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

And Balthazar...was unarmed.

He stared down at her hands, one of them bedecked in the rings he’d put there this morning. As he did, he became vaguely aware that he’d thrown on trousers and a haphazardly buttoned shirt, so that both of them were in white.

As if that made up for anything.

But it was her touch that astonished him. That would have broken him, he thought, had there been anything in him left to break.

“I told you that I’m your enemy,” he said then, his voice severe. “Since the moment I knew who you were, I have thought of nothing but crushing you, Kendra. You must know this.”

“I know it.” And though her lips were still curved, there was a certain steel in those golden eyes of hers. “But you are also my husband. And the father of my child. And I do not choose to be crushed, Balthazar.”

“Is it your choice?” he asked, though even as he did, he found himself moving to trap her hands there against his chest. To hold her, despite himself.

When he knew he should not tempt himself. That he did not deserve it. Or her.

“I want to be outraged, but I’m not,” she told him, almost solemnly. “I want to defend my father’s behavior, but I can’t. I tried to come up with excuses, but I don’t have any. The truth of the matter is that I’m not surprised to hear what he did to your mother. To you. Disappointed, maybe. But not, I’m afraid, surprised.”

“Do not forgive me, Kendra,” Balthazar gritted out. “Not so easily. You have no idea the kind of darkness that lives in me.”

“But I do know it,” she replied, to his astonishment. And that gaze of hers was steady on him, the sun to the earth. “I know your darkness, Balthazar. I know your fury, your retaliation. I know your absence and I know your touch. And I can tell you, with every part of my soul, that there is nothing you can do that would make me abandon you. Or I would already be swimming for the mainland.”

All the broken parts of him seemed to vibrate with the same ferocity, then. And still all he could see was her gaze, as if the sun had not yet set. As if she lit up the world.

She did it effortlessly.

“I don’t know how to do anything but plot revenge,” he threw at her. “I could stand here and tell you all the things I think I feel, but how would I know? Feelings were my first enemy and I vanquished them long ago. You deserve more than a broken man.”

“I deserve you,” she countered. Then she leaned in, to underscore the intensity on her face. “Because you have haunted me, Balthazar, since the moment I looked up and found you in that gazebo. My brother and my father might have had their own reasons for sending me to see you in New York, but I didn’t have to go. I wanted to. I wanted to see you. And let’s be very clear. I wanted to strip for you. I wanted your touch. I wanted everything that’s happened between us, because if I hadn’t, I could have walked away at any time.”

He wanted to believe that. Which was why he couldn’t. “I kidnapped you, Kendra. You can’t handwave that away.”

“I’m not the hapless maiden sent off to sacrifice herself to the village dragon, despite appearances,” Kendra said, with laughter in her voice. Actual laughter. “I could have ducked away from you when we went to your doctor in Athens. Failing that, Panagiota might have restricted access to the internet here but if I’d really, truly wanted to get online I could have found a way. I didn’t want to.”

“Kendra...” He managed to breathe. Barely. “Kendra, I can’t...”

The stars were upon them and around them, the sea whispered their names, and Balthazar felt caught somewhere between that light from up above and all the sunlight in her gaze. As if all that brightness could make of him a better man.

“I want to promise you that I will change,” he told her, though his heart hurt and he wanted things he could hardly identify. But that wanting never eased, not where she was concerned. Maybe it never would. “But I can only hope I will. I want to promise you the world, the stars above us now and the ground beneath our feet. I want to promise you that I will learn to be the kind of man who can love, and hope, and raise our child with those things instead of the back of my hand or the sting in my words. I have done a great many things in this life, Kendra. I was given a fortune and I made five more. I have feared no man I’ve ever met. I have faced every challenge set to me. All this, yet I have never loved. I...”

He wasn’t sure he could continue. But her eyes had gone bright again, gleaming with emotion.

All that emotion, like color, changing the world around them.

“Do you want to love, Balthazar?” She pulled in a ragged breath. “Do you want to love me?”

“I do,” he said, without pausing to consider it. Without worrying over the angles, the ramifications. And it all made sense then. All his broken pieces, all those feelings. The cacophony of the things that howled in him, louder by the second. And the fact that she was there in the middle of it all. The reason for everything. “I do.”

And when she smiled, it was like daybreak. But better, because it was all his.

“Then don’t worry,” she told him. “Concentrate on what you’re good at.”

He brought her hands to his mouth and placed a kiss there. “If you mean passion, I do not think that will be a problem.”

Her smile widened. “I believe you. But I don’t mean passion. That’s almost assured, I would think. No,