her many texts asking when he would be coming back.
I’m not.
That had been that. He hadn’t said much to her brother, Zachary, either. Leon had supposedly been waiting for the full release of his trust fund on his thirtieth birthday. He’d promised to inject capital into the marina when that happened, but he had ghosted the lot of them, destroying her brother’s livelihood and their father’s retirement in the process. Tanja had given up her school savings to help bail out Zach and still owed on the student loans she’d taken to finish her degree.
All of that meant she would rather kill and eat Leon Petrakis than be dragged out of bed to look at him, yet he opened his arms and spoke with what sounded like...tenderness?
“Agape mou. At last. I’m here to take you home.”
He moved forward in long, confident strides, like the lion he was named for, snaring her with easy strength and pulling her into his tall, muscled frame.
Her heart lurched in alarm at the sheer size of him. She’d forgotten this dynamic energy of his, this magnetism and sex appeal. How he made her feel utterly cherished as he crushed her close.
It was a lie, of course. She felt his disingenuousness in the hardness of his muscles as he cradled her. She saw it in his features, distant and closed off. He wasn’t so much older as altered. He was still beautiful, but now he was fierce. Hardened and serious. Everything about him was amplified. This was Leon two-point-O. Leaner and sharper and stronger.
The scent of salt breeze filled her nostrils along with damp cotton and faint notes of aftershave or some other manly, exclusive product. Underlying all of that was a scent that was masculine and familiar. Personal. Him. It was elemental power and a barbaric will that enveloped her the way his arms did, in a claim, like an animal leaving his scent on his mate.
Despite how false she knew this embrace to be, after so many weeks of worry, her body bought what he was selling. She gave an involuntary shudder and leaned into him, unconsciously latching onto him as a piece of her old life and the security and stability she yearned so badly to get back to.
She was losing her mind to fear, she realized, because some latent, ridiculous remnants of her crush on him pulsed heat through her. She hated him. She had decided that years ago, but instead of thrashing him with her fist and decrying him as the heartless profligate he was, she relaxed. Her most primitive self drew in his presence the way her lungs took in oxygen—as though it was something that could be absorbed and used to keep her alive.
Leon cupped her jaw to tilt her face up and stroked a thumb across her cheekbone. The men with guns disappeared, and tingles of pleasure raced across her skin as her husband bent his head and set his mouth warmly against her unsteady lips.
An unexpected spark leaped between them, bursting in her chest like fireworks, sending a singed line out to her fingertips, into her loins and down to her toes.
His flinty gaze flashed in surprise, as though he experienced something like it, as well.
They had only been lovers a few short weeks, but seeing that ember flare within him caused her own to intensify. Her mouth softened, and he deepened their kiss in a slow rock of his lips across hers.
She let her lashes flutter closed and leaned more completely into him. It was so intoxicating, so perfect and needed and right. She pressed into her toes, sealing their mouths. It was exactly as it had been five years ago. His kiss was hard and hot and held a hurricane of passion behind it that would have swept her into its eye if he hadn’t tightened his hands on her and set her back on her flat feet.
She swayed, stunned to discover reality crowding in like dark shadows.
None of this made sense. Not his presence here or her pounding heart or the way her hands refused to unclench from his soft pullover.
Keeping his arm around her, he faced the soldiers, speaking French, which was more common than English here, after the local dialect.
“See? As I told you. She’s my wife. She came to teach English, but when the changeover happened she was unable to leave without a male relative. I’ll take her home now.”
Changeover, she thought dimly. Such a well-scrubbed euphemism for foreign military invasion.