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

“I am delighted to hear you say that, Kendra,” he said. “Because the man I am speaking of is your father.”

It was like the world dimmed, or she slid off the side of it. She stared back at him, convinced her ears were ringing. Convinced her heart had stopped. Convinced she must have misheard him.

But none of those things were true.

“Your father,” he said again, so there could be no mistake, “drove my mother to her current state. And has never looked back. He prefers to dance around me in business situations as if I don’t know what he did. What he is.”

“But... But you...”

“I assumed you were nothing but another knife he thought to plunge in the side of my family,” Balthazar said. “Some men deal with their guilt in extravagant ways. Of course he sent you to me. I have no doubt his greatest hope was that history would repeat itself.”

“All along,” Kendra whispered. “All along you’ve...” She felt as if she might collapse, but she didn’t. “You don’t just hate me, do you, Balthazar? You want to use me to hurt him. You didn’t take your revenge—you made me become it.”

He bared his teeth as if the pain was too great. As if the villa they stood in was nothing but ash and ruins at their feet.

But she couldn’t tell if he wanted it that way, and it broke her heart.

“And I might have dreamed of your innocence, Kendra,” he managed to grit out, turned once again to a storm. She could feel the rain on her face. She could hear the thunder in his voice. “I might have imagined what it would be like if you are not as tarnished as the people you come from. But that is not who we are. And this marriage is nothing more than a weapon I will use to cut down a monster.”

“Balthazar...” she whispered, agonized. “You can’t mean that. You can’t.”

His mouth was a merciless lash. “You should have run when you had a chance, Kendra. I regret that you are not the woman I thought you were. But you will pay all the same.”

And then he left her there, in her wedding gown with his scent all over her like a curse, to let her tears fall at last.

Alone.

CHAPTER TWELVE

BALTHAZAR MEANT TO leave the island entirely.

He stormed from the bedchamber and pulled on the first clothing he could find in the attached dressing room. He would go to Athens, he decided. He would do what he had always done and lose himself in work. In the business. In the things that made him who he was and more, who he wished to remain.

The things that mattered, he thought.

And thinking of what mattered, perhaps heading back to New York made even more sense. He headed for the office suite he kept in the villa, finding all of his devices charged and ready for him, but he didn’t pick up his mobile. He didn’t give the order to have the helicopter readied for the flight to the mainland. Instead, he found himself staring at the desk before him, seeing nothing.

Nothing but the choices that had brought him here.

And wrapped around everything, shot through it all, he saw Kendra’s face. Her beautiful face and her lovely eyes filled with tears.

Tears he had put there, Balthazar knew.

He saw the way she’d stared at him, clutching that dress to her chest as if he was nothing more than a rampaging beast. A soulless monster, as he’d often been accused.

As if he’d finally become his father.

All the way through, at last.

Balthazar pushed away from the desk, moving without thought, almost as if he was trying to get away from that realization when it should have been cause for celebration. He should have been thrilled that he’d finally achieved what had long been the goal of his entire existence on this earth.

Demetrius Skalas had prided himself on his single-minded, emotionless pursuit of the bottom line. He had eradicated weakness, he had claimed. He felt nothing and took pride in it. He acted only in the interests of the company. Even the succession of beautiful women he sported on his arm, each one a blow to his despised wife, Demetrius claimed elevated his profile in the eyes of the world—and more importantly, in the eyes of the other titans of industry he considered his peers. All of whom preferred to do business with men they admired.

They had all admired Demetrius.

Balthazar had taken his beatings as a child, and had come to believe that his father was right—they made him stronger. And as he grew, he had dedicated himself, in word and deed, to following his father’s example. To locating and removing every hint of weakness he could find.

In place of any stray emotions, he had tended his thirst for revenge.

And in place of the pesky feelings that plagued other men, he had plotted the downfall of Thomas Connolly and his pathetic son.

Then she had come along and turned everything on its ear.

He found himself outside, the island drenched in the beauty of the setting sun, though all he saw was the past.

A past that was threaded through with the same driving goal, always. Balthazar had told himself that he was giving Tommy Connolly rope to hang himself with while, over the course of years, he’d sat back and watched his enemy’s son steal from him. In the months since Kendra had given herself to him in New York, he had continued to wait.

Now, standing outside as the breeze picked up as the sun made its lazy descent, he had to question that choice.

He had told himself it was because he was waiting. To see if Kendra was with child. To see if it was time to flip the script on his revenge and approach it a different way—one that would involve his in-laws. Surely that required a different tack, he’d assured himself.