This was life. Kendra had brought him life.
And in that moment, Balthazar could not bring himself to care what her reasons might have been. What her agenda was, then or now.
In that moment, he forgave her anything and everything, because there was this. The two of them, skin to skin. Their hands tangled up together to hold the new life they’d created.
The two of them breathing new life into him. Into her.
There was a them.
A family, something in him whispered.
It hit him like an explosion. A burst of near-incapacitating sensation.
It burned him alive.
“I need you,” Balthazar gritted out. “Now.”
And for a moment, he could have sworn that she was baffled. She blinked at him as if the words he used made no sense.
He shifted his hands to her hips, to grip her and move her into place. As he shifted her it seemed to dawn on her what she could do. She blew out a breath, then leaned forward, bracing herself on his chest.
Then he watched, somehow thrown and charmed at once, as she awkwardly tried to lift herself to take him within her.
And failed.
“Surely we are past this now,” he said, his voice gravelly with need. He reached between them to grab his own length and guide himself to her softness. God help him, to her heat. It nearly undid him. “I have already married you, Kendra. What is the point of continuing to play these games?”
“What games?” she asked, panting a bit as she wriggled against him, as if attempting to slot him into place.
As if she’d never done something like this before.
But that was not possible.
“I do not require you to pretend to be innocent,” he managed to say as she was poised there above him, her hair falling down to cocoon the both of them in all that fire.
His dreams could go to hell. This was better.
“Of course I’m not innocent,” Kendra replied with a laugh, holding herself up with her thighs splayed wide. “You took care of that in New York.”
“What does that mean?”
She blew out another breath as if gearing herself up. Then she took him into her body with a sudden thrust, sheathing him fully.
Finally.
Sensation punched through him. He almost lost his control, but wrenched back, barely.
Barely.
And she couldn’t have meant what he thought she’d meant. He was half-mad with wanting her, that was all.
“What do you mean about New York, Kendra?” he demanded, ordering himself to wait. To hold on.
To hear her answer before he lost his head.
“Oh,” Kendra said, sounding flustered and breathless. Sure enough, that telltale flush rolled down the length of her body, lighting her up as surely as a billboard in Times Square. “I thought you knew already. I was a virgin that night.”
And then she began to move.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HER BODY WAS different now. Kendra felt awkward in her clothes and sometimes couldn’t figure out how to move the way she’d used to. There were new aches and strange pains in all kinds of surprising places, but this—
This was the same.
Better.
Balthazar was deep inside her again. At last. And this time, she was fully aware of every inch of his flesh and the fact that there was nothing between them.
This time, there was no pain.
There was only the reality of him, hard and thick, filling her so completely that it was almost too much. Almost. She had to keep moving so that the sensation grew, but never quite tipped over into pain again.
The more she moved, the better it felt.
And there was something about the look on his face as he gazed up at her. An intensity so close to a scowl that if she’d been doing anything else, she might have frozen in place—
But there wasn’t a single part of her that wanted to stay still. Much less freeze.
Instead, she braced herself against him, leaned into all that glorious heat, and let her hips do as they wished.
She took him inside her, then lifted herself away. She was fully aware of the moment he took over that rhythm, moving her instead of letting her rock herself against him, and that was better.
Everything he did was better.
Sitting up like this, different sensations buffeted her with every thrust. Her breasts bounced gently. There was a stretch in her thighs that seemed to arrow straight to the place they were joined. And that new belly of hers changed how she fit against him.
Or maybe it was as simple as the position. How would she know?
Balthazar muttered something she didn’t understand, a rough scrape of Greek. Then he tugged her lower so he could take one of her nipples deep into his mouth.
And just like that, shockingly quickly, Kendra shattered all over again.
But he didn’t stop. He took his time with her oversensitive breasts and she kept falling apart. Again and again.
He switched his attention from one breast to the other, his hand taking over when his mouth abandoned the job. Back and forth, back and forth, and all the while he maintained that steady, even pounding rhythm deep inside her.
At first Kendra counted the times he made her dissolve.
Three times. Four.
Then she lost count. There were too many flames, setting her alight, making her scream. Making her forget there was anything but this.
But him.
Then Balthazar was rolling her over and stretching her out below him as he propped himself up on his arms. And suddenly he was even deeper, so much a part of her that she thought she could die like this, connected in ways she had never known were possible—
He was saying Greek words as he gazed down at her, as hot as his mouth against her pulse. And he lost that steady rhythm, pounding into her as he took her to that edge once more.
And this time when she bucked against him, fragments of her flying all around and shattering so completely she was sure she would never put herself back together again, he came with her.
For a long, long while, Kendra thought maybe they had died, after all. There was no other explanation for how she felt, floating and perfect and beautiful. Or the rawness of her despair when he moved, withdrawing from her body and rolling over to his back.
It took her some time to realize that her heart was still beating like a drum, but her breath was starting to even out.
And that he had moved to sit with his back to her, there on the edge of the wide bed.
Kendra thought she ought to do something about that, but found when she tried that she lacked the strength. Her whole body appeared to be made of wet clay.
“I will need you to explain yourself,” Balthazar said, his voice grim. “Now.”
It was a lot like a bucket of ice water in the face, if she was honest.
But even that felt like a pageant of sensation, mixed in with all the rest, so all Kendra did was turn over to her side. She propped herself up on her elbow and wished, with a passionate sort of fervency that might have alarmed her in any other circumstances, that she dared reach out and trace her fingers over the proud line of his strong back.
She hated that she did not dare. That she had married him, was having his baby, and had discovered that they could do these marvelous things to each other...but she did not quite dare a touch.
But he had married her. He had promised her many things at that altar above the sea, but he had not told her it would be easy. “What must I explain?”
Balthazar did not look at her, and still she could sense his scowl. She could feel it. He wasn’t the thundercloud, Kendra realized. He was the storm.
And what did it say about her that she wanted nothing more than to dance in it?
She saw him tense. “You came to my offic
e. Your bargaining chip was your body. You stripped down immediately... There’s no possible way you could have been innocent that night. None.”
“If you say so.”
He turned then, twisting around so that she could see a kind of anguish in his face. And worse, a different, searing condemnation in his thunderclap gaze. “You had already tried the game once before, in that gazebo. We both knew the truth of it.”
“In the gazebo?” Kendra’s heart beat as if she ought to be upset by this, but she was still having trouble following what was happening. How could he be so grim and growly when she wanted nothing more than to start all over again? “I had no idea you were there. I was trying to take a breather in the middle of one of my parents’ tedious parties, that was all. And then you were there and your mouth was on me, and I didn’t know what to do.”
“No. No. This is impossible.”
A laugh escaped before she could stop it. “Would you prefer that I was the tramp you’ve always thought I was?”
But then something in her turned over. Because she recognized the expression that moved over his face. He did wish that.
And in the next moment, she understood.
“I thought this was simply how you treat women,” she breathed.
Suddenly Kendra felt exposed. Ugly. She sat up and looked around in a bit of a panic for something to cover herself with, but there was only the frothy heap of her wedding gown at the foot of the bed. She pulled it to her, holding it against her like a shield.
Waiting, she knew, for him to say something. To deny it.
But he didn’t.
“This isn’t how you treat most women, is it?” she asked softly, though she wanted to scream. “This is how you treat me. It’s not that you think women are whores. It’s that you think I am. That I always have been.”
“Why would your father or your brother send me a virgin sacrifice?” Balthazar thundered. “Don’t they know—”
But he cut himself off. Kendra pulled the dress tighter against her chest.
“And, of course, a whore deserves to be stripped naked and humiliated,” she said quietly, because she understood too many things now. His fury. His coldness. He’d used the word—maybe it was her fault for thinking he didn’t mean it. Maybe if she’d had more experience, she would have. “Dispatched by her equally repellent family to do their calculated work, she deserves zero consideration. A quick tumble on a desktop and nothing but cruel words. What I don’t understand is why, if that is what you think of me, you didn’t wrap your entire body in latex to avoid the situation we find ourselves in now. To say nothing of other...contaminants.”
“I lost my head,” he growled at her. “I could not understand why I kept imagining your innocence when it was so plainly long gone. Now I know.”
And she could have sworn that sounded like...grief.
“Which is it, husband?” she asked. “Are you angry that I’m not as free with my favors as you thought I was? Are you angry that I didn’t tell you when I think we both know you wouldn’t have believed me? Or is it the uncomfortable notion that if I’m not who you thought I was...neither are you?”
“Is this the true game?” he demanded. “Is this what you’ve wanted all along, Kendra? To tie me in knots, crowd my head, make me into a madman? What does your father think will be gained by this kind of deception?”
She blinked at that, still holding the dress close. “My father? What does my father have to do with this?”
“Did he not send you to me in the first place?”
“He didn’t send me to the gazebo. He did send me to New York. What he did not do, ever, was even so much as hint that he was interested in whether or not I was in possession of my virginity.”
The very idea of discussing virginity with her father made her stomach turn.
Balthazar looked as if he might reach for her then, and Kendra wanted that so much she could feel moisture collect in the corners of her eyes.
But instead he pushed himself off the bed and moved across the bedroom. He stopped in one of the grand archways that opened over a graceful terrace and stood there, staring out toward the sea.
The sun poured in, making him seem like some kind of stone carving, polished to shine. Not a man at all.
Because he was no longer looking at her, she indulged herself and pressed the heel of her hand against the place where her heart beat so hard it hurt.
“You should have told me,” he said a long while later, his voice thick. Dark.
“What would have been the point?” she asked simply.
Even from across the room, she could hear the way he drew in a breath at that, and it made her heart hurt even more.
Kendra gathered the dress around her, like a security blanket. She remembered how she’d felt earlier, walking to him where he stood on the edge of that cliff.
As if together they might fly off into all that blue and stay there, as limitless as the horizon.
“Balthazar,” she said softly now. “What if we made a different kind of bargain altogether?”
The hand he’d propped up against the side of the open arch clenched into a fist.
Kendra decided to take that as encouragement. Or as a sign, anyway, that she was on the right track. Since he could so easily have shot her down already.
She slid one hand to her belly. She thought about her father and brother, even her mother, and the lives they’d all chosen. Then she thought about Great-Aunt Rosemary, who had walked away from that very same life and done as she pleased.
We can make our lives whatever we wish them to be, her great-aunt had written in loopy cursive on the first page of one of the journals she’d left for Kendra to read.
Kendra could start right now.
“What if we removed everybody else from the table?” she asked softly. “What if all we thought about was you and me and our child? You’re going to be a father, Balthazar. I’m going to be a mother. We’ll both be the parents of this baby, and that means something. To the baby, I have to think it will mean the world.”
The words were pouring from her mouth, though she couldn’t have said where they were coming from. They seem to be connected to the blood that pumped through her veins. The soft, hot core of her that was already hungry for him again. The heaviness in her breasts. And the rounded belly he had caressed so gently, making her feel like a fertility goddess. More beautiful than she’d ever been.
She had taken so few chances in her life. She had dared so little—except when it came to him.
But she thought of the crowns they’d worn today and the rings on their hands. She thought of that look of wonder on his face when he’d gazed up at her, both of them holding tight to the future they’d made.
It had to mean something. She would make it mean something.
She took a breath. “What if we decided, you and me, to be a family?”
He turned back to her then, though he didn’t come closer. He stood there with the light all around him and his gaze bleak.
Kendra fought off a shiver.
“Families like yours?” he asked with a certain, quiet menace. “An overly medicated mother. A morally corrupt father, who would prostitute his virgin daughter to protect his son from the consequences of his own deceitful actions. A man who knows no boundaries, who respects no limitations, who always and ever does only what pleases. What an enticing prospect.”
Kendra would have listed any number of reasons she was not thrilled with her family at the moment, but she didn’t like him doing it. “Families are complicated. Yours certainly is—you told me so yourself.”
He moved toward her then, something terrible on his face.
It didn’t make him any less beautiful.
“And would you like to know why my family is as complicated as it is?” he asked, his voice stark.
Kendra admitted to
herself that in that moment, she really didn’t.
“When my mother came back from her stay in her private hospital, she tried to make amends. With my brother and me, it was easy. We loved her.” Balthazar’s eyes had gone cold. “With my father, on the other hand, she had much less success.”
“The poor woman,” Kendra breathed.
“My father hated my mother for her weakness,” Balthazar told her. “Whether that was just or not is beside the point. It happened. After a while, I found myself following suit.” Kendra let out a ragged sort of sound, but that only made his mouth curve into something grim. “He beat me into his image, Kendra. Constantine was permitted his little rebellions but I never was. It was easy to take everything my father said as gospel. My mother was weak. She deserved no loyalty from my father. He believed this and so did I. He acted it out and so did I. I believed it.”
“Beliefs do not live in your bones, they live in your head and your heart,” Kendra threw right back at him. “They’re not facts, Balthazar. They’re feelings. You can change them. All you have to do is want to.”
“If only it were that simple.”
“What in life is simple?” She found herself moving to her knees, still clasping the wedding gown before her, like an offering now. “Do you think that I wanted to find myself pregnant with the child of a man who made it clear he hated me?”
“Yes,” he said, the simple syllable cutting deep into her. “Until today I assumed that was exactly what you wanted.”
Kendra was terrified she might break down into tears. And she couldn’t bear it. She crawled over to the edge of the bed and stood, pulling the dress up and over her head once more.
And the irony wasn’t lost on her that she stood there, wedded and bedded and discarded at dizzying speed. Barefoot and pregnant. A collection of worst nightmares, really.
She almost thought she should laugh at the absurdity. But the laughter wouldn’t quite come.
“You really thought I got pregnant on purpose?”
The look on his face made her hug herself. “My father believed in consequences,” Balthazar told her in that same grim tone. “When I was a small boy, he beat me himself. As I grew older and bigger, he used other means of punishment. Sometimes he would beat my brother for my infractions. Other times, he would do things he knew hurt my mother. In time, he promised me, I would stop caring about either, and he was right.”
The Secret That Can't Be Hidden (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 1) Page 13
