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“Right,” she managed to say, trying to find her feet beneath her. Trying to remind herself that no matter how intimidating she found him, and no matter how beautiful, this wasn’t only about the two of them any longer. “Because when we had sex with each other and were both present and accounted forin your office, only I was scheming. You were nothing but a naive maiden, lost in the woods.”
“Do not test me, Kendra.” His voice was something like a whisper, though lethal. She could feel it pierce her like a blade. She gripped the scarf around her even more tightly. “You will not like how I handle you. How I address what you have done to me. Let me promise you this.”
“You can’t really think I’m going to quietly remain here.” She shook her head at him. “I have a life, Balthazar. One I made all for myself, no matter what you might think of it. I have—”
“If you wished to have a life, you should not have irrevocably changed mine.”
He moved closer then, towering over her, and she could see a stark ferocity in his gaze that should have terrified her. Instead, something in her longed to meet it. Rise up on her toes, tilt her head, and—
Well. It wasn’t as if she was unaware of her own issues. There was that.
“Perhaps it’s escaped your notice,” she said, hoping the things she longed for so foolishly weren’t written all over her face, but mine is the life that is already changed. Mine is the life you decided to alter in more ways than one. I’m the one carrying this baby. I’m the one you’ve carted all over Europe today, and apparently plan to leave behind on this island.”
“The life you knew is over.” She watched as a muscle clenched in his jaw. “I suspect this was your plan from the start. I must congratulate you. I did not see it coming.”
“Yes,” she snapped at him, “I decided that I would miraculously become pregnant, the way all women do. That’s why there is no such thing as fertility issues. All womendecide,and then do it.”
He made a sound she could only describe as a growl, but she didn’t slink away. Something in herthrilledto the sound. She kept her gaze steady and forced her knees to remain strong beneath her.
“You may have saved your brother after all,” Balthazar said in that quiet way of his that made the world shake around him. “But I promise you, Kendra. You will live to regret this.”
For a moment she thought—wished?—that those big, hard hands of his were going to reach out to her. Take hold of her.
Touchher the way he did in her dreams, night after night—
But instead, Balthazar turned on his heel and stalked away from her.
Kendra stayed where she was, shaken so deeply by her own longing, even now, that she was surprised she didn’t sink to the floor. Was it self-hatred that made her tremble? Or was it that impossible yearning that she couldn’t stamp out?
And then she had to force herself not to panic, somehow, when she heard the helicopter’s rotors. When Balthazar disappeared into the sky, leaving her behind with these things she knew about herself now.
The worst of them being that no matter what he did, she still wanted him.
It took Kendra a solid ten days to investigate every single nook and cranny of the house and each of the outbuildings, desperate to find something she could use to make her escape.
There had been nothing. Panagiota was kind enough, but firm. She apologized repeatedly, but changed nothing. There was no cell service. Certainly no internet. At least, not any that Kendra was permitted to access.
Though she had to face the fact that even if there was, she had no idea who she would call. Her family would be delighted that she was in a position to bargain further with Balthazar. They would do nothing to help her.
Kendra took it as a mark of her personal growth that she knew this now.
The same way she knew, when she’d finished marching around the small island looking for boats to the mainland, that the real truth was worse.
She didn’t want to leave.
She wanted Balthazar to come back.
The way she knew he would, because no matter how angry he might have been, she was carrying his child.
Maybe what she did looked like surrender, but Kendra rather thought she was conserving her strength for the real fight—which certainly wasn’t the quietly insistent Panagiota, who was, after all, only doing Balthazar’s bidding.
She ate what he wanted her to eat, according to the nutritional guide he’d apparently left with the housekeeper. There was no way off the island—and she’d looked—so she took long, rambling walks on the beaches, over the fields, and through the groves of olive trees.
She slept in the bed he’d told her was hers, and even though he wasn’t there, she felt the imprint of him as if he truly was holding her where he wanted her.
“By the neck,” she muttered to herself one morning.
But she knew that wasn’t quite right. She knew it was quite a bit lower.
