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A Baby To Bind His Bride
CAITLIN CREWS
Claiming his wedding night!Presumed dead after a tragic accident, billionaire CEO Leonidas Betancur does not recall the vows he made four years ago. But when he's tracked down by his wife Susannah fragments of his memory reappear. He denied her a wedding night, and now he's ready to collect!Abandoned in her bridal gown, believing herself to be a widow, Susannah now wants Leonidas to reclaim his empire so she can be free. But he is more untamed and dangerously attractive than she remembers! With a single touch she surrenders her innocence… And the consequences of their passion will bind them together for ever!
Claiming his wedding night!
Presumed dead after a tragic accident, billionaire CEO Leonidas Betancur does not recall the vows he made four years ago. But after he is tracked down by his wife, Susannah, fragments of his memory reappear. He denied her of a wedding night, and now he is ready to collect!
Abandoned in her bridal gown and believing herself a widow, Susannah now wants Leonidas to reclaim his empire so she can be free. But he is more untamed and dangerously attractive than she remembers! With a single touch she surrenders her innocence... And now the consequences of their passion will bind them together forever!
“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?” Leonidas demanded, and the force of it rocked Susannah 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?”
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. There was the fact that she was trapped in this marriage and in this family and in this life that 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 that she’d done more than save him. They’d made a life.
One Night With Consequences
When one night...leads to pregnancy!
When succumbing to a night of unbridled desire, it’s impossible to think past the morning after!
But, with the sheets barely settled, that little blue line appears on the pregnancy test and it doesn’t take long to realise that one night of white-hot passion has turned into a lifetime of consequences!
Only one question remains:
How do you tell a man you’ve just met that you’re about to share more than just his bed?
Find out in:
The Guardian’s Virgin Ward by Caitlin Crews
A Child Claimed by Gold by Rachael Thomas
The Consequence of His Vengeance by Jennie Lucas
Secrets of a Billionaire’s Mistress by Sharon Kendrick
The Boss’s Nine-Month Negotiation by Maya Blake
The Pregnant Kavakos Bride by Sharon Kendrick
A Ring for the Greek’s Baby by Melanie Milburne
Engaged for Her Enemy’s Heir by Kate Hewitt
The Virgin’s Shock Baby by Heidi Rice
The Italian’s Christmas Secret by Sharon Kendrick
A Night of Royal Consequences by Susan Stephens
Look for more One Night With Consequences coming soon!
A Baby to Bind His Bride
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She even teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://caitlincrews.com).
Books by Caitlin Crews
Mills & Boon Modern Romance
Undone by the Billionaire Duke
Castelli’s Virgin Widow
At the Count’s Bidding
Scandalous Royal Brides
The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal
The Billionaire’s Secret Princess
Wedlocked!
Bride by Royal Decree
Expecting a Royal Scandal
One Night With Consequences
The Guardian’s Virgin Ward
The Billionaire’s Legacy
The Return of the Di Sione Wife
Secret Heirs of Billionaires
Unwrapping the Castelli Secret
Scandalous Sheikh Brides
Protecting the Desert Heir
Traded to the Desert Sheikh
Visit the Author Profile page at millsandboon.co.uk (http://millsandboon.co.uk) for more titles.
Contents
Cover (#u4042b257-20ff-5924-911d-8ff216902f98)
Back Cover Text (#uf9595a18-d946-5185-9dc1-0e5dd40befbd)
Introduction (#uc9e5606f-b948-585a-8b5b-f7fd93443c54)
One Night With Consequences (#u1cb4920e-7f15-5895-a86d-97c88d6d4aba)
Title Page (#uab8fc131-b537-5901-8e57-ae1c44524e11)
About the Author (#u35d22694-e2da-5fd6-91d2-b245827a9b8b)
CHAPTER ONE (#uae566908-c5c7-53f9-865a-9f5823de26c4)
CHAPTER TWO (#ubcf48c26-fc8c-5662-8686-e2527791748b)
CHAPTER THREE (#u4981c43f-e8d8-559d-8198-2bdb3fa93e87)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u25916eb9-d04e-56f7-94af-cb7a6c4f5a92)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u7f16f372-c946-544d-ba84-b431224dac0f)
“THEY CALL HIM the Count,” the gruff man told her as he led her deeper and deeper into the wild, wearing more flannel and plaid than Susannah Betancur had ever seen on a single person. “Never a name, always the Count. But they treat him like a god.”
“An actual god or a pretend god?” Susannah asked, as if that would make any difference. If the Count was the man she sought, it certainly wouldn’t.
Her guide shot her a look. “Not sure it really matters this far up the side of a hill, ma’am.”
The hill they were trudging up was more properly a mountain, to Susannah’s way of thinking, but then, everything in the American Rockies appeared to be built on a grand scale. Her impression of the Wild, Wild West was that it was an endless sprawl of jaw-dropping mountains bedecked with evergreens and quaint place names, as if the towering splendor in every direction could be contained by calling the highest peak around something like Little Summit.
“How droll,” Susannah muttered beneath her breath as she dug in and tried her best not to topple down the way she’d come. Or give in to what she thought was the high elevation, making her feel a little bit light-headed.
That she was also breathless went without saying.
Her friend in flannel had driven as far as he could on what passed for a road out in the remote Idaho wilderness. It was more properly a rutted, muddy dirt track that had wound deeper and deeper into the thick woods even as the sharp incline clearly indicated that they were going higher and higher at the same time. Then he’d stopped, long after Susannah had resigned herself to that lurching and bouncing lasting forever, or at least until it jostled her into a thousand tiny little jet-lagged pieces. Her driver had then indicated they needed to walk the rest of the way to what he called the compound, and little as Susannah had wanted to do anything of the kind after flying all the way here from the far more settled and civilized hills of her home on the other side of the world in Rome, she’d followed along.
Because Susannah might not be a particularly avid hiker. But she was the Widow Betancur, whether she liked it or not. She had no choice but to see this through.
She concentrated on putting one booted foot in front of the other now, well aware that her clothes were not exactly suited to an adventure in the great outdoors. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d actually be in the wilderness instead of merely adjacent to it. Unlike every person she’d seen since the Betancur private jet had landed on an airfield in the middle of nowhere, Susannah wore head-to-toe black to announce her state of permanent mourning at a glance. It was her custom. Today it was a sleek cashmere coat over a winter dress in merino wool and deceptively sturdy knee-high boots, because she’d expected the cold, just not the forced march to go along with it.
“Are you sure you don’t want to change?” her guide had asked her. They’d stared each other down in his ramshackle little cabin standing at lopsided attention in an overgrown field strewn with various auto parts. It had made her security detail twitchy. It had been his office, presumably. “Something less...?”
“Less?” Susannah had echoed as if she failed to catch his meaning, lifting a brow in an approximation of the ruthless husband she’d lost.
“There’s no real road in,” her guide had replied, eyeing her as if he expected her to wilt before him at that news. As if a mountain man or even the Rocky Mountains themselves, however challenging, could compare to the intrigues of her own complicated life and the multinational Betancur Corporation that had been in her control, at least nominally, these last few years, because she’d refused to let the rest of them win—her family and her late husband’s family and the entire board that had been so sure they could steamroll right over her. “It’s off the grid in the sense it’s, you know. Rough. You might want to dress for the elements.”
Susannah had politely demurred. She wore only black in public and had done so ever since the funeral, because she held the dubious distinction of being the very young widow of one of the richest men in the world. She found that relentless black broadcast the right message about her intention to remain in mourning indefinitely, no matter what designs her conspiring parents and in-laws, or anyone else, had on her at any given time.
She intended to remain the Widow Betancur for a very long while. No new husbands to take the reins and take control, no matter how hard she was pushed from all sides to remarry.
If it was up to her she’d wear black forever, because her widowhood kept her free.
Unless, that was, Leonidas Cristiano Betancur hadn’t actually died four years ago in that plane crash, which was exactly what Susannah had hauled herself across the planet to find out.
Leonidas had been headed out to a remote ranch in this same wilderness for a meeting with some potential investors into one of his pet projects when his small plane had gone down in these acres and acres of near-impenetrable national forest. No bodies had ever been found, but the authorities had been convinced that the explosion had burned so hot that all evidence had been incinerated.
Susannah was less convinced. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she’d been increasingly more convinced over time that what had happened to her husband—on their wedding night, no less—had not been any accident.
That had led to years of deploying private investigators and poring over grainy photographs of dark, grim men who were never Leonidas. Years of playing Penelope games with her conniving parents and her equally scheming in-laws like she was something straight out of The Odyssey, pretending to be so distraught by Leonidas’s death that she couldn’t possibly bear so much as a conversation about whom she might marry next.
When the truth was she was not distraught. She’d hardly known the older son of old family friends whom her parents had groomed her to marry so young. She’d harbored girlish fantasies, as anyone would have at that age, but Leonidas had dashed all of those when he’d patted her on the head at their wedding like she was a puppy and had then disappeared in the middle of their reception because business called.
“Don’t be so self-indulgent, Susannah,” her mother had said coldly that night while Susannah stood there, abandoned in her big white dress, trying not to cry. “Fantasies of fairy tales are for little girls. You are now the wife of the heir to the Betancur fortune. I suggest you take the opportunity to decide what kind of wife you will be. A pampered princess locked away on one of the Betancur estates or a force to be reckoned with?”
Before morning, word had come that Leonidas was lost. And Susannah had chosen to be a force indeed these past four years, during which time she’d grown from a sheltered, naive nineteen-year-old into a woman who was many things, but was always—always—someone to be reckoned with. She’d decided she was more than just a trophy wife, and she’d proved it.
And it had led here, to the side of a mountain in an American state Susannah had heard of only in the vaguest terms, trekking up to some “off the grid” compound where a man meeting Leonidas’s description was rumored to be heading up a local cult.
“It’s not exactly a doomsday cult,” her investigator had told her in the grand penthouse in Rome, where Susannah lived because it was the closest of her husband’s properties to the Betancur Corporation’s European headquarters, where she liked to make her presence known. It kept things running more smoothly, she’d found.
“Do such distinctions matter?” she’d asked, trying so hard to sound distant and unaffected with those photographs in her hands. Shots of a man in flowing white, hair longer than Leonidas had ever worn it, and still, that same ruthlessness in his dark gaze. That same lean, athletic frame, rangy and dangerous, with new scars that would make sense on someone who’d been in a plane crash.
