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CHAPTER ONE
IFSHECONCENTRATEDon how outrageous the situation was, how humiliating and impossible, Kendra Connolly knew she would never do what needed to be done.
Yet there was no way around it. She had to do this.
Her family was depending on her—for the first time. Ever.
She’d been sitting in her car for far too long already in the parking structure deep beneath Skalas Tower in the hectic bustle of Midtown Manhattan. She’d been given a certain amount of time to appear on the cameras in the elevators before the security officials who’d checked her in would investigate her whereabouts, here beneath the North American power center of one of the world’s wealthiest men. The clock was ticking, yet here she was, gripping the steering wheel while staring at her knuckles as they turned white. Psyching herself up for the unpleasant task ahead.
And failing.
“There must be some other solution,” she had said to her father.
So many times, in fact, that it had really been a lot more like begging.
Kendra was desperate to avoid...this. But Thomas Pierpont Connolly had been unmoved, as ever.
“For God’s sakes, Kendra,” he had boomed at her earlier today, when she’d tried one last time to change his mind. He’d been leaning back in his monstrously oversized leather chair, his hands laced over his straining golf shirt because nothing kept him from a few holes at Wee Burn when he was in the family home on the Connecticut island his Gilded Age forebears had claimed long ago. “Think about someone other than yourself, for a change. Your brother needs your help. That should be the beginning and the end of it, girl.”
Kendra hadn’t dared say that she disagreed with that assessment of the situation. Not directly.
Tommy Junior had always been a problem, but their father refused to see it. To him, Tommy had always been made of spun gold. When he’d been expelled from every boarding school on the East Coast, Thomas had called himhigh-spirited.When he’d been kicked out of college—despite the library Thomas had built to get him in—it had been excused asthat Connolly bullheadedness.His failed gestures toward entrepreneurial independence that cost his father several fortunes were seen as admirable attempts to follow in the family footsteps. His lackadaisical carrying-on as vice president of the family business—all expense account and very little actual work—was lauded by Thomas asplaying the game.
Tommy Junior could literally do no wrong, though he’d certainly tried his best.
Kendra, meanwhile, had been an afterthought in her parents’ polite, yet frosty marriage. Born when Tommy was fourteen and already on his fifth boarding school, her well-to-do parents had never known what to do with her. She’d been shunted off to nannies, which had suited her fine. The old Connolly fortune that consumed her father’s and brother’s lives had been meaningful to her only in that it provided the sprawling house on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, where she could curl up in a forgotten corner and escape into her books.
Her mother was the more approachable of her parents, but only if Kendra conformed to her precise specifications of what a debutante should be in the time-honored fashion of most ofherfamily, who proudly traced their lineage to theMayflower. To please her, Kendra had attended Mount Holyoke like every other woman in her family since the college was founded, but as shegrew oldershe’d come to understand that the only way to gain her father’s attention was to try to take part in the only thing that mattered to him, his business.
She wished she hadn’t now.
The clock kept ticking, and Kendra had no desire to explain why she was dragging her feet to the Skalas security team, who had already thoroughly searched her car and her person and had sent her photograph up to the executive floor. Where, she had been told coldly, she was expected. Within ten minutes or she would be deemed a security risk.
Kendra forced herself to get out of thecar andshivered, though it wasn’t cold.She didn’t like New York City, that was all. It was too loud, too chaotic,too much. Even here, several storiesbeneath ground with the famous Skalas Tower slicing into the sky above her, an architectural marvel of steel and glass, she was certain she could feel the weight of so manylivesstreaming about on the streets. On top of her.
Or, possibly, that was her trepidation talking.
Because she’d been so sure she would never, ever have to come face-to-face with Balthazar Skalas again.
She smoothed down herpencilskirt,butdidn’t give in to the urge to jump back in the car and check her carefully minimal makeup for the nineteenth time. There was no point. This was happening, and shewouldface him and the truth was, she was likely flattering herself to think that he would even recognize her.
The flutter low in her belly suggested that it was not so simple as mereflattery,but Kendra ignored that as she marched across the concrete toward the bank of elevators, clearly marked and unavoidable.
It had been years, after all. And this was an office building, however exquisite, not one of her family’s self-conscious parties packed full of the rich and the powerful, where Kendra was expected to present herself as her mother’s pride and her father’s indulgence. Such gatherings were the only reason she’d ever met or mingled with the kinds of people her father and brother admired so much, like Balthazar Skalas himself—feared and worshipped in turn by all and sundry.
Because Thomas certainly had no interest in letting Kendra work alongside him in the company.
Tommy had always laughed at her ambitions. She’d love to think, now, that he’d wanted to keep her at bay because she’d have discovered what he was up to sooner. But she knew the truth of that, too. Tommy didn’t think of her at all. And was certainly not threatened by anything she might or might not do, as he’d made clear today in no uncertain terms.
A reasonable person might ask herself why, when her father and brother had always acted as if she was an interloper as well as an afterthought—and her mother cared about her but only in between her garden parties and charity events—Kendra was carrying out this unpleasant task for them.
That was the trouble.
It was theonlytask she’d ever been askedto performfor them.
She couldn’t help thinking it was therefore her only chance to prove herself. To prove that she was worthy of being a Connolly. That she was more than an afterthought. That she deserved to take her place in the company, be more than her mother’s occasional dress up doll, and who knew? Maybe get treated, at last, like she was one of them.
And maybe if that happened she wouldn’t feel so lonely, for once. Maybe if she showed them how useful she was, she wouldn’t feel so excluded by her family, the way she always had.
