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Worse, she had suggested that the two of them could make their own, and he had seen the hope in her gaze when she’d said it.
God help him, but he had no defense againsthope.
He wanted to reject it the way he had rejected her. He wanted to already be far away from here, winging his way back to the only life he knew.
But he couldn’t make himself turn around. He couldn’t make himself leave.
Because her hope was infectious.
And if he accepted that, he accepted that he was far, far weaker than he’d ever imagined.
Because he’d dreamed all of this, hadn’t he? Balthazar had tortured himself, not simply with fantasies of availing himself of her beautiful body and slaking that hunger for her that had haunted him across the years. But more, he’d dreamed of her innocence. And not because he had ever put any great stock in virginity, as it was simply one more thing men liked to use for barter, whether women wished it or not.
But because innocence felt like a shortcut to a different life.
He thought of his poor mother, wrecked so many years ago. Long before she’d been tossed out by his father, she’d been left to fend for herself while Demetrius had cheated on her. After they’d divorced, Demetrius had repeated his behavior with any number of subsequent wives—but none ofthemcould claim they hadn’t known what they were getting into.
His first wife, the mother of his sons, had been blindsided. And what had been the sin that Demetrius had believeddeservedthe way he’d responded? Balthazar had stopped asking himself that when he was still a boy.
But he knew the answer now.
His mother had felt far too much and Demetrius had despised her for it.
Balthazar had learned to do the same.
He looked down at his hands, uncurling his fingers so he could see the flat of his palms.
He could still feel the warmth of Kendra’s belly, the life she carried within. And then, finally, asked himself the question he’d been avoiding since the night he’d realized that he’d had sex with Kendra Connolly without using any protection.
Did he truly wish to do to his child what his father had done to him?
He thought about taking his own hands, the ones he gazed at there on that cliffside, and raising them against his own child. He thought of carrying out this second phase of his revenge as he’d planned when the child was no more than a possibility instead of a fact, taking it to its logical extreme.
Did he plan to makehis babyhate its mother?
Was that who he was?
His heart kicked at him, too hard and too loud. And Balthazar tried to tell himself that there was no other way. That he had committed himself to this path and that was the end of it. But the dreams he’d had told him differently.
So had Kendra.
And if Balthazar could decide to be any man he chose, there was only one real question left. Would he choose to be this one?
Because suddenly, as the sun painted the sky the bright, brilliant shades of gold that reminded him only of Kendra, he looked back and saw the life he’d been living in a very different light than he would have if he’d considered it six months ago.
He had become his father after all. Cold. Unfeeling. Half monster, half machine, and proud of the worst parts of both. Dedicated entirely to a business that already had made him more money than he could ever spend in his own lifetime. Or ten successive lifetimes.
As if that mattered.
It seemed to him here, now, that it was stark. Empty.
A lifeless existence.
Until Kendra had come in and infused the prison he hadn’t even realized he lived in with all of her bright color.
How could he sentence his child to that same cell?
And it took him a moment to realize that what walloped him then was grief.
