head, and neither one of them made sense. Not the Leonidas he’d been, who had left her so abruptly. Not the man who called himself the Count and hid away in this compound.
But her fingers didn’t need pictures. They didn’t care which version of him he was today. His skin was so hot and his body was so hard, and every time she found a new scar and ran her fingers over it as if she was trying to memorize it, he pulled in his breath with a sharp sound that she knew, somehow, had nothing to do with pain.
“Do they make me a monster?” he asked, his voice a quiet rumble.
Susannah opened her mouth to refute that—but then saw the way his dark eyes gleamed. And she remembered. This was a man who had considered himself something of a god even before he’d crash-landed in the middle of the Rocky Mountain wilderness and found some followers to agree with him.
He didn’t think he was a monster. She doubted Leonidas Betancourt ever thought ill of himself at all, no matter what he was calling himself today.
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Do you care if they do? Or do you fancy yourself as much a monster as a man?”
And he laughed. Leonidas threw back his head, and he laughed and laughed.
Something speared through her then, part fear, part recognition. And something else she couldn’t quite identify.
It was because he was so beautiful, she thought. There was no denying it. That thick, rich dark hair, shot through with a hint of gold and much longer than his austere cut back in the day. Those dark, tawny eyes that burned and melted in turn. His height and his whipcord strength, evident in everything he did, even sit on a makeshift throne in a white room in a guarded compound. All of that would have been enough to make him noticeable no matter what. To make him attractive no matter where he went.
He had turned her head when she’d been little more than a girl.
But he was so much more than that. It was something about the sheer, sensual perfection of his face. The way his features were sculpted so intensely and precisely, put together like an amalgam of everything that was beautiful in him. His Greek mother. His Spanish father. His Brazilian grandparents on one side, his French and Persian grandparents on the other.
He was glorious. There was no other word for it.
And when he laughed, Susannah was tempted to believe that he really was a god, after all.
“You are quite right,” Leonidas said after a long while. Long after she’d been captivated by the way his laughter transformed him, right there where he sat astride her. Long after she’d lost another part of herself she couldn’t quite name. “I don’t care at all. Monster, god, man. It is all the same to me.”
And this time when he came down over her, she was already shaking. A deep, internal trembling, as if a terrible joy was tearing her apart from inside out. Some part of Susannah wanted it no matter how she feared it, and because she couldn’t tell if it was suicide or something sweeter, she threw herself into his hands.
Leonidas shifted. He kicked off his trousers, and then settled himself between her legs. He pulled her thighs up on either side of his hips while Susannah tried to make her whirling head settled down enough to accommodate him.
Then it didn’t matter, because he kissed her. Again and again, he took her mouth until she felt branded. Possessed.
Taken. At last.
It made her wonder how she’d ever survived all this time without him. Without this.
In some distant part of her brain she knew she should tell him.
I’m a virgin, she could say. Word of warning, our wedding really was a white one. Maybe he would even laugh again, at the absurdity of a woman her age still so untouched. Whatever he did, whether he believed her or not, it would be said. He would know.
But Susannah couldn’t seem to force the words out.
And she forgot about it anyway as his hands gripped her hips again, and he shifted her body beneath his in an even more pointed manner, as if he intended to take charge of this and do it his way.
Maybe that would be enough.
It would have to be enough, because she could feel him then. Huge and hard, flush there against the part of her that no other person had ever touched.
A different sort of shiver ran over her then. Foreboding, perhaps. Or a wild need she’d never encountered before, drawing tight all around her as if she was caught in a great fist. Again she opened her mouth to say the thing she didn’t want to say, just to make sure he didn’t—
But he thrust into her then, deep and sure.
Susannah couldn’t control her response. She couldn’t pretend. It was a deep ache, a burning kind of tear, and her body took over and bucked up against him as if her hips were trying to throw him off of their own volition. She couldn’t control the little yelp that she let out, filled with the pain and shock she couldn’t hide.
Though the instant it escaped her, she wished
