The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1)

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The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 7

by Caitlin Crews


  Because to all the customers sitting at these tables, she was nothing but an American girl on a lark. Enjoying herself abroad, perfectly carefree.

  And the more they treated her that way, the more she believed it was the truth.

  No Connolly family power struggles. No demands she marry a member of her mother’s yacht club, the red-shorts-wearing hedge fund brigade. No contending with Tommy and his latest fiasco.

  Carefree felt good.

  Kendra had her back to the door when it opened again. She sang out a greeting in French as she picked up the two heavy plates of charcuterie that the chef arranged in glorious piles of the finest meats and cheeses, all arranged on their own private stones.

  “Please take a menu and find a seat outside,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  She turned as she spoke, her happy carefree smile on her face.

  But it was not a new group of tourists.

  It was Balthazar.

  He did not speak. But then, he didn’t have to speak when all he did was reach up and remove the mirrored sunglasses from his face, letting that blazing dark gaze slam straight into her.

  He was Balthazar Skalas.

  That harsh look on his face was as good as another man’s shout.

  Kendra would never know how she managed to keep holding those heavy platters aloft. Possibly it was that she was frozen solid. Turned to stone.

  Incapable of anything but staring at the apparition before her.

  One ice age passed. Then another.

  “Excuse me,” she said in totally unnecessary French. “I must deliver these.”

  She hardly knew what she was doing, only that it was critical she do it. She set off across the floor, then ducked out the door to the patio while he stood there beside it like a smoldering ember.

  Outside, she smiled and laughed on cue. She set down the platter and then spent a long, long time telling the group at the table the involved history of every cheese, cured meat, and olive. Only when she’d exhausted that topic did she turn back and head inside.

  Slowly, having half convinced herself that Balthazar was a figment of her imagination.

  But no.

  He was still there, in the exact same place where she’d left him. The devil himself, so incongruous in a French winery’s tasting kitchen that she almost laughed at the absurdity.

  Almost. Because there was very little about Balthazar in his considerably mouthwatering flesh that made her feel like laughing.

  Another eon or two dragged by as she stared at him. As he returned the favor with the full force of his stern regard.

  It took everything Kendra had to fight off all the images that threatened to flood her then. The memories of what had happened between them.

  “You must connect these dots for me,” Balthazar said. Eventually. His voice was as she remembered it. Dark. Stirring. Dangerous. “Tell me how a Connecticut heiress finds herself a waitress half a world away.”

  “As it happens, I have an innate talent for customer service,” she replied, using her brightest, happiest tone, as if he was really interested in her answer. “That’s not something I knew before I came to France.”

  “How can it surprise you?” His voice only got more lethal. More than that, it was a whole storm inside her, so that not only was she forced to remember every single thing that had happened that night in Manhattan, she could feel it. Her body was reliving it, one sensation after the next. “Look what you were willing to do for your brother. How could you doubt that it was a...talent, as you say?”

  “I’m delighted you haven’t changed a bit.” She forced her usual happy smile. “Have you come for a tasting? I handle the food, but if you take a seat on the terrace, the sommelier will be with you shortly and can lead you on the journey of your choice through our wines. Today we’re featuring—”

  “If I wished to sample wine, Kendra, I would not come here. I have my own vineyards.”

  She rolled her eyes. “As one does.”

  His face tightened. “I still do not understand. Are you hiding?” If possible, his gaze darkened. “Do you have some reason to hide?”

  “This is the south of France,” Kendra said, frowning at him. “People do not hide here. They spend their entire lives concocting reasons to come visit. Then come back. Then find a picturesque cottage surrounded by sunflowers and lavender to grow old in. It’s paradise, Balthazar. Who wouldn’t want to live in paradise?”

  “You surprise me. I would have expected you to stay tethered to the family apron strings, running errands for your father and brother. That is your role, is it not?”

  She pulled in a breath, surprised at how much that hurt. When really, Kendra had been expecting something like that the moment she’d seen him.

  “Don’t beat around the bush,” she said softly. “If you want to call me names, call me names.”

  One of his dark brows rose. “Did I not do so?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve stepped away from my former profession.” She managed to use her usual bright and shiny voice, and took some pride in the fact she could when he’d left her bleeding. If she didn’t show it, that was almost as good as not bleeding at all. “If that’s why you’ve come, you’re going to be deeply disappointed.”

  Balthazar pushed away from the wall, then prowled around the small shop with its souvenirs and keepsakes along one wall, the refrigerated case filled with takeaway options, and the menu stand for table service.

  Somehow, Kendra had never realized how small the place was before. How...close.

  But then, Balthazar took all the air from the room.

  “If you have business with my family, you know how to find them,” she said after a moment, though her pulse was drumming loudly in her ears. “I have nothing to do with this.”

  “Perhaps.”

  His back was to her then. His gaze was directed out the windows, down over the gentle slope of the vineyard before them. The view she’d loved, until now. Would she ever be able to look at it again without seeing him?

  “Tell me this, if you please,” he was saying, low and commanding. “It has been some time since I saw you in New York.”

  “Since you saw me,” she echoed, and even laughed. “How sanitized that sounds.”

  Balthazar turned to her. She thought the way his gaze cut through her was stark. Brooding, even. But he didn’t speak.

  “It was three months ago.” Kendra tried to summon her smile, but gave up when it didn’t materialize. She repressed the urge to rub at the nape of her neck, where she was certain every single fine hair was standing at attention. “But I feel certain you know that.”

  “Indeed.”

  And something in the way he studied her then made her feel as if she was trembling again, from the inside out. As if her own bones had betrayed her. She had the wild notion that she should leap across the room, slap her hands over his mouth if necessary, do anything she could to keep him from saying whatever it was he’d come here to say... But she didn’t.

  “Three months,” he repeated, as if for emphasis. “And in that time, have you bled?”

  She felt all the color and sensation drain from her. “What?”

  “It is a simple question, if indelicate. Because we did not use protection, Kendra. And if you have not bled—”

  Her pulse was taking over her body, beating at her. “Why are we talking about this? How is it your business? And anyway, I moved to a different country. It’s not unusual to miss one or two—”

  She cut herself off, horrified.

  The reality of what she was saying slammed into her anyway, flattening her. And then it was as if she was swallowed up in the ferocious blaze of his glare.

  Balthazar did not move. He did not close the space between them.

  And still Kendra felt as if he’d lunged at
her. Or did she only wish he had?

  Did she really long for his touch so much? But she knew the answer to that. She lived it every night.

  “Is this your family’s latest attempt to force my hand?” Balthazar asked idly, though his gaze was afire with the darkest, harshest condemnation. With a bitter hatred that made her breath hitch. “This will not end for you the way you imagine, Kendra. I promise you that.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  BALTHAZAR’S WORST FEARS had come true.

  And he still couldn’t quite believe it.

  He followed the remote road to the cottage Kendra had said was hers. Which could mean she was letting it, or could mean it was her father’s, or could mean, well, anything. He didn’t believe a word she said. He didn’t believe her.

  He certainly hadn’t believed her flustered response to his appearance earlier. That he would come for her was the point of all this, surely. It was the final move in her game.

  Balthazar had been well and truly played. He still couldn’t quite accept it, but facts did not wait for his acceptance to be true.

  He certainly did not believe that Kendra Connolly wasn’t fully aware that they hadn’t used protection that night. He imagined she’d been counting down the days, same as him. The fact that she’d taken herself off to a foreign country was evidence enough of her guilt, to his mind.

  And he’d been waiting all this time for her to show her hand.

  Instead, she’d appeared to first take on the life of a middle-aged expatriate. Pottery and painting and God only knew what other pointless things, the province of the entitled and bored. Then she’d begun waiting tables, of all things, which might have been more age appropriate, but made no sense for the Connolly heiress.

  It had to be another part of her game, though he couldn’t imagine how it fit.

  The road opened up and a cottage came into view. Balthazar gritted his teeth. Because it looked like...a cozy, pastoral scene of Provence. Yellows, blues, and purples. Fields of wildflowers on either side with a humble dwelling on a soft rise, lit up against the darkening summer sky.

  He had been anticipating the kind of “cottage” people like Thomas Connolly like to call the gaudy, massive mansions in places like Newport, Rhode Island.

  This was not that.

  And Balthazar didn’t quite know what to do with this unpretentious house. Much less the woman who stood in the open doorway, the buttery light from within making her glow.

  Damn her.

  Balthazar came to a stop in a cloud of his own bad temper. He slammed out of the car, unfolding his body from the low-slung leather seats and taking longer than necessary to smooth his shirt into place when it did not require smoothing. His clothing did not defy him. It was only this creature before him, standing there like an innocent again, who dared.

  “I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding this place,” she said in that bright, chirpy voice he’d heard earlier at the winery.

  He detested it.

  “I am capable of using navigation technology, thank you,” he growled at her.

  Kendra did not back down. She only sighed, slightly. “I see this is going to be contentious. What a lovely change.”

  Balthazar did not appreciate her ironic tone of voice.

  Because it had been three months of worrying about this very thing. Three months of assuring himself that nothing would come of the one and only time he’d failed to protect himself, his family, and his wealth.

  And with a Connolly, to add insult to injury.

  Still, his self-delusion might have illuminated his darker moments, but he was a practical man. That, too, had been impressed upon him by his father’s heavy hand, whether he liked it or not. He had therefore enlisted a special security detail to track her movements. To see if she would give herself away.

  To make sure that whatever happened, he was on hand to intervene if it went in a direction he didn’t like.

  He’d expected her to head to a clinic in an attempt to draw him out. Her relocation to France had confused him. But perhaps it, too, had been as good as waving a flag—because here he was.

  Still, he hadn’t been sure.

  Not until that performance she’d put on earlier in the kitchen of the winery.

  “Perhaps you can explain to me what exactly it is you think you are doing, pretending to be a plucky waitress?” He moved around the front of the sports car and then stayed there, not quite trusting himself to venture any closer to her, which was another personal betrayal. They were adding up. “It does not suit you, kopéla. I think you must know this.”

  She might have seemed happy, but Balthazar could not accept that it was real. It was a role she was playing, nothing more. It was a way to hide from what she’d done, who she was, and what must come next.

  Surely she had to know this.

  He certainly knew it.

  As she was almost certainly carrying his child, this rustic life she’d arranged around her this summer was unacceptable, as she must surely have been aware. The mother of a Skalas heir could not be in service, God forbid.

  He told himself this supposed happiness of hers had to be fake. It had to be part of the bait in her trap.

  There was no other explanation.

  She only looked at him for a moment as if he was the one who made no sense. It meant there was nothing to do but gaze back at her.

  Damn her, but she looked...angelic.

  It made him want to break things.

  The light from inside the cottage made her hair look strawberry blonde and drenched in gold. That heart-shaped face had haunted him for months now—years, if he was honest—and it was far prettier in person than it had been in his memory.

  That infuriated him all the more.

  If he didn’t know any better, if he chose to rely on all his usual instincts, Balthazar would have been tempted to swear that there wasn’t a shred of deceit in this woman.

  She was the best manipulator he’d ever seen, he reflected in that moment, as the light exalted her and made her look something like beatific. The apple did not fall far from its gnarled, ugly tree.

  He ordered himself to unclench his fists.

  “I have to do something with myself,” Kendra said quietly. Thoughtfully, he would have said, if she was someone else. “It turns out a life of leisure doesn’t suit me at all.”

  “Yet three months ago I could have sworn you were attempting to be some kind of businesswoman. Wasn’t that your game?” He could remember that night entirely too well. “That outfit. The bartering.”

  A kind of shadow moved over her face, and she shrugged. It forced him to pay attention to the fact that she was not dressed like any kind of businesswoman now. She had changed out of the summery shift dress she’d been wearing at the winery and was now dressed simply in a pair of denim jeans and a deep blue tank top with wide shoulder straps that only drew more attention to the elegance of her neck and that clavicle that made his mouth water.

  He did not understand how he could want her like this.

  Even now.

  “My services were not required in the family business,” Kendra said.

  “Were they not? That sounds like a remarkably antiseptic version of family drama.”

  Another shadow crossed her pretty face, but this one looked like temper. “What does it matter if it’s antiseptic or not? I don’t work for the family company. And if I’m not working for the family company, why stay with the family?”

  “So your father and your brother, those paragons of virtue—”

  “There’s no need to overdo it, Balthazar.” Her tone was dry. Almost amused, though not quite. “At a certain level, being that sardonic might actually hurt you, don’t you think?”

  He almost laughed, but caught himself. “They were happy to send you out like a pair of pimps, is that it? But couldn’t
find it in them to offer you a cubicle tucked away in their offices?”

  The color in her cheeks bloomed. “That is...an absolutely revolting way to put it.”

  “Is it incorrect?”

  She made a sound as if she was clearing her throat, then swung around and walked into the cottage.

  “I think,” she said as she moved, “that this conversation is going to require wine.”

  Balthazar prowled in behind her, expecting to see...he didn’t know what. Something that shouted out her guilt. Something that penetrated this front she put on.

  But instead he found himself in an open, bright room that sprawled from the front door into an open kitchen at the back that looked out over a small terrace. There was real art on the walls, placed in a haphazard way that suggested they were there because the owner enjoyed them, not because she was showing off a collection. There were bookshelves and stacks of books and magazines everywhere, but the cottage didn’t feel fussy or overstuffed. The overall effect was of a kind of bohemian joy in art and literature.

  It didn’t fit with his impression of this woman. He found himself frowning at the wide, cozy couches that still held the imprint of her body.

  Then he remembered what she’d said as she’d walked inside.

  “No wine for you, kopéla,” he growled.

  He closed the front door behind him and watched her closely as she turned, halfway across the airy room. He noticed that her feet were bare, and could not have explained why that poked at him if his life had depended upon it.

  Nor could he understand why it very much felt as if it did.

  “No wine for me?” She looked baffled. “If you’re some kind of teetotaler—”

  “Hardly.” He waited for her to get his meaning and when she didn’t, another surge of fury swept through him. “Have you forgotten you might be pregnant?”

  He didn’t quite know what to do when she paled, as if she truly had forgotten. When that couldn’t be true.

  How could that be true?

  And because she seemed frozen there, staring at him with her eyes wide and horrified, he moved toward her and tossed the small package he’d brought with him onto an accent table beside her.

 

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