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

that is already changed. Mine is the life you decided to alter in more ways than one. I’m the one carrying this baby. I’m the one you’ve carted all over Europe today, and apparently plan to leave behind on this island.”

“The life you knew is over.” She watched as a muscle clenched in his jaw. “I suspect this was your plan from the start. I must congratulate you. I did not see it coming.”

“Yes,” she snapped at him, “I decided that I would miraculously become pregnant, the way all women do. That’s why there is no such thing as fertility issues. All women decide, and then do it.”

He made a sound she could only describe as a growl, but she didn’t slink away. Something in her thrilled to the sound. She kept her gaze steady and forced her knees to remain strong beneath her.

“You may have saved your brother after all,” Balthazar said in that quiet way of his that made the world shake around him. “But I promise you, Kendra. You will live to regret this.”

For a moment she thought—wished?—that those big, hard hands of his were going to reach out to her. Take hold of her.

Touch her the way he did in her dreams, night after night—

But instead, Balthazar turned on his heel and stalked away from her.

Kendra stayed where she was, shaken so deeply by her own longing, even now, that she was surprised she didn’t sink to the floor. Was it self-hatred that made her tremble? Or was it that impossible yearning that she couldn’t stamp out?

And then she had to force herself not to panic, somehow, when she heard the helicopter’s rotors. When Balthazar disappeared into the sky, leaving her behind with these things she knew about herself now.

The worst of them being that no matter what he did, she still wanted him.

It took Kendra a solid ten days to investigate every single nook and cranny of the house and each of the outbuildings, desperate to find something she could use to make her escape.

There had been nothing. Panagiota was kind enough, but firm. She apologized repeatedly, but changed nothing. There was no cell service. Certainly no internet. At least, not any that Kendra was permitted to access.

Though she had to face the fact that even if there was, she had no idea who she would call. Her family would be delighted that she was in a position to bargain further with Balthazar. They would do nothing to help her.

Kendra took it as a mark of her personal growth that she knew this now.

The same way she knew, when she’d finished marching around the small island looking for boats to the mainland, that the real truth was worse.

She didn’t want to leave.

She wanted Balthazar to come back.

The way she knew he would, because no matter how angry he might have been, she was carrying his child.

Maybe what she did looked like surrender, but Kendra rather thought she was conserving her strength for the real fight—which certainly wasn’t the quietly insistent Panagiota, who was, after all, only doing Balthazar’s bidding.

She ate what he wanted her to eat, according to the nutritional guide he’d apparently left with the housekeeper. There was no way off the island—and she’d looked—so she took long, rambling walks on the beaches, over the fields, and through the groves of olive trees.

She slept in the bed he’d told her was hers, and even though he wasn’t there, she felt the imprint of him as if he truly was holding her where he wanted her.

“By the neck,” she muttered to herself one morning.

But she knew that wasn’t quite right. She knew it was quite a bit lower.

One week passed, then another. Summer began to wane, though on a Greek island in the Aegean it was hard to note the difference.

Balthazar did not contact her. His messages were sent through Panagiota. They were always terse and to the point, and still, Kendra was sure she could feel the gathering storm of his temper from across the sea.

She heard the rotors first on an afternoon six weeks after he’d left her. She was curled up in her favorite spot, a swinging chair out on one of the terraces, the sun in her face and a book in her lap from the library she’d been reading her way through.

Kendra felt a kind of electricity shoot through her at the sound. She sat up, aware that if she squinted, this prison of hers bore a distinct resemblance to what she might have considered paradise when she was younger. Nothing to do but take long walks on a secluded beach and lie about reading books? She should have been delirious with joy.

Sometimes she forgot that she wasn’t. That she’d been imprisoned here, no matter how pretty it was.

That she was pregnant with the child of a man who detested her.

A man whose memory woke her in the night, still, on fire with need.

Kendra stayed where she was. She kept on gazing down at her book, even when she heard the faint sound of footsteps against the stones behind her.

And she would have known it was Balthazar even if he hadn’t made a sound. She could feel the leading edge of the storm. She could feel the wind snapping at her, the temperature drop, and far off, she was certain, the warning rumble of thunder.

She should have been scared. Instead, what charged around inside her felt a lot more like exhilaration.

“What a pretty picture you make,” came his sardonic, insulting voice. Darker than she recalled, maybe. But still, it arrowed straight to her core, making her melt. That easily. “What a shame that I know it is all lies.”

Kendra wanted to hurl the book she was reading at his head.

Somehow, she refrained.

“How nice of you to stop in, Balthazar,” she said calmly instead. “You do know, don’t you, that pregnancies keep going even if you’d prefer to pretend that they don’t? I mention this because eventually, when you deign to