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As if he’d finally become his father.
All the way through, at last.
Balthazar pushed away from the desk, moving without thought, almost as if he was trying to get away from that realization when it should have been cause for celebration. He should have been thrilled that he’d finally achieved what had long been the goal of his entire existence on this earth.
Demetrius Skalas had prided himself on his single-minded, emotionless pursuit of the bottom line. He had eradicated weakness, he had claimed. He felt nothing and took pride in it. He acted only in the interests of the company. Even the succession of beautiful women he sported on his arm, each one a blow to his despised wife, Demetrius claimed elevated his profile in the eyes of the world—and more importantly, in the eyes of the other titans of industry he considered his peers. All of whom preferred to do business with men they admired.
They had all admired Demetrius.
Balthazar had taken his beatings as a child, and had come to believe that his father was right—they made him stronger. And as he grew, he had dedicated himself, in word and deed, to following his father’s example. To locating and removing every hint of weakness he could find.
In place of any stray emotions, he had tended his thirst for revenge.
And in place of the pesky feelings that plagued other men, he had plotted the downfall of Thomas Connolly and his pathetic son.
Then she had come along and turned everything on its ear.
He found himself outside, the island drenched in the beauty of the setting sun, though all he saw was the past.
A past that was threaded through with the same driving goal, always. Balthazar had told himself that he was giving Tommy Connolly rope to hang himself with while, over the course of years, he’d sat back and watched his enemy’s son steal from him. In the months since Kendra had given herself to him in New York, he had continued to wait.
Now, standing outside as the breeze picked up as the sun made its lazy descent, he had to question that choice.
He had told himself it was because he was waiting. To see if Kendra was with child. To see if it was time to flip the script on his revenge and approach it a different way—one that would involve his in-laws. Surely that required a different tack, he’d assured himself. He’d felt perfectly prepared to handle whatever came of Kendra’s potential pregnancy. First and foremost, he’d been thinking of the child’s legitimacy and the wedding he’d never imagined for himself.
What he hadn’t thought to reckon with were emotions.
Balthazar had congratulated himself on feeling nothing for Kendra—because surely, his abiding, distracting hunger for her didn’t count. Surely his obsession with her, with what she was doing and where she was going and every expression that crossed her pretty face, was about that same physical hunger.
It was nothing more, he’d told himself, time and again. Nothing but sex, lust and need.
He might not have liked those things in him, making him as basic as any other man, but they were understandable.
What he had not been prepared for was her pregnancy. Not the fact of it, which he’d seen coming or he wouldn’t have tracked her. But that wave of emotion that had struck him earlier. It had felt something like sacred when, together, they had held their hands over her belly and the life that grew within.
How could he possibly have prepared for that?
But even as he asked himself that question, he knew that there was another, more pointed query he needed to make. Just as he knew everything in him wanted to avoid it.
He walked until he reached the edge of one of the cliffs, then stood there, bracing himself. His hands were in fists at his side while the sun seemed to pause in its fall toward the sea to hit him full in the face.
A bit too much like clarity for his tastes.
And all he could see was the golden shimmer of Kendra’s eyes, as if she was here before him, watching him.
Waiting for him, something in him whispered.
“Beliefs do not live in your bones, they live in your head and your heart,”she had told him.“You can change your feelings, Balthazar. All you have to do iswantto.”
He had never wanted to do anything of the kind. He had never wanted to feel a thing.
And now he felt ravaged by thesefeelings.
Enemies he could fight. He was good at that. It only took waiting, watching, and then striking their weaknesses when they presented themselves.
But how could he fight this?
Kendra had used the wordfamily. That damned word.
