USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, 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.
Also by Caitlin Crews
Unwrapping the Innocent’s Secret
Secrets of His Forbidden Cinderella
Chosen for His Desert Throne
Once Upon a Temptation collection
Claimed in the Italian’s Castle
Passion in Paradise collection
The Italian’s Pregnant Cinderella
Royal Christmas Weddings miniseries
Christmas in the King’s Bed
His Scandalous Christmas Princess
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.
The Secret That Can’t Be Hidden
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk
ISBN: 978-0-008-91391-5
THE SECRET THAT CAN’T BE HIDDEN
© 2021 Caitlin Crews
Published in Great Britain 2021
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Extract
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
IF SHE CONCENTRATED on how outrageous the situation was, how humiliating and impossible, Kendra Connolly knew she would never do what needed to be done.
Yet there was no way around it. She had to do this.
Her family was depending on her—for the first time. Ever.
She’d been sitting in her car for far too long already in the parking structure deep beneath Skalas Tower in the hectic bustle of Midtown Manhattan. She’d been given a certain amount of time to appear on the cameras in the elevators before the security officials who’d checked her in would investigate her whereabouts, here beneath the North American power center of one of the world’s wealthiest men. The clock was ticking, yet here she was, gripping the steering wheel while staring at her knuckles as they turned white. Psyching herself up for the unpleasant task ahead.
And failing.
“There must be some other solution,” she had said to her father.
So many times, in fact, that it had really been a lot more like begging.
Kendra was desperate to avoid...this. But Thomas Pierpont Connolly had been unmoved, as ever.
“For God’s sakes, Kendra,” he had boomed at her earlier today, when she’d tried one last time to change his mind. He’d been leaning back in his monstrously oversized leather chair, his hands laced over his straining golf shirt because nothing kept him from a few holes at Wee Burn when he was in the family home on the Connecticut island his Gilded Age forebears had claimed long ago. “Think about someone other than yourself, for a change. Your brother needs your help. That should be the beginning and the end of it, girl.”
Kendra hadn’t dared say that she disagreed with that assessment of the situation. Not directly.
Tommy Junior had always been a problem, but their father refused to see it. To him, Tommy had always been made of spun gold. When he’d been expelled from every boarding school on the East Coast, Thomas had called him high-spirited. When he’d been kicked out of college—despite the library Thomas had built to get him in—it had been excused as that Connolly bullheadedness. His failed gestures toward entrepreneurial independence that cost his father several fortunes were seen as admirable attempts to follow in the family footsteps. His lackadaisical carrying-on as vice president of the family business—all expense account and very little actual work—was lauded by Thomas as playing the game.
Tommy Junior could literally do no wrong, though he’d certainly tried his best.
Kendra, meanwhile, had been an afterthought in her parents’ polite, yet frosty marriage. Born when Tommy was fourteen and already on his fifth boarding school, her well-to-do parents had never known what to do with her. She’d been shunted off to nannies, which had suited her fine. The old Connolly fortune that consumed her father’s and brother’s lives had been meaningful to her only in that it provided the sprawling house on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, where she could curl up in a forgotten corner and escape into her books.
Her mother was the more approachable of her parents, but only if Kendra conformed to her precise specifications of what a debutante should be in the time-honored fashion of most of her family, who proudly traced their lineage to the Mayflower. To please her, Kendra had attended Mount Holyoke like every other woman in her family since the college was founded, but as she grew older she’d come to understand that the only way to gain her father’s attention was to try to take part in the only thing that mattered to him, his business.
She wished she h
adn’t now.
The clock kept ticking, and Kendra had no desire to explain why she was dragging her feet to the Skalas security team, who had already thoroughly searched her car and her person and had sent her photograph up to the executive floor. Where, she had been told coldly, she was expected. Within ten minutes or she would be deemed a security risk.
Kendra forced herself to get out of the car and shivered, though it wasn’t cold. She didn’t like New York City, that was all. It was too loud, too chaotic, too much. Even here, several stories beneath ground with the famous Skalas Tower slicing into the sky above her, an architectural marvel of steel and glass, she was certain she could feel the weight of so many lives streaming about on the streets. On top of her.
Or, possibly, that was her trepidation talking.
Because she’d been so sure she would never, ever have to come face-to-face with Balthazar Skalas again.
She smoothed down her pencil skirt, but didn’t give in to the urge to jump back in the car and check her carefully minimal makeup for the nineteenth time. There was no point. This was happening, and she would face him and the truth was, she was likely flattering herself to think that he would even recognize her.
The flutter low in her belly suggested that it was not so simple as mere flattery, but Kendra ignored that as she marched across the concrete toward the bank of elevators, clearly marked and unavoidable.
It had been years, after all. And this was an office building, however exquisite, not one of her family’s self-conscious parties packed full of the rich and the powerful, where Kendra was expected to present herself as her mother’s pride and her father’s indulgence. Such gatherings were the only reason she’d ever met or mingled with the kinds of people her father and brother admired so much, like Balthazar Skalas himself—feared and worshipped in turn by all and sundry.
Because Thomas certainly had no interest in letting Kendra work alongside him in the company.
Tommy had always laughed at her ambitions. She’d love to think, now, that he’d wanted to keep her at bay because she’d have discovered what he was up to sooner. But she knew the truth of that, too. Tommy didn’t think of her at all. And was certainly not threatened by anything she might or might not do, as he’d made clear today in no uncertain terms.
A reasonable person might ask herself why, when her father and brother had always acted as if she was an interloper as well as an afterthought—and her mother cared about her but only in between her garden parties and charity events—Kendra was carrying out this unpleasant task for them.
That was the trouble.
It was the only task she’d ever been asked to perform for them.
She couldn’t help thinking it was therefore her only chance to prove herself. To prove that she was worthy of being a Connolly. That she was more than an afterthought. That she deserved to take her place in the company, be more than her mother’s occasional dress up doll, and who knew? Maybe get treated, at last, like she was one of them.
And maybe if that happened she wouldn’t feel so lonely, for once. Maybe if she showed them how useful she was, she wouldn’t feel so excluded by her family, the way she always had.
No matter how many times she told herself it was simply because she was so much younger than her brother, or because she represented a strange moment in her parents’ otherwise distant marriage, it stung that she was always so easily dismissed. So easily ignored, left out, or simply not told about the various issues that affected all of them.
Maybe this time she could show them that she belonged.
So even though the very idea of what she might have to do made her stomach a heavy lead ball, and even though she thought Tommy would be better off accepting whatever punishment came his way for his behavior—for once—she marched herself to the elevator marked Executive Level, put in the code she’d been given, and stepped briskly inside when the doors slid soundlessly open before her.
That her heart began to catapult around inside her chest was neither here nor there.
“I don’t understand why you think a man as powerful and ruthless as Balthazar Skalas will listen to me,” she’d told her father, sitting there in the uncomfortable chair on the other side of his desk. She had not said, My own father doesn’t listen to me, why should he? “Surely he’d be more likely to listen to you.”
Thomas had given a bitter laugh. He’d actually looked at her directly, without that patronizing glaze that usually took him over in her presence. “Balthazar Skalas has washed his hands of the Connolly Company. As far as he’s concerned, I am as guilty as Tommy.”
A traitorous part of Kendra had almost cheered at that, because surely that would encourage her father to finally face the truth about his son. But she knew better.
“All the more reason to want nothing to do with me, I would have thought,” she’d said instead. “As I, too, am a Connolly.”
“Kendra. Please. You have nothing to do with the company.” Thomas Connolly had waved one of his hands in a dismissive sort of way, as if Kendra’s dreams were that silly. “You must appeal to him as...a family man.”
Her head had been alive with those too-bright, too-hot images of Balthazar Skalas she carried around inside and tried to hide, even from herself. Especially from herself. Because he was... Excessive. Too dangerous. Too imperious. Too arrogantly beautiful. Even his name conjured up the kind of devil he was.
But it didn’t do any justice to the reality of him, that cruel mouth and eyes like the darkest hellfire. And oh, how he could make the unwary burn...
She’d flushed, but luckily her father paid little attention to such inconsequential things as his only daughter’s demeanor or emotional state. This was the first time he’d ever wanted more from her than a pretty smile, usually aimed at his lecherous business associates at a party.
“What does he know of family?” Kendra had been proud of herself for sounding much calmer than she felt, though it had taken an act of will to keep from pressing her palms to her hot cheeks. “I thought he and that brother of his were engaged in some kind of civil war.”
“He can be at war with his brother, but I do not suggest anyone else attempt it. They are still running the same company.”
“I’m sure I read an article that claimed they’d balkanized the corporation so that each one of them need not—”
“Then you must appeal to him as a man, Kendra,” her father had said, very distinctly.
And they’d stared at each other, across the width of that grand desk of his that he claimed some ancestor or another had won from Andrew Carnegie in a wager. Kendra told herself she must have misheard him. Or misunderstood it. Her heart had been pounding so hard that she felt it everywhere. Her temples. Her wrists. Beneath her collarbone.
Somehow she had kept her composure.
But in case she’d had any doubt about what her father might have meant by that, Tommy had waylaid her moments after she’d left her father’s study. She’d rounded the corner and he’d been there, flashing that grin of his that always meant he thought he was being charming.
Kendra knew better. She hadn’t found him charming in as long as she could remember. Ever, even. A side effect of knowing him, she would have said.
Not that anyone had ever asked her.
“Don’t tell me you’re wearing that,” he’d growled at her, a contemptuous glare raking her from head to toe. “You look like a secretary. Not really what we’re going for here.”
“No need to thank me for running off to rescue you,” Kendra had replied tartly. “The sacrifice is its own reward.”
Tommy had grabbed her arm, hard. Deliberately hard, she’d assumed, but she’d learned a long time ago never to show him any weakness.
“I don’t know what Dad told you,” he snarled at her. “But there’s only one way out of this. We have to make sure that Skalas won’t try to press charges against me. And
that’s not going to happen with you in this dowdy, forgettable outfit.”
“I’m going to appeal to his sense of family, Tommy.” She’d ignored his comments about her outfit because there was no point arguing with him. He always went low and mean. Always.
Tommy had laughed. In a way that had sent cold water rushing down her spine in a torrent. “Balthazar Skalas hates his family. He’s not looking for a trip down memory lane, sis. But rumor is, he’s always looking for a new mistress.”
“You can’t mean...”
Her brother had shaken his head. Then her, too, because he was still gripping her arm. “You have one chance to prove you’re not useless, Kendra. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste it.”
Hours later, she was still numb. The inside of the executive elevator was sleek and mirrored, and Kendra could see the panic on her own face, mixed right in with the smattering of freckles her mother abhorred. She wanted, more than anything, to pretend her father had meant something different. That Tommy was just being Tommy.
But she knew better.
That sinking feeling inside told her so.
What’s the difference, really? she asked herself as the elevator shot up. A mistress or a loveless marriage?
Because Tommy might have asked her to make herself a mistress, but her mother had been trying to marry Kendra off for years. Emily Cabot Connelly hadn’t understood why Kendra hadn’t graduated from college with an engagement ring. And she’d taken a dim view of Kendra’s attempts over the past three years to convince Thomas to give her a job at the company when that was no way to find an appropriate husband.
“I don’t want to get married,” Kendra had protested the last time the topic had come up, a few weeks ago on the way to a dreary tea party for some or other pet charity of Emily’s.
“Darling, no one wants to get married. You have certain responsibilities due to your station in life. And certain compensations for the choices that must result.” Her mother had laughed. “What does want have to do with anything?”
The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 1