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

He’d felt perfectly prepared to handle whatever came of Kendra’s potential pregnancy. First and foremost, he’d been thinking of the child’s legitimacy and the wedding he’d never imagined for himself.

What he hadn’t thought to reckon with were emotions.

Balthazar had congratulated himself on feeling nothing for Kendra—because surely, his abiding, distracting hunger for her didn’t count. Surely his obsession with her, with what she was doing and where she was going and every expression that crossed her pretty face, was about that same physical hunger.

It was nothing more, he’d told himself, time and again. Nothing but sex, lust and need.

He might not have liked those things in him, making him as basic as any other man, but they were understandable.

What he had not been prepared for was her pregnancy. Not the fact of it, which he’d seen coming or he wouldn’t have tracked her. But that wave of emotion that had struck him earlier. It had felt something like sacred when, together, they had held their hands over her belly and the life that grew within.

How could he possibly have prepared for that?

But even as he asked himself that question, he knew that there was another, more pointed query he needed to make. Just as he knew everything in him wanted to avoid it.

He walked until he reached the edge of one of the cliffs, then stood there, bracing himself. His hands were in fists at his side while the sun seemed to pause in its fall toward the sea to hit him full in the face.

A bit too much like clarity for his tastes.

And all he could see was the golden shimmer of Kendra’s eyes, as if she was here before him, watching him.

Waiting for him, something in him whispered.

“Beliefs do not live in your bones, they live in your head and your heart,” she had told him. “You can change your feelings, Balthazar. All you have to do is want to.”

He had never wanted to do anything of the kind. He had never wanted to feel a thing.

And now he felt ravaged by these feelings.

Enemies he could fight. He was good at that. It only took waiting, watching, and then striking their weaknesses when they presented themselves.

But how could he fight this?

Kendra had used the word family. That damned word.

Worse, she had suggested that the two of them could make their own, and he had seen the hope in her gaze when she’d said it.

God help him, but he had no defense against hope.

He wanted to reject it the way he had rejected her. He wanted to already be far away from here, winging his way back to the only life he knew.

But he couldn’t make himself turn around. He couldn’t make himself leave.

Because her hope was infectious.

And if he accepted that, he accepted that he was far, far weaker than he’d ever imagined.

Because he’d dreamed all of this, hadn’t he? Balthazar had tortured himself, not simply with fantasies of availing himself of her beautiful body and slaking that hunger for her that had haunted him across the years. But more, he’d dreamed of her innocence. And not because he had ever put any great stock in virginity, as it was simply one more thing men liked to use for barter, whether women wished it or not.

But because innocence felt like a shortcut to a different life.

He thought of his poor mother, wrecked so many years ago. Long before she’d been tossed out by his father, she’d been left to fend for herself while Demetrius had cheated on her. After they’d divorced, Demetrius had repeated his behavior with any number of subsequent wives—but none of them could claim they hadn’t known what they were getting into.

His first wife, the mother of his sons, had been blindsided. And what had been the sin that Demetrius had believed deserved the way he’d responded? Balthazar had stopped asking himself that when he was still a boy.

But he knew the answer now.

His mother had felt far too much and Demetrius had despised her for it.

Balthazar had learned to do the same.

He looked down at his hands, uncurling his fingers so he could see the flat of his palms.

He could still feel the warmth of Kendra’s belly, the life she carried within. And then, finally, asked himself the question he’d been avoiding since the night he’d realized that he’d had sex with Kendra Connolly without using any protection.

Did he truly wish to do to his child what his father had done to him?

He thought about taking his own hands, the ones he gazed at there on that cliffside, and raising them against his own child. He thought of carrying out this second phase of his revenge as he’d planned when the child was no more than a possibility instead of a fact, taking it to its logical extreme.

Did he plan to make his baby hate its mother?

Was that who he was?

His heart kicked at him, too hard and too loud. And Balthazar tried to tell himself that there was no other way. That he had committed himself to this path and that was the end of it. But the dreams he’d had told him differently.

So had Kendra.

And if Balthazar could decide to be any man he chose, there was only one real question left. Would he choose to be this one?

Because suddenly, as the sun painted the sky the bright, brilliant shades of gold that reminded him only of Kendra, he looked back and saw the life he’d been living in a very different light than he would have if he’d considered it six months ago.

He had become his father after all. Cold. Unfeeling. Half monster, half machine, and proud of the worst parts of both. Dedicated entirely to a business that already had made him more money than he could ever spend in his own lifetime. Or ten successive lifetimes.

As if that mattered.

It seemed to him here, now, that it was stark. Empty.

A lifeless existence.

Until Kendra had come in and infused the prison