AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She was so bright with her own outrage. Alight with self-righteous indignation, and Balthazar should have found that laughable. He told himself he did.
But he didn’t laugh.
Instead, he jerked her toward him and set his mouth to hers.
At last.
And it was that same wild, impossible fire. That same electric explosion, as if he’d been struck by lightning—yet he wanted more. Always and ever more.
He angled his head to one side, taking the kiss deeper and growling his appreciation when she met him, all slick heat and greed.
And he was amazed, again, to find his head spinning when she pushed herself away.
“Kissing me changes nothing,” she managed to say, though he took perhaps too much pride in the fact her voice shook. “Do you really think that a kiss like that is any kind of punishment at all? Here’s a news flash. It’s not. If I didn’t like it, I would bite you.”
“Yes, yes,kopéla,” he drawled, suddenly enjoying himself when she scowled at him. “You’re very fierce. You have fangs, and I promise you, I cannot wait to feel them on my skin.”
Kendra bared her teeth at him and he laughed, he wanted her so intensely. So comprehensively it was like pain. But he knew pain. He knew how to live with it. In a dark way, how to crave it.
“Remember you said that, Balthazar,” she hissed at him.
It was meant as a dire warning, he was sure. Still, he took her chin in his hand and held her there, smiling hard when temper flooded her bright gaze.
“But one way or another, all this posturing or no, in the morning, you will be my wife,” he told her, like an ancient omen. Like a curse. “And that will be an end to it.”
CHAPTER NINE
KENDRAWASN’TTHEsort of woman who had dedicated years of her life to fantasizing about her wedding one day. Not that there was anything wrong with such fantasies, but she’d always spent her time daydreaming about winning over her father’s boardroom, and sitting behind suitably impressive desks in the family offices.
And she’d found herself fantasizing about far different things these days.
Still, if she’d thrown together a few wedding ideas off the top of her head, it would not have been...this.
It was a small affair on a particular stretch of the island that Panagiota informed her, with great seriousness, had been sanctified.
“Is that...good?” she asked.
“It is more than good,” the other woman had replied. “It is necessary.”
She’d woken the morning of hersanctifiedwedding her mouth feeling swollen and bruised from Balthazar’s kiss the night before, though her inspection of her lips had indicated that sensation was rather more emotional than physical. Panagiota had come in, smiling merrily, her arms filled with a flowing white gown. Kendra was tempted to tear it up. Or demand something more suitable for the occasion, like a black shroud.
Maybe she would have done both of those things, but she made the mistake of running her hand over the filmy, flowy material of the gown when Panagiota carefully laid it out. And the next thing she knew, she was slipping it on.
Her body was changing, thickening by the day. She already had a significant belly. She was aware of her body in different ways these days. Clothes never quite fit the way she expected them to, and stranger still, her center of gravity had shifted.
But when she slipped the dress on, it was like a caress. It made her feel sensual and beautiful.
When she looked in the mirror, her heart constricted. Then it began to beat at her, hard.
Kendra told herself that she could make this forced wedding anything she wanted it to be.
She’d said a lot of things to Balthazar last night and then had stayed awake the rest of the night, wondering if any of them were true—because all he had to do was look at her and she trembled.
And after six weeks of solitude, she’d found she enjoyed that trembling. Maybe more than she should have.
“I want what I said to be true,” she said out loud now as she stared at the vision in flowing white before her in the glass, her hand over her belly. Her baby grew by the day. Time was moving right along no matter what she said or didn’t say to the man as caught in this as she was. “That will have to be enough.”
She would make it enough.
