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It had to be another part of her game, though he couldn’t imagine how it fit.
The road opened up and a cottage came into view. Balthazar gritted his teeth. Because it looked like...a cozy, pastoral scene of Provence. Yellows, blues, and purples. Fields of wildflowers on either side with a humble dwelling on a soft rise, lit up against the darkening summer sky.
He had been anticipating the kind of “cottage” people like Thomas Connolly like to call the gaudy, massive mansions in places like Newport, Rhode Island.
This was not that.
And Balthazar didn’t quite know what to do with this unpretentious house. Much less the woman who stood in the open doorway, the buttery light from within making her glow.
Damn her.
Balthazar came to a stop in a cloud of his own bad temper. He slammed out of the car, unfolding his body from the low-slung leather seats and taking longer than necessary to smooth his shirt into place when it did not require smoothing. His clothing did not defy him. It was only this creature before him, standing there like an innocent again, who dared.
“I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding this place,” she said in that bright, chirpy voice he’d heard earlier at the winery.
He detested it.
“I am capable of using navigation technology, thank you,” he growled at her.
Kendra did not back down. She only sighed, slightly. “I see this is going to be contentious. What a lovely change.”
Balthazar did not appreciate her ironic tone of voice.
Because it had been three months of worrying about this very thing. Three months of assuring himself that nothing would come of the one and only time he’d failed to protect himself, his family, and his wealth.
And with a Connolly, to add insult to injury.
Still, his self-delusion might have illuminated his darker moments, but he was a practical man. That, too, had been impressed upon him by his father’s heavy hand, whether he liked it or not. He had therefore enlisted a special security detail to track her movements. To see if she would give herself away.
To make sure that whatever happened, he was on hand to intervene if it went in a direction he didn’t like.
He’d expected her to head to a clinic in an attempt to draw him out. Her relocation to France had confused him. But perhaps it, too, had been as good as waving a flag—because here he was.
Still, he hadn’t been sure.
Not until that performance she’d put on earlier in the kitchen of the winery.
“Perhaps you can explain to me what exactly it is you think you are doing, pretending to be a plucky waitress?” He moved around the front of the sports car and then stayed there, not quite trusting himself to venture any closer to her, which was another personal betrayal. They were adding up. “It does not suit you,kopéla. I think you must know this.”
She might have seemed happy, but Balthazar could not accept that it was real. It was a role she was playing, nothing more. It was a way to hide from what she’d done, who she was, and what must come next.
Surely she had to know this.
Hecertainly knew it.
As she was almost certainly carrying his child, this rustic life she’d arranged around her this summer was unacceptable, as she must surely have been aware. The mother of a Skalas heir could not bein service, God forbid.
He told himself this supposed happiness of hers had to be fake. It had to be part of the bait in her trap.
There was no other explanation.
She only looked at him for a moment as ifhewas the one who made no sense. It meant there was nothing to do but gaze back at her.
Damn her, but she looked...angelic.
It made him want to break things.
The light from inside the cottage made her hair look strawberry blonde and drenched in gold. That heart-shaped face had haunted him for months now—years, if he was honest—and it was far prettier in person than it had been in his memory.
