Everywhere.
“I have no idea,” she said, sounding broken to her own ears.
Panic was so thick inside her that she was surprised she could breathe, much less speak, and scenarios drifted through her head, one more outlandish than the next. She could live abroad, in a country far from here, just her and the baby. So long as no one knew who they were or how to find them, they could live anywhere. She could raise a child in some protected mountain valley somewhere and learn how to farm—perhaps in Idaho, for a little symmetry, where it was apparently perfectly easy to disappear into the woods for years at a time. She could relocate to any number of distant, unfashionable cities she’d never seen and work in an anonymous office somewhere, raising her child as a single mother no different from all the rest.
“None?” The way Leonidas studied her did not make her goose bumps subside. She rubbed at her arms and wished she could stop that shivering thing down deep inside her. “No ideas at all?”
“Anything but this,” she threw at him. “That’s my idea.”
“Define ‘this,’ please.”
“This, damn you.” She shook her head, only dimly aware that moisture leaked from her eyes as she did. “I’ve been a pawn in Betancur games for four years, and it’s too long. I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life. I certainly don’t want to raise a child the way I was raised. Or worse, the way you were. This is a prison and if I don’t want to live in it, I’m certain my child deserves better, too.”
And she watched him change again, softening somehow without seeming to move. She didn’t understand it. It wasn’t as if it made him any less… Leonidas. But it was as if something in him loosened.
It occurred to her as she watched his subtle transformation that he might not have known what she’d meant by options.
Just as it occurred to her that it had never crossed her mind that she wouldn’t keep her baby. She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant, but the doctor had told her she was and all she’d thought about was escaping the Betancurs with her child.
She supposed that answered a question she hadn’t known she had inside her. That she was already a better mother than her own, who had spent a memorable Christmas one year regaling Susannah with tales of how close she’d come to ending her pregnancy, so little had she wanted a child. Susannah had been twelve.
“You must know that I never wanted to let you go in the first place,” Leonidas said now, drawing her attention back to him and that hooded, lethal way he was watching her from his place by the fire. And she should have been appalled by that. She should have railed against the idea. But instead there was something small and bright inside her, and it glowed. “I entertained the possibility because I owed you. You came to that mountain and you restored me to myself. I told myself the least I could do was grant you a wish. But you should know, Susannah, that there is no such possibility now.”
He almost sounded sorrowful, but she knew better. She could see the glittering thing in his gaze, dark and possessive and very, very male.
“You might as well slam the cage door shut and throw away the key,” she managed to get out past the constriction in her throat.
“I am not a cage,” Leonidas said with quiet certainty. “The Betancur name has drawbacks, it is true, and most of them were at that gala tonight. But it is also not a cage. On the contrary. I own enough of the world that it is for all intents and purposes yours now. Literally.”
“I don’t want the world.” She didn’t realize she’d shot to her feet until she was taking a step toward him, very much as if she thought she might take a swing at him next. As if she’d dare. “And I understand that you’re used to ruling everything you see, but I took care of your company and your family and this whole great mess just fine when you were gone. I don’t need you. I don’t want you.”
“Then why did you go to such trouble to find me?” he demanded, and the force of it rocked her back on her heels. “No one else was looking for me. No one else considered for even one second that I might be anything but dead. Only you. Why?”
And Susannah hardly knew what she felt as she stared at him, her chest heaving as if she’d been running and her hands in fists at her sides. There were too many things inside her then. There was the fact that she was trapped, in this marriage and in his family and in this life she’d wanted to escape the whole time she’d been stuck in it. More than that, there was the astounding reality of the situation—that there was life inside her. That she’d found her husband on a mountaintop when everyone had accepted that he was gone, and she’d done more than save him. They’d made a life.