BALTHAZAR HAD NO intention of doing anything of the kind.
He gave the orders. He did not follow them.
But Kendra sat before him, a vision in flowing white and her hair pinned up to catch the kiss of the sun. Her cheeks were flushed, her freckles a tempting spray across her nose and over her bared shoulders. It made him want to do nothing but eat her like a dessert far sweeter than Panagiota’s baklava.
Kendra was sugar and flame and all his now. His wife.
His wife.
Balthazar had not expected that word, common as it was, to get to him like this. Its meaning rocked through him, almost too hot to bear. He blamed that age-old ceremony and the words the old priest had spoken over them. He blamed the rings he’d slid onto her finger, the platinum catching the light and the diamonds so bright they nearly dimmed the sun.
But he could blame anything and everything. What he didn’t understand was how she seemed to grow more beautiful by the moment, especially when this should have been a festival arranged around his revenge, not...whatever it was she imagined she was doing. He glared at her, but she only smiled, looking happy enough to wait forever for him to do as she’d demanded.
He could not imagine what made her imagine she had any power here.
Just as he could not imagine why he wasn’t claiming his by right. And claiming her while he was at it.
“What’s the matter?” she asked almost offhandedly, a gleam in those golden eyes of hers. “Don’t tell me that the mighty Balthazar Skalas is afraid to do something here, on his own private island, that I did without blinking in the middle of a busy office? How funny. I thought you were meant to be the powerful one.”
“Do you think goading me will work?”
She only smiled.
It turned that heat inside him...volcanic.
Before he knew it, Balthazar found himself rising from his seat. As he did, he took great pleasure in watching her eyes widen.
Not quite so sure of herself, then. No matter what she said.
And that made everything inside him run molten.
He made short work of his clothing. He shrugged out of the dark suit he’d worn for the ceremony, stripping down until he stood before her wholly naked. The sun poured all over him. The sea air was like a caress.
But best of all was that expression on Kendra’s face.
It looked a great deal like awe.
He watched her flush. He watched that same giddy heat move its way down her neck. The dress she wore left her arms bare and he could see that same flush there, then goose bumps to match as she gazed up at him.
Balthazar felt everything shift. As if the world had spun about on its axis, then flattened him as it stopped still.
But he liked it.
Because he was the one standing naked before her, but he felt not a shred of supplication. No hint of weakness.
He had never felt more powerful in his life.
Had he called her names because he had sensed this, somehow? That a display of vulnerability led straight to something far more powerful? Had he wanted to diminish this very same light in her?
The notion sat uneasily in him. It pricked at him, reminding him of the reasons they were here, and married, and the revenge he had long ago vowed to rain down upon her father and the rest of her family...
But then he forgot it all. Because her eyes moved, almost convulsively, down over his chest. He was sure he could feel it like a touch over every ridge of his abdomen, every line of muscle. And she kept going until she found the hardest part of him, ready for her where he stood.
More than ready.
“If this is a proper audition,” he managed to say, in a voice made harsh with need, “will you require the complete demonstration?”
When she lifted her gaze to his again, the wildfire he saw there made him want to roar like the beast he had always feared he was.
Though he didn’t fear it now. Not when she looked at him as if the beast was precisely what she wanted.
God help him.
“Of course.” Kendra’s voice sounded husky now, though no less of a taunt. “Or how could I possibly make an informed decision?”
“How indeed.”
Balthazar crossed to her then, bent down, and lifted her into his arms.
He spared no thought for his plans. The promises he’d made himself about how he would handle this marriage, how he would treat the wife he’d never wanted, how all of this would become part of what was owed Thomas Connolly. It all seemed inconsequential when he held her like this, her flowing dress wrapping around them as he moved, like tendrils of that same dream he always seemed to have when she was near.
He knew it wasn’t true. It could never be true. And yet it haunted him.
Balthazar had intended to make it through his wedding secure in the purity of his fury. Secure in his hatred, his bitterness.
But when he’d looked up from the altar at the edge of the cliff to see Kendra coming toward him—in flowing white as she made her way through the ruins of the old chapel, flowers in hands and sunshine all over her face—the same dream that had woken him up in the night too many times to count now had walloped him all over again.
Constantine had murmured something that sounded suspiciously like steady.
Balthazar had been forced to ignore it, because the only other option was acknowledging that he had made some sound, or some face that allowed his brother to think he was ever anything but steady. That had proclaimed his weakness to the whole of the watching Aegean Sea.
And also because his bride was coming to him in the island breeze.
And for the time it took her to walk to his side, he tortured himself with fantasies of her innocence. He had never cared about such things before. It was only her. It was only this woman he could not bear to imagine with anyone else. Only this woman who he could not seem to imagine with anyone but him.
It should not have felt like torture, but she disturbed his sleep. The fantasy that she could come to him like that, bearing his child and no hand upon her but his... The dream that she might truly be his, without any bitterness coloring their days...
He knew better. He’d known better. Nothing had changed when he’d put a ring on her finger. No blessings, however sanctified, could change who they were.
And yet.
He carried her into the villa and took her straight to his private suite. It was a Greek daydream of archways to welcome in the sea and the sky. Everything was white and blue and then, there in the middle, his wife with her hair like flame and eyes of the brightest gold.
Like a treasure.
By the time he set her down gently at the foot of the wide, low bed, Balthazar was so hard, so greedy for her, that he was surprised she hadn’t already burst into a thousand pieces with the force of it.
“Let me tell you how I want you to audition,” she said, though she had to reach out to him to keep her balance and better still, she sounded breathless.
He found he liked that more than he should have. That no matter what—no matter the truth of things and the dark reality he would return to as soon as he did something about the hunger that was tearing him apart—he got to her, too.
“I find I have a particular take on the role,” he told her, his voice dark. The greed in him like its own, beating pulse. “Why don’t you tell me how you feel about it once I’m done.”
This time, when he set his mouth to hers, he had no intention of stopping.
He kissed her, deep and long. He got his hands in her hair, scattering the pins she’d used to secure it to the top of her head. It wasn’t enough. No matter how he angled his head, no matter how close he held her, he wanted more.
He wanted everything.
Balthazar didn’t understand this drive in him. This need. The dream and the greed, the feelings that battered at him, over and over, when he had been so certain for so long that he had none—
He felt as if something in him had broken. Yet as he held Kendra in his arms, he had the strangest notion that he had never been more whole.
That wasn’t something he could take on board then, so Balthazar spun her around instead. He watched the deep, jarring breath she took as he worked to pull that dress up the length of her newly voluptuous body, then off.
Then she was before him in only a bra that wrapped around her back, holding her breasts as if on a shelf, and a skimpy pair of lace panties that made his mouth water. Her back was to him, so he indulged himself without worrying how his face might have been betraying him.
He put his mouth on the nape of her neck, then made his way down the tempting line of her spine. He removed that bra as he went, his hands trailing behind his mouth to graze her sides but not quite making it around to the particular temptation of those perfect breasts, now much larger than before. Not yet.
He found the small of her back and hooked his fingers in the lace he found high on her hips, then tugged it down as he bared the whole of her to his view.
Crouched there behind her, he turned her around so he could inhale the scent of her arousal. Sugar and heat. Then he indulged himself completely by licking his way directly into all of her soft, wet heat.
She jolted against him, making a shocked sort of sound that only made the greed in him worse. He was sure there was another lightning strike. He felt it go through her, and him.
Beneath his tongue, she quivered, but that was not enough. Not nearly enough.
Could anything be enough? something in him asked.
He wrapped one arm around her hips and pulled one of her legs over the width of his shoulder, opening her to him. Completely.
And then he devoured her.
She was sweet and he was savage. And the noises she made as she arched back, offering herself to him, pulsed in him like light. Like heat.
Like that greed he thought might never leave him.
He felt her convulse against his mouth, her body jerking as she sobbed out something incoherent that he thought might be his name.
And even as she shook, Balthazar was moving. He hauled her up into his arms again and then tumbled the both of them down into the embrace of that wide mattress.
She was still shaking, still making sobbing sounds, and for a moment he lost himself all over again in the slide of her flesh against his.
Skin to skin, head to toe, at last.
Balthazar felt as if he’d never had a woman before. As if he never would again. As if she was the beginning and the end of everything—and all he wanted to do was get closer.
Everything was heat and delight, a dark and encompassing glory.
All he wanted was that everything, even if it killed them both.
He rolled to his back and pulled her astride him. He watched, breathing hard already, as she braced herself against his chest, looking something like intoxicated when he knew she hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol.
For that matter, neither had he—and that meant the spinning in his head was entirely due to Kendra.
He waited for her to shift herself into better position, to sheath him on a downward stroke he could almost feel already, but she didn’t.
It was as if she was trying to focus on him. Her hair tumbled around her shoulders like another lick of flame. Balthazar wanted to taste each individual freckle he could see in that sweet spray across her nose, and more across her shoulders.
She was busy breathing, so he held her for a moment. This woman who had come to him twice, both times at the bidding of men he despised. This woman he had taken from that cottage in France. This woman he had married and would call his wife, and who would be, no matter what else she was or became in time, the mother of his child.
For the first time, Balthazar let his gaze drop to her swollen belly, even more beautiful now that she wasn’t wearing clothes to conceal it.
His heart beat at him in a new way, then. More intense. More wild and dangerous.
A different kind of greed.
Balthazar slid his hands over her belly. He heard her breath catch, and though he ordered himself not to do it, he looked up and caught her gaze.
And for a moment he forgot who they were.
For moment he was nothing more and nothing less than a man holding the pregnant belly of a woman, both of them fully aware that the child they’d made was just there, just inside.
She sat astride him and a different kind of electricity moved between them. He could feel it. It was part of him, part of her. Not a lightning strike from elsewhere, but made from this. From the heat they sparked between them, and had from the moment she’d stepped into that gazebo.
He was unsurprised and something like furious and deeply glad all at once when she moved her hands to cover his.
And for a long while there was only breath. There was only this.
Only this.
There was creation and revelation. Wonder and hope. Sex and need and a baby woven into the middle of that.
Woven so tightly it only then occurred to Balthazar that he’d been kidding himself all this time to imagine that this wasn’t the very point of...everything.
This was life. Kendra had brought him life.
And in that moment, Balthazar could not bring himself to care what her reasons might have been. What her agenda was, then or now.
In that moment, he forgave her anything and everything, because there was this. The two of them, skin to skin. Their hands tangled up together to hold the new life they’d created.
The two of them breathing new life into him. Into her.
There was a them.
A family, something in him whispered.
It hit him like an explosion. A burst of near-incapacitating sensation.
It burned him alive.
“I need you,” Balthazar gritted out. “Now.”
And for a moment, he could have sworn that she was baffled. She blinked at him as if the words he used made no sense.
He shifted his hands to her hips, to grip her and move her into place. As he shifted her it seemed to dawn on her what she could do. She blew out a breath, then leaned forward, bracing herself on his chest.
Then he watched, somehow thrown and charmed at once, as she awkwardly tried to lift herself to take him within her.
And failed.
“Surely we are past this now,” he said, his voice gravelly with need. He reached between them to grab his own length and guide himself to her softness. God help him, to her heat. It nearly undid him. “I have already married you, Kendra. What is the point of continuing to play these games?”
“What games?” she asked, panting a bit as she wriggled against him, as if attempting to slot him into place.
As if she’d never done something like this before.
But that was not possible.
“I do not require you to pretend to be innocent,” he managed to say as she was poised there above him, her hair falling down to cocoon the both of them in all that fire.
His dreams could go to hell. This was better.
“Of course I’m not innocent,” Kendra replied with a laugh, holding herself up with her thighs splayed wide. “You took care of that in New York.”
“What does that mean?”
She blew out another breath as if gearing herself up. Then she took him into her body with a sudden thrust, sheathing him fully.
Finally.
Sensation punched through him. He almost lost his control, but wrenched back, barely.
Barely.
And she couldn’t have meant what he thought she’d meant. He was half-mad with wanting her, that was all.
“What do you mean about New York, Kendra?” he demanded, ordering himself to wait. To hold on.
To hear her answer before he lost his head.
“Oh,” Kendra said, sounding flustered and breathless. Sure enough, that telltale flush rolled down the length of her body, lighting her up as surely as a billboard in Times Square. “I thought you knew already. I was a virgin that night.”
And then she began to move.