He liked that more than he should have.
“Shall we consider that a down payment?” she asked, her voice so crisp and cold that it took him a moment to realize she hadn’t actually hauled off and slapped him.
And he chose not to question why it felt like a betrayal. When he knew it shouldn’t. When he knew who she was.
Who she always had been. Why did he insist on wishing it could be otherwise?
“Don’t be ridiculous, Kendra,” he replied in kind. “That was merely finishing what we started three years ago.”
He watched the column of her throat move. He was suddenly, deeply furious that she wouldn’t raise her head and look at him directly. “Surely it can be both.”
Balthazar made himself laugh and took some pride in how she stiffened at the sound.
“I wouldn’t pay two dollars for something I could get so easily, kopéla. Much less two million.”
Her gaze snapped to his then, bright and hot.
And worse, a kind of knowledge flickering there in the depths that made everything in him tighten. Sending him into a spiral of something perilously close to shame.
Especially when she didn’t crumple before him.
She held herself almost regally. “Shall I tell my brother to expect to see you in court?”
“You can tell your brother to go to hell,” he growled at her, because he didn’t care for the sensation still curling around and around inside of him. He didn’t acknowledge shame. But he could still feel her, clenched tight around him. And the taste of her was in his mouth. And all of it was part of the same game. He would never forgive it. “You can go right along with him, for all I care.”
He saw her gaze grow brighter and he thought once again that she might sob. He didn’t know what he would do if she did—
But instead, she only nodded, once.
“Understood,” she said icily.
Then Balthazar watched as Kendra Connolly marched over to his door, threw it open, and left as if she’d never been here.
As if she’d never screamed his name while he was buried deep inside her. Twice.
Leaving behind nothing but a torn bit of lace that had once been her panties.
Balthazar stood there a long, long while. His phone rang. His mobile buzzed. He heard one of his secretaries come to the door and say his name, then retreat when he failed to respond.
Outside the walls of windows, New York was a mess of color and noise.
Like her.
While inside, Balthazar was nothing but cold.
So cold that it took him much, much longer than it should have to realize that for the first time in his life, he had not only failed to use protection with a woman—and not just any woman, the daughter of the man who Balthazar had long ago vowed to destroy if it took him his whole life—it had not so much as crossed his mind.
CHAPTER FIVE
THREE MONTHS LATER, Kendra had succeeded in convincing herself that what had happened at Skalas Tower was some kind of bad dream.
Well. She called it a bad dream in the light of day. What a nightmare! What a horror!
But the more unpalatable truth was that sometimes she woke in the night, convinced that she could feel all that thick, hot masculinity moving inside her again. Sure that if she blinked away the sleep from her eyes she would see his face, so stern and sensual at once, right there above her as he blocked out the world...
The way she felt in the dark had nothing to do with horror. She was wise enough to keep that to herself.
Because she had better things to think about than one evening of pure insanity three months ago. Such as finding herself a new life because, like it or not, she’d left the old one in tatters on the floor of Balthazar’s office that night, and there was no pretending otherwise.
Her father and brother had not been impressed when Kendra had returned that night without any good news to report. She had been similarly unimpressed to find them both waiting up for her, since the drive back out from New York City had in no way allowed her to settle down after...him.
“Well?” Tommy had demanded.
Angrily, as if waiting for his baby sister to return from this vile errand was beneath him.
When it was for him.
He had been swilling his gin and looking at her in disgust, neither of which was new. But after her intense, provoking experience earlier, something inside of her had... Not snapped, exactly. But she’d stripped naked in front of Balthazar Skalas. She’d argued for leniency and she’d bartered herself, all for the brother who was making no secret of how little he cared for her.
Why are you trying to help this person? an unfamiliar voice asked from deep down inside her. When he would quite clearly never, ever so much as consider doing the same for you?
Kendra had never thought about it quite like that before. Once she had, she couldn’t think of anything else. Why was she trying to prove herself to him? Or her father?
Why do you feel you have anything to prove?
She couldn’t answer that question, either.
It was as if letting Balthazar inside her body had changed her, profoundly.
Not simply the act itself, which she couldn’t quite let herself think about at that point—too overwhelming and raw, painful and then transcendent, all mixed in together—but the fact of it.
She didn’t feel like the same naive creature who had set off in her sensible shoes, so determined to fight off a dragon and save her family. She wasn’t the same. The dragon had eaten her alive and there was no pretending otherwise.
That had been the first evidence of how different she was after her encounter with Balthazar. The fact that she could see her selfish, petulant brother for who he was and feel no matching surge of need to prove herself any further.
“What exactly did you think would happen?” she’d asked as she stood in the door of her father’s study. And after matching wits with Balthazar Skalas, she’d rather thought her brother unequal to the task. “Did you really think that a man like that could be tempted into forgetting what you did to him?”
“I hope you’re not saying that you struck out, girl,” her father had grumbled from his favorite armchair. “That’s not what you’re saying, is it?”
Even then, Kendra had wanted badly to tell herself that he’d wanted her to succeed because he believed in her. And not because he’d wanted her to sort out Tommy’s mess.
But she’d lost her ability to fool herself that night.
“I tried my best,” she had said, because what else was there to say? Even if she’d told them what she’d done, they wouldn’t understand. They hadn’t been there. They wouldn’t get the weight of her surrender. That exquisite tension that had flared between her and Balthazar that she’d still been able to feel tight around her, like his hands around her throat. Or his palm between her legs. She’d shrugged instead. “I tried and I failed. I don’t know what he’s going to do now.”
“You frigid bitch,” Tommy had snarled at her. And even though their father had made a tutting sort of noise, Tommy hadn’t retracted it. He hadn’t backed down. Instead, he’d taken the tumbler he was holding and threw it so that it exploded against the stone of the fireplace. “I told you not to go dressed like that. Of course you failed. Just look at you! You look like a dowdy, frumpy, boring secretary. Who would want that?”
She’d stared back at her brother, seeing his sulky expression and remembering Balthazar’s beautiful, brutal masculinity. His grace and ferocity. Tommy had not done well by comparison.
“I can only wonder why you were pinning all your hopes on me if I’m so deficient,” she’d said calmly. Almost coldly. “There’s nothing more that I can do. And if I’m honest, I think I’ve already done too much—particularly if this is the thanks I get.”
Kendra had turned and marched from the room, paying no attention when
she heard her brother’s voice raised in fury behind her. She had not glanced at her father again. She’d had the revolutionary thought, after everything, that what happened next to the pair of them had nothing to do with her.
Instead, she’d run up the stairs to her childhood bedroom, locked the door behind her, and then crumpled down on the other side of it. She’d hugged her knees to her chest, held herself tight, and tried to figure out what to do with herself now everything had changed.
Now that she had changed.
Now that she knew the things she knew. Now that she’d finally faced the truth.
Kendra had wanted to dissolve into sobs, but hadn’t. She’d breathed a little too heavily for a while, ragged and overwhelmed, and had eventually found her way into the shower. There she’d done her best to use up all the hot water on the eastern seaboard as she’d done her best to scrub off the evening she’d had.
She’d failed at that, too.
It was only later, when she’d tucked herself up in her childish canopy bed as if that could make her the girl she’d been again, that she’d finally allowed herself to go through the whole thing, step by step.
He’d braced himself above her, so fierce, almost furious.
And he’d called her a whore, so Kendra had been determined that he never suspect that she was anything but. She’d told herself that she was a modern woman, after all. She’d ridden horses her whole life. Surely, if she didn’t tell him, he would never know that she’d never let anyone close to her before. That she’d been too busy trying to be perfect in one way or another, and had never seen how a boyfriend fit into that.
It won’t hurt, she’d told herself. If it hurt as much as people claimed it did, no one would do it again.
Then Balthazar had slammed his way inside her, and it was as if he’d plugged her into an electrical outlet, the most fragile part of her first.
Her first reaction had been shock.
Her body had reacted without her permission, arching up in a way that could as easily have been surrender as a scream. She hadn’t known herself.
She’d hidden her face, bitten down on her own arm, and it was only when her teeth dug into her own flesh that she’d begun to sort through the storm of it all.
Pain wasn’t the right word. She’d felt everything, that was the trouble. The shock of his intrusion. The shape of him, lodged deep inside of her. Big, hot, long. There was a person inside her, and that notion made her want to cry even as it sent spirals of a different sensation dancing through her.
He’d told her to drop her arms, she’d obeyed, and again she’d been swept up in the certainty that if she let him see that this was her first time, if she let him know that this was anything but what she wanted it to be, she would die.
Die.
So instead, she’d dared him to do it faster. Harder. Deeper.
But when he did, everything had changed again.
And by the time they were finished, Kendra had learned a great many things about herself.
In the three months since that night, she’d had a lot of time to think about those things.
That she was not at all who she’d always thought she was if she could be so easily taken. Not just taken, but possessed, fully. A man who hated her could do those things to her body, and more astonishingly, her body could respond to him with pure jubilation.
No matter what she might have thought about the situation.
If that was true, and Kendra knew it was, then she didn’t know herself at all. And if she didn’t know herself at all, if she even now found herself something like hungry, constantly going over that night in Balthazar’s office in her head—
She’d concluded mere days after that fateful night that she needed to change her life entirely.
And so she had.
Her Great-Aunt Rosemary, the despair of Kendra’s haughty Grandmother Patricia, had taken herself off to the French countryside rather than settle down into marriage the way her parents would have preferred. She had never bothered to return to the family, but she’d left Kendra her cottage when she’d died the previous year.
On the off chance you are not like your mother or hers, Great-Aunt Rosemary’s will had read, I offer you a place to land.
Kendra had always meant to make it over to inspect her inheritance...someday.
Someday had turned out to be a lot sooner than she’d imagined.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” her father had thundered at her when she’d announced her plans to remove herself to the French countryside. At once. “What on earth do you plan to do in France, of all places?”
“Whatever I like,” she’d replied. “Would you like me to stay? That will only happen if you give me a job in the company.”
“Kendra. Sweetheart.” The unusual endearment had shocked them both, and her father had looked away. “I don’t see the company as a part of your future.”
She’d braced herself for the pain of that to swipe at her, but there had been nothing. As if she’d finally moved past it. “Then what does it matter where I choose to live?”
And that was how she’d found her way to her great-aunt’s lovely little cottage, suspended between the mountains and the sea. Nestled amid rolling vineyards on country roads, the cottage itself was a bookish girl’s dream. A few bright, happy rooms filled with books and art, paths through the fields to walk on, and more than a few trees with abundant shade if she wanted a break from the glorious Côte d’Azur sunshine.
She went down into Nice to do her shopping, and it was easy enough to drive down into Italy, or take the long train ride to Paris. She told herself it was the best few months of her life.
She wanted it to be. Desperately.
And if sometimes Kendra felt so melancholy that she almost got sick with it, she dismissed it as growing pains. She was lucky enough to be in the position to take a time-out to figure out what her life ought to be. Accordingly, she tried to imagine what her life would look like now if she took the family company off the table. If she stopped pushing so hard.
Maybe it was a good thing that she wasn’t working with her father and brother now that she’d lost a huge amount of her respect for them. But Kendra had always wanted to work. She had no interest in the kind of highly charged, gossip-soaked idleness her mother preferred—and no aptitude for it, if she was honest.
All the sorts of play jobs other women in her position had, she dismissed. Virtuous charities with flashy balls, prized internships only those with trust funds could afford to take, silly publicity positions that were usually about getting on the guest lists to highly photographed parties. None of that appealed to her. Kendra tried to encourage herself to think outside the box. She’d been so focused on getting into her father’s good graces that she’d never spent any time imagining what would happen if that...stopped mattering to her.
Because it didn’t. The further away she got from that night with Balthazar, the more angry she found herself.
Not at Tommy, who had never made a secret of who he was or pretended to be anything else. Not Balthazar, who was wholly and completely himself, always.
But at her father.
Her father, who had preferred that his daughter give herself to a man he considered an enemy than deal with Tommy’s behavior himself. Tommy had put the company, the family, and his own sister into peril—but that hadn’t inspired her father to handle him, once and for all. And at no time had Thomas Connolly thought, Maybe it would be smart to try out the one child who hasn’t caused me problems.
Kendra was humiliated she hadn’t seen all of this before. It wasn’t as if anyone had hidden it. She’d simply seen what she’d wanted to see. She’d believed that if she worked hard enough, there was a way for her to take her rightful place at her father’s side. All she had to do was prove it.
Now she thought that if given the chance, she’d burn the whole
Connolly family down. Great-Aunt Rosemary had clearly had the right idea.
A darling little cottage tucked away in the south of France was the perfect opportunity for Kendra to uncover her heretofore unknown artistic leanings, she’d figured. She kept a journal. She tried a bit of creative writing. She took a painting class. A pottery class. She tried to learn how to play piano.
But by the end of her second month in France, neck deep in all things Provençal, it was clear that Kendra had no aptitude whatsoever for anything creative.
Not even the faintest shred of it.
And that was how she’d found herself at one of the local wineries nestled away in a glorious, sweeping vineyard down the road from her cottage. The owners thought it would be helpful to have an American on hand for the summer to help with tourists, and Kendra quickly found that her real aptitude was in customer service, of all things.
Because she was fantastic at it. And more, enjoyed it.
It was a beautiful summer afternoon. The breeze was scented with lavender and the hint of earth. Groups of tasters and merrymakers had come to enjoy the vineyard and its offerings, some coming up from the crowded beaches along this magical stretch of coastline, some engaged in winery tours, and some on self-guided explorations of the area. They sat in merry little clusters at the tiled tables out beneath bright blue umbrellas and graceful trellises wrapped in jasmine and wisteria vines.
Kendra moved from table to table, making sure everyone had the food they’d ordered from the small kitchen or the sommelier’s attention. She got to use the French she’d taken in boarding school and college or her English, depending on the group. And maybe there was something wrong with her, she thought when she ducked back inside to see if the kitchen was ready with the charcuterie platters one of her groups had ordered. There had to be, because most people surely didn’t find it easier to know themselves while they were interacting with strangers. Or not know herself, perhaps. But feel at ease with herself all the same.
The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 6