The tension between them was so thick it seemed to settle on Kendra like smog.
Once in Athens, Balthazar herded her off the plane and into yet another astonishingly glossy and aspirational sports car, then drove her into the center of the ancient city itself.
“I’m astonished,” she managed to say when he stopped before what looked like an indistinguishable block of flats. “I would have thought that the mighty Balthazar lived on his own mountaintop. In an appropriate castle. With several moats.”
“This is a medical facility,” he clipped out, sounding bored and impatient. “And this is a private entrance.”
He parked the car at the behest of a set of overawed attendants, then marched her into an elevator. She was whisked up to a series of private rooms, a waiting area and then an exam room, and Balthazar only glared stonily at her when she dared to suggest she might like some privacy.
“Really,” she tried. “I would prefer it.”
His mouth curved into that hard line. “This is no time for fantasies, Kendra.”
When it was done, both pregnancy and paternity had been determined.
Kendra felt the truth like a stone, heavy and unwieldy, crushing her even when she stood upright. Balthazar, meanwhile, had transformed from a mere thunderstorm to the threat of a far more terrifying tornado, evident in the blazing fury she could see in his dark eyes.
The trip back to that offensively bright car of his was so tense that she found herself shaking.
“Balthazar,” she began as he roared his way out of the parking area and back into the crowded streets of Athens, “I really think—”
“If you have any sense of self-preservation whatsoever,” he growled, an imposing fury beside her as he drove, “you will be quiet.”
The ferocity in his words left her winded.
Kendra decided self-preservation was an excellent idea and stayed silent for the rest of the drive. It was a short one, ending at another private entrance to a corporate parking area and another gleaming elevator. Where he ushered her, in that same grim silence, up to the roof of an office building she only belatedly realized was the corporate headquarters of Skalas & Sons. Where a helicopter waited to carry them off.
She could have argued, she supposed. Thrown a fit on the rooftop, where there were no witnesses but Balthazar’s men and the ancient city spread out beneath them. She could at least have tried.
But she didn’t see how fighting a losing battle with a tornado was going to help either her or her baby.
Her baby.
Kendra might hate herself for her weaknesses when this was all said and done, but for the moment, she wrapped her arms around the middle she’d thought was expanding thanks to eating her way through Provence and sat with that. She was having a baby.
His baby.
And when they landed on a small island surrounded by a gleaming blue sea, she didn’t have it in her to make smart remarks about castles or moats. Because the island was not large. There was no sign of anything like a village. There was one sprawling house on the higher end of the island, a collection of outbuildings, and beaches.
She supposed most people would consider it paradise, but she knew better.
It was a prison.
Balthazar marched off into the sprawling villa, a celebration of Greek architecture with wide-open spaces that flowed in and out of the outdoors. Letting in the sea and sky from every angle.
Kendra followed him because what else was she to do? Attempt to fly herself back to the mainland?
“There is a skeleton staff on the island,” he informed her when he led her to a bedroom that sat above the sea and then stood there, glowering at her, as if she’d impregnated herself purely to spite him. It occurred to her that he thought she had. “They’ll operate according to the orders of the housekeeper, Panagiota, who has been with my family since my father was young and is deeply loyal to me. You may assume that anything she says comes directly from me.”
“You’re leaving me here?” Kendra should have assumed that was what he was doing, she knew. She had the absurd thought that if she’d known she wouldn’t be returning to the cottage, she would have packed more of her things. As if her things were what mattered at the moment. “For how long?”
He took a long while to simply look at her, as if he was trying to see beneath her skin. As if he was looking for something. “For as long as it takes.”
She tried to gather herself. “You are aware, I hope, that there’s a specific timeline? And we’re in the second trimester. Leaving only one remaining.”
“I can count.” His tone was withering.
“Are you really planning to leave me here for six months?”
But even as she asked the question, she knew the answer. She was glad she’d wrapped her great-aunt’s gauzy scarf around her on the helicopter ride. It felt like a hug.
“Consider this a kindness,” Balthazar bit off. “There’s nothing I have to say to you right now that you would like to hear, I promise you.”
“Right,” she managed to say, trying to find her feet beneath her. Trying to remind herself that no matter how intimidating she found him, and no matter how beautiful, this wasn’t only about the two of them any longer. “Because when we had sex with each other and were both present and accounted for in your office, only I was scheming. You were nothing but a naive maiden, lost in the woods.”
“Do not test me, Kendra.” His voice was something like a whisper, though lethal. She could feel it pierce her like a blade. She gripped the scarf around her even more tightly. “You will not like how I handle you. How I address what you have done to me. Let me promise you this.”
“You can’t really think I’m going to quietly remain here.” She shook her head at him. “I have a life, Balthazar. One I made all for myself, no matter what you might think of it. I have—”
“If you wished to have a life, you should not have irrevocably changed mine.”
He moved closer then, towering over her, and she could see a stark ferocity in his gaze that should have terrified her. Instead, something in her longed to meet it. Rise up on her toes, tilt her head, and—
Well. It wasn’t as if she was unaware of her own issues. There was that.
“Perhaps it’s escaped your notice,” she said, hoping the things she longed for so foolishly weren’t written all over her face, but mine is the life that is already changed. Mine is the life you decided to alter in more ways than one. I’m the one carrying this baby. I’m the one you’ve carted all over Europe today, and apparently plan to leave behind on this island.”
“The life you knew is over.” She watched as a muscle clenched in his jaw. “I suspect this was your plan from the start. I must congratulate you. I did not see it coming.”
“Yes,” she snapped at him, “I decided that I would miraculously become pregnant, the way all women do. That’s why there is no such thing as fertility issues. All women decide, and then do it.”
He made a sound she could only describe as a growl, but she didn’t slink away. Something in her thrilled to the sound. She kept her gaze steady and forced her knees to remain strong beneath her.
“You may have saved your brother after all,” Balthazar said in that quiet way of his that made the world shake around him. “But I promise you, Kendra. You will live to regret this.”
For a moment she thought—wished?—that those big, hard hands of his were going to reach out to her. Take hold of her.
Touch her the way he did in her dreams, night after night—
But instead, Balthazar turned on his heel and stalked away from her.
Kendra stayed where she was, shaken so deeply by her own longing, even now, that she was surprised she didn’t sink to the floor. Was it self-hatred that made her tremble? Or was it that impossible yearning that she couldn’t stamp out?
And then she
had to force herself not to panic, somehow, when she heard the helicopter’s rotors. When Balthazar disappeared into the sky, leaving her behind with these things she knew about herself now.
The worst of them being that no matter what he did, she still wanted him.
It took Kendra a solid ten days to investigate every single nook and cranny of the house and each of the outbuildings, desperate to find something she could use to make her escape.
There had been nothing. Panagiota was kind enough, but firm. She apologized repeatedly, but changed nothing. There was no cell service. Certainly no internet. At least, not any that Kendra was permitted to access.
Though she had to face the fact that even if there was, she had no idea who she would call. Her family would be delighted that she was in a position to bargain further with Balthazar. They would do nothing to help her.
Kendra took it as a mark of her personal growth that she knew this now.
The same way she knew, when she’d finished marching around the small island looking for boats to the mainland, that the real truth was worse.
She didn’t want to leave.
She wanted Balthazar to come back.
The way she knew he would, because no matter how angry he might have been, she was carrying his child.
Maybe what she did looked like surrender, but Kendra rather thought she was conserving her strength for the real fight—which certainly wasn’t the quietly insistent Panagiota, who was, after all, only doing Balthazar’s bidding.
She ate what he wanted her to eat, according to the nutritional guide he’d apparently left with the housekeeper. There was no way off the island—and she’d looked—so she took long, rambling walks on the beaches, over the fields, and through the groves of olive trees.
She slept in the bed he’d told her was hers, and even though he wasn’t there, she felt the imprint of him as if he truly was holding her where he wanted her.
“By the neck,” she muttered to herself one morning.
But she knew that wasn’t quite right. She knew it was quite a bit lower.
One week passed, then another. Summer began to wane, though on a Greek island in the Aegean it was hard to note the difference.
Balthazar did not contact her. His messages were sent through Panagiota. They were always terse and to the point, and still, Kendra was sure she could feel the gathering storm of his temper from across the sea.
She heard the rotors first on an afternoon six weeks after he’d left her. She was curled up in her favorite spot, a swinging chair out on one of the terraces, the sun in her face and a book in her lap from the library she’d been reading her way through.
Kendra felt a kind of electricity shoot through her at the sound. She sat up, aware that if she squinted, this prison of hers bore a distinct resemblance to what she might have considered paradise when she was younger. Nothing to do but take long walks on a secluded beach and lie about reading books? She should have been delirious with joy.
Sometimes she forgot that she wasn’t. That she’d been imprisoned here, no matter how pretty it was.
That she was pregnant with the child of a man who detested her.
A man whose memory woke her in the night, still, on fire with need.
Kendra stayed where she was. She kept on gazing down at her book, even when she heard the faint sound of footsteps against the stones behind her.
And she would have known it was Balthazar even if he hadn’t made a sound. She could feel the leading edge of the storm. She could feel the wind snapping at her, the temperature drop, and far off, she was certain, the warning rumble of thunder.
She should have been scared. Instead, what charged around inside her felt a lot more like exhilaration.
“What a pretty picture you make,” came his sardonic, insulting voice. Darker than she recalled, maybe. But still, it arrowed straight to her core, making her melt. That easily. “What a shame that I know it is all lies.”
Kendra wanted to hurl the book she was reading at his head.
Somehow, she refrained.
“How nice of you to stop in, Balthazar,” she said calmly instead. “You do know, don’t you, that pregnancies keep going even if you’d prefer to pretend that they don’t? I mention this because eventually, when you deign to make an appearance, I won’t be the only one here.”
“The doctor is even now setting up an exam room in one of the guest bedrooms. He will perform a full examination.”
“A prison infirmary,” she replied gaily. “What a treat.”
Kendra looked at him then and she wished she hadn’t.
Because looking at Balthazar...hurt.
He looked like exactly who and what he was. The devil, one of the richest men alive, and her enemy.
All wrapped up in that brooding, near brutal intensity and a dark, bespoke suit that proclaimed his power to the whole of the Mediterranean.
If he was less beautiful, would she be less...thrown?
It shouldn’t matter how beautiful he is, she snapped at herself. It should only matter that he’s locked you away on this island.
“I don’t know why you bothered to come,” she continued, keeping her voice brighter than it should have been. “At this point, wouldn’t it be easier if you just stayed away? I can raise your child in shame and solitude all by myself.”
“I doubt you feel anything approaching shame,” he said, with one of those hard laughs that nearly made her shiver, though she sat in the sunshine. “And it is of no matter, anyway. I have no intention of leaving you here forever, no matter how tempting the prospect. Like it or not, you will be the mother of my child. And I am Balthazar Skalas. There are certain conventions that need to be followed.”
“I can’t imagine what you mean. More kidnaps? More insults and accusations? I can hardly wait.”
His smile then was wintry. It made something cold and bright flash over her, worse than before.
“Why, Kendra. I thought you knew.”
That he seemed to be enjoying himself made her shudder, and she knew he saw it.
He thinks he’s beaten me, Kendra thought, and found she was holding her breath.
“I’ve come to congratulate you, of course,” Balthazar told her. His dark eyes gleamed with satisfaction. Worse, with triumph. “As we are to be married tomorrow.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS ALMOST worth the fact that Balthazar was marrying her against his will, if at his command, to see that stunned look on Kendra’s face.
Better still, a flash of temper besides, proving she wasn’t nearly as calm or collected as she sometimes acted.
Balthazar almost slipped and showed her how much her reaction pleased him, but caught himself just in time. She didn’t deserve to see his own responses, but why should he be the only person dreading the inevitable? She was a Connolly, she had conspired against him from the start with her vile father and brother, and this was her fault.
He ignored the voice inside him that reminded him that her conspiracies could not have gained any ground had he not lost his head completely and sampled her without protecting himself. The way he’d been ignoring that voice for weeks.
But he didn’t like to think about that. He was appalled that he’d lost control of himself so utterly, when his father had spent long years teaching him how to strip any and all emotions out of every last moment and situation. Even sex was meant to be a release, nothing more.
Nothing...overwhelming.
He wrestled himself back under control. As he should have done from the start.
“I will not be marrying you,” she shot back at him, predictably. She bristled in her hanging chair and he watched dispassionately as she struggled to pull herself out of its embrace, then stood. Rather rounder than the last time he’d seen her, though he refused to focus on that. On what her fuller figure meant. “Not tomorrow. Not ev
er.”
“You’re beginning to bore me,” he replied, almost idly, and knew he sounded sterner than perhaps he’d intended when she stiffened. “You will not do this, you will not do that. I suggest you come up with a new song. In the meantime, the doctor is waiting.”
“What magical powers I must possess that I can bore you in six seconds after your absence of six weeks. Maybe the problem is your attention span.”
Balthazar did not lower himself to sniping with her, especially because he wanted to do just that. He gestured toward the archway that led into the house and waited for her to obey him.
For a moment, he wasn’t sure what she would do. Refuse? Fight him? Worse, he wasn’t entirely sure what he planned to do if she did either of those things. Nor could he read the expressions that chased each other across her lovely, flushed face when she swept past him, though he got the overall impression of feminine fury.
She would be his wife come the morning. She was carrying his child.
She was his enemy.
All good reasons not to want her with that greedy, driving need that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. And yet Balthazar had to order himself to stand down. To keep his hands to himself. To stop himself before he made this unfortunate situation worse.
He, who could stare down the most powerful men alive and make them regret catching his eye, could barely control himself in the presence of a woman who should have disgusted him.
It was an outrage and it never eased. Three years hadn’t dulled his reaction. Why had he assured himself six weeks would do the trick this time?
Balthazar had no answer. Instead, once inside, he led her down the long, bright hallway, across an interior courtyard covered in pink bougainvillea, then ushered her into the set of rooms his staff had rearranged so they could stand in for a medical suite.
And because he knew his doctor would report to him in full, he left her there.
Though he would have died before admitting it, and by his own hand, he was happy for the breathing room.
Because the truth was that Balthazar had been utterly unprepared for the sight of her.
The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 9