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

And even the woman who had greeted him at the door tonight, seemingly angelic. Bathed in light and not nearly as intimidated by him she ought to have been.

Now there was this version. Unafraid, uncowed, and somehow even more beautiful because of it.

He had come here wanting to do absolutely nothing but crush her, and instead he found himself hard again. That longing, that impossible need, stormed through him as if it intended to tear him apart.

She had no idea how close he came to simply sweeping her into his arms and tasting her mouth again. To lose himself that completely, that quickly.

No matter what she’d done to him.

This weakness will soon rule you, a voice inside that sounded far too much like his harsh father lashed out at him. Then you will be no better than she is. Is that what you want?

His trouble was he knew exactly what he wanted.

Kendra dropped that finger, but only so she could prop her hands on her hips. “You make a lot of threats but I think we both know they’re empty. Because this is the modern world, not whatever medieval daydream you have going on.”

Balthazar laughed, then. “I would advise you not to make yourself comfortable with that fantasy.” He laughed again when she scowled at him. “I would prefer it if you agreed to my terms. I would prefer it if you took those tests now, to spare us both the suspense. But I don’t require your agreement or cooperation, kopéla. Either way, I will have my answers in the end.”

“Either way? What are you going to do?” Kendra scoffed at him. “Kidnap me?”

But Balthazar only smiled.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THEY LANDED IN Athens the next morning.

And while Balthazar had not, technically, kidnapped her, he hadn’t exactly left her any choice.

Kendra hated herself for not finding a way out of the situation, but she hadn’t.

She hadn’t—and she wasn’t sure she really wanted to ask herself why that was.

Balthazar hadn’t bothered to continue arguing with her last night. He’d left her after flashing that enigmatic smile, the one that had made her shiver with foreboding. But before he’d driven off in that absurd sports car of his that she was fairly certain was as bespoke as the clothes he wore, he’d made a quick call in emphatic Greek.

Within moments, two glossy black SUVs had pulled up.

“You called the cavalry?” she’d asked.

He’d smiled again, and it wasn’t any better that time. “Insurance, that is all.”

“Weird.” Kendra had eyed the men who poured out of the SUVs. Balefully. “They look a great deal like your own private army.”

“You may call them whatever you like, Kendra,” Balthazar had said. “They are not here for you.”

“Excellent news. I’ll have them make themselves comfortable in the lavender fields while I take myself off to Monaco for the weekend.”

“Do as you like.” Another, third version of that smile of his made her bones feel cold. “My men will protect my potential heir.”

And then he’d taken himself off in that obnoxious car, leaving his men behind.

Men who would protect the baby she refused to believe she was carrying, not her.

Kendra had retreated back into the cottage and barricaded herself inside. She’d pulled all the curtains and then had sat there on one of Great-Aunt Rosemary’s cozy little couches, very deliberately not staring across the room at the sack of pregnancy tests Balthazar had left behind.

She had done nothing but obsessively count days since he’d showed up at the winery. She’d gone over it again and again. The truth was, she hadn’t spared a single thought about whether or not her monthly cycle was showing up as it should have been...because she’d never had any reason to think about such things. Not only had Kendra never been late, as far as she knew—she’d never had any reason to worry about it if for some reason she had been.

Why hadn’t it occurred to her to worry about it now that there was a reason?

But she knew the answer to that. She might wake in the night, suffused with heat and with Balthazar’s name on her lips, but by day she never, ever allowed herself to think about that night. To think about him. Part of that was also not thinking about her own body—from the things he’d made her feel to its biological functions.

As she’d sat there in her cottage, barricaded in against truths she didn’t want to face, Kendra honestly hadn’t known if she’d been motivated by denial...or survival.

Either way, the longer she’d stared at that bag full of pregnancy tests, the more it seemed to overtake the room, crowding out the books and the art Great-Aunt Rosemary had left behind. And the more it seemed directly connected to the panic inside of her, pounding at her, filling her up like a wicked flood.

Until she couldn’t breathe.

And so it was that Kendra discovered that she really was pregnant with Balthazar Skalas’s child while hiding in the small bathroom of her great-aunt’s cottage after midnight, hiding from the men he’d sent to make sure she stayed there, after making implicit kidnapping threats.

She’d taken all five tests, sure that they had to be defective. That the next one would prove that she wasn’t actually living through...this.

But they all showed her the exact same thing.

Kendra was pregnant.

And when she finally stopped chugging water so she could make a new test happen, when she finally accepted that no new test was going to change the truth...the whole world shifted.

With such a dramatic, irrevocable jolt that she’d found herself on the floor of the bathroom, her back against the wall, staring at the incontrovertible evidence before her.

Five times over.

She’d remembered that night in his office vividly. Too vividly, really, when she now knew what would become of it.

Had she been so quick to pretend nothing had happened because it had been so...raw? She was an educated, sophisticated woman who not only had not inquired about protection, she’d never given it a moment’s thought, afterward. It