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CHAPTER SEVEN
THEYLANDEDINAthens the next morning.
And while Balthazar had not, technically, kidnapped her, he hadn’t exactly left her any choice.
Kendra hated herself for not finding a way out of the situation, but she hadn’t.
She hadn’t—and she wasn’t sure she really wanted to ask herself why that was.
Balthazar hadn’t bothered to continue arguing with her last night. He’d left her after flashing that enigmatic smile, the one that had made her shiver with foreboding. But before he’d driven off in that absurd sports car of his that she was fairly certain was as bespoke as the clothes he wore, he’d made a quick call in emphatic Greek.
Within moments, two glossy black SUVs had pulled up.
“You called the cavalry?” she’d asked.
He’d smiled again, and it wasn’t any better that time. “Insurance, that is all.”
“Weird.” Kendra had eyed the men who poured out of the SUVs. Balefully. “They look a great deal like your own private army.”
“You may call them whatever you like, Kendra,” Balthazar had said. “They are not here for you.”
“Excellent news. I’ll have them make themselves comfortable in the lavender fields while I take myself off to Monaco for the weekend.”
“Do as you like.” Another, third version of that smile of his made her bones feel cold. “My men will protect my potential heir.”
And then he’d taken himself off in that obnoxious car, leavinghis menbehind.
Men who would protect the baby she refused to believe she was carrying, not her.
Kendra had retreated back into the cottage and barricaded herself inside. She’d pulled all the curtains and then had sat there on one of Great-Aunt Rosemary’s cozy little couches, very deliberatelynotstaring across the room at the sack of pregnancy tests Balthazar had left behind.
She had done nothing but obsessively count days since he’d showed up at the winery. She’d gone over it again and again. The truth was, she hadn’t spared a single thought about whether or not her monthly cycle was showing up as it should have been...because she’d never had any reason to think about such things. Not only had Kendra never been late, as far as she knew—she’d never had any reason to worry about it if for some reason she had been.
Why hadn’t it occurred to her to worry about it now that there was a reason?
But she knew the answer to that. She might wake in the night, suffused with heat and with Balthazar’s name on her lips, but by day she never, ever allowed herself to think about that night. To think abouthim.Part of that was also not thinking about her own body—from the things he’d made her feel to its biological functions.
As she’d sat there in her cottage, barricaded in against truths she didn’t want to face, Kendra honestly hadn’t known if she’d been motivated by denial...or survival.
Either way, the longer she’d stared at that bag full of pregnancy tests, the more it seemed to overtake the room, crowding out the books and the art Great-Aunt Rosemary had left behind. And the more it seemed directly connected to the panic inside of her, pounding at her, filling her up like a wicked flood.
Until she couldn’t breathe.
And so it was that Kendra discovered that she really was pregnant with Balthazar Skalas’s child while hiding in the small bathroom of her great-aunt’s cottage after midnight, hiding from the men he’d sent to make sure she stayed there,aftermaking implicit kidnapping threats.
She’d taken all five tests, sure that they had to be defective. That the next one would prove that she wasn’t actually living through...this.
But they all showed her the exact same thing.
Kendra was pregnant.
And when she finally stopped chugging water so she could make a new test happen, when she finally accepted that no new test was going to change the truth...the whole world shifted.
With such a dramatic, irrevocable jolt that she’d found herself on the floor of the bathroom, her back against the wall, staring at the incontrovertible evidence before her.
Five times over.
She’d remembered that night in his office vividly. Too vividly, really, when she now knew what would become of it.
