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

“Of course not. Greed is really quite simple, kopéla. He wanted more. So he took it.”

“I’m not going to pretend to you that I understand every detail of the accounting here.” She lifted her chin, but kept her gaze steady on his, when men twice her size would quail before him. “I understand stealing, however. I’m prepared to pay you back, with interest. Today.”

“And again, you misunderstand.” He smiled then, noting the way she flinched, then tried to hide it. “I don’t want your money. I want your ruin.”

Or her father’s shame, but that would come. Her cheeks had been bright since she’d followed him into the room, but she paled then.

“My understanding is that it added up to two and a half million, give or take. A good chunk of change, I grant you. My father intends to pay it back from his personal account. In cash, if necessary. And there should be no cause for financial ruin.”

Balthazar had spent some time imagining this moment. He relished it.

“You mistake me,” he said quietly. Distinctly. “I am not speaking of money. It is your family I wish to see ruined, Kendra. Your father and his arrogance in particular. You and I both know perfectly well that your family would be tarnished forever if I dragged your brother through the courts. No one would be surprised, mind you, only distinctly horrified in that particular old money way that your Tommy was caught. And I believe the rest of your family might find themselves...less welcome in the circles you all currently enjoy.”

And he would count that a decent start.

She looked distressed for the first time since she’d appeared in his waiting room, and he’d expected that to feel like more of a triumph than it did. “There must be some way I can convince you that you don’t need to do that.”

Balthazar studied her. “What do you have that you think I might want?”

Something in him swelled then, bitter and almost furious, as Kendra swallowed. Hard. Then started toward him with determination stamped all over her face.

If she’d put up a sign advertising her wares on a street corner, she could not have been more obvious.

And he’d expected this, hadn’t he? It confirmed what he’d already suspected. That three years ago, she’d been sent out to that gazebo to see how far she could get with him.

To tempt, then tease.

It had Thomas Connolly’s hands all over it. And damn the man, damn his unforgivable arrogance, but he had succeeded.

Balthazar would rather die where he stood than admit how successful Thomas Connolly had actually been.

Because at first he hadn’t known who she was. He had stood there longer than he cared to remember after she’d left, trying to understand what had occurred. He could not recall the last time a woman had fled from him. Because it had never happened.

Women tend to run toward him, not away.

He had been irritated, courtesy of Isabella, the mistress he’d finished with only moments before Kendra had found him there in the gazebo. And not because any of the insults or accusations Isabella had flung at him had landed. Much less held any weight. He had never cared for her emotional outbursts and had paid them little mind throughout the six months of their arrangement.

But he liked his sex regular and often. Knowing that, Isabella had deliberately forced their conversation that night, well aware that he’d been aching for release.

Isabella might have cried as she’d stormed away from him, but he knew the tears were more for the loss of her access to her allowance than any true emotion. Just as he knew that the moment she stepped back into the light of the party, the tears would miraculously dry up, she would take deep pleasure in having left him unsatisfied and she would begin scouting for a new benefactor.

He had sent an abrupt message to his assistant to cut Isabella off and then had stood there, annoyed.

But then Kendra had appeared.

He hadn’t known who she was and so to him, Kendra had seemed like a breath of fresh air after Isabella’s sultry, cloying, obviousness.

Those soft, rosy cheeks. The hint of freckles across her nose, when he would have sworn no imperfections were permitted in these hallowed halls of the so-called American elite. Her hair had been swept up into something elegant, though tendrils fell down, and the red in it had shone like flame in the soft light from the lanterns outside the gazebo.

She had stopped before him like a startled fawn, her gleaming eyes wide, her sensual lips parted.

Balthazar did not believe in innocence. And yet that night, he had been tempted to imagine she might be the exception that proved the rule.

She had proved him wrong in short order.

No innocent could possibly melt like that, arching back beneath the onslaught of his need, his longing, both pounding through him like a storm. No innocent would open herself up to him so eagerly, then come apart in his palm so readily.

He’d been so hard he’d ached, another new sensation. He’d wanted to peel her out of the dress she wore, lay her out beneath him on a wide bed in a room with a locked door and sate himself fully.

Instead she had turned away, then run.

And when he’d finally made his way back into the tedious party, astounded at what had happened to him, everything had made a sickening kind of sense.

Thomas Connolly, the pompous git, had been making a speech with his family arrayed behind him. Smirking Tommy, the sort of vicious alcoholic heir who thought his money would protect him from his sins. The overtly medicated wife, looking blank and distant even up close.

And Kendra, the daughter, Balthazar understood in that instant was as corrupt as the rest of them, for all she had stood beside her mother, reeking of the innocence he knew she did not possess.

Eighteen months later, when the first discrepancies in Skalas &