“I’m disappointed,” she said briskly as she walked toward him, ordering her knees not to buckle beneath her. Because there could be no kneeling, God help her. “I expected better of you than cheap, juvenile name-calling.”
“Did you? I can’t think why.”
“Not to mention, I would have thought that a man who trafficked in mistresses would prefer an experienced practitioner. Or are you under the impression that a woman who accepts a mercenary position as your mistress somehow... isn’t?”
“Don’t be silly,” Balthazar said, a kind of dark humor in his voice. “A good mistress always pretends that she would never, ever succumb to anyone else.”
“Surely, once again, what you mean is an accomplished proficient. Isn’t the expectation that she’ll always make the client feel as if, were it only up to her, she’d be doing it for free?”
He let out a bark of laughter. Real laughter, Kendra thought, when she nearly missed a step. Her heart didn’t know how to process it.
All kinds of parts of her didn’t know how to process it.
She stood there a few feet away from him, stricken, too aware of the way that laughter licked its way through her. And equally aware that despite her best attempts here—despite actually removing her clothing and standing there naked before this man—she had failed.
He was laughing at her. He had already rejected her.
What else did she have to offer him?
“You must go back to your father and your brother and tell them about these offers you have made me,” Balthazar said, when his laughter finally stopped. He straightened from the wall, and she was struck anew by the physicality of this man. Unlike the rest of her father’s associates that she’d met over the years, there wasn’t the faintest hint of dissipation stamped on his skin. No paunch, no alcoholic redness about his cheeks. Just that glare of his, like smoke and condemnation—and all else a pageant of lean muscle and tightly leashed power. “How proud the two of them will be, I am certain, that you are prepared to go to these lengths for them. The obvious next question is, how often have you done exactly this on their command?”
“That’s more of a philosophical question, really,” she made herself say, trying to sound witty and urbane. Or something other than shattered. “Are fallen women born or made, do you think?”
It was only as his expression changed, shifting to something far more heated and intent, that she realized that she’d been backing up. That he was advancing on her. And she really ought to have stood there, stood her ground—
But she didn’t have it in her. She was still trembling, from the inside out, and he was bearing down on her.
She could either kneel or back away, and she didn’t dare kneel.
Kendra was terrified that she might not want to do anything else once she did.
“The philosophy of fallen women,” Balthazar said in a musing sort of voice, though there was nothing musing in the way he looked at her, then. “I confess I have never given it any thought.”
“Of course not. Why think of such things when all that is necessary is using and discarding them on a whim?”
She threw the words at him as if she thought they might hurt him. As if she thought anything might hurt him.
His mouth moved into something even more cruel. Her breath caught. Then Kendra had the confusing sensation of moving through something—only belatedly realizing that he’d backed her straight through the door of his office again.
“Shall we test your theory?” he asked, his voice a growl.
She was something like bewitched. She could only watch as he reached out a hand again, sliding it along her jaw, his fingers over her lips, then hooking the nape of her neck as he had long ago.
Her breath was a wild, flickering flame between them—
Then Balthazar’s mouth was on hers, obliterating everything else but need.
CHAPTER FOUR
HE SHOULD HAVE let her go.
That had been Balthazar’s plan. Humiliate her, then dismiss her.
A neat revenge for how she’d left him in that gazebo three years ago. Also a slap at her father and brother, who kept aiming their tawdry secret weapon at him. He’d been looking forward to aiming it right back in their direction, without giving them even a shred of what they’d wanted from him in return.
Only a small taste of what he had in store for Thomas Connolly and his spawn.
He had been congratulating himself on a job well done while he waited for her to slink out, her proverbial tail between her legs.
But she’d come out of his office tucked neatly back into the sleek skirt and blouse she’d worn. There hadn’t been the faintest hint of any slinking. It was as if nothing happened in there. There was only some turbulence in her gaze.
And that husky note in her voice.
Balthazar honestly didn’t know what had come over him. Maybe it was when she hadn’t wilted away into nothing when he’d used the word whore.
When she’d debated the point instead.
He had been unable to control himself. Or more precisely, perfectly able to control himself, a skill that had been beaten into him by his merciless father—but wholly uninterested in doing so.
And now his mouth was on hers, at last.
At last.
The half-formed notion he might have had that he’d mistaken things three years ago, along with any story he might have been tempted to tell himself about the ways he’d convinced himself it had been more than it was, disappeared as if they’d never been.
Because the taste of Kendra was far better than any memory.
It was the richness of her mouth, the way her lips met his. It was the slickness. The heat. It was better than anything he could have imagined. She was better.
Worth the wait, a voice inside whispered.
He tried to shove it aside, but something in him...snapped.
As if he truly had been waiting for her all this time, instead of merely interested that an opportunity to pay her back had arisen.
As if this was what he’d wanted all along.
This. Her.
He reached out blindly with his free hand and slammed his office door shut. That was the last thought he planned to give to the outside world. He moved her across his floor, every cell in his body focused on the same thing.
More.
Kendra had as much as told him she was precisely who and what he’d thought she was all along. She’d offered herself to him. Attempted to barter the terms of selling herself to her family’s enemy. Despite what he’d imagined in those first moments in that long-ago gazebo, she was no innocent.
He told himself that was a gift.
Because it turned out that Balthazar was in no way above taking what she’d made it clear was his to take.
Surely he’d initially meant to aim for the sofa that sat across the room, but it was suddenly too far. He made it to his desk and laid her down across the vast granite surface, making her its only adornment.
Like a sacrificial lamb, something in him thought, though that was a reach. This was no sacrifice.
This was a reckoning.
Balthazar couldn’t seem to get enough of her mouth. He braced himself over her, his palm near her head, and lost himself for far too long in the simple act of kissing her.
Again and again.
But there was nothing simple about it.
It was carnal. It was a rush. The taste of her coursed through him, storming through his veins and pooling in his sex.
More than worth the wait, that voice in him said, more definitively this time.
Like a kick to the side of his head. Balthazar tore his mouth away from hers, outraged that he felt as close to shaky in the presence of a woman as he’d ever become.
Shaky, of all things. When his father had made him pay hefty prices for weakness. Un
til now, Balthazar had been certain he’d stamped any hint of his out.
And it was only when he set his mouth to Kendra’s neck, finding that raucous pulse again, that it finally dawned on him that he hadn’t kissed her three years ago. No wonder a simple taste of her had set his head to ringing.
He wanted to strip her naked again, but he wasn’t certain he could handle it.
That truth was humbling.
He, Balthazar Skalas, who had proven himself again and again in the course of his lifetime whether he wished to or not. Against his father’s heavy hand, his mother’s defection. Against fair-weather friends and false intimates. The trials of handling both the Skalas’s wealth and business concerns with all the questionable, obsequious grifters both attracted.
He had always assumed that his ruthlessness was bone-deep.
But this mercenary little liar, an emissary from a man he despised, who wanted her to trade her body for her thieving waste of a brother—
Why on earth should it be this girl who got to him like this?
He could see her body still, as if she hadn’t put her clothes back on. He could see how she’d stood before him, not unaffected by her nudity, but not cringing or cowering, either.
He thought of his beloved Greece and all the great statues of goddesses, breasts bared, bodies more weapons of awe than shame.
And he thought that for the rest of his life when he looked at such pieces of art he would see Kendra instead. Small yet plump breasts with rosy crests. The tempting slope of her belly. The auburn tangle of curls at the apex of her thighs.
Somehow, with the taste of her in his mouth, he thought that if he stripped her again it might kill him.
That was absurd, of course.
But even so, he reached down and began to tug her skirt up instead of removing it. She made a wordless sort of noise, then lifted her hips, helping him clear the fabric from around her hips.
He could smell her arousal.
It made him think of gardens before a summer storm, heavy with scent. Flowers and a raw bloom.
It almost made him lose himself completely.
Balthazar didn’t understand what was happening inside of him.
She was spread out before him, his entirely for the taking if the blissed-out look on her face was any clue, and he should have felt cynical and triumphant at once.
He’d had any number of beautiful women below him before, but this was different. This was Kendra Connolly. And much as he might like to imagine otherwise, he had been imagining something like this for very long time indeed.
There was a part of him that had been thrilled to discover that her vile brother had been foolish enough to get himself into such trouble.
Had he hoped that this would happen? He had expected her to offer, but had he hoped all along that he would accept that offer—even though he’d assured himself that he was only taking this meeting for the chance to humiliate a Connolly?
He had to face the fact that this was exactly what he’d wanted.
Balthazar felt something like drunk, when he never allowed himself such indulgences.
But her legs were free of the constriction of her skirt then, so he stepped between them, pulling her bottom to the edge of the granite desk.
Her arms seem to move of their own accord, rising over her head. She arched back with a kind of inbred grace that poured through him, a new kind of storm. Looking at her made his chest feel tight.
But he shoved all of that aside and concentrated on the part of him that ached for her the most.
Balthazar reached down to unzip himself, then pull his own throbbing length free. Finally.
He heard an indrawn breath and when he looked up again, Kendra’s eyes seemed even wider and brighter, and she was biting down on her bottom lip.
And he felt something sharp move in him then, like fragments of broken glass, embedding themselves in his flesh.
She was the very picture of innocence on the verge of surrender, wasn’t she? Balthazar could admit, deep inside himself where he would never discuss it with another living soul or admit it out loud, that there was no small part of him that wished the picture she presented was real.
That had been the issue three years ago. It was worse now.
He reached between her legs and pulled her panties to one side. Then, giving in to the brute in him, he tore them off her and tossed them aside. He could see goose bumps rise on the smooth flesh of her inner thighs and wasn’t surprised when she covered her face with her arms, because they both knew the truth, didn’t they?
She wanted him. This was the game. And better she should hide now that he was winning it.
If he had been more in control of himself, he wouldn’t have allowed it. He’d have pinned her hands above her head, bent close, and studied her face as he thrust deep into the very center of her molten heat.
He’d have enjoyed every moment of this victory.
But this was far wilder than he’d anticipated. Whatever it was that beat in him, it made him feel savage. Something like mad with it.
She was too hot, too wet.
He felt himself growl, like the beast only she brought out in him, and then he simply slammed himself home.
She arched up against him and he gripped her hips, because she felt so good. She was impossibly tight and hot around him, and for a heady beat or two of his heart he thought he might finish there and then.
Surely not.
Balthazar braced himself against the desk, fighting for control. And as he did, he became aware that she was breathing rapidly. Her chest was moving, and there was a deep red flush all over her neck.
“Show me your face,” he ordered her.
He felt her clench down hard, internally, and swore as that tight grip nearly threw him over the edge. She moved her hips almost tentatively and held her arms in place, tighter, for a few more moments before she let her arms fall.
Her face looked even more flushed than her neck, her eyes so bright it made him freeze. Almost as if she was on the verge of tears—but that made no sense.
“I don’t understand why we’re stopping,” she threw at him. Reminding him that this was a fight, and no matter if there was a strange note in her voice as she spoke. He could see the echo of it reflected in her too-bright gaze, burning like the sweet, hot center of an open fire. “This is what you wanted, surely. Do it.”
A kind of alarm rang in him at that, but she made a greedy sort of sound and then locked her ankles in the small of his back.
And then, her eyes fastened fiercely to his, she began to move her hips.
It was crude and inelegant and, oddly, the most erotic thing he could ever recall happening to him.
There was something about the determination on her flushed face. The way she moved, taking all of him, then retreating, over and over, her teeth almost bared as if she was determined to get this right.
He’d expected practiced moves, soft laughter.
What he got instead was...this fierce attack of pleasure that should have put him off.
Balthazar thought it might be the hottest thing he’d ever seen.
And it felt like magic.
He slid his hands beneath her and lifted her up, gripping the soft curves of her bottom and holding her before him so he could take control.
He started slow, matching her deliberateness. Her intensity.
Stroke after stroke, deep and hard, so there could be no mistake about who he was. Who she was. What was happening here.
And something extraordinary happened as he kept going, communicating the truth of things the only way he could. That sheen of ferocity seemed to mellow, as if the heat between them was doing the same work in her as it was in him. The sharpness in her gaze became something else, something molten.
He kept on, maintaining a deliberate rhythm even as he watc
hed a different kind of heat wash over her.
And when she stiffened again, her head fell back in that same beautiful surrender he recalled years ago.
Once again, Kendra cried out heedlessly as she shattered all around him.
He wanted more. He wanted everything. He wanted.
Balthazar dropped down and set his mouth against her neck. His hips pounded into her, faster and faster. He reached between them and found the proud center of her need, then worked it with his fingers as he finally, greedily, cast off what few chains of control remained.
And let himself go wild.
This time, when she screamed she bucked against him, hurtling straight off that edge and taking him with her.
But the noise he made felt torn from deep inside him as he followed her over.
Ruined, that voice in him whispered.
And Balthazar could do nothing about it. He was...broken into pieces, sprawled over her without breath.
For a long while there was only the way their hearts thundered, almost as if to the same beat.
He wanted to gather her to him. He wanted to do things that made no sense, like press kisses against the line of her jaw. When it finally penetrated that he felt the urge to do these mad things, it was like dousing himself in a cold plunge.
Balthazar pulled out, though it caused him something almost like pain to leave behind that silken grip.
He told himself to turn away abruptly, but he didn’t. He took his time, fully aware that it was likely to be burned into him forever, the sight of her like this. Sprawled out on his desk, her skirt rucked up to her waist, thoroughly debauched and thoroughly his.
You’re a fool, he growled at himself. That was revenge and nothing more.
But that felt very much like a lie, when he had long considered himself allergic to dishonesty in any form.
When he finished putting himself to rights, he focused on her and found her doing the same. Her eyes were downcast as she slid from the desk. And though she tugged her skirt back into place competently enough, her hair told a different story.
Balthazar did not advise her to smooth it down. A clear indication that no matter how smooth an exterior she tried to present, the reality remained.
The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 5
