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Again, he was struck by the fact thathis sonwas in there. Thathis sonwould be out in this same world in a matter of months, calling Balthazar father. Maybe that was why he did not reply to Kendra in the thunderous manner he could have.
The way he should have.
“My brother and I were born in quick succession,” he told her instead, because that was also true. “And my mother... After my brother came, I am told, she disappeared. She left us in the care of our nannies and never left her rooms. After that had gone on for some time, my father had her admitted to a private hospital in Austria, where she was better cared for. But she did not return to us for several years.”
“And you think that is...evidence against her?”
“It is simply what happened.”
“It sounds like you’re describing postpartum depression, Balthazar. It wasn’t her choice.” Kendra studied his face for a moment. “You know that, don’t you?”
“What I know is that my father could not abide weakness,” Balthazar told her, his voice rough. “In anyone.”
Kendra was sitting much too still, that hand still resting on her belly. “So what you’re telling me is that your poor mother suffered from a terrible depression and your father took it upon himself to punish her for a chemical and hormonal imbalance that wasn’t her fault.”
“He was an unforgiving man.”
“And what about you?” Kendra asked quietly. “Are you forgiving?”
This was the right time to tell her the rest of it, to see once and for all what she knew and what game she was playing. But somehow, Balthazar couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He couldn’t stop thinking of a small boy with his eyes, looking at him the way he’d tried to implore his father. Before he’d learned the folly of such things.
Kendra reached over and tapped the folder that still sat there between them. “It would appear that no, you are not particularly forgiving.”
“Do you deserve forgiveness, Kendra?” he growled at her, keeping himself still in his chair when he wanted nothing more than to rage. To break things. To hurl the table between them into the sea far below.
Because that was easier than confronting what was happening in him. He thought of his mother, messier and messier throughout his childhood until his father had divorced her. She had gone off to lick her wounds—in horribly public ways. Balthazar had always considered it a defection. He had always judged her, harshly, as much for her particular extramarital affair neither his father nor he could overlook as for her departure.
What he had never done was question how and why she had lost his father’s respect in the first place. Much less whether or not that had been fair to her. And he didn’t much care for the heavy ball of something like dread that sat in him now he was doing just that.
Thinking about forgiveness didn’t help.
“By your reckoning, no,” Kendra replied, but she didn’t look particularly broken up about whether or not he might forgive her. As if a lifetime of his father’s brand of consequences was right up her alley, when he knew better. He knew what it did to soft creatures like her, didn’t he? “But then, I don’t need to prove myself to you, Balthazar. I don’t care what you believe. I’m going to marry you, not because you’ve demanded it, but because I’m a rational person who can see that marrying you will afford my child her best possible life. You keep talking about the past if it makes you feel better. I’m focused on the future.”
She stood up then, still outrageously graceful despite her fuller figure and her new, big bump. He told himself it was sheer temper that pounded through him. Sheer, unmitigated fury—because what else could it be? What else would he allow it to be?
He was rising before he meant to move, blocking her path.
She stared up at him, her chin lifted as her copper-burnished hair flowed around her, backlit by the setting sun.
“You have no moral high ground here,” he gritted out at her. He wanted to put his hands on her, so he did, gripping her shoulders as he held her before him. “You’ve achieved what you wanted, but I assure you, the price you pay will be steep.”
“What Iwanted,” she threw right back at him, “was peace. Quiet. A cottage all my own filled with books and a fire and as many buttery croissants as I could eat. Which, it turns out, is a great many croissants. Instead you stormed in and carried me off to this place. And I’m not an idiot, Balthazar. I’m notdivorced from reality. I’m perfectly aware that as prisons go, this one is charming. Beautiful. Some people would dream of coming here and staying here forever. But I’m not one of them.”
“If I was interested in what you wanted, Kendra, I would have asked you.”
He expected her to recoil at that. To react as if he’d slapped her. Instead, she surged up onto her toes, bringing herself even closer to him.
Exhibiting, he couldn’t help but notice, absolutely no fear.
He couldn’t think of a single reason that should have made him want her so desperately.
“You can issue all the orders you like,” she told him in a rush. “You will never control me. If I happen to go along with your wishes, you can be sure it’s because I want to. Not because you told me to.”
He managed—just—not to sneer. “From a girl who was willing to prostitute herself at her father’s command.”
“You don’t know anything about my family,” she threw right back at him. “Or about me. And I don’t want you to know. You don’t deserve it.”
