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When she lifted her gaze to his again, the wildfire he saw there made him want to roar like the beast he had always feared he was.
Though he didn’t fear it now. Not when she looked at him as if the beast was precisely what she wanted.
God help him.
“Of course.” Kendra’s voice sounded husky now, though no less of a taunt. “Or how could I possibly make an informed decision?”
“How indeed.”
Balthazar crossed to her then, bent down, and lifted her into his arms.
He spared no thought for his plans. The promises he’d made himself about how he would handle this marriage, how he would treat the wife he’d never wanted, how all of this would become part of what was owed Thomas Connolly. It all seemed inconsequential when he held her like this, her flowing dress wrapping around them as he moved, like tendrils of that same dream he always seemed to have when she was near.
He knew it wasn’t true. It could never be true. And yet it haunted him.
Balthazar had intended to make it through his wedding secure in the purity of his fury. Secure in his hatred, his bitterness.
But when he’d looked up from the altar at the edge of the cliff to see Kendra coming toward him—in flowing white as she made her way through the ruins of the old chapel, flowers in hands and sunshine all over her face—the same dream that had woken him up in the night too many times to count now had walloped him all over again.
Constantine had murmured something that sounded suspiciously likesteady.
Balthazar had been forced to ignore it, because the only other option was acknowledging that he had made some sound, or some face that allowed his brother to think he was ever anything but steady. That had proclaimed his weakness to the whole of the watching Aegean Sea.
And also because his bride was coming to him in the island breeze.
And for the time it took her to walk to his side, he tortured himself with fantasies of her innocence. He had never cared about such things before. It was only her. It was only this woman he could not bear to imagine with anyone else. Only this woman who he could not seem to imagine with anyone but him.
It should not have felt like torture, but she disturbed his sleep. The fantasy that she could come to him like that, bearing his child and no hand upon her but his... The dream that she might truly be his, without any bitterness coloring their days...
He knew better. He’d known better. Nothing had changed when he’d put a ring on her finger. No blessings, however sanctified, could change who they were.
And yet.
He carried her into the villa and took her straight to his private suite. It was a Greek daydream of archways to welcome in the sea and the sky. Everything was white and blue and then, there in the middle, his wife with her hair like flame and eyes of the brightest gold.
Like a treasure.
By the time he set her down gently at the foot of the wide, low bed, Balthazar was so hard, so greedy for her, that he was surprised she hadn’t already burst into a thousand pieces with the force of it.
“Let me tell you how I want you to audition,” she said, though she had to reach out to him to keep her balance and better still, she sounded breathless.
He found he liked that more than he should have. That no matter what—no matter the truth of things and the dark reality he would return to as soon as he did something about the hunger that was tearing him apart—he got to her, too.
“I find I have a particular take on the role,” he told her, his voice dark. The greed in him like its own, beating pulse. “Why don’t you tell me how you feel about it once I’m done.”
This time, when he set his mouth to hers, he had no intention of stopping.
He kissed her, deep and long. He got his hands in her hair, scattering the pins she’d used to secure it to the top of her head. It wasn’t enough. No matter how he angled his head, no matter how close he held her, he wanted more.
He wanted everything.
Balthazar didn’t understand this drive in him. This need. The dream and the greed, thefeelingsthat battered at him, over and over, when he had been so certain for so long that he had none—
He felt as if something in him had broken. Yet as he held Kendra in his arms, he had the strangest notion that he had never been more whole.
That wasn’t something he could take on board then, so Balthazar spun her around instead. He watched the deep, jarring breath she took as he worked to pull that dress up the length of her newly voluptuous body, then off.
Then she was before him in only a bra that wrapped around her back, holding her breasts as if on a shelf, and a skimpy pair of lace panties that made his mouth water. Her back was to him, so he indulged himself without worrying how his face might have been betraying him.
