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

He stood out in the courtyard, surrounded by flowers and the pitiless Aegean sky, and thought of her new roundness. The widening of her hips, the swell of her belly. He found he was wholly moved by the knowledge that she carried his child. His child tucked inside that beautiful, gently rounded body of hers.

He hadn’t expected that. This... insane response to her. A tenderness he abhorred mixed in with too much pounding, bone-rattling need.

Tenderness was anathema to him. Softness of any kind led to desperate places—didn’t he know that already?

But he refused to think about his own family. Of the things sentimentality had wrought.

There was no need to think of it when he knew who to blame.

Balthazar had convinced himself that his response to Kendra had been nothing more than two strange moments in time, bookending three years. But it was over now, surely. He’d spent the past month handling the details of what needed to happen next, now that his heir’s birth was imminent. Up to and including a meeting with his brother to lay out the changes he would be making in his will and various trusts. For dynastic purposes.

“Kendra... Connolly?” Constantine had asked lazily. He had gazed at his brother as he’d lounged about in his typical state of seeming dishevelment all over Balthazar’s sleek, modern furniture. Then he’d waved a languid hand at Athens outside the windows as if he expected the whole of Greece to rise up to support his astonishment. “You cannot be serious.”

“I would hardly make such announcements in jest.”

“She is a Connolly.”

“A fact that does not become less appalling the more you repeat it, brother.”

Constantine had shaken his head. “What can you possibly be thinking? After everything—” He’d stopped then. The canny look that Balthazar sometimes thought only he had ever seen changed his brother’s face. Constantine suddenly looked every inch the shark he was. “Let me guess. You got her pregnant. Good god, Balthazar. How could you be so careless?”

“A simple congratulations would do. As you will shortly become an uncle.”

Constantine had let out a bark of laughter. “Never let it be said you are not prepared to think outside the box when it comes to taking revenge on our enemies. I am inspired, truly.”

And he’d smiled in a way that had distracted Balthazar for a moment, wondering who his brother considered worthy of enemy status—and a revenge scenario to match. He did not fancy that person’s chances against the wolf-in-playboy’s-clothing Constantine played up for public consumption.

“Prepare yourself,” Balthazar had advised his brother that night. “You will be the koumbaro.”

If Constantine had any further feelings about taking his place at his brother’s side in the traditional role of koumbaro, combining best man, future godparent, and witness in one, he had wisely kept that to himself.

Possibly too busy concocting his own form of revenge, Balthazar had thought then.

Now Balthazar waited in a riot of blooms and his body’s greedy responses to the enemy he planned to take as his wife, forced to remind himself that revenge was the point of this. Revenge had always been the point.

It was simply taking rather a different form than he’d expected it would when Kendra had asked for that appointment with him months back.

He had never imagined how close a Connolly would come to ruining him.

Do not allow temptation to change your path, he told himself dourly, despite the sunshine and the bright explosion of pink flowers all around him. Stay the course.

And later—after the doctor had announced that Kendra and the baby she carried could not have been in better health, then left them to an evening meal out on one of the terraces over the sea—Balthazar did not bother to wait for the good food or a full belly to dull her temper. He shouldn’t have cared what mood she was in. He slid the folder he’d brought for her across the table.

“What is this?” Her voice was clipped. It was at odds with that glow she had about her, and Balthazar disliked it, but he tapped his finger against the thick file anyway.

“These are the agreements that require your signature.”

She sniffed, poking at the food on her plate with rather more violence than strictly necessary, to his mind. “I will not be signing anything.”

“That does not sound like the new song I suggested you sing,” he said, mildly enough. He studied her mutinous expression. “Was I unclear?”

Balthazar expected her to argue with him. If he was honest, he was looking forward to it. Though he wasn’t certain he truly wished to acknowledge that what kicked around inside of him was more of that anticipation and hunger than the righteous fury he would have said was guiding his every word and deed.

There was something about this woman that got under his skin. That was the sad truth, no matter how he fought against it. Any hope he might have had that she had released her grip on him in the time he’d spent away from her had disappeared the moment he’d seen her curled up in a chair with the sunlight in her hair, turning it to flame.

Maybe it was time to admit it to himself.

But Kendra didn’t make it easy on him. She didn’t leap into the fray. Instead, she looked away, her gaze off toward the blue line of the horizon, far in the distance. He imagined she was dreaming of ways to escape him, to avoid the consequences he had been forced to accept.

He resented it.

“I have no interest in your money,” she said after a moment, as if studying the inevitable way the sun dipped toward the edge of the world. “You know full well I have my own. There is no need whatsoever to sign agreements to that effect.”

“You mean you have your father’s money,” Balthazar corrected her, sitting back in his chair and absolutely not giving in to his temper. Just because she got to