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“I want to promise you that I will change,” he told her, though his heart hurt and he wanted things he could hardly identify. But that wanting never eased, not where she was concerned. Maybe it never would. “But I can only hope I will. I want to promise you the world, the stars above us now and the ground beneath our feet. I want to promise you that I will learn to be the kind of man who can love, and hope, and raise our child with those things instead of the back of my hand or the sting in my words. I have done a great many things in this life, Kendra. I was given a fortune and I made five more. I have feared no man I’ve ever met. I have faced every challenge set to me. All this, yet I have never loved. I...”
He wasn’t sure he could continue. But her eyes had gone bright again, gleaming with emotion.
All that emotion, like color, changing the world around them.
“Do you want to love, Balthazar?” She pulled in a ragged breath. “Do you want to love me?”
“I do,” he said, without pausing to consider it. Without worrying over the angles, the ramifications. And it all made sense then. All his broken pieces, all those feelings. The cacophony of the things that howled in him, louder by the second. And the fact that she was there in the middle of it all. The reason for everything. “I do.”
And when she smiled, it was like daybreak. But better, because it was all his.
“Then don’t worry,” she told him. “Concentrate on what you’re good at.”
He brought her hands to his mouth and placed a kiss there. “If you mean passion, I do not think that will be a problem.”
Her smile widened. “I believe you. But I don’t mean passion. That’s almost assured, I would think. No, Balthazar. I mean revenge.”
“I will renounce it,” he told her at once.
“But I don’t want you to.”
Kendra moved even closer, tipping her face back, so it was as if the whole world was her gaze. The press of her round belly into his body. Her hands he held in his.
Here on this altar where he had made her his wife.
“I want you to take your revenge, Balthazar,” Kendra told him, solemn and sure. “The most perfect way possible. I want you to let me love you. I want you to love me in return. I want us to raise this child with joy.”
“Joy,” he repeated, like vows etched in stone.
“Not the way we were raised, always made to feel that we were never enough.” She shook her head and her tears spilled over, but she was smiling. God help him, but he could watch that smile forever. He intended to do just that. “I want us to live life, big and bright and happy.”
“Then that is what we will do,” Balthazar promised her. “No matter what.”
“That will be the ultimate revenge,” Kendra said as she melted against him. “A life well lived, together.”
And as he swept her up into his arms, the stars shone down, like a blessing. A promise.
Their true vows had finally been spoken.
And their real life began.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
REVENGECERTAINLYWASSWEET, Kendra thought ten years later.
She sat in her favorite spot on the cozy sofa in Great-Aunt Rosemary’s cottage in France. Outside it was a golden, glorious summer, which reminded her of her first months here. She smiled, remembering it. Pregnant without knowing it and so focused on choosing a new path in life. Treating strangers she waited on with kindness when she hardly knew how to offer the same to herself.
All without the slightest bit of knowledge of how profoundly her life was about to change, like it or not.
“I wish I’d known you better,” she murmured to the room at large.
But she would have to settle for knowing herself. And she thought her prickly great-aunt would have approved.
Outside, she could hear the approach of excited voices, and smiled even wider. She could pick them all out from each other, each voice like a new song in her heart. Serious, delightfully odd Irene, who had made Kendra a mother and made her laugh, daily. She was almost a decade old now, when Kendra could still remember the shock and miracle of her arrival. She had been born straight into her father’s hands, and as if it were yesterday, Kendra recalled gazing at Balthazar over Irene’s tiny, fragile head, the wonder almost too bright to bear.
It was still that bright.
“If we’re going to have a family,” Balthazar had said when Irene was still new, “then we might as well do it right.”
