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

by Caitlin Crews

  She cleared her throat. “Why do I doubt you brought me gifts?”

  Balthazar didn’t trust himself to speak. But he must have communicated himself all the same, because Kendra moved to the table and picked up the small carrier bag, then blew out a loud breath when she looked inside.

  “Wow.” She laughed, though he could see from the color on her face and the sudden sheen in her eyes that she didn’t find any of this particularly amusing. Good, he thought.

  “Pregnancy tests. You thought I needed pregnancy tests. Five of them, no less.”

  “It will do for a start.”

  She raised her gaze to his and actually had the gall to look shocked. “You can’t possibly imagine that I’m going to...”

  “Now, please.”

  His voice was soft, but a command. He saw it move in her, a kind of jolt.

  “No.” She dropped the carrier bag on the table as if it had fangs. “I will not—”

  “Allow me to explain to you what is going to happen, Kendra.” Balthazar didn’t move closer to her. He didn’t trust himself. Nor did he raise his voice. Even so, she jolted again, harder this time. Her eyes snapped to his and he approved. Maybe now she would take this—him—seriously. “I do not know how you intended to play this game. But you chose the wrong man to play it with. I do not believe the innocent act because, lest we forget, I know the truth about you. And even if I did not, I know exactly what your family is capable of.”

  “I’m not acting. I’m not an actor, and even if I was, I certainly wouldn’t bother to put on a performance for a man I never planned to lay eyes on again.”

  “Silence.”

  That command sliced straight across the room, and if he wasn’t mistaken, straight through her.

  Kendra’s breathing sounded a little heavy, almost as if she was having an emotional response...

  Or, the appropriately cynical part of him chimed in, she knows she’s caught.

  “Your intentions do not matter to me,” he told her, harsh and precise so there could be no mistake. “I would prefer to determine, here and now, if you are pregnant. If this nightmare is truly happening.”

  “I vote no, it’s not.” She jerked her head toward the door. “Feel free to leave. Now.”

  “But of course, I do not trust you, Kendra.” Balthazar wanted to reach for her and lectured himself, sternly, to keep his hands to himself. This situation could hardly be improved by repeating the same mistake. And besides, he needed to interrogate himself as to why and how he could possibly want this woman the way he did, when he knew what she was. When he knew exactly what she’d done. “Therefore, tomorrow—regardless of what we discovered tonight—we will fly to Athens for an appointment with my personal physician.”

  He stood there, feeling like an avenging angel, as she gaped at him.

  The way an innocent he was railroading might—

  But Balthazar dismissed that.

  “There is not one part of what you said that’s going to happen.” Kendra crossed her arms and held herself stiffly. “Not one single part.”

  “This is nonnegotiable.”

  “Are you under the impression that I...work for you?” This time, her laugh bordered on the hysterical, and he had to fight—again—the urge to put his hands on her. “The only interest I ever had in you was as an emissary from my family on behalf of my brother. Who, I can’t help but notice, you have yet to report to the authorities.”

  “Was this not the entire point of your little gambit?”

  Against his will, against his own orders, he found himself moving closer to her. When he noticed that he’d placed himself within arm’s reach, he stopped, but it didn’t help.

  Nothing helped. This woman was the only addiction Balthazar had ever had, and he would not succumb to it. To her.

  He refused.

  “There is no gambit,” she was saying, her voice hot and her eyes dark. “This is my life. A life I put together to suit me, not anyone else. I don’t care what you think of it and I certainly don’t appreciate you storming in here like you have some claim—”

  “I have every claim.”

  Balthazar’s voice was pure ice.

  Kendra made a soft sound that might have been a gasp, as if he’d punctured her straight through. He rather hoped he had.

  “Whatever life you think you might have had here, you forfeited your right to it when you involved me,” he told her. Ferociously. “You must realize that there exists absolutely no possibility that I will allow you to give birth to my child anywhere that is not under my direct supervision.”

  “If I’m pregnant,” she said, and on some distant level he noticed that she almost stuttered over that word, “I will handle it. My way. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “I will require genetic testing to determine paternity, obviously. Because oddly, Kendra, I do not trust you.”

  “Genetic testing...” She blinked, then lifted a hand as if warding him off. “I understand that you take great pride in crashing about the planet, ordering everyone around and taking your revenge when they don’t do what you want. But I have already spent a lifetime putting up with that from my actual relatives. I have no intention of allowing you to take up where they left off.”

  “How will you stop it?” he asked with genuine curiosity, though there was a kind of silken threat in his voice.

  He did nothing to hide it.

  And he expected her to cower. To look away, keep her eyes downcast, make herself small, the way most of his subordinates and rivals did in his presence.

  Instead, Kendra Connolly charged across the few feet remaining between them and actually brandished her finger in his face.

  It was...astonishing, not alarming.

  Such a thing had never happened before. Not with anyone other than his father, that was.

  “You can go straight to hell,” Kendra threw at him. “And you can start by getting out of my house.”

  Balthazar shrugged. “Whether I am in this house or out of it, that will make no difference. The outcome will be the same.”

  “You have absolutely no authority over me. I don’t even like you. And even if I did, the state of my womb is none of your business.”

  “Think again, Kendra.”

  He saw sheer murder on her face, and something about it...delighted him.

  Balthazar had now seen a number of different versions of this woman. The fluttery, overcome, supposed innocent that night in the gazebo. The cool, controlled businesswoman who had sold herself so matter-of-factly and then kissed him like the culmination of a lifetime of his most erotic fantasies. The sunny, happy little waitress at the winery.

  And even the woman who had greeted him at the door tonight, seemingly angelic. Bathed in light and not nearly as intimidated by him she ought to have been.

  Now there was this version. Unafraid, uncowed, and somehow even more beautiful because of it.

  He had come here wanting to do absolutely nothing but crush her, and instead he found himself hard again. That longing, that impossible need, stormed through him as if it intended to tear him apart.

  She had no idea how close he came to simply sweeping her into his arms and tasting her mouth again. To lose himself that completely, that quickly.

  No matter what she’d done to him.

  This weakness will soon rule you, a voice inside that sounded far too much like his harsh father lashed out at him. Then you will be no better than she is. Is that what you want?

  His trouble was he knew exactly what he wanted.

  Kendra dropped that finger, but only so she could prop her hands on her hips. “You make a lot of threats but I think we both know they’re empty. Because this is the modern world, not whatever medieval daydream you have going on.”

  Balthazar laughed, then. “I would advise you not to make yourself comfo
rtable with that fantasy.” He laughed again when she scowled at him. “I would prefer it if you agreed to my terms. I would prefer it if you took those tests now, to spare us both the suspense. But I don’t require your agreement or cooperation, kopéla. Either way, I will have my answers in the end.”

  “Either way? What are you going to do?” Kendra scoffed at him. “Kidnap me?”

  But Balthazar only smiled.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THEY LANDED IN Athens the next morning.

  And while Balthazar had not, technically, kidnapped her, he hadn’t exactly left her any choice.

  Kendra hated herself for not finding a way out of the situation, but she hadn’t.

  She hadn’t—and she wasn’t sure she really wanted to ask herself why that was.

  Balthazar hadn’t bothered to continue arguing with her last night. He’d left her after flashing that enigmatic smile, the one that had made her shiver with foreboding. But before he’d driven off in that absurd sports car of his that she was fairly certain was as bespoke as the clothes he wore, he’d made a quick call in emphatic Greek.

  Within moments, two glossy black SUVs had pulled up.

  “You called the cavalry?” she’d asked.

  He’d smiled again, and it wasn’t any better that time. “Insurance, that is all.”

  “Weird.” Kendra had eyed the men who poured out of the SUVs. Balefully. “They look a great deal like your own private army.”

  “You may call them whatever you like, Kendra,” Balthazar had said. “They are not here for you.”

  “Excellent news. I’ll have them make themselves comfortable in the lavender fields while I take myself off to Monaco for the weekend.”

  “Do as you like.” Another, third version of that smile of his made her bones feel cold. “My men will protect my potential heir.”

  And then he’d taken himself off in that obnoxious car, leaving his men behind.

  Men who would protect the baby she refused to believe she was carrying, not her.

  Kendra had retreated back into the cottage and barricaded herself inside. She’d pulled all the curtains and then had sat there on one of Great-Aunt Rosemary’s cozy little couches, very deliberately not staring across the room at the sack of pregnancy tests Balthazar had left behind.

  She had done nothing but obsessively count days since he’d showed up at the winery. She’d gone over it again and again. The truth was, she hadn’t spared a single thought about whether or not her monthly cycle was showing up as it should have been...because she’d never had any reason to think about such things. Not only had Kendra never been late, as far as she knew—she’d never had any reason to worry about it if for some reason she had been.

  Why hadn’t it occurred to her to worry about it now that there was a reason?

  But she knew the answer to that. She might wake in the night, suffused with heat and with Balthazar’s name on her lips, but by day she never, ever allowed herself to think about that night. To think about him. Part of that was also not thinking about her own body—from the things he’d made her feel to its biological functions.

  As she’d sat there in her cottage, barricaded in against truths she didn’t want to face, Kendra honestly hadn’t known if she’d been motivated by denial...or survival.

  Either way, the longer she’d stared at that bag full of pregnancy tests, the more it seemed to overtake the room, crowding out the books and the art Great-Aunt Rosemary had left behind. And the more it seemed directly connected to the panic inside of her, pounding at her, filling her up like a wicked flood.

  Until she couldn’t breathe.

  And so it was that Kendra discovered that she really was pregnant with Balthazar Skalas’s child while hiding in the small bathroom of her great-aunt’s cottage after midnight, hiding from the men he’d sent to make sure she stayed there, after making implicit kidnapping threats.

  She’d taken all five tests, sure that they had to be defective. That the next one would prove that she wasn’t actually living through...this.

  But they all showed her the exact same thing.

  Kendra was pregnant.

  And when she finally stopped chugging water so she could make a new test happen, when she finally accepted that no new test was going to change the truth...the whole world shifted.

  With such a dramatic, irrevocable jolt that she’d found herself on the floor of the bathroom, her back against the wall, staring at the incontrovertible evidence before her.

  Five times over.

  She’d remembered that night in his office vividly. Too vividly, really, when she now knew what would become of it.

  Had she been so quick to pretend nothing had happened because it had been so...raw? She was an educated, sophisticated woman who not only had not inquired about protection, she’d never given it a moment’s thought, afterward. It had never occurred to her that anything like this could happen.

  And as she’d huddled there on the cool bathroom floor, she’d had to face a number of realities. Including the fact that she’d tried her hardest to blank out what had happened in New York because it hadn’t been anything like the fantasies of him she’d carried around in her head after encountering him in that gazebo. It had been so much more...physical. Each and every sensation so intense she still wasn’t sure if it had been pain or pleasure—only that she wanted more. She didn’t have a single memory or feeling about Balthazar Skalas that wasn’t complicated. Complex.

  When she’d been taught again and again that sex was no place for tangled emotions and overwhelming memories. It was meant to be a lovely, celebratory thing, that was all. Not an experience so darkly erotic that she could only face it fast asleep.

  “Daylight is no place for unpleasant things, dear,” her mother had always said.

  Kendra had only realized then, curled up on the floor, that she’d taken that to heart. Maybe a bit too much to heart. Because she’d been living her whole life like this, hadn’t she? Her head so far in the sand she was surprised she could breathe through it.

  The last few months had been nothing more or less than the inevitable conclusion of a lifetime of her own ostrich impression. She’d ignored the obvious indicators that her father was always the kind of man who would send his own daughter off to appeal to Balthazar as a man. She’d ignored the unpleasant reality that he supported Tommy, who was by no definition a good man. She’d ignored everything that didn’t suit her.

  Maybe it wasn’t a surprise that she’d ignored what was happening in her own body, too.

  She’d sat there, her knees pulled beneath her chin, too stunned by her own stupidity to even bother crying about it.

  That would come later, Kendra had suspected. She could almost feel an emotional breakdown hovering there like a storm, just out of reach over the horizon.

  But first she could do nothing but marvel at her own naivete.

  Balthazar was upsettingly correct. Her own family had pimped her out.

  And it wasn’t as if he was much better. She could feel the hatred in him. He seethed with it. He hated her brother. He detested her father.

  Much as some part of her didn’t wish to think about it, he was no fan of hers, either.

  And still she had marched herself into that office building, a lamb to the slaughter—though in her case, she’d actually believed she was some kind of wolf, not a lamb at all.

  But now it was all worse.

  So much worse, Kendra didn’t truly understand how she was going to live through whatever came next.

  She’d spent her whole life trying to be perfect, and instead, she’d gone and gotten herself knocked up the first time she’d so much as touched a man. It was her parents’ worst nightmare, as they’d made clear a thousand times while she was growing up. Her mother might very well slip off into a coma, so appalled was Emily Connolly sure to be at this news. />
  That was bad enough. Far worse was the trepidation she could feel churn about inside her as she tried to imagine how on earth she was going to navigate sharing a child with a man like Balthazar when she wasn’t sure she could survive sharing a car ride with him.

  She’d actually laughed out loud, there in her bathroom, then winced at how unhinged she sounded.

  “I’m sorry,” she’d whispered, sneaking her hands over her belly, though it still seemed impossible to her that there could be a life inside. A life. A baby. My baby, something in her whispered. “I’ll find a way, don’t worry.”

  Because Balthazar Skalas might be his own level of impossible, but Kendra had no intention of hiding from reality any longer. She was going to be a mother. She was not going to be her mother.

  She’d never been any good at fighting for herself, but she would fight for this child.

  “No matter what,” she’d promised the tiny life growing inside her, there on the bathroom floor and a few more times in her bed, too, for good measure.

  But the next morning, far too early for someone who’d stayed up as late as she had, Balthazar had been pounding at her door, and Kendra had made a decision on the spot that there was no point fighting him. Probably because she knew he would win. And she really didn’t want to see how, exactly, he would go about physically removing her from France.

  She’d seen no reason to share the news with him. He could wait for the ill-gotten gains of his kidnapping attempt to learn what she already knew. If he marinated in his temper while he waited, all the better.

  He’d stood there in the cottage’s main room, a thundercloud of fury as she’d moved about collecting items like her passport and her great-aunt’s oversize scarf that she could fling about her neck and pretend was a fashion accessory when really, it was more like a portable blanket she planned to use to soothe herself.

  Because if the look on Balthazar’s face had been any guide, Kendra was going to need some soothing.

  He’d driven her to a private airfield outside of Nice without a word. The flight had been short and equally silent.