A Baby To Bind His Bride. Caitlin Crews
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New York. London. Shanghai. New Delhi. Berlin. Cairo. Auckland.
As if he’d been to each and every one of them.
He shoved that oddity aside and studied the woman. They’d brought her inside the compound walls and placed her in a sealed-off room that no one ever called a cell. But that’s what it was. It was outfitted with nothing more than an old sofa, a toilet behind a screen in the corner and cameras in the walls.
If she was as uncomfortable as the last three law enforcement officials had been when they’d visited, she didn’t show it. She sat on the sofa as if she could do it forever. Her face was perfectly calm, her blue eyes clear. She looked almost serene, he might have said, which only drew attention to the fact that she was almost incomprehensibly pretty.
Not that he had many other women to compare her with. But somehow the Count knew that if he lined up every woman out there in the world he couldn’t remember, he would still find this one stunning.
Her legs were long and shapely, even in the boots she wore, and she crossed them neatly as if she hadn’t noticed they were splattered with mud. She wore only one rather large ring on her left hand that kept catching the light when she moved, and she crossed her fingers in her lap before her as if she knew it and was trying to divert attention away from all that excessive sparkle. Her mouth caught at him in ways he didn’t entirely understand, greed and hunger like a ball inside him, and the Count wasn’t sure he liked it. He concentrated on her remarkably glossy blond hair instead, swept back from her face into something complicated at her nape.
A chignon, he thought.
It was a word the Count didn’t know. But it was also the proper term to describe how she had styled her hair. He knew that in the way he knew all the things he shouldn’t have, so he shoved it aside and kept on.
“Bring her to me,” he said before he thought better of it.
Then he thought better of it and still said nothing to contradict himself.
“She’s not your wife,” Robert said, scowling. “You have no wife. You are the Count, the leader of the glorious path, and the answer to every question of the faithful!”
“Yes, yes,” the Count said with a wave of his hand. What he thought was that Robert didn’t actually know if this woman was his wife. Neither did he. Because he couldn’t simply have appeared from nowhere in a shower of flame, the way everyone claimed. He’d understood that from the start. At the very least, he’d thought, if he’d simply appeared one day in a burst of glory, he wouldn’t have needed all that time to recover, would he?
But these mysteries of faith, he’d learned, were not something he could explore in public.
What he knew was that if he’d come from somewhere else, that meant he’d had a life there. Wherever it was. And if this woman thought she knew him, it was possible she could prove to be a font of information.
The Count wanted information more than anything.
He didn’t wait to see if Robert would obey him. He knew the other man would, because everyone did. The Count left the surveillance room behind and walked back through his compound. He knew it so well, every room and every wall built of logs. The fireplaces of stone and the thick rugs on the common floors. He had never thought beyond this place. Because everything he wanted and needed was right here. The mountain gave and the followers received, that was the way.
Sydney. Saint Petersburg. Vancouver. Reykjavik. Oslo. Rome.
What did it mean that he could suddenly see so many more places? Places not hewn from wood and tucked away in these mountains, with nothing to see in all directions but trees and weather? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
The Count made his way to his own private rooms, set apart from the dormitories where the rest of his people slept. He kept his expression blank as he moved, as if he was communing with the Spirit the way he was supposed to do, the better to discourage anyone from approaching him.
The good news was that no one would dare. They watched him as he walked and the more attention-seeking among them pitched their prayers even louder, but no one tried to catch his eye.
When he got to his rooms, he waited in the outer chamber. When he’d first started to come into awareness, to become himself, he’d recoiled from the starkness of these rooms. It had felt like a prison, though he knew, somehow, he’d never been in one. But now he’d come to prefer it to the relatively cozier rooms on the other side of his doors. Stark-white walls. Minimal furnishings. Nothing to distract a man from his purpose.
It was between him and his conscience that he’d never quite managed to feel that purpose the way everyone assumed he did.
He didn’t have to wait long for them to bring her in. And when they did, the starkness of the walls seemed to make the shock of her black clothes that much bolder in comparison. Everything was white. The clothes he wore, loose and flowing. His walls, the hardwood floor, even the chair he sat in, like an ivory throne.
And then this woman in the middle of it all, black clothes, blue eyes and unbent knees. This woman who stared at him, her lips slightly parted and a sheen in her eyes he couldn’t quite read.
This woman who called herself his wife.
“I do not have a wife,” he told her when his followers had left them alone at last. He told himself there was no reason his anticipation should make him so...restless. “The leader has no wife. His path is pure.”
He stayed where he was, sitting on the only chair in the room. But if standing there before him like one of his supplicants bothered her—though, of course, his followers would all be prostrate before his magnificence rather than stand and risk his displeasure—she didn’t let it show.
In fact, the look on her face was something that edged more toward astonishment. With an undertone he was fairly sure was temper—not that he’d seen such a thing with his own eyes. Not directed at him.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
That was all she said. It was a harsh little whisper, nothing more.
And the Count found himself fascinated by her eyes. They were so tremendously blue it made him think of the breathless summers here, and they were filled with a brilliant, diamond-cut emotion he couldn’t begin to understand.
“I do not kid,” he said. Or he didn’t think he did. He was certain he never had, anyway. Not here.
The woman before him blew out a breath as if something was hard. As if she was performing some kind of physical labor.
“How long do you intend to hide out here?” She threw the words at him in a tight sort of voice that suggested she was upset.
The Count could not think of any reason at all that she should be.
“Where else would I be?” He tilted his head slightly to one side as he regarded her, trying to make sense of all the emotion he could see swirling around her, written into every line of her black-clad body. Trying to puzzle out its cause. “And I’m not hiding. This is my home.”
She let out a sharp little laugh, but not as if she thought anything was funny. The Count found himself frowning, which never happened.
“You have many homes,” she said in a voice that sounded almost...gritty. “I enjoy the penthouse in Rome, certainly, but there’s something to be said for the New Zealand vineyard. The island in the South Pacific. The town house in London or the Greek villa. Or all those acres of land your family owns in Brazil. You have multiple homes on every possible continent, is my point, and not one of them is a sanitarium in a mountain tree house in Idaho.”
“A sanitarium?” he echoed. It was another word he didn’t know—and yet did, as soon as she said it.
But she wasn’t paying attention to what he did or didn’t comprehend. She was pivoting to take in the stark-white chamber, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Is this supposed to