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Instead, she’d run up the stairs to her childhood bedroom, locked the door behind her, and then crumpled down on the other side of it. She’d hugged her knees to her chest, held herself tight, and tried to figure out what to do with herself now everything had changed.
Now that she had changed.
Now that she knew the things she knew. Now that she’d finally faced the truth.
Kendra had wanted to dissolve into sobs, but hadn’t. She’d breathed a little too heavily for a while, ragged and overwhelmed, and had eventually found her way into the shower. There she’d done her best to use up all the hot water on the eastern seaboard as she’d done her best to scrub off the evening she’d had.
She’d failed at that, too.
It was only later, when she’d tucked herself up in her childish canopy bed as if that could make her the girl she’d been again, that she’d finally allowed herself to go through the whole thing, step by step.
He’d braced himself above her, so fierce, almost furious.
And he’d called her a whore, so Kendra had been determined that he never suspect that she was anything but. She’d told herself that she was a modern woman, after all. She’d ridden horses her whole life. Surely, if she didn’t tell him, he would never know that she’d never let anyone close to her before. That she’d been too busy trying to be perfect in one way or another, and had never seen how a boyfriend fit into that.
It won’t hurt, she’d told herself.If it hurt as much as people claimed it did, no one would do it again.
Then Balthazar had slammed his way inside her, and it was as if he’d plugged her into an electrical outlet, the most fragile part of her first.
Her first reaction had been shock.
Her body had reacted without her permission, arching up in a way that could as easily have been surrender as a scream. She hadn’t known herself.
She’d hidden her face, bitten down on her own arm, and it was only when her teeth dug into her own flesh that she’d begun to sort through the storm of it all.
Pain wasn’t the right word. She’d felteverything, that was the trouble. The shock of his intrusion. The shape of him, lodged deep inside of her. Big, hot, long. There wasa person inside her,and that notion made her want to cry even as it sent spirals of a different sensation dancing through her.
He’d told her to drop her arms, she’d obeyed, and again she’d been swept up in the certainty that if she let him see that this was her first time, if she let him know that this was anything but what she wanted it to be, she would die.
Die.
So instead, she’d dared him to do it faster. Harder. Deeper.
But when he did, everything had changed again.
And by the time they were finished, Kendra had learned a great many things about herself.
In the three months since that night, she’d had a lot of time to think about those things.
That she was not at all who she’d always thought she was if she could be so easily taken. Not just taken, but possessed, fully. A man who hated her could do those things to her body, and more astonishingly, her body could respond to him with pure jubilation.
No matter whatshemight have thought about the situation.
If that was true, and Kendra knew it was, then she didn’t know herself at all. And if she didn’t know herself at all, if she even now found herself something like hungry, constantly going over that night in Balthazar’s office in her head—
She’d concluded mere days after that fateful night that she needed to change her life entirely.
And so she had.
Her Great-Aunt Rosemary, the despair of Kendra’s haughty Grandmother Patricia, had taken herself off to the French countryside rather than settle down into marriage the way her parents would have preferred. She had never bothered to return to the family, but she’d left Kendra her cottage when she’d died the previous year.
On the off chance you are not like your mother or hers,Great-Aunt Rosemary’s will had read,I offer you a place to land.
Kendra had always meant to make it over to inspect her inheritance...someday.
Someday had turned out to be a lot sooner than she’d imagined.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” her father had thundered at her when she’d announced her plans to remove herself to the French countryside. At once. “What on earth do you plan to do inFrance, of all places?”
