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

common as it was, to get to him like this. Its meaning rocked through him, almost too hot to bear. He blamed that age-old ceremony and the words the old priest had spoken over them. He blamed the rings he’d slid onto her finger, the platinum catching the light and the diamonds so bright they nearly dimmed the sun.

But he could blame anything and everything. What he didn’t understand was how she seemed to grow more beautiful by the moment, especially when this should have been a festival arranged around his revenge, not...whatever it was she imagined she was doing. He glared at her, but she only smiled, looking happy enough to wait forever for him to do as she’d demanded.

He could not imagine what made her imagine she had any power here.

Just as he could not imagine why he wasn’t claiming his by right. And claiming her while he was at it.

“What’s the matter?” she asked almost offhandedly, a gleam in those golden eyes of hers. “Don’t tell me that the mighty Balthazar Skalas is afraid to do something here, on his own private island, that I did without blinking in the middle of a busy office? How funny. I thought you were meant to be the powerful one.”

“Do you think goading me will work?”

She only smiled.

It turned that heat inside him...volcanic.

Before he knew it, Balthazar found himself rising from his seat. As he did, he took great pleasure in watching her eyes widen.

Not quite so sure of herself, then. No matter what she said.

And that made everything inside him run molten.

He made short work of his clothing. He shrugged out of the dark suit he’d worn for the ceremony, stripping down until he stood before her wholly naked. The sun poured all over him. The sea air was like a caress.

But best of all was that expression on Kendra’s face.

It looked a great deal like awe.

He watched her flush. He watched that same giddy heat move its way down her neck. The dress she wore left her arms bare and he could see that same flush there, then goose bumps to match as she gazed up at him.

Balthazar felt everything shift. As if the world had spun about on its axis, then flattened him as it stopped still.

But he liked it.

Because he was the one standing naked before her, but he felt not a shred of supplication. No hint of weakness.

He had never felt more powerful in his life.

Had he called her names because he had sensed this, somehow? That a display of vulnerability led straight to something far more powerful? Had he wanted to diminish this very same light in her?

The notion sat uneasily in him. It pricked at him, reminding him of the reasons they were here, and married, and the revenge he had long ago vowed to rain down upon her father and the rest of her family...

But then he forgot it all. Because her eyes moved, almost convulsively, down over his chest. He was sure he could feel it like a touch over every ridge of his abdomen, every line of muscle. And she kept going until she found the hardest part of him, ready for her where he stood.

More than ready.

“If this is a proper audition,” he managed to say, in a voice made harsh with need, “will you require the complete demonstration?”

When she lifted her gaze to his again, the wildfire he saw there made him want to roar like the beast he had always feared he was.

Though he didn’t fear it now. Not when she looked at him as if the beast was precisely what she wanted.

God help him.

“Of course.” Kendra’s voice sounded husky now, though no less of a taunt. “Or how could I possibly make an informed decision?”

“How indeed.”

Balthazar crossed to her then, bent down, and lifted her into his arms.

He spared no thought for his plans. The promises he’d made himself about how he would handle this marriage, how he would treat the wife he’d never wanted, how all of this would become part of what was owed Thomas Connolly. It all seemed inconsequential when he held her like this, her flowing dress wrapping around them as he moved, like tendrils of that same dream he always seemed to have when she was near.

He knew it wasn’t true. It could never be true. And yet it haunted him.

Balthazar had intended to make it through his wedding secure in the purity of his fury. Secure in his hatred, his bitterness.

But when he’d looked up from the altar at the edge of the cliff to see Kendra coming toward him—in flowing white as she made her way through the ruins of the old chapel, flowers in hands and sunshine all over her face—the same dream that had woken him up in the night too many times to count now had walloped him all over again.

Constantine had murmured something that sounded suspiciously like steady.

Balthazar had been forced to ignore it, because the only other option was acknowledging that he had made some sound, or some face that allowed his brother to think he was ever anything but steady. That had proclaimed his weakness to the whole of the watching Aegean Sea.

And also because his bride was coming to him in the island breeze.

And for the time it took her to walk to his side, he tortured himself with fantasies of her innocence. He had never cared about such things before. It was only her. It was only this woman he could not bear to imagine with anyone else. Only this woman who he could not seem to imagine with anyone but him.

It should not have felt like torture, but she disturbed his sleep. The fantasy that she could come to him like that, bearing his child and no hand upon her but his... The dream that she might truly be his, without any bitterness coloring their days...

He knew better. He’d known better. Nothing had changed when he’d put a ring on