Kendra reached over and tapped the folder that still sat there between them. “It would appear that no, you are not particularly forgiving.”
“Do you deserve forgiveness, Kendra?” he growled at her, keeping himself still in his chair when he wanted nothing more than to rage. To break things. To hurl the table between them into the sea far below.
Because that was easier than confronting what was happening in him. He thought of his mother, messier and messier throughout his childhood until his father had divorced her. She had gone off to lick her wounds—in horribly public ways. Balthazar had always considered it a defection. He had always judged her, harshly, as much for her particular extramarital affair neither his father nor he could overlook as for her departure.
What he had never done was question how and why she had lost his father’s respect in the first place. Much less whether or not that had been fair to her. And he didn’t much care for the heavy ball of something like dread that sat in him now he was doing just that.
Thinking about forgiveness didn’t help.
“By your reckoning, no,” Kendra replied, but she didn’t look particularly broken up about whether or not he might forgive her. As if a lifetime of his father’s brand of consequences was right up her alley, when he knew better. He knew what it did to soft creatures like her, didn’t he? “But then, I don’t need to prove myself to you, Balthazar. I don’t care what you believe. I’m going to marry you, not because you’ve demanded it, but because I’m a rational person who can see that marrying you will afford my child her best possible life. You keep talking about the past if it makes you feel better. I’m focused on the future.”
She stood up then, still outrageously graceful despite her fuller figure and her new, big bump. He told himself it was sheer temper that pounded through him. Sheer, unmitigated fury—because what else could it be? What else would he allow it to be?
He was rising before he meant to move, blocking her path.
She stared up at him, her chin lifted as her copper-burnished hair flowed around her, backlit by the setting sun.
“You have no moral high ground here,” he gritted out at her. He wanted to put his hands on her, so he did, gripping her shoulders as he held her before him. “You’ve achieved what you wanted, but I assure you, the price you pay will be steep.”
“What I wanted,” she threw right back at him, “was peace. Quiet. A cottage all my own filled with books and a fire and as many buttery croissants as I could eat. Which, it turns out, is a great many croissants. Instead you stormed in and carried me off to this place. And I’m not an idiot, Balthazar. I’m not divorced from reality. I’m perfectly aware that as prisons go, this one is charming. Beautiful. Some people would dream of coming here and staying here forever. But I’m not one of them.”
“If I was interested in what you wanted, Kendra, I would have asked you.”
He expected her to recoil at that. To react as if he’d slapped her. Instead, she surged up onto her toes, bringing herself even closer to him.
Exhibiting, he couldn’t help but notice, absolutely no fear.
He couldn’t think of a single reason that should have made him want her so desperately.
“You can issue all the orders you like,” she told him in a rush. “You will never control me. If I happen to go along with your wishes, you can be sure it’s because I want to. Not because you told me to.”
He managed—just—not to sneer. “From a girl who was willing to prostitute herself at her father’s command.”
“You don’t know anything about my family,” she threw right back at him. “Or about me. And I don’t want you to know. You don’t deserve it.”
She was so bright with her own outrage. Alight with self-righteous indignation, and Balthazar should have found that laughable. He told himself he did.
But he didn’t laugh.
Instead, he jerked her toward him and set his mouth to hers.
At last.
And it was that same wild, impossible fire. That same electric explosion, as if he’d been struck by lightning—yet he wanted more. Always and ever more.
He angled his head to one side, taking the kiss deeper and growling his appreciation when she met him, all slick heat and greed.
And he was amazed, again, to find his head spinning when she pushed herself away.
“Kissing me changes nothing,” she managed to say, though he took perhaps too much pride in the fact her voice shook. “Do you really think that a kiss like that is any kind of punishment at all? Here’s a news flash. It’s not. If I didn’t like it, I would bite you.”
“Yes, yes, kopéla,” he drawled, suddenly enjoying himself when she scowled at him. “You’re very fierce. You have fangs, and I promise you, I cannot wait to feel them on my skin.”
Kendra bared her teeth at him and he laughed, he wanted her so intensely. So comprehensively it was like pain. But he knew pain. He knew how to live with it. In a dark way, how to crave it.
“Remember you said that, Balthazar,” she hissed at him.
It was meant as a dire warning, he was sure. Still, he took her chin in his hand and held her there, smiling hard when temper flooded her bright gaze.
“But one way or another, all this posturing or no, in the morning, you will be my wife,” he told her, like an ancient omen. Like a curse. “And that will be an end to it.”
CHAPTER NINE
KENDRA WASN’T THE sort of woman who had dedicated years of her life to fantasizing about her wedding one day. Not that there was anything wrong with such fantasies, but she’d always spent her time daydreaming about winning over her father’s boardroom, and sitting behind suitably impressive desks in the family offices.
And she’d found herself fantasizing about far different things these days.
Still, if she’d thrown together a few wedding ideas off the top of her head, it would not have been...this.
It was a small affair on a particular stretch of the island that Panagiota informed her, with great seriousness, had been sanctified.
“Is that...good?” she asked.
“It is more than good,” the other woman had replied. “It is necessary.”
She’d woken the morning of her sanctified wedding her mouth feeling swollen and bruised from Balthazar’s kiss the night before, though her inspection of her lips had indicated that sensation was rather more emotional than physical. Panagiota had come in, smiling merrily, her arms filled with a flowing white gown. Kendra was tempted to tear it up. Or demand something more suitable for the occasion, like a black shroud.
Maybe she would have done both of those things, but she made the mistake of running her hand over the filmy, flowy material of the gown when Panagiota carefully laid it out. And the next thing she knew, she was slipping it on.
Her body was changing, thickening by the day. She already had a significant belly. She was aware of her body in different ways these days. Clothes never quite fit the way she expected them to, and stranger still, her center of gravity had shifted.
But when she slipped the dress on, it was like a caress. It made her feel sensual and beautiful.
When she looked in the mirror, her heart constricted. Then it began to beat at her, hard.
Kendra told herself that she could make this forced wedding anything she wanted it to be.
She’d said a lot of things to Balthazar last night and then had stayed awake the rest of the night, wondering if any of them were true—because all he had to do was look at her and she trembled.
And after six weeks of solitude, she’d found she enjoyed that trembling. Maybe more than she should have.
“I want what I said to be true,” she said out loud now as she stared at the vision in flowing white before her in the glass, her hand over her belly. Her baby grew by the day. Time was moving right along no matter what she said or didn’t say to t
he man as caught in this as she was. “That will have to be enough.”
She would make it enough.
Kendra did her own hair, bundling it up on the top of her head into a messy bun, then pinning it into place so it looked artistic rather than sloppy. She slicked on some lip gloss and decided against any blusher, as she could see she didn’t need it. She didn’t hide her freckles. She didn’t bother to accentuate her eyes.
And strangely enough, she almost felt...free.
Because she knew that if one of those florid-cheeked boys her mother had forever been pushing on her was waiting for her today, her wedding would look nothing like this. She would have been sitting in her parents’ house in Connecticut in a far more traditional gown, looking out at a huge tent on the lawn above the water. There would have been veils and churches and brigades of attendants. Guest lists filled with people she didn’t know and didn’t wish to know.
Maybe, Kendra thought, she’d never bothered to fantasize about her wedding day because it had always been a foregone conclusion. She certainly wouldn’t have looked happy the way her reflection did.
Her heart did a cartwheel in her chest as she told herself, hurriedly, that was merely the pregnancy talking. The baby was giving her this glow. It wasn’t happiness. It was hormones.
Either that, she thought when Panagiota came to collect her, or she’d taken leave of her senses entirely. Because as much as she might have shot her mouth off to Balthazar last night, she’d done what he wanted. She’d signed his agreements. She’d put on this dress.
For a woman who had claimed she had no intention of marrying him, Kendra was doing a terrific impression of a blushing, eager bride.
She waited for reality to slap her awake, but it didn’t. Because this was reality. The baby inside her and the man waiting for her.
And both were better than anything involving the life she’d left behind in Connecticut.
That was the truth that slapped her.
Hard.
Kendra tried to catch her breath from the wallop of it as the housekeeper led her through the sprawling villa, whitewashed walls and raucous flowers on all sides, then outside. Past all the terraces, past the ruins of a long-ago chapel, to a small altar on the side of a cliff.
There were three people waiting for her, seemingly suspended between the wide blue sky and the sun-drenched sea. Balthazar in his usual black, severe and unsmiling. The unfathomable priest. And another man she did not know, yet recognized instantly all the same.
Constantine Skalas, looking faintly rumpled and amused, as if he’d just that moment rolled off a supermodel and slouched his way to the ceremony.
As she drew closer, clutching the white gardenias Panagiota had handed her as they walked, Balthazar and the priest stared at her in varying degrees of condemnation. Constantine only smirked.
Kendra reminded herself that she was choosing to be as happy as she liked because she’d escaped the life her family wanted for her, which had to be worth a celebration, and beamed at all of them in turn.
“A white wedding,” Balthazar murmured darkly as he took her arm. He did not quite scowl. “Let us hope God does not smite us down where we stand.”
“This is the day our child becomes legitimate, Balthazar,” she replied, smiling at him. Then more wildly when he actually did scowl at her. “Let us give thanks and be glad.”
The ceremony was conducted in Greek and English. There were three rounds of blessings. Constantine exchanged their rings three times. There were candles and crowns, the joining of hands, and a ceremonial procession three times around the altar.
Kendra couldn’t help being moved by the ancient words, the traditions, the press of Balthazar’s hands against her own.
Like the baby inside her, her baby, the wedding felt bigger than her. It connected her to something far larger than herself or this man she was marrying or all the dark little squabbles that had brought them here.
Somehow, this wedding she hadn’t wanted gave her hope.
She clung to that when it was over. Balthazar and his brother went off somewhere. Panagiota pressed a small bag of what she called koufeta into her hands—the word for sugared almonds, it seemed—then left with the priest.
Kendra spent her first moments as a married woman—as the wife of Balthazar Skalas—in a beautiful dress with gardenias and sugared almonds in her hands, alone at an altar. Unwilling to let go of that undeserved hope that ran through her as surely as the breeze.
She moved over to the railing and looked out at the deep blue Aegean Sea, because that felt like the same thing.
And she couldn’t have said how long she stood there, but she was all too aware of it when Balthazar returned. She could feel him. That brooding, crackling energy, whipping all around her as if he brought his own storm with him wherever he went.
Kendra already knew he did.
“I’ll admit it,” she said, without looking over at him as he came to stand beside her, a dark and brooding cloud. “I expected to feel different.”
“You should feel different. You are no longer a Connolly.” He said that as if Connolly was a synonym for rat. The way he always did. “You are a Skalas.”
“Oh, happy day.”
They both stood there as the helicopter rose into the air from the pad on the other side of the villa, presumably taking Constantine and the unamused priest back to the mainland. Long after the sound of the propellers died away, they stayed there at the wedding altar.
Silent except for the beat of that same, familiar tension between them and the waves against the rocks below.
Until Kendra could take it no more and turned toward him, gazing up at the forbidding face of this man who was now her husband.
Her husband.
She had a heavy set of rings on her finger to prove it. More, she carried his baby inside of her—and felt the baby move, then. As if in agreement.
And Kendra tried to hold on to her sense of hope. To the beauty of the ceremony that had bound them together. She did. But she didn’t understand how she could feel connected to this man in all these different ways, yet see no hint of that intimacy on his stern, remote face.
“What now?” she asked quietly. “Do the humiliations and punishments begin today? Or are we easing into them?”
“Such bravado. I wonder, would you retain it if I called your bluff?”
Kendra shrugged carelessly, though she did not feel careless in the least. Last night she had. Last night she’d felt powerful, because she’d grown comfortable here. The reality of this—of them—grew bigger within her all the time. She hadn’t been hiding from it as he had.
She didn’t know when that had changed. Was it the vows they’d spoken, in two languages? Had that made something shift inside of her?
“Go right ahead and call my bluff,” she invited him. “But I intend to eat first. No one likes to be humiliated on an empty stomach.”
She took her meal, still dressed in her full wedding regalia, on a different terrace with a different view of the enduring sea. Teach me how to endure like that, she thought, though she knew better than to say it aloud.
And then she applied herself to her wedding feast. There was a seafood salad of mussels and scallops, crab and calamari, all heaped together and marinated in lemon and the oil from the island’s olives. There was a platter of tender lamb with tomato and orzo, topped with cheese. And when she was finished, heavenly baklava drenched in honey.
Kendra was not wholly surprised that Balthazar joined her, though he did not eat. Instead, he sat across from her. Brooding, clearly. She wondered if he meant to put her off her food, so she viewed it as a kind of rebellion that she ate her fill anyway.
Hope took many forms, she assured herself.
Then they both sat there, in more fraught silence, as their brand-new forced marriage entered its second hour.
&nbs
p; “Well,” she said after that went on for some time. “I will say that so far, I’m finding marriage a delight. But I didn’t realize that we took a vow of silence. Was that the Greek part?”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “We have yet to agree to terms.”
“And here I thought I signed all kinds of papers last night. What was that, if not terms?”
“That was about money,” Balthazar said in a certain, silken way. “But now you and I must decide the rest of it.”
Her pulse picked up, kicking its way through her. And there was an answering surge of heat between her legs. But Kendra didn’t want to show him her reaction, so all she did was lean back, smile, and wait.
“You have options, of course,” he said, his dark eyes glittering and blocking out all the sun and sky. “But these choices have ramifications.”
“Are we talking about consequences? Already?”
“I told you. I require a great deal of sex.” And he said it so coldly. So devoid of passion that if she hadn’t been looking directly at him she might have thought this was a clinical discussion. But she could see the way his eyes blazed. More, she could feel it, sharp and hot, in the softest part of her. Almost better than a touch. “Do you wish to provide it?”
“Why, Balthazar,” she said softly. “Are you asking me to be your mistress as well as your wife? My cup runneth over.”
It occurred to her to wonder as she said that, why, when he seemed to get grimmer by the moment, she was...moving in the opposite direction. Maybe it was because he’d married her. Maybe it was because she already loved, deeply, the child she carried—and somehow that splashed over on him, too.
Kendra shied away from that word. It came with deep, painful spikes.
All she knew was that she couldn’t hate him the way she wanted to. God knew, she’d tried. She’d never quite gotten there, and now? She couldn’t.
There had been crowns and rings and vows besides.
She couldn’t.
“If you would prefer that this marriage remain in name only, I’m happy to oblige,” Balthazar said with a certain dark inevitability. “I will find other means to meet my needs.”
The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 11