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No innocent could possibly melt like that, arching back beneath the onslaught of his need, his longing, both pounding through him like a storm. No innocent would open herself up to him so eagerly, then come apart in his palm so readily.
He’d been so hard he’d ached, another new sensation. He’d wanted to peel her out of the dress she wore, lay her out beneath him on a wide bed in a room with a locked door and sate himself fully.
Instead she had turned away, then run.
And when he’d finally made his way back into the tedious party, astounded at what had happened to him, everything had made a sickening kind of sense.
Thomas Connolly, the pompous git, had been making a speech with his family arrayed behind him. Smirking Tommy, the sort of vicious alcoholic heir who thought his money would protect him from his sins. The overtly medicated wife, looking blank and distant even up close.
And Kendra, the daughter, Balthazar understood in that instant was as corrupt as the rest of them, for all she had stood beside her mother, reeking of the innocence he knew she did not possess.
Eighteen months later, when the first discrepancies in Skalas & Sons’ accounts with the Connolly family’s shipping concern appeared, Balthazar could have made his move. But he had remembered that night, the sheer heat of Kendra in his hand, and had waited.
He had not merely allowed Tommy his rope. He had spooled it out himself so there could be no doubt whatsoever when Tommy hung himself with it.
Balthazar told himself it was triumph, not disappointment, that pounded in him as Kendra came to stand just there on the other side of his desk.
Because he should have known that night three years ago that she was like the rest of her family, whether he’d known who she was or not. That he’d been fooled for even a moment gnawed at him.
There was no such thing as innocence. Not in his world and certainly not in her morally bankrupt family. For his part, Balthazar had been raised a Skalas, which was akin to walking forth with a golden target on his back. He had never had a single friend—or woman, or colleague—who had not betrayed him, or could be prevailed upon to betray him, for the right price.
A lesson he had learned young.
His own brother would cheerfully stab him in the back if it benefited him. Balthazar had no doubt about that. It was why he and Constantine had split things up neatly between them. Better not to offer each other the temptation, they’d decided.
The threat of mutually assured destruction kept them friendly enough, no matter what the tabloids said. They were the only thing they had, after all.
Something that was certainly not true of Kendra Connolly.
“What exactly are you offering me?” he asked her, trying to keep his tone even when inside, he raged.
She was close enough now that he could read her expression. Or try. He could have sworn what he saw there was something like misery. Or apprehension.
Or, a cynical voice inside him chimed in,she’s merely good at what she does.
Too good.
Because he was certain, for a moment, that he could detect a faint tremor in her lips. Before she firmed them into a straight line and he became equally certain he’d imagined it.
“Name your price,” she invited him.
“I am more interested in what it is you think I want.” He eyed her as he would any conquest, business or personal. Assessing profit and loss. Looking for weaknesses to exploit to his benefit. “What can you imagine you have to offer that I do not already have?”
She spread out her hands again, though this time it read as less of a surrender.
“Me,” she said.
Balthazar watched that pulse in her neck react. If he didn’t know better, he would think that she was desperate when he felt certain that she was not. That this, like that night three years ago, was nothing but more deception.
“I think you overestimate your charms,” he said with cruel deliberation. “Do you really imagine you are worth more than two million dollars?”
She blanched at that, but stood her ground. “Of course.”
“I do not wish to insult you,” he murmured. Though that was a lie. “But I would not pay a single dollar for something I could get for free. In abundance. And do.”
“And here I thought you preferred to keep mistresses,” she shot back at him, to his great surprise. “Hardly free, is it?”
“You should be less opaque.” Balthazar shrugged. “One night to clear your brother’s debt? That is not so appealing. But a mistress? Mine for as long as I am interested? That is a different proposition altogether. Though far more...strenuous.”
