Modern Romance March 2021 Book 5-8 Carol Marinelli (ebook reader computer txt) 📖

of that grand desk of his that he claimed some ancestor or another had won from Andrew Carnegie in a wager. Kendra told herself she must have misheard him. Or misunderstood it. Her heart had been pounding so hard that she felt it everywhere. Her temples. Her wrists. Beneath her collarbone.

Somehow she had kept her composure.

But in case she’d had any doubt about what her father might have meant by that, Tommy had waylaid her moments after she’d left her father’s study. She’d rounded the corner and he’d been there, flashing that grin of his that always meant he thought he was being charming.

Kendra knew better. She hadn’t found him charming in as long as she could remember. Ever, even. A side effect of knowing him, she would have said.

Not that anyone had ever asked her.

“Don’t tell me you’re wearing that,” he’d growled at her, a contemptuous glare raking her from head to toe. “You look like a secretary. Not really what we’re going for here.”

“No need to thank me for running off to rescue you,” Kendra had replied tartly. “The sacrifice is its own reward.”

Tommy had grabbed her arm, hard. Deliberately hard, she’d assumed, but she’d learned a long time ago never to show him any weakness.

“I don’t know what Dad told you,” he snarled at her. “But there’s only one way out of this. We have to make sure that Skalas won’t try to press charges against me. And that’s not going to happen with you in this dowdy, forgettable outfit.”

“I’m going to appeal to his sense of family, Tommy.” She’d ignored his comments about her outfit because there was no point arguing with him. He always went low and mean. Always.

Tommy had laughed. In a way that had sent cold water rushing down her spine in a torrent. “Balthazar Skalas hates his family. He’s not looking for a trip down memory lane, sis. But rumor is, he’s always looking for a new mistress.”

“You can’t mean...”

Her brother had shaken his head. Then her, too, because he was still gripping her arm. “You have one chance to prove you’re not useless, Kendra. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste it.”

Hours later, she was still numb. The inside of the executive elevator was sleek and mirrored, and Kendra could see the panic on her own face, mixed right in with the smattering of freckles her mother abhorred. She wanted, more than anything, to pretend her father had meant something different. That Tommy was just being Tommy.

But she knew better.

That sinking feeling inside told her so.

What’s the difference, really? she asked herself as the elevator shot up. A mistress or a loveless marriage?

Because Tommy might have asked her to make herself a mistress, but her mother had been trying to marry Kendra off for years. Emily Cabot Connelly hadn’t understood why Kendra hadn’t graduated from college with an engagement ring. And she’d taken a dim view of Kendra’s attempts over the past three years to convince Thomas to give her a job at the company when that was no way to find an appropriate husband.

“I don’t want to get married,” Kendra had protested the last time the topic had come up, a few weeks ago on the way to a dreary tea party for some or other pet charity of Emily’s.

“Darling, no one wants to get married. You have certain responsibilities due to your station in life. And certain compensations for the choices that must result.” Her mother had laughed. “What does want have to do with anything?”

Kendra knew her mother expected her to do as she had done. Marry to consolidate assets, then live a life of leisure as a reward that she could make meaningful in whatever way suited her. Charities. Foundations. If she wanted, she could even hare off to the Continent like her black sheep of a great-aunt and “forget” to come home again.

If she thought about it that way, Kendra supposed becoming a mistress to a man like Balthazar Skalas would be much the same thing, if of shorter duration.

The reward was the point, not the relationship.

No one seemed to care that Kendra wanted to make her own reward.

The elevator rose so fast the leaden ball that was her stomach stayed behind, buried beneath the ground. She saw a security camera with its red light blinking at her from one corner and was happy that it was there. It reminded her to remain composed. She was here for a business meeting, in sensible heels with her pencil skirt and a dark, silky blouse that made her feel like the vice president of the family business that she intended to become one day.

I do not look like a secretary, she told herself, eyeing her reflection.

But she also did not look like a woman auditioning to be the mistress of a man like Balthazar Skalas.

A man she kept assuring herself would not remember her. He must attend a thousand parties, and if that flash of heat that sometimes woke her in the night was any guide, affected at least a thousand women in precisely the same way.

As she watched, her cheeks grew red.

It didn’t matter what her father or Tommy said, because she was the one who had to do this thing. And she had to believe that a cool, measured approach, neither denying Tommy’s transgressions nor attempting to find a better side to a man who she already knew had only hard edges, was a reasonable course of action.

Unless he remembers you, a treacherous voice inside her whispered.

When the elevator doors opened again, she walked out briskly. And if she’d been in any doubt as to where she was, the lobby she found herself in reminded her. It was all sleek marble with the company name etched into stone. Skalas & Sons. Almost as if theirs was a quaint little family enterprise, when, in fact, the late Demetrius Skalas had been the richest man on earth at one time.

When he died, his two sons had taken the