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The half-formed notion he might have had that he’d mistaken things three years ago, along with any story he might have been tempted to tell himself about the ways he’d convinced himself it had been more than it was, disappeared as if they’d never been.
Because the taste of Kendra was far better than any memory.
It was the richness of her mouth, the way her lips met his. It was the slickness. The heat. It was better than anything he could have imagined.Shewas better.
Worth the wait,a voice inside whispered.
He tried to shove it aside, but something in him...snapped.
As if he truly had been waiting for her all this time, instead of merely interested that an opportunity to pay her back had arisen.
As if this was what he’d wanted all along.
This. Her.
He reached out blindly with his free hand and slammed his office door shut. That was the last thought he planned to give to the outside world. He moved her across his floor, every cell in his body focused on the same thing.
More.
Kendra had as much as told him she was precisely who and what he’d thought she was all along. She’d offered herself to him. Attempted to barter the terms of selling herself to her family’s enemy. Despite what he’d imagined in those first moments in that long-ago gazebo, she was no innocent.
He told himself that was a gift.
Because it turned out that Balthazar was in no way above taking what she’d made it clear was his to take.
Surely he’d initially meant to aim for the sofa that sat across the room, but it was suddenly too far. He made it to his desk and laid her down across the vast granite surface, making her its only adornment.
Like a sacrificial lamb, something in him thought, though that was a reach. This was no sacrifice.
This was a reckoning.
Balthazar couldn’t seem to get enough of her mouth. He braced himself over her, his palm near her head, and lost himself for far too long in the simple act of kissing her.
Again and again.
But there was nothing simple about it.
It was carnal. It was a rush. The taste of her coursed through him, storming through his veins and pooling in his sex.
More than worth the wait,that voice in him said, more definitively this time.
Like a kick to the side of his head. Balthazar tore his mouth away from hers, outraged that he felt as close to shaky in the presence of a woman as he’d ever become.
Shaky,of all things. When his father had made him pay hefty prices for weakness. Until now, Balthazar had been certain he’d stamped any hint of his out.
And it was only when he set his mouth to Kendra’s neck, finding that raucous pulse again, that it finally dawned on him that he hadn’t kissed her three years ago. No wonder a simple taste of her had set his head to ringing.
He wanted to strip her naked again, but he wasn’t certain he could handle it.
That truth was humbling.
He, Balthazar Skalas, who had proven himself again and again in the course of his lifetime whether he wished to or not. Against his father’s heavy hand, his mother’s defection. Against fair-weather friends and false intimates. The trials of handling both the Skalas’s wealth and business concerns with all the questionable, obsequious grifters both attracted.
He had always assumed that his ruthlessness was bone-deep.
But this mercenary little liar, an emissary from a man he despised, who wanted her to trade her body for her thieving waste of a brother—
Why on earth should it be this girl who got to him like this?
