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Had she been so quick to pretend nothing had happened because it had been so...raw? She was an educated, sophisticated woman who not only had not inquired about protection, she’d never given it a moment’s thought, afterward. It had never occurred to her that anything like this could happen.
And as she’d huddled there on the cool bathroom floor, she’d had to face a number of realities. Including the fact that she’d tried her hardest to blank out what had happened in New York because it hadn’t been anything like the fantasies of him she’d carried around in her head after encountering him in that gazebo. It had been so much more...physical.Each and every sensation so intense she still wasn’t sure if it had been pain or pleasure—only that she wanted more. She didn’t have a single memory or feeling about Balthazar Skalas that wasn’t complicated. Complex.
When she’d been taught again and again that sex was no place for tangled emotions and overwhelming memories. It was meant to be a lovely, celebratory thing, that was all. Not an experience so darkly erotic that she could only face it fast asleep.
“Daylight is no place for unpleasant things, dear,”her mother had always said.
Kendra had only realized then, curled up on the floor, that she’d taken that to heart. Maybe a bit too much to heart. Because she’d been living her whole life like this, hadn’t she? Her head so far in the sand she was surprised she could breathe through it.
The last few months had been nothing more or less than the inevitable conclusion of a lifetime of her own ostrich impression. She’d ignored the obvious indicators that her father was always the kind of man who would send his own daughter off toappeal to Balthazar as a man.She’d ignored the unpleasant reality that he supported Tommy, who was by no definition a good man. She’d ignored everything that didn’t suit her.
Maybe it wasn’t a surprise that she’d ignored what was happening in her own body, too.
She’d sat there, her knees pulled beneath her chin, too stunned by her own stupidity to even bother crying about it.
That would come later, Kendra had suspected. She could almost feel an emotional breakdown hovering there like a storm, just out of reach over the horizon.
But first she could do nothing but marvel at her own naivete.
Balthazar was upsettingly correct. Her own family had pimped her out.
And it wasn’t as ifhewas much better. She could feel the hatred in him. He seethed with it. He hated her brother. He detested her father.
Much as some part of her didn’t wish to think about it, he was no fan of hers, either.
And still she had marched herself into that office building, a lamb to the slaughter—though in her case, she’d actually believed she was some kind of wolf, not a lamb at all.
But now it was all worse.
So much worse, Kendra didn’t truly understand how she was going to live through whatever came next.
She’d spent her whole life trying to be perfect, and instead, she’d gone and gotten herself knocked up the first time she’d so much as touched a man. It was her parents’ worst nightmare, as they’d made clear a thousand times while she was growing up. Her mother might very well slip off into a coma, so appalled was Emily Connolly sure to be at this news.
That was bad enough. Far worse was the trepidation she could feel churn about inside her as she tried to imagine how on earth she was going to navigatesharing a childwith a man like Balthazar when she wasn’t sure she could survive sharing a car ride with him.
She’d actually laughed out loud, there in her bathroom, then winced at how unhinged she sounded.
“I’m sorry,” she’d whispered, sneaking her hands over her belly, though it still seemed impossible to her that there could be a life inside. Alife.A baby.My baby,something in her whispered. “I’ll find a way, don’t worry.”
Because Balthazar Skalas might be his own level of impossible, but Kendra had no intention of hiding from reality any longer. She was going to be a mother. She was not going to behermother.
She’d never been any good at fighting for herself, but she would fight for this child.
“No matter what,” she’d promised the tiny life growing inside her, there on the bathroom floor and a few more times in her bed, too, for good measure.
But the next morning, far too early for someone who’d stayed up as late as she had, Balthazar had been pounding at her door, and Kendra had made a decision on the spot that there was no point fighting him. Probably because she knew he would win. And she really didn’t want to see how, exactly, he would go about physically removing her from France.
She’d seen no reason to share the news with him. He could wait for the ill-gotten gains of his kidnapping attempt to learn what she already knew. If he marinated in his temper while he waited, all the better.
He’d stood there in the cottage’s main room, a thundercloud of fury as she’d moved about collecting items like her passport and her great-aunt’s oversize scarf that she could fling about her neck and pretend was a fashion accessory when really, it was more like a portable blanket she planned to use to soothe herself.
Because if the look on Balthazar’s face had been any guide, Kendra was going to need some soothing.
He’d driven her to a private airfield outside of Nice without a word. The flight had been short and equally silent.
The tension between them was so thick it seemed to settle on Kendra like smog.
Once in Athens, Balthazar herded her off the plane and into yet another astonishingly glossy and aspirational sports car, then drove her into the center of the ancient city itself.
