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 she’d bitten it back.
Above her, Leonidas went still. Forbidding.
His eyes were like flint.
And still, she could feel him there, deep inside her, stretching her and filling her, making her feel things in places she’d never realized were part of her own body. The fact she couldn’t seem to catch her breath didn’t help.
“It has been a while, I grant you,” Leonidas said and he sounded almost...strained. Tight and something like furious at once. “But it’s not supposed to hurt.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Susannah lied.
He studied her for a long moment. Then, not changing the intensity of his gaze at all, he lifted a hand and wiped away a bit of moisture she hadn’t realized had escaped from her eye and pooled beneath it.
Leonidas repeated it on her other eye, still watching her intently.
“Try that again.”
“Really.” Susannah didn’t want to move, possibly ever again, but there was something working in her she didn’t understand. Something spurring her on, pulsing out from the ache between her legs that she knew was him, fusing with that breathlessness she couldn’t control. A kind of dangerous restlessness, reckless and needy. She tested her hips against his, biting down on her lower lip as she rocked yourself against him. “It feels fantastic.”
“I can see that. The tears alone suggest it, of course. And the fact that you’re frowning at me proves it beyond a doubt.”
Susannah was indeed frowning at him, she realized then, though she hadn’t known it. She knew it now, and she let it deepen.
“Here’s a newsflash,” she managed to say. “Just because people worship the ground you walk on—literally—doesn’t mean you can read minds. Particularly not mine.”
“Tell yourself anything you need to, little one,” he murmured, and that should have enraged her. But it didn’t. If anything, it made her feel...warm. Too warm. Leonidas ran his hands down her sides. Once, then again. He brushed her hair back from her face. She could still feel him inside her, so big and so hard, and yet all he did was smooth those caresses all over her. “I don’t have to read your mind. Your body tells me everything I need to know. What I don’t understand is how you’ve managed to remain innocent all this time.”
She opened her mouth to answer him, but she was distracted by the way he touched her. Those big hands of his moved all over her, spreading heat and sensation everywhere he touched. He didn’t move inside her. He didn’t slam himself into her or any of the other things she half expected him to do. He only touched her. Caressed her. Settled there above her as if he could wait forever.
It made a little knot deep in her belly pull tight. Then glow as it began to swell into something far bigger and more unwieldy.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Susannah said at last, blinking more unwelcome heat from her eyes. “I am your widow. Of course I’m innocent. You died before you could change that.”
If she had any doubt that he was pretending not to remember her before, it disappeared. Because the look he turned on her then was 100 percent Leonidas Betancur. The hard, ruthless man she remembered vividly, all ruthless power sharply contained.
The one who hadn’t been in evidence when she’d walked into this place.
Had he truly forgotten who he was?
And if he had—when had he remembered?
“I find that hard to believe, knowing my cousins,” he was saying, offering more proof. He tilted his head to one side, and his dark eyes glittered. “I would have thought they’d be on my widow like carrion crows.”
“They were, of course.”
“But it was your depth of feeling for me that prevented you from taking a better offer when it was presented to you?” Leonidas’s voice was sardonic. The expression in his tawny dark eyes was cynical.
And that knotted thing inside her seemed harder. Edgier.
“It might surprise you to learn that I don’t like your cousins very much,” she told him, bracing her hands on his shoulders as if she’d half a mind to push him off her. But she didn’t. Her fingers curled into him of their own accord. “I asked them to respect my mourning process. Repeatedly.”
This time, when Leonidas laughed, it wasn’t anything like sunshine. But Susannah still felt it deep inside her, where they were connected, and then everywhere else in a rolling wave of sensation.
“What exactly have you been mourning, little one?” he asked, that sardonic cast to his beautiful face. “Me? You hardly know me. Let me be the first to assure you I’m no better than my cousins.”
“Maybe you are and maybe you’re not,” she retorted. “But I’m married to you, not them.”
And something changed in him then, she could feel it. A deep kind of earthquake, shaking through him and then all over her.
But as if he didn’t want her to notice, as if he wanted to pretend instead that it hadn’t happened, that was when he chose to move.
Everything changed all over again. Because she was so slick and he was so hard, so deep. And Susannah had never felt anything like it. The thrust, the drag. The pressure, the heat. The pure, wild delight that seemed to pound through her veins, turning to a bright, hot liquid everywhere it went.
Tentatively, with growing confidence, she learned to match his slow, steady rhythm. He was being something like careful she would have said with all her total lack of experience, but there was something in the slowness that tore her wide open with every intense stroke.
She felt it building in her all over again, that impossible fire she’d never felt before today, and she could tell from the deepening intensity on his face above her that he knew it. That he was doing this. Deliberately.
That this had been the point all along.
And something about that set her free. She didn’t fight it. She didn’t try to keep her body’s wild responses in check. Maybe she would regret her abandon later, but here, now, it felt natural. Right. Necessary.
She simply hung on to him and let him take her wherever he wanted them to go.
This was her husband, back from the dead. This was overdue.
This was the very thing she’d wanted more than anything else in all the world, that she’d missed all these years, and Susannah hadn’t known it until now. Until Leonidas had touched her and changed everything.
Until they were so deeply connected that she doubted she would ever be the same again.
He reached between them and found her center with his deliciously hard fingers, and then he made everything worse.
Better.
“Now,” he ordered her, every inch of him in control of this. Of her.
And she obeyed.
Susannah