But that day, all he’d been able to focus on was Susannah. His throat had been dry from the press conference. He’d felt outside himself, as if he was recovering all over again from the accident that had struck him down in the first place. When what he really was doing was standing in the middle of what should have felt like home.
Then again, maybe nothing was going to feel like home anymore, he’d told himself. Maybe that was the trouble. There was not one single part of him that wanted to return to those Idaho mountains. But he didn’t quite know how to be in Rome where he belonged, either.
In the fact that the wife he barely knew was more comfortable in his home than he was… Troubled him.
Maybe it wasn’t that it troubled him. Maybe it was that it made him feel both fierce and something like lonely in a manner he didn’t like at all.
“No one has replaced you,” Susannah had replied in those first moments in the penthouse. She’d been standing there in another one of her sleek black ensembles. She seemed to have nothing but. The only color on her was the gold of her hair and the bright blue of her eyes. It made her something more than pretty. Striking.
He had the distinct impression that no one underestimated her twice.
“Do not attempt to placate me, please.”
She’d raised one eyebrow, and he, in turn, had hated that he didn’t know her well enough to read that expression on her face.
“You died before you could alter your will to reflect the changes everyone assured me had been agreed to before our wedding, Leonidas, which meant everything defaulted to me. And I saw no particular reason to appoint a new president or CEO, just to fill the position. There have been many candidates over the years, as you might imagine. But none have been you.”
“It’s been four years. That’s an eternity.”
She’d smiled coolly. “We’ve only actively been looking for replacement for…oh…the last eighteen months or so.”
Leonidas had imagined he could feel the rusted gears of his mind start to grind together. “That makes no sense. Surely one of my cousins—”
“Your cousins have a great many ideas, and an even greater sense of entitlement, but what they do not have are the skill sets to back those up.” She’d raised one delicately shaped shoulder, then dropped it. “And unfortunately for them, while they may be of the Betancur blood, I’ve been the one with the deciding vote.”
No, Leonidas thought now as he had then, it would not be wise to underestimate his ever-surprising wife.
She was in the office, making her way down the center aisle of the executive floor with all its deliberate windows to let light pour into the company’s highest offices. This afternoon she wore yet another dark wardrobe concoction, black boots and a dark dress he knew was an inky navy blue only because the color was slightly different from the boots. Today’s boots boasted impressively high heels, but she seemed to walk in them just the same as she had when she’d been hiking up and down mountains. The dress had tiny sleeves that curved over her shoulders, somehow calling more attention to her feminine, elegant figure without actually showing too much of it.
He wanted to taste her. He wanted to test the difference between how delicate she appeared to be and how fierce he suspected she truly was.
He couldn’t seem to get his need for her under control, but he told himself it was no more than a function of the time he’d spent away from the company of women. She’d reignited his thirst, that was all. It was nothing personal. It couldn’t be.
Leonidas wouldn’t let it be anything like personal.
He didn’t do personal. He suspected that had been the first casualty of his father’s style of parenting. Nothing was personal. Everything was the business.
He waited there as she made her way down the long hall, smiling and nodding to all she passed. Some in the hall itself, some through those walls of glass. Not quite friendly, he noticed. But cool. Direct and precise.
The Widow Betancur.
“I was barely more than a child when we married,” she had told him, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. She’d curled her feet beneath her on the leather sofa in the private jet’s living room area and managed to look nothing at all like small or vulnerable when she did it. The air steward had handed her a warm mug of something—and it ate at Leonidas that he didn’t know what she drank, that he didn’t know her preferences as well as the least of his employees—and she held it between her palms as she spoke in that smooth voice of hers, all those polished European vowels that could dance so nimbly from one romance language to the next. “For the first year after your disappearance, the only thing I had going for me was the depths of my grief.”