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

“You must go back to your father and your brother and tell them about these offers you have made me,” Balthazar said, when his laughter finally stopped. He straightened from the wall, and she was struck anew by the physicality of this man. Unlike the rest of her father’s associates that she’d met over the years, there wasn’t the faintest hint of dissipation stamped on his skin. No paunch, no alcoholic redness about his cheeks. Just that glare of his, like smoke and condemnation—and all else a pageant of lean muscle and tightly leashed power. “How proud the two of them will be, I am certain, that you are prepared to go to these lengths for them. The obvious next question is, how often have you done exactly this on their command?”

“That’s more of a philosophical question, really,” she made herself say, trying to sound witty and urbane. Or something other than shattered. “Are fallen women born or made, do you think?”

It was only as his expression changed, shifting to something far more heated and intent, that she realized that she’d been backing up. That he was advancing on her. And she really ought to have stood there, stood her ground—

But she didn’t have it in her. She was still trembling, from the inside out, and he was bearing down on her.

She could either kneel or back away, and she didn’t dare kneel.

Kendra was terrified that she might not want to do anything else once she did.

“The philosophy of fallen women,” Balthazar said in a musing sort of voice, though there was nothing musing in the way he looked at her, then. “I confess I have never given it any thought.”

“Of course not. Why think of such things when all that is necessary is using and discarding them on a whim?”

She threw the words at him as if she thought they might hurt him. As if she thought anything might hurt him.

His mouth moved into something even more cruel. Her breath caught. Then Kendra had the confusing sensation of moving through something—only belatedly realizing that he’d backed her straight through the door of his office again.

“Shall we test your theory?” he asked, his voice a growl.

She was something like bewitched. She could only watch as he reached out a hand again, sliding it along her jaw, his fingers over her lips, then hooking the nape of her neck as he had long ago.

Her breath was a wild, flickering flame between them—

Then Balthazar’s mouth was on hers, obliterating everything else but need.

CHAPTER FOUR

HE SHOULD HAVE let her go.

That had been Balthazar’s plan. Humiliate her, then dismiss her.

A neat revenge for how she’d left him in that gazebo three years ago. Also a slap at her father and brother, who kept aiming their tawdry secret weapon at him. He’d been looking forward to aiming it right back in their direction, without giving them even a shred of what they’d wanted from him in return.

Only a small taste of what he had in store for Thomas Connolly and his spawn.

He had been congratulating himself on a job well done while he waited for her to slink out, her proverbial tail between her legs.

But she’d come out of his office tucked neatly back into the sleek skirt and blouse she’d worn. There hadn’t been the faintest hint of any slinking. It was as if nothing happened in there. There was only some turbulence in her gaze.

And that husky note in her voice.

Balthazar honestly didn’t know what had come over him. Maybe it was when she hadn’t wilted away into nothing when he’d used the word whore.

When she’d debated the point instead.

He had been unable to control himself. Or more precisely, perfectly able to control himself, a skill that had been beaten into him by his merciless father—but wholly uninterested in doing so.

And now his mouth was on hers, at last.

At last.

The half-formed notion he might have had that he’d mistaken things three years ago, along with any story he might have been tempted to tell himself about the ways he’d convinced himself it had been more than it was, disappeared as if they’d never been.

Because the taste of Kendra was far better than any memory.

It was the richness of her mouth, the way her lips met his. It was the slickness. The heat. It was better than anything he could have imagined. She was better.

Worth the wait, a voice inside whispered.

He tried to shove it aside, but something in him...snapped.

As if he truly had been waiting for her all this time, instead of merely interested that an opportunity to pay her back had arisen.

As if this was what he’d wanted all along.

This. Her.

He reached out blindly with his free hand and slammed his office door shut. That was the last thought he planned to give to the outside world. He moved her across his floor, every cell in his body focused on the same thing.

More.

Kendra had as much as told him she was precisely who and what he’d thought she was all along. She’d offered herself to him. Attempted to barter the terms of selling herself to her family’s enemy. Despite what he’d imagined in those first moments in that long-ago gazebo, she was no innocent.

He told himself that was a gift.

Because it turned out that Balthazar was in no way above taking what she’d made it clear was his to take.

Surely he’d initially meant to aim for the sofa that sat across the room, but it was suddenly too far. He made it to his desk and laid her down across the vast granite surface, making her its only adornment.

Like a sacrificial lamb, something in him thought, though that was a reach. This was no sacrifice.

This was a reckoning.

Balthazar couldn’t seem to get enough of her mouth. He braced himself over her, his palm near her head, and lost himself for far too long in the simple act of kissing her.

Again and again.

But there was nothing simple about it.

It was carnal. It