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“Is this the true game?” he demanded. “Is this what you’ve wanted all along, Kendra? To tie me in knots, crowd my head, make me into a madman? What does your father think will be gained by this kind of deception?”
She blinked at that, still holding the dress close. “My father? What does my father have to do with this?”
“Did he not send you to me in the first place?”
“He didn’t send me to the gazebo. He did send me to New York. What he did not do, ever, was even so much as hint that he was interested in whether or not I was in possession of my virginity.”
The very idea of discussing virginity with her father made her stomach turn.
Balthazar looked as if he might reach for her then, and Kendra wanted that so much she could feel moisture collect in the corners of her eyes.
But instead he pushed himself off the bed and moved across the bedroom. He stopped in one of the grand archways that opened over a graceful terrace and stood there, staring out toward the sea.
The sun poured in, making him seem like some kind of stone carving, polished to shine. Not a man at all.
Because he was no longer looking at her, she indulged herself and pressed the heel of her hand against the place where her heart beat so hard it hurt.
“You should have told me,” he said a long while later, his voice thick. Dark.
“What would have been the point?” she asked simply.
Even from across the room, she could hear the way he drew in a breath at that, and it made her heart hurt even more.
Kendra gathered the dress around her, like a security blanket. She remembered how she’d felt earlier, walking to him where he stood on the edge of that cliff.
As if together they might fly off into all that blue and stay there, as limitless as the horizon.
“Balthazar,” she said softly now. “What if we made a different kind of bargain altogether?”
The hand he’d propped up against the side of the open arch clenched into a fist.
Kendra decided to take that as encouragement. Or as a sign, anyway, that she was on the right track. Since he could so easily have shot her down already.
She slid one hand to her belly. She thought about her father and brother, even her mother, and the lives they’d all chosen. Then she thought about Great-Aunt Rosemary, who had walked away from that very same life and done as she pleased.
We can make our lives whatever we wish them to be,her great-aunt had written in loopy cursive on the first page of one of the journals she’d left for Kendra to read.
Kendra could start right now.
“What if we removed everybody else from the table?” she asked softly. “What if all we thought about was you and me and our child? You’re going to be a father, Balthazar. I’m going to be a mother. We’ll both be the parents of this baby, and that means something. To the baby, I have to think it will mean the world.”
The words were pouring from her mouth, though she couldn’t have said where they were coming from. They seem to be connected to the blood that pumped through her veins. The soft, hot core of her that was already hungry for him again. The heaviness in her breasts. And the rounded belly he had caressed so gently, making her feel like a fertility goddess. More beautiful than she’d ever been.
She had taken so few chances in her life. She had dared so little—except when it came to him.
But she thought of the crowns they’d worn today and the rings on their hands. She thought of that look of wonder on his face when he’d gazed up at her, both of them holding tight to the future they’d made.
It had to mean something. She wouldmake itmean something.
She took a breath. “What if we decided, you and me, to be a family?”
He turned back to her then, though he didn’t come closer. He stood there with the light all around him and his gaze bleak.
Kendra fought off a shiver.
“Families like yours?” he asked with a certain, quiet menace. “An overly medicated mother. A morally corrupt father, who would prostitute his virgin daughter to protect his son from the consequences of his own deceitful actions. A man who knows no boundaries, who respects no limitations, who always and ever does only what pleases. What an enticing prospect.”
Kendra would have listed any number of reasons she was not thrilled with her family at the moment, but she didn’t like him doing it. “Families are complicated. Yours certainly is—you told me so yourself.”
