AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER EIGHT
ITWASALMOSTworth the fact that Balthazar was marrying her against his will, if at his command, to see that stunned look on Kendra’s face.
Better still, a flash of temper besides, proving she wasn’t nearly as calm or collected as she sometimes acted.
Balthazar almost slipped and showed her how much her reaction pleased him, but caught himself just in time. She didn’t deserve to see his own responses, but why should he be the only person dreading the inevitable? She was a Connolly, she had conspired against him from the start with her vile father and brother, and this was her fault.
He ignored the voice inside him that reminded him that her conspiracies could not have gained any ground had he not lost his head completely and sampled her without protecting himself. The way he’d been ignoring that voice for weeks.
But he didn’t like to think about that. He was appalled that he’d lost control of himself so utterly, when his father had spent long years teaching him how to strip any and all emotions out of every last moment and situation. Even sex was meant to be a release, nothing more.
Nothing...overwhelming.
He wrestled himself back under control. As he should have done from the start.
“I will not be marrying you,” she shot back at him, predictably. She bristled in her hanging chair and he watched dispassionately as she struggled to pull herself out of its embrace, then stood. Rather rounder than the last time he’d seen her, though he refused to focus on that. On what her fuller figure meant. “Not tomorrow. Not ever.”
“You’re beginning to bore me,” he replied, almost idly, and knew he sounded sterner than perhaps he’d intended when she stiffened. “You will not do this, you will not do that. I suggest you come up with a new song. In the meantime, the doctor is waiting.”
“What magical powers I must possess that I can bore you in six seconds after your absence of sixweeks.Maybe the problem is your attention span.”
Balthazar did not lower himself to sniping with her, especially because he wanted to do just that. He gestured toward the archway that led into the house and waited for her to obey him.
For a moment, he wasn’t sure what she would do. Refuse? Fight him? Worse, he wasn’t entirely sure whatheplanned to do if she did either of those things. Nor could he read the expressions that chased each other across her lovely, flushed face when she swept past him, though he got the overall impression of feminine fury.
She would be his wife come the morning. She was carrying his child.
She was his enemy.
All good reasons not to want her with that greedy, driving need that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. And yet Balthazar had to order himself to stand down. To keep his hands to himself. To stop himself before he made this unfortunate situation worse.
He, who could stare down the most powerful men alive and make them regret catching his eye, could barely control himself in the presence of a woman who should have disgusted him.
It was an outrage and it never eased. Three years hadn’t dulled his reaction. Why had he assured himself six weeks would do the trick this time?
Balthazar had no answer. Instead, once inside, he led her down the long, bright hallway, across an interior courtyard covered in pink bougainvillea, then ushered her into the set of rooms his staff had rearranged so they could stand in for a medical suite.
And because he knew his doctor would report to him in full, he left her there.
Though he would have died before admitting it, and by his own hand, he was happy for the breathing room.
Because the truth was that Balthazar had been utterly unprepared for the sight of her.
The glow he’d seen in France and had attributed to the lighting at her cottage—or the glory of the Côte d’Azur itself—was worse now. Or better, more like. She was a gleaming, bright and shining thing, and he had no idea how he was meant to cope.
He stood out in the courtyard, surrounded by flowers and the pitiless Aegean sky, and thought of her newroundness.The widening of her hips, the swell of her belly. He found he was wholly moved by the knowledge that she carried his child.His childtucked inside that beautiful, gently rounded body of hers.
He hadn’t expected that. This... insane response to her. A tenderness he abhorred mixed in with too much pounding, bone-rattlingneed.
Tenderness was anathema to him. Softness of any kind led to desperate places—didn’t he know that already?
But he refused to think about his own family. Of the things sentimentality had wrought.
There was no need to think of it when he knew who to blame.
Balthazar had convinced himself that his response to Kendra had been nothing more than two strange moments in time, bookending three years. But it was over now, surely. He’d spent the past month handling the details of what needed to happen next, now that his heir’s birth was imminent. Up to and including a meeting with his brother to lay out the changes he would be making in his will and various trusts. For dynastic purposes.
“Kendra...Connolly?” Constantine had asked lazily. He had gazed at his brother as he’d lounged about in his typical state of seeming dishevelment all over Balthazar’s sleek, modern furniture. Then he’d waved a languid hand at Athens outside the windows as if he expected the whole of Greece to rise up to support his astonishment. “You cannot be serious.”
