A Baby To Bind His Bride. Caitlin Crews
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reflected, while her heart beat out a desperate tattoo in her chest. She reminded herself that here, in the middle of this vast and dangerous wilderness, the people who held these places had a different relationship to their weapons. And to threats, for that matter.
The man before her was perhaps being nothing but matter-of-fact.
“I’m not looking to get shot,” she told him as calmly as possible. “But the Count will want to see me, I’m sure of it.” She wasn’t sure of any such thing. The fact that Leonidas had locked himself away in this place and started calling himself something so ridiculous suggested that he had no desire to be located. Ever. But she wasn’t going to get into that with one of his wild-eyed true believers. She aimed a cool smile the guard’s way instead. “Why don’t you take me to him and he can tell you so himself?”
“Lady, I’m not going to tell you again. You should turn around. You need to get off this hill and never come back here again.”
“I’m not going to do that,” Susannah said, with that iron matter-of-factness she’d developed over the past few years. As if she expected her orders to be obeyed simply because she’d issued them. As if she was Leonidas himself instead of the young widow everyone knew he’d never meant to leave in charge of anything, much less the whole of his fortune. But Susannah had done exactly what her mother had told her to do. She’d taken Leonidas’s name and gained his authority at the same time. She’d been confounding people in the corporate world he’d left behind with this exact same attitude for years now. “I have to see the Count. That’s nonnegotiable. Whatever needs to happen so that I can do that is up to you. I don’t care.”
“Listen, lady—”
“Or you can shoot me,” Susannah suggested coolly. “But those are the only two possible outcomes here.”
The man blinked at her as if he didn’t know what to do. Susannah didn’t entirely blame him. She didn’t cower. She didn’t shift her weight from side to side or give any indication that she was anything but perfectly calm. She simply stood there as if it was completely natural that she should be thousands of feet high on the side of a mountain in the Idaho wilderness. She gazed back at the strange man before her as if she marched up to the doors of cults and demanded entry every day of the week.
She stared at him until it became clear that he was the one who was ill at ease, not her.
“Who the hell are you?” he finally demanded.
“I’m so glad you asked,” Susannah said then, and this time, her smile was something less than cool. Something more like a weapon and she’d had four years to learn how to shoot it. “I’m the Count’s wife.”
THE COUNT DIDN’T have a wife.
Or he hadn’t had one in as long as he could remember—but that was the trouble with everything, wasn’t it? It was eating at him more and more these days that there were so many things he couldn’t remember.
There were more things he couldn’t remember than things he could. And all of them had happened in the last four years.
His followers told the stories of how they’d found this place. How they’d come here, each finding his or her own way up the mountain and proving themselves worthy of entry. They spoke of what they’d left behind. The people, the places. The things. The dreams and expectations.
But the Count knew only the compound.
His first memory was of waking up in the expansive set of rooms he still occupied. He been battered, broken. It had taken him a long time to return to anything approaching health. To sit, then stand. Then slowly, painfully, walk. And even when he’d been walking around of his own volition at last, he hadn’t felt that his body was back to his standard.
Though he couldn’t have said what his standard was.
It had taken him almost eighteen months to feel something like normal.
And another eighteen months to realize that no matter what he pretended because it seemed to make his people so nervous when he did not, he didn’t really know what normal was.
Because he still couldn’t remember anything but this. Here. Now.
His people assured him it was preordained. They told him that it was all a part of the same glorious plan. They had gathered, they had prayed, and so to them a leader had appeared in this same forest where they lived. The end.
The Count had agreed because there was no reason not to agree.
He certainly felt like a leader. He had since the first moment he’d opened his eyes. When he issued an order and people leaped to fill it, it didn’t feel new. It felt deeply familiar. Right and good.
He rarely shared with anyone how much he liked the things that felt familiar. It seemed to shy too close to some kind of admission he didn’t want to make.
His every need was attended to here, of course. His people gathered to hear him speak. They fretted over his health. They fed him and they clothed him and they followed him. What more could a man want?
And yet there was a woman in the compound, claiming she was his wife, and the Count felt as if something in him he’d never known was there had cracked wide open.
“She’s quite insistent,” his closest adviser, Robert, said. Again—and this time with more obvious disapproval. “She says she’s been looking for you for some time.”
“And yet I do not have a wife,” the Count replied. “Have you not told me this from the start?”
Robert was the only follower with him then, watching the woman in question on the bank of monitors before them. The Count waited to feel some kind of familiarity or recognition. He waited to know her one way or another, but like everything in his life, there was no knowing. There was no memory.
Sometimes he told his people that he was grateful for this blank canvas.
But then there were other times, like this, when the things he didn’t feel, the things he didn’t know, seemed to batter at him like a winter storm.
“Of course you do not have a wife,” Robert was saying, sounding something like scandalized. “That is not your path. That is for lesser men.”
This was a place of purity. That was one of the few things that had always been clear to the Count, and it was handy that he’d never been tempted to stray from that path. The men and women here practiced a version of the same radical purity that he did—with a special dispensation for those who were married—or they left.
But in all this time, the Count had never gazed upon a female and felt something other than that same purity, drowning out anything else.
Until now.
It took him a moment to recognize what was happening to him, and he supposed that he should have been horrified. But he wasn’t. Lust rolled through him like an old friend, and he couldn’t have said why that failed to set off any alarms within him. He told himself temptation was good, as it would make him even more powerful to conquer it. He told himself that this was nothing more than a test.
The woman who filled his screens looked impatient. That was the first thing that separated her from the handful of women who lived here. More than that, she looked... Fragile. Not weathered and hardy the way his people were. Not prepared for any eventuality. She looked soft.
The Count had no idea why he wanted to touch her to see if she could possibly be as soft as she looked.
She was dressed in clothes that didn’t make any sense to him, here on top of the mountain. He could never remember being off the mountain, of course, but he knew that there was a whole world out there. He’d been told. And all that black, sleek and slick over her trim little figure, made him think of cities.
It had