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

“I will renounce it,” he told her at once.

“But I don’t want you to.”

Kendra moved even closer, tipping her face back, so it was as if the whole world was her gaze. The press of her round belly into his body. Her hands he held in his.

Here on this altar where he had made her his wife.

“I want you to take your revenge, Balthazar,” Kendra told him, solemn and sure. “The most perfect way possible. I want you to let me love you. I want you to love me in return. I want us to raise this child with joy.”

“Joy,” he repeated, like vows etched in stone.

“Not the way we were raised, always made to feel that we were never enough.” She shook her head and her tears spilled over, but she was smiling. God help him, but he could watch that smile forever. He intended to do just that. “I want us to live life, big and bright and happy.”

“Then that is what we will do,” Balthazar promised her. “No matter what.”

“That will be the ultimate revenge,” Kendra said as she melted against him. “A life well lived, together.”

And as he swept her up into his arms, the stars shone down, like a blessing. A promise.

Their true vows had finally been spoken.

And their real life began.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

REVENGE CERTAINLY WAS SWEET, Kendra thought ten years later.

She sat in her favorite spot on the cozy sofa in Great-Aunt Rosemary’s cottage in France. Outside it was a golden, glorious summer, which reminded her of her first months here. She smiled, remembering it. Pregnant without knowing it and so focused on choosing a new path in life. Treating strangers she waited on with kindness when she hardly knew how to offer the same to herself.

All without the slightest bit of knowledge of how profoundly her life was about to change, like it or not.

“I wish I’d known you better,” she murmured to the room at large.

But she would have to settle for knowing herself. And she thought her prickly great-aunt would have approved.

Outside, she could hear the approach of excited voices, and smiled even wider. She could pick them all out from each other, each voice like a new song in her heart. Serious, delightfully odd Irene, who had made Kendra a mother and made her laugh, daily. She was almost a decade old now, when Kendra could still remember the shock and miracle of her arrival. She had been born straight into her father’s hands, and as if it were yesterday, Kendra recalled gazing at Balthazar over Irene’s tiny, fragile head, the wonder almost too bright to bear.

It was still that bright.

“If we’re going to have a family,” Balthazar had said when Irene was still new, “then we might as well do it right.”

“Is that a proclamation?” Kendra had asked, rolling her eyes at him, so dramatically she thought half of Athens must have seen.

But Balthazar only smiled.

Baz had been born in the following year, and Kendra grinned as she heard her oldest son shouting outside. Never one to pay attention to his older sister’s proclamations, far too much like his father, and currently making noise simply because he could.

Because unlike his father, Baz would not be beaten. He would not be cut into pieces and shoved into a cold, iron box.

Kendra stood from the sofa and went to the door, throwing it open so she could see her family come toward her across the fields. The two oldest ones bickering, as they did. And behind them, the most beautiful man she’d ever seen or ever would, holding the youngest two. One in each arm. Five-year-old Kassandra, all stubborn cheeks and a pouty lip. And the sunny, giggly baby, Thaddeus, who was eighteen months old and had the rest of them—and the world—wrapped around his chubby little fingers.

They could have been a painting, Kendra thought. Walking across golden fields studded with lavender and sunflowers, and the Alps in the distance.

But this was the life that she and Balthazar had made, and it was far better than any painting. It was complicated. Sometimes painful. And most of all, theirs.

They had taught each other how to love, and while there was no part of that Kendra did not find rewarding, that didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt along the way.

“I love you,” he had said the morning after their fateful wedding day, scowling at her as if the words caused him pain.

“I love you too,” she had replied, frowning right back at him. “And note that I didn’t say it like there was a gun in my back.”

Slowly but surely, they learned.

They had stayed on the island for the rest of Kendra’s pregnancy, because neither one of them wished to share their fledgling happiness with the world.

The world could wait. And it did.

“I love you,” he had said, over and over, every single day, so that by the time Irene was born, there was no more scowling.

And it only got better from there.

Though soon, too soon, it was time to let the world in again.

It had not always been easy.

Kendra had seen her father and brother only once. She and Balthazar had gone back to Connecticut, where it had all begun. There had been one unpleasant conversation, after which Kendra washed her hands of them both.

Balthazar had pressed charges against Tommy. Her father had not been ruined financially, but the ensuing scandal had made him persona non grata in all the places that meant anything to him.

They both found there was a solace in that. Kendra accompanied Balthazar to the long-term care facility where his mother lived out her days, and sat with him as he told her that it was done. At long last, it was done.

And she felt certain that if the other woman could have forgiven her son, she would have.

But the true surprise was when Emily Cabot Connelly had put down her Valium, contacted her attorneys, and divorced her husband. As part of her settlement she claimed,