“An open marriage,” Kendra said, nodding as if she discussed such things all the time. As if she didn’t feel that strange hollow space yawn open inside of her. “I’m told many people in our tax bracket rely on these arrangements.”
“We will not have an open marriage,” Balthazar told her. It was a stern rebuke. “I do not share what is mine.”
Her heart actually hurt, there beneath her too-tight ribs. But she made herself smile as if this was nothing more than idle talk over cocktails. “But you assume I do?”
“I told you that you have a choice. I do not recall telling you that you would enjoy the choice.” He shrugged in that way of his, so supremely arrogant it should have left marks. “Either way, it is what it is.”
Kendra opened her mouth to say something flippant, but something stopped her. Her breath caught in her throat, and she realized in the next second it was because he was holding himself so carefully. All of that leashed power, yes, but a certain glitter in those dark eyes made her wonder...
Something seemed to swell in her then. A kind of optimism, maybe. That same foolish hope.
If what you want is connection, intimacy, a voice in her said with a kind of calm practicality she associated with the great-aunt she’d hardly known, but who she felt she’d come to know over the months she’d spent living in that cottage, you can’t fight your way there. You can’t demand vulnerability wearing battle armor and imagine it will come to you.
And it was suddenly as if Kendra could see her whole life spinning around in front of her. As if it was contained in some kind of snow globe she held in her hands, already shaken hard. She’d wanted her father’s attention. She’d wanted her brother’s companionship. She’d wanted her mother’s approval.
All of those were careful ways of saying she’d wanted their love.
That word with all its pain, its sharp edges and deep spikes.
She held her belly in her palms, and she looked at this man who had wrecked her in a thousand ways already. That night on the gazebo. That night in his office. That kiss right here in this villa the night before. All that plus sacred vows and the sea as witness, and Kendra couldn’t help thinking that, like it or not, she’d shown him more of herself than she had ever shown anyone else.
On the one hand, she thought maybe that was a sad thing, because she’d spent so long trying to shape herself according to other people’s molds. But on the other hand, there was something about Balthazar—something so overwhelming and intense that she felt she could show him anything at all. That there was nothing she could reveal or do that would ruin it. He wasn’t her father or brother, who would cut her off so easily if she didn’t perform as they wished.
Oh, he said he was.
But she was sitting across from him now in a wedding dress. She wore his rings on her finger. Best of all, she could see the expression on his face.
And somehow, some way, she was sure she knew better.
Kendra didn’t know much about sex. But she knew that this man had asked her to strip herself naked and she’d done it. She knew that this man had touched her and changed her forever. He’d moved inside her, and her life had no longer made any sense.
She’d changed it completely after that night, months before she would discover she was pregnant.
Maybe it was sex itself that was that powerful. But she didn’t think so. Kendra had expected sex to be fun and maybe a little silly, because that was the way people spoke of it. That was what the movies showed her, dressing it up with a suggestive soundtrack and lighting it all up so it looked like art.
When instead, it was a haunting thing. It came to her still, woke her in the night, and infused her dreams with a dark, erotic need.
Not for sex.
For him.
And if Balthazar could have that kind of power, that meant she could, too.
She smiled, letting it widen as his eyes narrowed. That felt like a power all its own.
“I can’t possibly make this choice with so little information,” she told him. She waved a hand at him. Regally. “I will require an audition, of course. Isn’t that how these things go?”
And then she nearly had to bite her tongue off to keep herself from laughing at the thunderstruck look of sheer, masculine astonishment on his arrogant face.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t be coy, Balthazar.” She let out a laugh, then. She couldn’t help it. “It’s so unbecoming in a brand-new husband.”
He bared his teeth at her. “I’m not following you.”
“You are. You’re just pretending not to.” Kendra inclined her head at him. “Strip, please.”
CHAPTER TEN
BALTHAZAR HAD NO intention of doing anything of the kind.
He gave the orders. He did not follow them.
But Kendra sat before him, a vision in flowing white and her hair pinned up to catch the kiss of the sun. Her cheeks were flushed, her freckles a tempting spray across her nose and over her bared shoulders. It made him want to do nothing but eat her like a dessert far sweeter than Panagiota’s baklava.
Kendra was sugar and flame and all his now. His wife.
His wife.
Balthazar had not expected that word, common as it was, to get to him like this. Its meaning rocked through him, almost too hot to bear. He blamed that age-old ceremony and the words the old priest had spoken over them. He blamed the rings he’d slid onto her finger, the platinum catching the light and the diamonds so bright they nearly dimmed the sun.
But he could blame anything and everything. What he didn’t understand was how she seemed to grow more beautiful by the moment, especially when this should have been a festival arranged around his revenge, not...whatever it was she imagined she was doing. He glared at her, but she only smiled, looking happy enough to wait forever for him to do as she’d demanded.
He could not imagine what made her imagine she had any power here.
Just as he could not imagine why he wasn’t claiming his by right. And claiming her while he was at it.
“What’s the matter?” she asked almost offhandedly, a gleam in those golden eyes of hers. “Don’t tell me that the mighty Balthazar Skalas is afraid to do something here, on his own private island, that I did without blinking in the middle of a busy office? How funny. I thought you were meant to be the powerful one.”
“Do you think goading me will work?”
She only smiled.
It turned that heat inside him...volcanic.
Before he knew it, Balthazar found himself rising from his seat. As he did, he took great pleasure in watching her eyes widen.
Not quite so sure of herself, then. No matter what she said.
And that made everything inside him run molten.
He made short work of his clothing. He shrugged out of the dark suit he’d worn for the ceremony, stripping down until he stood before her wholly naked. The sun poured all over him. The sea air was like a caress.
But best of all was that expression on Kendra’s face.
It looked a great deal like awe.
He watched her flush. He watched that same giddy heat move its way down her neck. The dress she wore left her arms bare and he could see that same flush there, then goose bumps to match as she gazed up at him.
Balthazar felt everything shift. As if the world had spun about on its axis, then flattened him as it stopped still.
But he liked it.
Because he was the one standing naked before her, but he felt not a shred of supplication. No hint of weakness.
He had never felt more powerful in his life.
Had he called her names because he had sensed this, somehow? That a display of vulnerability led straight to something far more powerful? Had he wanted to diminish this very same light in her?
The notion sat uneasily in him. It pricked at him, r
eminding him of the reasons they were here, and married, and the revenge he had long ago vowed to rain down upon her father and the rest of her family...
But then he forgot it all. Because her eyes moved, almost convulsively, down over his chest. He was sure he could feel it like a touch over every ridge of his abdomen, every line of muscle. And she kept going until she found the hardest part of him, ready for her where he stood.
More than ready.
“If this is a proper audition,” he managed to say, in a voice made harsh with need, “will you require the complete demonstration?”
When she lifted her gaze to his again, the wildfire he saw there made him want to roar like the beast he had always feared he was.
Though he didn’t fear it now. Not when she looked at him as if the beast was precisely what she wanted.
God help him.
“Of course.” Kendra’s voice sounded husky now, though no less of a taunt. “Or how could I possibly make an informed decision?”
“How indeed.”
Balthazar crossed to her then, bent down, and lifted her into his arms.
He spared no thought for his plans. The promises he’d made himself about how he would handle this marriage, how he would treat the wife he’d never wanted, how all of this would become part of what was owed Thomas Connolly. It all seemed inconsequential when he held her like this, her flowing dress wrapping around them as he moved, like tendrils of that same dream he always seemed to have when she was near.
He knew it wasn’t true. It could never be true. And yet it haunted him.
Balthazar had intended to make it through his wedding secure in the purity of his fury. Secure in his hatred, his bitterness.
But when he’d looked up from the altar at the edge of the cliff to see Kendra coming toward him—in flowing white as she made her way through the ruins of the old chapel, flowers in hands and sunshine all over her face—the same dream that had woken him up in the night too many times to count now had walloped him all over again.
Constantine had murmured something that sounded suspiciously like steady.
Balthazar had been forced to ignore it, because the only other option was acknowledging that he had made some sound, or some face that allowed his brother to think he was ever anything but steady. That had proclaimed his weakness to the whole of the watching Aegean Sea.
And also because his bride was coming to him in the island breeze.
And for the time it took her to walk to his side, he tortured himself with fantasies of her innocence. He had never cared about such things before. It was only her. It was only this woman he could not bear to imagine with anyone else. Only this woman who he could not seem to imagine with anyone but him.
It should not have felt like torture, but she disturbed his sleep. The fantasy that she could come to him like that, bearing his child and no hand upon her but his... The dream that she might truly be his, without any bitterness coloring their days...
He knew better. He’d known better. Nothing had changed when he’d put a ring on her finger. No blessings, however sanctified, could change who they were.
And yet.
He carried her into the villa and took her straight to his private suite. It was a Greek daydream of archways to welcome in the sea and the sky. Everything was white and blue and then, there in the middle, his wife with her hair like flame and eyes of the brightest gold.
Like a treasure.
By the time he set her down gently at the foot of the wide, low bed, Balthazar was so hard, so greedy for her, that he was surprised she hadn’t already burst into a thousand pieces with the force of it.
“Let me tell you how I want you to audition,” she said, though she had to reach out to him to keep her balance and better still, she sounded breathless.
He found he liked that more than he should have. That no matter what—no matter the truth of things and the dark reality he would return to as soon as he did something about the hunger that was tearing him apart—he got to her, too.
“I find I have a particular take on the role,” he told her, his voice dark. The greed in him like its own, beating pulse. “Why don’t you tell me how you feel about it once I’m done.”
This time, when he set his mouth to hers, he had no intention of stopping.
He kissed her, deep and long. He got his hands in her hair, scattering the pins she’d used to secure it to the top of her head. It wasn’t enough. No matter how he angled his head, no matter how close he held her, he wanted more.
He wanted everything.
Balthazar didn’t understand this drive in him. This need. The dream and the greed, the feelings that battered at him, over and over, when he had been so certain for so long that he had none—
He felt as if something in him had broken. Yet as he held Kendra in his arms, he had the strangest notion that he had never been more whole.
That wasn’t something he could take on board then, so Balthazar spun her around instead. He watched the deep, jarring breath she took as he worked to pull that dress up the length of her newly voluptuous body, then off.
Then she was before him in only a bra that wrapped around her back, holding her breasts as if on a shelf, and a skimpy pair of lace panties that made his mouth water. Her back was to him, so he indulged himself without worrying how his face might have been betraying him.
He put his mouth on the nape of her neck, then made his way down the tempting line of her spine. He removed that bra as he went, his hands trailing behind his mouth to graze her sides but not quite making it around to the particular temptation of those perfect breasts, now much larger than before. Not yet.
He found the small of her back and hooked his fingers in the lace he found high on her hips, then tugged it down as he bared the whole of her to his view.
Crouched there behind her, he turned her around so he could inhale the scent of her arousal. Sugar and heat. Then he indulged himself completely by licking his way directly into all of her soft, wet heat.
She jolted against him, making a shocked sort of sound that only made the greed in him worse. He was sure there was another lightning strike. He felt it go through her, and him.
Beneath his tongue, she quivered, but that was not enough. Not nearly enough.
Could anything be enough? something in him asked.
He wrapped one arm around her hips and pulled one of her legs over the width of his shoulder, opening her to him. Completely.
And then he devoured her.
She was sweet and he was savage. And the noises she made as she arched back, offering herself to him, pulsed in him like light. Like heat.
Like that greed he thought might never leave him.
He felt her convulse against his mouth, her body jerking as she sobbed out something incoherent that he thought might be his name.
And even as she shook, Balthazar was moving. He hauled her up into his arms again and then tumbled the both of them down into the embrace of that wide mattress.
She was still shaking, still making sobbing sounds, and for a moment he lost himself all over again in the slide of her flesh against his.
Skin to skin, head to toe, at last.
Balthazar felt as if he’d never had a woman before. As if he never would again. As if she was the beginning and the end of everything—and all he wanted to do was get closer.
Everything was heat and delight, a dark and encompassing glory.
All he wanted was that everything, even if it killed them both.
He rolled to his back and pulled her astride him. He watched, breathing hard already, as she braced herself against his chest, looking something like intoxicated when he knew she hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol.
For that matter, neither had he—and that meant the spinning in his head was entirely due to Kendra.
He waited for her to shift herself i
nto better position, to sheath him on a downward stroke he could almost feel already, but she didn’t.
It was as if she was trying to focus on him. Her hair tumbled around her shoulders like another lick of flame. Balthazar wanted to taste each individual freckle he could see in that sweet spray across her nose, and more across her shoulders.
She was busy breathing, so he held her for a moment. This woman who had come to him twice, both times at the bidding of men he despised. This woman he had taken from that cottage in France. This woman he had married and would call his wife, and who would be, no matter what else she was or became in time, the mother of his child.
For the first time, Balthazar let his gaze drop to her swollen belly, even more beautiful now that she wasn’t wearing clothes to conceal it.
His heart beat at him in a new way, then. More intense. More wild and dangerous.
A different kind of greed.
Balthazar slid his hands over her belly. He heard her breath catch, and though he ordered himself not to do it, he looked up and caught her gaze.
And for a moment he forgot who they were.
For moment he was nothing more and nothing less than a man holding the pregnant belly of a woman, both of them fully aware that the child they’d made was just there, just inside.
She sat astride him and a different kind of electricity moved between them. He could feel it. It was part of him, part of her. Not a lightning strike from elsewhere, but made from this. From the heat they sparked between them, and had from the moment she’d stepped into that gazebo.
He was unsurprised and something like furious and deeply glad all at once when she moved her hands to cover his.
And for a long while there was only breath. There was only this.
Only this.
There was creation and revelation. Wonder and hope. Sex and need and a baby woven into the middle of that.
Woven so tightly it only then occurred to Balthazar that he’d been kidding himself all this time to imagine that this wasn’t the very point of...everything.
The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 12
