The glow he’d seen in France and had attributed to the lighting at her cottage—or the glory of the Côte d’Azur itself—was worse now. Or better, more like. She was a gleaming, bright and shining thing, and he had no idea how he was meant to cope.
He stood out in the courtyard, surrounded by flowers and the pitiless Aegean sky, and thought of her new roundness. The widening of her hips, the swell of her belly. He found he was wholly moved by the knowledge that she carried his child. His child tucked inside that beautiful, gently rounded body of hers.
He hadn’t expected that. This... insane response to her. A tenderness he abhorred mixed in with too much pounding, bone-rattling need.
Tenderness was anathema to him. Softness of any kind led to desperate places—didn’t he know that already?
But he refused to think about his own family. Of the things sentimentality had wrought.
There was no need to think of it when he knew who to blame.
Balthazar had convinced himself that his response to Kendra had been nothing more than two strange moments in time, bookending three years. But it was over now, surely. He’d spent the past month handling the details of what needed to happen next, now that his heir’s birth was imminent. Up to and including a meeting with his brother to lay out the changes he would be making in his will and various trusts. For dynastic purposes.
“Kendra... Connolly?” Constantine had asked lazily. He had gazed at his brother as he’d lounged about in his typical state of seeming dishevelment all over Balthazar’s sleek, modern furniture. Then he’d waved a languid hand at Athens outside the windows as if he expected the whole of Greece to rise up to support his astonishment. “You cannot be serious.”
“I would hardly make such announcements in jest.”
“She is a Connolly.”
“A fact that does not become less appalling the more you repeat it, brother.”
Constantine had shaken his head. “What can you possibly be thinking? After everything—” He’d stopped then. The canny look that Balthazar sometimes thought only he had ever seen changed his brother’s face. Constantine suddenly looked every inch the shark he was. “Let me guess. You got her pregnant. Good god, Balthazar. How could you be so careless?”
“A simple congratulations would do. As you will shortly become an uncle.”
Constantine had let out a bark of laughter. “Never let it be said you are not prepared to think outside the box when it comes to taking revenge on our enemies. I am inspired, truly.”
And he’d smiled in a way that had distracted Balthazar for a moment, wondering who his brother considered worthy of enemy status—and a revenge scenario to match. He did not fancy that person’s chances against the wolf-in-playboy’s-clothing Constantine played up for public consumption.
“Prepare yourself,” Balthazar had advised his brother that night. “You will be the koumbaro.”
If Constantine had any further feelings about taking his place at his brother’s side in the traditional role of koumbaro, combining best man, future godparent, and witness in one, he had wisely kept that to himself.
Possibly too busy concocting his own form of revenge, Balthazar had thought then.
Now Balthazar waited in a riot of blooms and his body’s greedy responses to the enemy he planned to take as his wife, forced to remind himself that revenge was the point of this. Revenge had always been the point.
It was simply taking rather a different form than he’d expected it would when Kendra had asked for that appointment with him months back.
He had never imagined how close a Connolly would come to ruining him.
Do not allow temptation to change your path, he told himself dourly, despite the sunshine and the bright explosion of pink flowers all around him. Stay the course.
And later—after the doctor had announced that Kendra and the baby she carried could not have been in better health, then left them to an evening meal out on one of the terraces over the sea—Balthazar did not bother to wait for the good food or a full belly to dull her temper. He shouldn’t have cared what mood she was in. He slid the folder he’d brought for her across the table.
“What is this?” Her voice was clipped. It was at odds with that glow she had about her, and Balthazar disliked it, but he tapped his finger against the thick file anyway.
“These are the agreements that require your signature.”
She sniffed, poking at the food on her plate with rather more violence than strictly necessary, to his mind. “I will not be signing anything.”
“That does not sound like the new song I suggested you sing,” he said, mildly enough. He studied her mutinous expression. “Was I unclear?”
Balthazar expected her to argue with him. If he was honest, he was looking forward to it. Though he wasn’t certain he truly wished to acknowledge that what kicked around inside of him was more of that anticipation and hunger than the righteous fury he would have said was guiding his every word and deed.
There was something about this woman that got under his skin. That was the sad truth, no matter how he fought against it. Any hope he might have had that she had released her grip on him in the time he’d spent away from her had disappeared the moment he’d seen her curled up in a chair with the sunlight in her hair, turning it to flame.
Maybe it was time to admit it to himself.
But Kendra didn’t make it easy on him. She didn’t leap into the fray. Instead, she looked away, her gaze off toward the blue line of the horizon, far in the distance. He imagined she was dreaming of ways to escape him, to avoid the consequences he had been forced to accept.
He resented it.
“I have no interest in your money,” she said after a moment, as if studying the inevitable way the sun dipped toward the edge of the world. “You know full well I have my own. There is no need whatsoever to sign agreements to that effect.”
“You mean you have your father’s money,” Balthazar corrected her, sitting back in his chair and absolutely not giving in to his temper. Just because she got to him, it didn’t mean he had to lose his grip. He was furious it was even in question. “That is not quite the same thing, is it?”
Her gaze shifted back to him, glittering hot and gold. “Remind me, whose money is it that you were given?”
He found himself smiling. Almost. “Fair point. Though, unlike me, I am unaware of any great financial ventures you’ve been involved in on your own since you came of age. Please enlighten me.”
“I was happily working in a winery in Provence until six weeks ago.”
Balthazar lifted a brow. “Are you so divorced from reality that you imagine waiting tables is a wealth-building exercise? Unless, of course, you went about getting your tips in the same way you approached your business meeting with me?”
Kendra didn’t rise to the bait and surely he should not have felt a vague sense of disappointment at that.
She sighed as if he was the trial. “Surely the man who has spirited me away to his very own private island is not really speaking to me about reality.”
And he, who had a cutting response for everything, found he had nothing.
Worse, he found himself sitting there, seething, while Kendra returned her attention to the grilled chicken on her plate, helping herself to more fresh greens from the bowl at her elbow. Ignoring him, he was forced to conclude.
Ignoring him.
Ignoring him.
He ordered himself to stop gritting his teeth.
“If I am brutally honest—”
“That would be a bracing shift, I’m sure,” she murmured aridly.
Balthazar ignored that. And continued, with great magnanimity. “I am not worried about you, kopéla. Obviously it is your father and brother and their grasping, deceitful behavior who concern me more.”
“Are you marrying all three of us?”
&nb
sp; He couldn’t quite read that tone she’d used, but he could see the look on her face all too well. He couldn’t say he liked it.
“Oh, I see,” she said when he didn’t reply. “I forgot that I am no more than a tool my father and brother alike use for their own nefarious ends. You think you’re taking their little toy away and making it yours instead. Naturally you want me to sign documents to enshrine these playground antics into contract law. After all, what could be the harm? This was never my life in the first place.”
It was the bitterness in her tone, the harsh slap of it, that got to him then. Balthazar felt as if he’d lost something when she reached out, grabbed the folder, and pulled it toward her.
A feeling that only worsened as she rifled through the pages, signing her name with dramatic flourish.
“You do not appear to be reading the documents, Kendra.”
“Does it matter?” She didn’t look up at him. “Surely the object of this humiliation is the mere fact of it. Not what the papers actually say.”
She capped the pen, closed the folder again, and then shoved it all back across the table toward him. “Here you go, Balthazar. Congratulations, you have dominion over me and legal documents to prove it. What a glorious environment this will be for your child.”
Balthazar told himself it was the mention of the child that got to him then, that was all. Imagining that child torn between warring parents the way he and his brother had been. He told himself that was all it was.
He had been so focused on the fact of Kendra’s pregnancy. What it meant in financial and practical terms. What he was going to have to do to contain the damage and attempt to repair this mistake of his own making.
Somehow, he hadn’t thought about the fact his child would be an individual, a whole human being who would grow and laugh—and want his parents to be better, as he had—until now.
It felt a great deal like a kick to the gut.
For a moment, he almost dared imagine what things might have been like if his parents had been different. If they had actually gotten better instead of worse. If they had somehow managed not to poison everything they touched—
But that felt uncomfortably disloyal.
He shoved it aside—aware that it seemed harder to do than it should have.
“Why are you staring at me?” Kendra asked after a while, and he wondered if she found the silence between them oppressive. Or if that was only him, again. “It is not going to change anything.”
“Nothing needs to change.” He shrugged, no longer feeling oppressed. Not when she was aiming that baleful glare of hers his way. “We will marry in the morning. Though as a Connolly you certainly do not deserve such consideration, you will become my wife. You may thank me.”
“I would be happier with less consideration, actually. No thanks required.”
“Too bad.” His mouth curved into something hard. “The child you carry will be my heir, and I insist any child of mine be legitimate. If you had read the documents you signed, you would know that I have made generous accommodation for you because you are the mother of this child, no matter what our future holds.”
Somehow, he knew she was not likely to thank him for that, either.
“Do we have a future?” she asked instead. Then frowned. “Or, wait. Do you mean a succession of creative imprisonments for me to enjoy?”
“That is up to you, Kendra.”
“Why do I find that very hard to believe?”
Balthazar studied her. “This role you keep attempting to play, that of the wronged innocent, does not suit you.”
“Whereas the role of overly controlling bastard seems to fit you perfectly. Almost as if you’ve had practice. I’m betting you have.”
“You have only a few months left.” It was a warning, not that Balthazar expected her to take it on board. “Indulge your bitterness as you wish. Once the child is born, it stops. Or I will make certain you see as a little of him as possible.”
“I don’t know what makes you think it’s going to be a boy, aside from wishful thinking,” she said, when he’d thought she would have reacted more dramatically to his other threat. She lifted a brow. “And you can try to separate me from this baby. But I wouldn’t advise it.”
The sun had dropped almost to the sea then. The sky was bathed in golds and reds, a commotion of flame and fury, just like Kendra.
He hated that he’d made that connection.
“Perhaps you are laboring under some misapprehension,” he said softly. “I am Balthazar Skalas and we are in Greece. There is no court in the land that would concern itself with your position should I make mine clear.”
To his surprise, all she did was laugh. “All these threats. Is this how you’re used to interacting with the world? Is this what it’s like to be your mistress? No wonder you go through them like tissues.”
“This is nothing like being one of my mistresses,” he replied silkily, because this was steadier ground. “As that role is far more...active.”
Kendra leaned forward and propped her elbows on the table, very much as if she thought she was in a classroom of some kind. “Tell me more about this active mistress lifestyle of yours. Is this going to be a part of my humiliation at your hands? Will I sit, tucked away in this or that luxurious prison, while you prance around with your various women in public places?”
She did not look particularly upset at that possibility, which Balthazar found he disliked. Intensely. “What business is that of yours?”
“I don’t ask for myself,” Kendra said, aiming that cool smile at him that he remembered too well from his office. “It’s your child who concerns me. Then again, perhaps you are not concerned that she will grow up loathing you. Detesting the way you treat her mother and worse, how you humiliate your family in public. But then, wasn’t your father that kind of man? Perhaps your child can hope for no better.”
It was such a kill shot, aimed so perfectly and with such lethal accuracy, that Balthazar almost laughed. He hadn’t seen it coming. In truth, he hadn’t imagined she’d had it in her. That was what he got for assuming she was nothing but a pawn.
He found himself sitting back in his chair, tempted to check to see if he was bleeding.
And as he did, she carried on eating, as if she hadn’t a single care in the world.
As if she hadn’t lacerated him like that.
“Both of my parents had affairs,” he said, eventually.
It was true enough, though it was not an accurate summation of his parents’ marriage. Much less what had become of it.
“Demetrius Skalas did not have affairs.” Kendra sounded almost placid. Matter-of-fact. “An affair suggests that there were some attempts to keep the behavior undercover. Your father preferred to parade around with a new woman on his arm whenever possible, publicly and horribly. When your mother responded in kind, he divorced her.”
“Thank you for reciting facts about which you know nothing,” Balthazar managed to grit out, while his pulse pounded at him.
“These are not my facts.” She smiled at him, a little more edgily that her calm tone would suggest. “Panagiota may have banned me from the internet, but it turns out that the family housekeeper has a great many facts at her disposal. And is only too happy to share them.”
Balthazar shook his head. And tamped down on the urge in him to lash out. Because she wasn’t any old adversary. She wasn’t her own father, that despicable man. She was the mother of his child, whether he liked it or not. And he was still trying to decide how best to come to terms with that.
“My father was a man of absolutes,” he said when the silence between them grew too heavy again. “I do not expect you to understand, but he had strict expectations. And should anyone fall short of those expectations, the consequences were severe. Anyone who knew him knew this.”
“Are you saying that your mother earned
her humiliation?” Kendra made a face. “I suppose I’d better watch my step.”
“I am not my father.”
And Balthazar was surprised at how...raw that sounded.
“Are you not?” Kendra sat back, one hand moving to cover her belly. He wanted to decry the theatrics, but he had the strangest notion that it was an unconscious gesture.
Again, he was struck by the fact that his son was in there. That his son would be out in this same world in a matter of months, calling Balthazar father. Maybe that was why he did not reply to Kendra in the thunderous manner he could have.
The way he should have.
“My brother and I were born in quick succession,” he told her instead, because that was also true. “And my mother... After my brother came, I am told, she disappeared. She left us in the care of our nannies and never left her rooms. After that had gone on for some time, my father had her admitted to a private hospital in Austria, where she was better cared for. But she did not return to us for several years.”
“And you think that is...evidence against her?”
“It is simply what happened.”
“It sounds like you’re describing postpartum depression, Balthazar. It wasn’t her choice.” Kendra studied his face for a moment. “You know that, don’t you?”
“What I know is that my father could not abide weakness,” Balthazar told her, his voice rough. “In anyone.”
Kendra was sitting much too still, that hand still resting on her belly. “So what you’re telling me is that your poor mother suffered from a terrible depression and your father took it upon himself to punish her for a chemical and hormonal imbalance that wasn’t her fault.”
“He was an unforgiving man.”
“And what about you?” Kendra asked quietly. “Are you forgiving?”
This was the right time to tell her the rest of it, to see once and for all what she knew and what game she was playing. But somehow, Balthazar couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He couldn’t stop thinking of a small boy with his eyes, looking at him the way he’d tried to implore his father. Before he’d learned the folly of such things.
The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 10