AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Somehow, Kendra had never realized how small the place was before. How...close.
But then, Balthazar took all the air from the room.
“If you have business with my family, you know how to find them,” she said after a moment, though her pulse was drumming loudly in her ears. “I have nothing to do with this.”
“Perhaps.”
His back was to her then. His gaze was directed out the windows, down over the gentle slope of the vineyard before them. The view she’d loved, until now. Would she ever be able to look at it again without seeing him?
“Tell me this, if you please,” he was saying, low and commanding. “It has been some time since I saw you in New York.”
“Since you saw me,” she echoed, and even laughed. “How sanitized that sounds.”
Balthazar turned to her. She thought the way his gaze cut through her was stark. Brooding, even. But he didn’t speak.
“It was three months ago.” Kendra tried to summon her smile, but gave up when it didn’t materialize. She repressed the urge to rub at the nape of her neck, where she was certain every single fine hair was standing at attention. “But I feel certain you know that.”
“Indeed.”
And something in the way he studied her then made her feel as if she was trembling again, from the inside out. As if her own bones had betrayed her. She had the wild notion that she should leap across the room, slap her hands over his mouth if necessary, do anything she could to keep him from saying whatever it was he’d come here to say... But she didn’t.
“Three months,” he repeated, as if for emphasis. “And in that time, have you bled?”
She felt all the color and sensation drain from her. “What?”
“It is a simple question, if indelicate. Because we did not use protection, Kendra. And if you have not bled—”
Her pulse was taking over her body, beatingather. “Why are we talking about this? How is it your business? And anyway, I moved to a different country. It’s not unusual to miss one or two—”
She cut herself off, horrified.
The reality of what she was saying slammed into her anyway, flattening her. And then it was as if she was swallowed up in the ferocious blaze of his glare.
Balthazar did not move. He did not close the space between them.
And still Kendra felt as if he’d lunged at her. Or did she only wish he had?
Did she really long for his touch so much? But she knew the answer to that. She lived it every night.
“Is this your family’s latest attempt to force my hand?” Balthazar asked idly, though his gaze was afire with the darkest, harshest condemnation. With a bitter hatred that made her breath hitch. “This will not end for you the way you imagine, Kendra. I promise you that.”
CHAPTER SIX
BALTHAZAR’SWORSTFEARShad come true.
And he still couldn’t quite believe it.
He followed the remote road to the cottage Kendra had said was hers. Which could mean she was letting it, or could mean it was her father’s, or could mean, well, anything. He didn’t believe a word she said. He didn’t believeher.
He certainly hadn’t believed her flustered response to his appearance earlier. That he would come for her was the point of all this, surely. It was the final move in her game.
Balthazar had been well and truly played. He still couldn’t quite accept it, but facts did not wait for his acceptance to be true.
He certainly did not believe that Kendra Connolly wasn’t fully aware that they hadn’t used protection that night. He imagined she’d been counting down the days, same as him. The fact that she’d taken herself off to a foreign country was evidence enough of her guilt, to his mind.
And he’d been waiting all this time for her to show her hand.
Instead, she’d appeared to first take on the life of a middle-aged expatriate. Pottery and painting and God only knew what other pointless things, the province of the entitled and bored. Then she’d begun waiting tables, of all things, which might have been more age appropriate, but made no sense for the Connolly heiress.
