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

Kendra reached over and tapped the folder that still sat there between them. “It would appear that no, you are not particularly forgiving.”

“Do you deserve forgiveness, Kendra?” he growled at her, keeping himself still in his chair when he wanted nothing more than to rage. To break things. To hurl the table between them into the sea far below.

Because that was easier than confronting what was happening in him. He thought of his mother, messier and messier throughout his childhood until his father had divorced her. She had gone off to lick her wounds—in horribly public ways. Balthazar had always considered it a defection. He had always judged her, harshly, as much for her particular extramarital affair neither his father nor he could overlook as for her departure.

What he had never done was question how and why she had lost his father’s respect in the first place. Much less whether or not that had been fair to her. And he didn’t much care for the heavy ball of something like dread that sat in him now he was doing just that.

Thinking about forgiveness didn’t help.

“By your reckoning, no,” Kendra replied, but she didn’t look particularly broken up about whether or not he might forgive her. As if a lifetime of his father’s brand of consequences was right up her alley, when he knew better. He knew what it did to soft creatures like her, didn’t he? “But then, I don’t need to prove myself to you, Balthazar. I don’t care what you believe. I’m going to marry you, not because you’ve demanded it, but because I’m a rational person who can see that marrying you will afford my child her best possible life. You keep talking about the past if it makes you feel better. I’m focused on the future.”

She stood up then, still outrageously graceful despite her fuller figure and her new, big bump. He told himself it was sheer temper that pounded through him. Sheer, unmitigated fury—because what else could it be? What else would he allow it to be?

He was rising before he meant to move, blocking her path.

She stared up at him, her chin lifted as her copper-burnished hair flowed around her, backlit by the setting sun.

“You have no moral high ground here,” he gritted out at her. He wanted to put his hands on her, so he did, gripping her shoulders as he held her before him. “You’ve achieved what you wanted, but I assure you, the price you pay will be steep.”

“What I wanted,” she threw right back at him, “was peace. Quiet. A cottage all my own filled with books and a fire and as many buttery croissants as I could eat. Which, it turns out, is a great many croissants. Instead you stormed in and carried me off to this place. And I’m not an idiot, Balthazar. I’m not divorced from reality. I’m perfectly aware that as prisons go, this one is charming. Beautiful. Some people would dream of coming here and staying here forever. But I’m not one of them.”

“If I was interested in what you wanted, Kendra, I would have asked you.”

He expected her to recoil at that. To react as if he’d slapped her. Instead, she surged up onto her toes, bringing herself even closer to him.

Exhibiting, he couldn’t help but notice, absolutely no fear.

He couldn’t think of a single reason that should have made him want her so desperately.

“You can issue all the orders you like,” she told him in a rush. “You will never control me. If I happen to go along with your wishes, you can be sure it’s because I want to. Not because you told me to.”

He managed—just—not to sneer. “From a girl who was willing to prostitute herself at her father’s command.”

“You don’t know anything about my family,” she threw right back at him. “Or about me. And I don’t want you to know. You don’t deserve it.”

She was so bright with her own outrage. Alight with self-righteous indignation, and Balthazar should have found that laughable. He told himself he did.

But he didn’t laugh.

Instead, he jerked her toward him and set his mouth to hers.

At last.

And it was that same wild, impossible fire. That same electric explosion, as if he’d been struck by lightning—yet he wanted more. Always and ever more.

He angled his head to one side, taking the kiss deeper and growling his appreciation when she met him, all slick heat and greed.

And he was amazed, again, to find his head spinning when she pushed herself away.

“Kissing me changes nothing,” she managed to say, though he took perhaps too much pride in the fact her voice shook. “Do you really think that a kiss like that is any kind of punishment at all? Here’s a news flash. It’s not. If I didn’t like it, I would bite you.”

“Yes, yes, kopéla,” he drawled, suddenly enjoying himself when she scowled at him. “You’re very fierce. You have fangs, and I promise you, I cannot wait to feel them on my skin.”

Kendra bared her teeth at him and he laughed, he wanted her so intensely. So comprehensively it was like pain. But he knew pain. He knew how to live with it. In a dark way, how to crave it.

“Remember you said that, Balthazar,” she hissed at him.

It was meant as a dire warning, he was sure. Still, he took her chin in his hand and held her there, smiling hard when temper flooded her bright gaze.

“But one way or another, all this posturing or no, in the morning, you will be my wife,” he told her, like an ancient omen. Like a curse. “And that will be an end to it.”

CHAPTER NINE

KENDRA WASN’T THE sort of woman who had dedicated years of her life to fantasizing about her wedding one day. Not that there was anything wrong with such fantasies, but she’d always spent her time daydreaming about winning over her father’s boardroom, and