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

She raised her gaze to his and actually had the gall to look shocked. “You can’t possibly imagine that I’m going to...”

“Now, please.”

His voice was soft, but a command. He saw it move in her, a kind of jolt.

“No.” She dropped the carrier bag on the table as if it had fangs. “I will not—”

“Allow me to explain to you what is going to happen, Kendra.” Balthazar didn’t move closer to her. He didn’t trust himself. Nor did he raise his voice. Even so, she jolted again, harder this time. Her eyes snapped to his and he approved. Maybe now she would take this—him—seriously. “I do not know how you intended to play this game. But you chose the wrong man to play it with. I do not believe the innocent act because, lest we forget, I know the truth about you. And even if I did not, I know exactly what your family is capable of.”

“I’m not acting. I’m not an actor, and even if I was, I certainly wouldn’t bother to put on a performance for a man I never planned to lay eyes on again.”

“Silence.”

That command sliced straight across the room, and if he wasn’t mistaken, straight through her.

Kendra’s breathing sounded a little heavy, almost as if she was having an emotional response...

Or, the appropriately cynical part of him chimed in, she knows she’s caught.

“Your intentions do not matter to me,” he told her, harsh and precise so there could be no mistake. “I would prefer to determine, here and now, if you are pregnant. If this nightmare is truly happening.”

“I vote no, it’s not.” She jerked her head toward the door. “Feel free to leave. Now.”

“But of course, I do not trust you, Kendra.” Balthazar wanted to reach for her and lectured himself, sternly, to keep his hands to himself. This situation could hardly be improved by repeating the same mistake. And besides, he needed to interrogate himself as to why and how he could possibly want this woman the way he did, when he knew what she was. When he knew exactly what she’d done. “Therefore, tomorrow—regardless of what we discovered tonight—we will fly to Athens for an appointment with my personal physician.”

He stood there, feeling like an avenging angel, as she gaped at him.

The way an innocent he was railroading might—

But Balthazar dismissed that.

“There is not one part of what you said that’s going to happen.” Kendra crossed her arms and held herself stiffly. “Not one single part.”

“This is nonnegotiable.”

“Are you under the impression that I...work for you?” This time, her laugh bordered on the hysterical, and he had to fight—again—the urge to put his hands on her. “The only interest I ever had in you was as an emissary from my family on behalf of my brother. Who, I can’t help but notice, you have yet to report to the authorities.”

“Was this not the entire point of your little gambit?”

Against his will, against his own orders, he found himself moving closer to her. When he noticed that he’d placed himself within arm’s reach, he stopped, but it didn’t help.

Nothing helped. This woman was the only addiction Balthazar had ever had, and he would not succumb to it. To her.

He refused.

“There is no gambit,” she was saying, her voice hot and her eyes dark. “This is my life. A life I put together to suit me, not anyone else. I don’t care what you think of it and I certainly don’t appreciate you storming in here like you have some claim—”

“I have every claim.”

Balthazar’s voice was pure ice.

Kendra made a soft sound that might have been a gasp, as if he’d punctured her straight through. He rather hoped he had.

“Whatever life you think you might have had here, you forfeited your right to it when you involved me,” he told her. Ferociously. “You must realize that there exists absolutely no possibility that I will allow you to give birth to my child anywhere that is not under my direct supervision.”

“If I’m pregnant,” she said, and on some distant level he noticed that she almost stuttered over that word, “I will handle it. My way. It has nothing to do with you.”

“I will require genetic testing to determine paternity, obviously. Because oddly, Kendra, I do not trust you.”

“Genetic testing...” She blinked, then lifted a hand as if warding him off. “I understand that you take great pride in crashing about the planet, ordering everyone around and taking your revenge when they don’t do what you want. But I have already spent a lifetime putting up with that from my actual relatives. I have no intention of allowing you to take up where they left off.”

“How will you stop it?” he asked with genuine curiosity, though there was a kind of silken threat in his voice.

He did nothing to hide it.

And he expected her to cower. To look away, keep her eyes downcast, make herself small, the way most of his subordinates and rivals did in his presence.

Instead, Kendra Connolly charged across the few feet remaining between them and actually brandished her finger in his face.

It was...astonishing, not alarming.

Such a thing had never happened before. Not with anyone other than his father, that was.

“You can go straight to hell,” Kendra threw at him. “And you can start by getting out of my house.”

Balthazar shrugged. “Whether I am in this house or out of it, that will make no difference. The outcome will be the same.”

“You have absolutely no authority over me. I don’t even like you. And even if I did, the state of my womb is none of your business.”

“Think again, Kendra.”

He saw sheer murder on her face, and something about it...delighted him.

Balthazar had now seen a number of different versions of this woman. The fluttery, overcome, supposed innocent that night in the gazebo. The cool, controlled businesswoman who had sold herself so matter-of-factly and then kissed him like the culmination of a lifetime of his most erotic fantasies. The sunny, happy little waitress at