He was Balthazar Skalas. He surrendered to no man.
Lucky for him, then, that the only person on earth he intended to surrender to was a woman. His wife.
Assuming she would have him now that she knew the truth about her family and his, and the great, ugly weight of the revenge he’d tried so hard to take out on her.
He turned, surprised to find that he’d made his way to the altar where he had married her a lifetime ago on this very same, endless day. The ruins of the old chapel gleamed in the starlight and for moment, when he saw movement, he thought it was an apparition.
Or better still, that dream of his, come to comfort him once more.
But as she moved closer, he saw that it really was Kendra.
His heart skipped a beat.
She still wore her wedding gown, that flowing, frothy gown that gleamed an unearthly white in the starlight. And she looked wilder than she had this morning, as if the daylight had required compliance, but here in the dark, there was only her.
Her hair was a tousled flame, and he longed to run his hands through it all over again. He could see traces of the tears she’d cried, there on her cheeks as she drew closer, but she was not weeping now. If anything, she looked determined.
His own little warrior, who could not stop fighting, no matter what.
Balthazar had a vision of her in his New York office so long ago and felt his heart lurch all over again. In those moments before she’d seen him she’d stood at the window, staring out at the glittering sprawl of Manhattan. Her face had been so soft, suffused with that sweet heat that had entranced him, even then.
He had told himself he was unmoved, but that had been a lie.
And he’d waited longer than he should have, drinking her in. Something he would have denied to the death if she’d called him on it.
Something he couldn’t have admitted then, especially to himself.
Kendra stopped before him, the breeze making her seem half ghost, though he knew better. She was made of warmth and sunlight, even in the dark.
Maybe especially in the dark.
“I was sure that you would be halfway to New York by now,” she said.
There was a roaring thing in him, but he ignored it. “I intended to be.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Here I am,” he agreed.
And it felt...portentous. Huge. The roaring in him and that white gown in the breeze and the stars all around them, as if they knew.
Her gaze searched his. Balthazar wished that he could understand what he saw there. And he wished even more that he could find the words to tell her what had happened to him. In him. What she’d done to him.
But it all seemed inadequate when there was Kendra, staring up at him with that same openness as if he had not hurt her. Again and again.
“You should run from me, little one,” he said then. “Screaming, and in the opposite direction.”
“What would be the point of that?” she asked. Her lips curved. “This is a very small island. And I have no interest in drowning myself.”
He frowned at that, and that hint of levity when he wished to take responsibility, at last, for who and what he had become—
Kendra swayed closer to him, placing her hands on his chest.
And Balthazar...was unarmed.
He stared down at her hands, one of them bedecked in the rings he’d put there this morning. As he did, he became vaguely aware that he’d thrown on trousers and a haphazardly buttoned shirt, so that both of them were in white.
As if that made up for anything.
But it was her touch that astonished him. That would have broken him, he thought, had there been anything in him left to break.
“I told you that I’m your enemy,” he said then, his voice severe. “Since the moment I knew who you were, I have thought of nothing but crushing you, Kendra. You must know this.”
“I know it.” And though her lips were still curved, there was a certain steel in those golden eyes of hers. “But you are also my husband. And the father of my child. And I do not choose to be crushed, Balthazar.”
“Is it your choice?” he asked, though even as he did, he found himself moving to trap her hands there against his chest. To hold her, despite himself.
When he knew he should not tempt himself. That he did not deserve it. Or her.
“I want to be outraged, but I’m not,” she told him, almost solemnly. “I want to defend my father’s behavior, but I can’t. I tried to come up with excuses, but I don’t have any. The truth of the matter is that I’m not surprised to hear what he did to your mother. To you. Disappointed, maybe. But not, I’m afraid, surprised.”
“Do not forgive me, Kendra,” Balthazar gritted out. “Not so easily. You have no idea the kind of darkness that lives in me.”
“But I do know it,” she replied, to his astonishment. And that gaze of hers was steady on him, the sun to the earth. “I know your darkness, Balthazar. I know your fury, your retaliation. I know your absence and I know your touch. And I can tell you, with every part of my soul, that there is nothing you can do that would make me abandon you. Or I would already be swimming for the mainland.”
All the broken parts of him seemed to vibrate with the same ferocity, then. And still all he could see was her gaze, as if the sun had not yet set. As if she lit up the world.
She did it effortlessly.
“I don’t know how to do anything but plot revenge,” he threw at her. “I could stand here and tell you all the things I think I feel, but how would I know? Feelings were my first enemy and I vanquished them long ago. You deserve more than a broken man.”
“I deserve you,” she countered. Then she leaned in, to underscore the intensity on her face. “Because you have haunted me, Balthazar, since the moment I looked up and found you in that gazebo. My brother and my father might have had their own reasons for sending me to see you in New York, but I didn’t have to go. I wanted to. I wanted to see you. And let’s be very clear. I wanted to strip for you. I wanted your touch. I wanted everything that’s happened between us, because if I hadn’t, I could have walked away at any time.”
He wanted to believe that. Which was why he couldn’t. “I kidnapped you, Kendra. You can’t handwave that away.”
“I’m not the hapless maiden sent off to sacrifice herself to the village dragon, despite appearances,” Kendra said, with laughter in her voice. Actual laughter. “I could have ducked away from you when we went to your doctor in Athens. Failing that, Panagiota might have restricted access to the internet here but if I’d really, truly wanted to get online I could have found a way. I didn’t want to.”
“Kendra...” He managed to breathe. Barely. “Kendra, I can’t...”
The stars were upon them and around them, the sea whispered their names, and Balthazar felt caught somewhere between that light from up above and all the sunlight in her gaze. As if all that brightness could make of him a better man.
“I want to promise you that I will change,” he told her, though his heart hurt and he wanted things he could hardly identify. But that wanting never eased, not where she was concerned. Maybe it never would. “But I can only hope I will. I want to promise you the world, the stars above us now and the ground beneath our feet. I want to promise you that I will learn to be the kind of man who can love, and hope, and raise our child with those things instead of the back of my hand or the sting in my words. I have done a great many things in this life, Kendra. I was given a fortune and I made five more. I have feared no man I’ve ever met. I have faced every challenge set to me. All this, yet I have never loved. I...”
He wasn’t sure he could continue. But her eyes had gone bright again, gleaming with emotion.
All that emotion, like color, changing the world around them.
“Do you want to love, Balthazar?” She pulled in a
ragged breath. “Do you want to love me?”
“I do,” he said, without pausing to consider it. Without worrying over the angles, the ramifications. And it all made sense then. All his broken pieces, all those feelings. The cacophony of the things that howled in him, louder by the second. And the fact that she was there in the middle of it all. The reason for everything. “I do.”
And when she smiled, it was like daybreak. But better, because it was all his.
“Then don’t worry,” she told him. “Concentrate on what you’re good at.”
He brought her hands to his mouth and placed a kiss there. “If you mean passion, I do not think that will be a problem.”
Her smile widened. “I believe you. But I don’t mean passion. That’s almost assured, I would think. No, Balthazar. I mean revenge.”
“I will renounce it,” he told her at once.
“But I don’t want you to.”
Kendra moved even closer, tipping her face back, so it was as if the whole world was her gaze. The press of her round belly into his body. Her hands he held in his.
Here on this altar where he had made her his wife.
“I want you to take your revenge, Balthazar,” Kendra told him, solemn and sure. “The most perfect way possible. I want you to let me love you. I want you to love me in return. I want us to raise this child with joy.”
“Joy,” he repeated, like vows etched in stone.
“Not the way we were raised, always made to feel that we were never enough.” She shook her head and her tears spilled over, but she was smiling. God help him, but he could watch that smile forever. He intended to do just that. “I want us to live life, big and bright and happy.”
“Then that is what we will do,” Balthazar promised her. “No matter what.”
“That will be the ultimate revenge,” Kendra said as she melted against him. “A life well lived, together.”
And as he swept her up into his arms, the stars shone down, like a blessing. A promise.
Their true vows had finally been spoken.
And their real life began.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
REVENGE CERTAINLY WAS SWEET, Kendra thought ten years later.
She sat in her favorite spot on the cozy sofa in Great-Aunt Rosemary’s cottage in France. Outside it was a golden, glorious summer, which reminded her of her first months here. She smiled, remembering it. Pregnant without knowing it and so focused on choosing a new path in life. Treating strangers she waited on with kindness when she hardly knew how to offer the same to herself.
All without the slightest bit of knowledge of how profoundly her life was about to change, like it or not.
“I wish I’d known you better,” she murmured to the room at large.
But she would have to settle for knowing herself. And she thought her prickly great-aunt would have approved.
Outside, she could hear the approach of excited voices, and smiled even wider. She could pick them all out from each other, each voice like a new song in her heart. Serious, delightfully odd Irene, who had made Kendra a mother and made her laugh, daily. She was almost a decade old now, when Kendra could still remember the shock and miracle of her arrival. She had been born straight into her father’s hands, and as if it were yesterday, Kendra recalled gazing at Balthazar over Irene’s tiny, fragile head, the wonder almost too bright to bear.
It was still that bright.
“If we’re going to have a family,” Balthazar had said when Irene was still new, “then we might as well do it right.”
“Is that a proclamation?” Kendra had asked, rolling her eyes at him, so dramatically she thought half of Athens must have seen.
But Balthazar only smiled.
Baz had been born in the following year, and Kendra grinned as she heard her oldest son shouting outside. Never one to pay attention to his older sister’s proclamations, far too much like his father, and currently making noise simply because he could.
Because unlike his father, Baz would not be beaten. He would not be cut into pieces and shoved into a cold, iron box.
Kendra stood from the sofa and went to the door, throwing it open so she could see her family come toward her across the fields. The two oldest ones bickering, as they did. And behind them, the most beautiful man she’d ever seen or ever would, holding the youngest two. One in each arm. Five-year-old Kassandra, all stubborn cheeks and a pouty lip. And the sunny, giggly baby, Thaddeus, who was eighteen months old and had the rest of them—and the world—wrapped around his chubby little fingers.
They could have been a painting, Kendra thought. Walking across golden fields studded with lavender and sunflowers, and the Alps in the distance.
But this was the life that she and Balthazar had made, and it was far better than any painting. It was complicated. Sometimes painful. And most of all, theirs.
They had taught each other how to love, and while there was no part of that Kendra did not find rewarding, that didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt along the way.
“I love you,” he had said the morning after their fateful wedding day, scowling at her as if the words caused him pain.
“I love you too,” she had replied, frowning right back at him. “And note that I didn’t say it like there was a gun in my back.”
Slowly but surely, they learned.
They had stayed on the island for the rest of Kendra’s pregnancy, because neither one of them wished to share their fledgling happiness with the world.
The world could wait. And it did.
“I love you,” he had said, over and over, every single day, so that by the time Irene was born, there was no more scowling.
And it only got better from there.
Though soon, too soon, it was time to let the world in again.
It had not always been easy.
Kendra had seen her father and brother only once. She and Balthazar had gone back to Connecticut, where it had all begun. There had been one unpleasant conversation, after which Kendra washed her hands of them both.
Balthazar had pressed charges against Tommy. Her father had not been ruined financially, but the ensuing scandal had made him persona non grata in all the places that meant anything to him.
They both found there was a solace in that. Kendra accompanied Balthazar to the long-term care facility where his mother lived out her days, and sat with him as he told her that it was done. At long last, it was done.
And she felt certain that if the other woman could have forgiven her son, she would have.
But the true surprise was when Emily Cabot Connelly had put down her Valium, contacted her attorneys, and divorced her husband. As part of her settlement she claimed, among a great many other things, that gracious old house on its own point on Long Island Sound that she had brought to her marriage in the first place.
The first thing she did was invite her daughter and grandchildren to visit her there.
And it made Kendra glad that she and her mother had found a way to build bridges in these last ten years. They might not always understand each other, but they tried. No matter what, they tried.
In the end, Kendra thought as she stood in the doorway of her cottage and watched the love of her life and the four children they both adored beyond the telling of it draw close, that was happiness.
True happiness wasn’t one thing. It wasn’t static. It was layered and deep, forever changing in the light. It was all the colors, feelings and frustrations of each moment and the broader life around it, wound together into the same tight knot.
The secret to life wasn’t holding that knot in one place. It was learning how to do the knotting in the first place and then keep doing it, day after day. Year after year. To get up when knocked down, brush herself off, and do it all over again.
Happiness was in the details. Joy was all around.
Balthazar smiled at
her as he approached, because gone was that grim, cold, intimidating man she’d met long ago. This Balthazar smiled. He even laughed. He was still fierce in business, demanding in bed, but best of all, he was happy.
They were happy.
They had built on to the cottage over time, adding space for their family, but still maintaining Great-Aunt Rosemary’s cozy aesthetic. Tonight, they ate together out beneath a trellis wrapped in wisteria, breathing in the glory of the Provence summer. Just as Kendra’s favorite great-aunt must have done herself.
And after the children had gone to sleep, Kendra and Balthazar sat out there together. Beneath the quiet stars, Kendra took her favorite seat. His lap.
“You seem particularly pleased with yourself, agápi mou,” Balthazar murmured, though his attention was on the line of her neck as he tasted his way down the length of it. “It makes me wonder what you can possibly be thinking about.”
Kendra was thinking about that gazebo, long ago. How overwhelmed she’d been. How thunderstruck.
She was thinking of the night she’d surrendered her innocence on that desk in New York that they had returned to again and again over time. Christening it repeatedly, because they could. Because the heat between them only grew.
God, how it grew.
She was thinking of the island, where they spent as much time as they could, grounding themselves in the quiet. In the peace.
And using the altar where they’d made their vows, first to a priest and then to each other, as a touchstone. A talisman. A way to remind themselves who they were. Who they wanted to be, come what may.
“Tell me,” Balthazar urged her, his voice dark and hot, and she could feel his smile against her skin.
“What am I always thinking about?” When he lifted his head, she smiled at him, more in love now that she’d ever known a person could be. And she could see the same reflected back at her, always. “Revenge, Balthazar. Sweet, sweet revenge.”
“I love you,” he told her.
“I love you, too,” she whispered.
And then he showed her exactly how much he loved her, the way he always did, muffling her cries against his chest.
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