THEY LANDED IN Athens the next morning.
And while Balthazar had not, technically, kidnapped her, he hadn’t exactly left her any choice.
Kendra hated herself for not finding a way out of the situation, but she hadn’t.
She hadn’t—and she wasn’t sure she really wanted to ask herself why that was.
Balthazar hadn’t bothered to continue arguing with her last night. He’d left her after flashing that enigmatic smile, the one that had made her shiver with foreboding. But before he’d driven off in that absurd sports car of his that she was fairly certain was as bespoke as the clothes he wore, he’d made a quick call in emphatic Greek.
Within moments, two glossy black SUVs had pulled up.
“You called the cavalry?” she’d asked.
He’d smiled again, and it wasn’t any better that time. “Insurance, that is all.”
“Weird.” Kendra had eyed the men who poured out of the SUVs. Balefully. “They look a great deal like your own private army.”
“You may call them whatever you like, Kendra,” Balthazar had said. “They are not here for you.”
“Excellent news. I’ll have them make themselves comfortable in the lavender fields while I take myself off to Monaco for the weekend.”
“Do as you like.” Another, third version of that smile of his made her bones feel cold. “My men will protect my potential heir.”
And then he’d taken himself off in that obnoxious car, leaving his men behind.
Men who would protect the baby she refused to believe she was carrying, not her.
Kendra had retreated back into the cottage and barricaded herself inside. She’d pulled all the curtains and then had sat there on one of Great-Aunt Rosemary’s cozy little couches, very deliberately not staring across the room at the sack of pregnancy tests Balthazar had left behind.
She had done nothing but obsessively count days since he’d showed up at the winery. She’d gone over it again and again. The truth was, she hadn’t spared a single thought about whether or not her monthly cycle was showing up as it should have been...because she’d never had any reason to think about such things. Not only had Kendra never been late, as far as she knew—she’d never had any reason to worry about it if for some reason she had been.
Why hadn’t it occurred to her to worry about it now that there was a reason?
But she knew the answer to that. She might wake in the night, suffused with heat and with Balthazar’s name on her lips, but by day she never, ever allowed herself to think about that night. To think about him. Part of that was also not thinking about her own body—from the things he’d made her feel to its biological functions.
As she’d sat there in her cottage, barricaded in against truths she didn’t want to face, Kendra honestly hadn’t known if she’d been motivated by denial...or survival.
Either way, the longer she’d stared at that bag full of pregnancy tests, the more it seemed to overtake the room, crowding out the books and the art Great-Aunt Rosemary had left behind. And the more it seemed directly connected to the panic inside of her, pounding at her, filling her up like a wicked flood.
Until she couldn’t breathe.
And so it was that Kendra discovered that she really was pregnant with Balthazar Skalas’s child while hiding in the small bathroom of her great-aunt’s cottage after midnight, hiding from the men he’d sent to make sure she stayed there, after making implicit kidnapping threats.
She’d taken all five tests, sure that they had to be defective. That the next one would prove that she wasn’t actually living through...this.
But they all showed her the exact same thing.
Kendra was pregnant.
And when she finally stopped chugging water so she could make a new test happen, when she finally accepted that no new test was going to change the truth...the whole world shifted.
With such a dramatic, irrevocable jolt that she’d found herself on the floor of the bathroom, her back against the wall, staring at the incontrovertible evidence before her.
Five times over.
She’d remembered that night in his office vividly. Too vividly, really, when she now knew what would become of it.
Had she been so quick to pretend nothing had happened because it had been so...raw? She was an educated, sophisticated woman who not only had not inquired about protection, she’d never given it a moment’s thought, afterward. It had never occurred to her that anything like this could happen.
And as she’d huddled there on the cool bathroom floor, she’d had to face a number of realities. Including the fact that she’d tried her hardest to blank out what had happened in New York because it hadn’t been anything like the fantasies of him she’d carried around in her head after encountering him in that gazebo. It had been so much more...physical. Each and every sensation so intense she still wasn’t sure if it had been pain or pleasure—only that she wanted more. She didn’t have a single memory or feeling about Balthazar Skalas that wasn’t complicated. Complex.
When she’d been taught again and again that sex was no place for tangled emotions and overwhelming memories. It was meant to be a lovely, celebratory thing, that was all. Not an experience so darkly erotic that she could only face it fast asleep.
“Daylight is no place for unpleasant things, dear,” her mother had always said.
Kendra had only realized then, curled up on the floor, that she’d taken that to heart. Maybe a bit too much to heart. Because she’d been living her whole life like this, hadn’t she? Her head so far in the sand she was surprised she could breathe through it.
The last few months had been nothing more or less than the inevitable conclusion of a lifetime of her own ostrich impression. She’d ignored the obvious indicators that her father was always the kind of man who would send his own daughter off to appeal to Balthazar as a man. She’d ignored the unpleasant reality that he supported Tommy, who was by no definition a good man. She’d ignored everything that didn’t suit her.
Maybe it wasn’t a surprise that she’d ignored what was happening in her own body, too.
She’d sat there, her knees pulled beneath her chin, too stunned by her own stupidity to even bother crying about it.
That would come later, Kendra had suspected. She could almost feel an emotional breakdown hovering there like a storm, just out of reach over the horizon.
But first she could do nothing but marvel at her own naivete.
Balthazar was upsettingly correct. Her own family had pimped her out.
And it wasn’t as if he was much better. She could feel the hatred in him. He seethed with it. He hated her brother. He detested her father.
Much as some part of her didn’t wish to think about it, he was no fan of hers, either.
And still she had marched herself into that office building, a lamb to the slaughter—though in her case, she’d actually believed she was some kind of wolf, not a lamb at all.
But now it was all worse.
So much worse, Kendra didn’t truly understand how she was going to live through whatever came next.
She’d spent her whole life trying to be perfect, and instead, she’d gone and gotten herself knocked up the first time she’d so much as touched a man. It was her parents’ worst nightmare, as they’d made clear a thousand times while she was growing up. Her mother might very well slip off into a coma, so appalled was Emily Connolly sure to be at this news.
That was bad enough. Far worse was the trepidation she could feel churn about inside her as she tried to imagine how on earth she was going to navigate sharing a child with a man like Balthazar when she wasn’t sure she could survive sharing a car ride with him.
She’d actually laughed out loud, there in her bathroom, then winced at how unhinged she sounded.
“I’m sorry,” she’d whispered, sneaking her hands over her belly, though it still seemed impossible to her that there could be a life inside. A life. A baby. My baby, something in her whispered. “I’ll find a way, don’t worry.”
Because Balthazar Skalas might be his own level of impossible, but Kendra had no intention of hiding from reality any longer. She was going to be a mother. She was not going to be her mother.
She’d never been any good at fighting for herself, but she would fight for this child.
“No matter what,” she’d promised the tiny life growing inside her, there on the bathroom floor and a few more times in her bed, too, for good measure.
But the next morning, far too early for someone who’d stayed up as late as she had, Balthazar had been pounding at her door, and Kendra had made a decision on the spot that there was no point fighting him. Probably because she knew he would win. And she really didn’t want to see how, exactly, he would go about physically removing her from France.
She’d seen no reason to share the news with him. He could wait for the ill-gotten gains of his kidnapping attempt to learn what she already knew. If he marinated in his temper while he waited, all the better.
He’d stood there in the cottage’s main room, a thundercloud of fury as she’d moved about collecting items like her passport and her great-aunt’s oversize scarf that she could fling about her neck and pretend was a fashion accessory when really, it was more like a portable blanket she planned to use to soothe herself.
Because if the look on Balthazar’s face had been any guide, Kendra was going to need some soothing.
He’d driven her to a private airfield outside of Nice without a word. The flight had been short and equally silent.
The tension between them was so thick it seemed to settle on Kendra like smog.
Once in Athens, Balthazar herded her off the plane and into yet another astonishingly glossy and aspirational sports car, then drove her into the center of the ancient city itself.
“I’m astonished,” she managed to say when he stopped before what looked like an indistinguishable block of flats. “I would have thought that the mighty Balthazar lived on his own mountaintop. In an appropriate castle. With several moats.”
“This is a medical facility,” he clipped out, sounding bored and impatient. “And this is a private entrance.”
He parked the car at the behest of a set of overawed attendants, then marched her into an elevator. She was whisked up to a series of private rooms, a waiting area and then an exam room, and Balthazar only glared stonily at her when she dared to suggest she might like some privacy.
“Really,” she tried. “I would prefer it.”
His mouth curved into that hard line. “This is no time for fantasies, Kendra.”
When it was done, both pregnancy and paternity had been determined.
Kendra felt the truth like a stone, heavy and unwieldy, crushing her even when she stood upright. Balthazar, meanwhile, had transformed from a mere thunderstorm to the threat of a far more terrifying tornado, evident in the blazing fury she could see in his dark eyes.
The trip back to that offensively bright car of his was so tense that she found herself shaking.
“Balthazar,” she began as he roared his way out of the parking area and back into the crowded streets of Athens, “I really think—”
“If you have any sense of self-preservation whatsoever,” he growled, an imposing fury beside her as he drove, “you will be quiet.”
The ferocity in his words left her winded.
Kendra decided self-preservation was an excellent idea and stayed silent for the rest of the drive. It was a short one, ending at another private entrance to a corporate parking area and another gleaming elevator. Where he ushered her, in that same grim silence, up to the roof of an office building she only belatedly realized was the corporate headquarters of Skalas & Sons. Where a helicopter waited to carry them off.
She could have argued, she supposed. Thrown a fit on the rooftop, where there were no witnesses but Balthazar’s men and the ancient city spread out beneath them. She could at least have tried.
But she didn’t see how fighting a losing battle with a tornado was going to help either her or her baby.
Her baby.
Kendra might hate herself for her weaknesses when this was all said and done, but for the moment, she wrapped her arms around the middle she’d thought was expanding thanks to eating her way through Provence and sat with that. She was having a baby.
His baby.
And when they landed on a small island surrounded by a gleaming blue sea, she didn’t have it in her to make smart remarks about castles or moats. Because the island was not large. There was no sign of anything like a village. There was one sprawling house on the higher end of the island, a collection of outbuildings, and beaches.
She supposed most people would consider it paradise, but she knew better.
It was a prison.
Balthazar marched off into the sprawling villa, a celebration of Greek architecture with wide-open spaces that flowed in and out of the outdoors. Letting in the sea and sky from every angle.
Kendra followed him because what else was she to do? Attempt to fly herself back to the mainland?
“There is a skeleton staff on the island,” he informed her when he led her to a bedroom that sat above the sea and then stood there, glowering at her, as if she’d impregnated herself purely to spite him. It occurred to her that he thought she had. “They’ll operate according to the orders of the housekeeper, Panagiota, who has been with my family since my father was young and is deeply loyal to me. You may assume that anything she says comes directly from me.”
“You’re leaving me here?” Kendra should have assumed that was what he was doing, she knew. She had the absurd thought that if she’d known she wouldn’t be returning to the cottage, she would have packed more of her things. As if her things were what mattered at the moment. “For how long?”
He took a long while to simply look at her, as if he was trying to see beneath her skin. As if he was looking for something. “For as long as it takes.”
She tried to gather herself. “You are aware, I hope, that there’s a specific timeline? And we’re in the second trimester. Leaving only one remaining.”
“I can count.” His tone was withering.
“Are you really planning to leave me here for six months?”
But even as she asked the question, she knew the answer. She was glad she’d wrapped her great-aunt’s gauzy scarf around her on the helicopter ride. It felt like a hug.
“Consider this a kindness,” Balthazar bit off. “There’s nothing I have to say to you right now that you would like to hear, I promise you.”
“Right,” she managed to say, trying to find her feet beneath her. Trying to remind herself that no matter how intimidating she found him, and no matter how beautiful, this wasn’t only about the two of them any longer. “Because when we had sex with each other and were both present and accounted for in your office, only I was scheming. You were nothing but a naive maiden, lost in the woods.”
“Do not test me, Kendra.” His voice was something like a whisper, though lethal. She could feel it pierce her like a blade. She gripped the scarf around her even more tightly. “You will not like how I handle you. How I address what you have done to me. Let me promise you this.”
“You can’t really think I’m going to quietly remain here.” She shook her head at him. “I have a life, Balthazar. One I made all for myself, no matter what you might think of it. I have—”
“If you wished to have a life, you should not have irrevocably changed mine.”
He moved closer then, towering over her, and she could see a stark ferocity in his gaze that should have terrified her. Instead, something in her longed to meet it. Rise up on her toes, tilt her head, and—
Well. It wasn’t as if she was unaware of her own issues. There was that.
“Perhaps it’s escaped your notice,” she said, hoping the things she longed for so foolishly weren’t written all over her face, but mine is the life that is already changed. Mine is the life you decided to alter in more ways than one. I’m the one carrying this baby. I’m the one you’ve carted all over Europe today, and apparently plan to leave behind on this island.”
“The life you knew is over.” She watched as a muscle clenched in his jaw. “I suspect this was your plan from the start. I must congratulate you. I did not see it coming.”
“Yes,” she snapped at him, “I decided that I would miraculously become pregnant, the way all women do. That’s why there is no such thing as fertility issues. All women decide, and then do it.”
He made a sound she could only describe as a growl, but she didn’t slink away. Something in her thrilled to the sound. She kept her gaze steady and forced her knees to remain strong beneath her.
“You may have saved your brother after all,” Balthazar said in that quiet way of his that made the world shake around him. “But I promise you, Kendra. You will live to regret this.”
For a moment she thought—wished?—that those big, hard hands of his were going to reach out to her. Take hold of her.
Touch her the way he did in her dreams, night after night—
But instead, Balthazar turned on his heel and stalked away from her.
Kendra stayed where she was, shaken so deeply by her own longing, even now, that she was surprised she didn’t sink to the floor. Was it self-hatred that made her tremble? Or was it that impossible yearning that she couldn’t stamp out?
And then she had to force herself not to panic, somehow, when she heard the helicopter’s rotors. When Balthazar disappeared into the sky, leaving her behind with these things she knew about herself now.
The worst of them being that no matter what he did, she still wanted him.
It took Kendra a solid ten days to investigate every single nook and cranny of the house and each of the outbuildings, desperate to find something she could use to make her escape.
There had been nothing. Panagiota was kind enough, but firm. She apologized repeatedly, but changed nothing. There was no cell service. Certainly no internet. At least, not any that Kendra was permitted to access.
Though she had to face the fact that even if there was, she had no idea who she would call. Her family would be delighted that she was in a position to bargain further with Balthazar. They would do nothing to help her.
Kendra took it as a mark of her personal growth that she knew this now.
The same way she knew, when she’d finished marching around the small island looking for boats to the mainland, that the real truth was worse.
She didn’t want to leave.
She wanted Balthazar to come back.
The way she knew he would, because no matter how angry he might have been, she was carrying his child.
Maybe what she did looked like surrender, but Kendra rather thought she was conserving her strength for the real fight—which certainly wasn’t the quietly insistent Panagiota, who was, after all, only doing Balthazar’s bidding.
She ate what he wanted her to eat, according to the nutritional guide he’d apparently left with the housekeeper. There was no way off the island—and she’d looked—so she took long, rambling walks on the beaches, over the fields, and through the groves of olive trees.
She slept in the bed he’d told her was hers, and even though he wasn’t there, she felt the imprint of him as if he truly was holding her where he wanted her.
“By the neck,” she muttered to herself one morning.
But she knew that wasn’t quite right. She knew it was quite a bit lower.
One week passed, then another. Summer began to wane, though on a Greek island in the Aegean it was hard to note the difference.
Balthazar did not contact her. His messages were sent through Panagiota. They were always terse and to the point, and still, Kendra was sure she could feel the gathering storm of his temper from across the sea.
She heard the rotors first on an afternoon six weeks after he’d left her. She was curled up in her favorite spot, a swinging chair out on one of the terraces, the sun in her face and a book in her lap from the library she’d been reading her way through.
Kendra felt a kind of electricity shoot through her at the sound. She sat up, aware that if she squinted, this prison of hers bore a distinct resemblance to what she might have considered paradise when she was younger. Nothing to do but take long walks on a secluded beach and lie about reading books? She should have been delirious with joy.
Sometimes she forgot that she wasn’t. That she’d been imprisoned here, no matter how pretty it was.
That she was pregnant with the child of a man who detested her.
A man whose memory woke her in the night, still, on fire with need.
Kendra stayed where she was. She kept on gazing down at her book, even when she heard the faint sound of footsteps against the stones behind her.
And she would have known it was Balthazar even if he hadn’t made a sound. She could feel the leading edge of the storm. She could feel the wind snapping at her, the temperature drop, and far off, she was certain, the warning rumble of thunder.
She should have been scared. Instead, what charged around inside her felt a lot more like exhilaration.
“What a pretty picture you make,” came his sardonic, insulting voice. Darker than she recalled, maybe. But still, it arrowed straight to her core, making her melt. That easily. “What a shame that I know it is all lies.”
Kendra wanted to hurl the book she was reading at his head.
Somehow, she refrained.
“How nice of you to stop in, Balthazar,” she said calmly instead. “You do know, don’t you, that pregnancies keep going even if you’d prefer to pretend that they don’t? I mention this because eventually, when you deign to make an appearance, I won’t be the only one here.”
“The doctor is even now setting up an exam room in one of the guest bedrooms. He will perform a full examination.”
“A prison infirmary,” she replied gaily. “What a treat.”
Kendra looked at him then and she wished she hadn’t.
Because looking at Balthazar...hurt.
He looked like exactly who and what he was. The devil, one of the richest men alive, and her enemy.
All wrapped up in that brooding, near brutal intensity and a dark, bespoke suit that proclaimed his power to the whole of the Mediterranean.
If he was less beautiful, would she be less...thrown?
It shouldn’t matter how beautiful he is, she snapped at herself. It should only matter that he’s locked you away on this island.
“I don’t know why you bothered to come,” she continued, keeping her voice brighter than it should have been. “At this point, wouldn’t it be easier if you just stayed away? I can raise your child in shame and solitude all by myself.”
“I doubt you feel anything approaching shame,” he said, with one of those hard laughs that nearly made her shiver, though she sat in the sunshine. “And it is of no matter, anyway. I have no intention of leaving you here forever, no matter how tempting the prospect. Like it or not, you will be the mother of my child. And I am Balthazar Skalas. There are certain conventions that need to be followed.”
“I can’t imagine what you mean. More kidnaps? More insults and accusations? I can hardly wait.”
His smile then was wintry. It made something cold and bright flash over her, worse than before.
“Why, Kendra. I thought you knew.”
That he seemed to be enjoying himself made her shudder, and she knew he saw it.
He thinks he’s beaten me, Kendra thought, and found she was holding her breath.
“I’ve come to congratulate you, of course,” Balthazar told her. His dark eyes gleamed with satisfaction. Worse, with triumph. “As we are to be married tomorrow.”