BALTHAZAR MEANT TO leave the island entirely.
He stormed from the bedchamber and pulled on the first clothing he could find in the attached dressing room. He would go to Athens, he decided. He would do what he had always done and lose himself in work. In the business. In the things that made him who he was and more, who he wished to remain.
The things that mattered, he thought.
And thinking of what mattered, perhaps heading back to New York made even more sense. He headed for the office suite he kept in the villa, finding all of his devices charged and ready for him, but he didn’t pick up his mobile. He didn’t give the order to have the helicopter readied for the flight to the mainland. Instead, he found himself staring at the desk before him, seeing nothing.
Nothing but the choices that had brought him here.
And wrapped around everything, shot through it all, he saw Kendra’s face. Her beautiful face and her lovely eyes filled with tears.
Tears he had put there, Balthazar knew.
He saw the way she’d stared at him, clutching that dress to her chest as if he was nothing more than a rampaging beast. A soulless monster, as he’d often been accused.
As if he’d finally become his father.
All the way through, at last.
Balthazar pushed away from the desk, moving without thought, almost as if he was trying to get away from that realization when it should have been cause for celebration. He should have been thrilled that he’d finally achieved what had long been the goal of his entire existence on this earth.
Demetrius Skalas had prided himself on his single-minded, emotionless pursuit of the bottom line. He had eradicated weakness, he had claimed. He felt nothing and took pride in it. He acted only in the interests of the company. Even the succession of beautiful women he sported on his arm, each one a blow to his despised wife, Demetrius claimed elevated his profile in the eyes of the world—and more importantly, in the eyes of the other titans of industry he considered his peers. All of whom preferred to do business with men they admired.
They had all admired Demetrius.
Balthazar had taken his beatings as a child, and had come to believe that his father was right—they made him stronger. And as he grew, he had dedicated himself, in word and deed, to following his father’s example. To locating and removing every hint of weakness he could find.
In place of any stray emotions, he had tended his thirst for revenge.
And in place of the pesky feelings that plagued other men, he had plotted the downfall of Thomas Connolly and his pathetic son.
Then she had come along and turned everything on its ear.
He found himself outside, the island drenched in the beauty of the setting sun, though all he saw was the past.
A past that was threaded through with the same driving goal, always. Balthazar had told himself that he was giving Tommy Connolly rope to hang himself with while, over the course of years, he’d sat back and watched his enemy’s son steal from him. In the months since Kendra had given herself to him in New York, he had continued to wait.
Now, standing outside as the breeze picked up as the sun made its lazy descent, he had to question that choice.
He had told himself it was because he was waiting. To see if Kendra was with child. To see if it was time to flip the script on his revenge and approach it a different way—one that would involve his in-laws. Surely that required a different tack, he’d assured himself. He’d felt perfectly prepared to handle whatever came of Kendra’s potential pregnancy. First and foremost, he’d been thinking of the child’s legitimacy and the wedding he’d never imagined for himself.
What he hadn’t thought to reckon with were emotions.
Balthazar had congratulated himself on feeling nothing for Kendra—because surely, his abiding, distracting hunger for her didn’t count. Surely his obsession with her, with what she was doing and where she was going and every expression that crossed her pretty face, was about that same physical hunger.
It was nothing more, he’d told himself, time and again. Nothing but sex, lust and need.
He might not have liked those things in him, making him as basic as any other man, but they were understandable.
What he had not been prepared for was her pregnancy. Not the fact of it, which he’d seen coming or he wouldn’t have tracked her. But that wave of emotion that had struck him earlier. It had felt something like sacred when, together, they had held their hands over her belly and the life that grew within.
How could he possibly have prepared for that?
But even as he asked himself that question, he knew that there was another, more pointed query he needed to make. Just as he knew everything in him wanted to avoid it.
He walked until he reached the edge of one of the cliffs, then stood there, bracing himself. His hands were in fists at his side while the sun seemed to pause in its fall toward the sea to hit him full in the face.
A bit too much like clarity for his tastes.
And all he could see was the golden shimmer of Kendra’s eyes, as if she was here before him, watching him.
Waiting for him, something in him whispered.
“Beliefs do not live in your bones, they live in your head and your heart,” she had told him. “You can change your feelings, Balthazar. All you have to do is want to.”
He had never wanted to do anything of the kind. He had never wanted to feel a thing.
And now he felt ravaged by these feelings.
Enemies he could fight. He was good at that. It only took waiting, watching, and then striking their weaknesses when they presented themselves.
But how could he fight this?
Kendra had used the word family. That damned word.
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 against hope.
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 of them could 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 believed deserved the 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 make his baby hate 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.
For the mother he had lost when he was young, then had pushed away when she returned because he’d thought that might please his father. Only accepting the guilt and shame he’d felt over her treatment when it was too late for her. No amount of revenge in her name was ever going to change the fact that he was the one who had abandoned her.
And another kind of grief seized him, because while he had seen his father for who he was, Balthazar had always imagined himself immune. He’d been expected to be immune. He’d known Demetrius was a cruel man, certainly. A viciously cold one. A father who could not love and refused to allow such soft sentiments in anyone near him. A man who had raised two sons with enough violence that they felt that they dared not attempt it themselves.
Balthazar could do the same, of course. That had been his plan.
But for the first time he understood, not only how much damage had been done to him, but what he had lost.
How much he had lost.
That he had such darkness in him made him despair of himself. But the greater punch of grief was that, had it not been for Kendra and this baby he would have sworn he did not want, he might never have seen the truth about himself so clearly.
If it weren’t for Kendra, he would never have known.
He tried to fight it, but it was no use. Night was coming, bringing with it the heartless stars, each and every one of which seemed to punch their way inside of him.
And he could call it what he liked.
But Balthazar understood that the emotion he’d been avoiding the whole of his life had come for him, at last.
And it was no mystery to him why his father had abhorred them so. Emotions were messy. They tore through him now, storm after storm, never ceasing and always changing, making a mockery of the anger he tried to throw up as a shield.
He took it, one hurricane after the next turning him inside out and then slapping him back together as if he could ever be the same.
When he knew better. Because he’d seen colors now, and there was no way to go back from that. There was no way to make himself willfully blind.
Even if he had tried, he knew that he didn’t have it in him to sentence his child to that same stark and lifeless fate.
He was Balthazar Skalas. He surrendered to no man.
Lucky for him, then, that the only person on earth he intended to surrender to was a woman. His wife.
Assuming she would have him now that she knew the truth about her family and his, and the great, ugly weight of the revenge he’d tried so hard to take out on her.
He turned, surprised to find that he’d made his way to the altar where he had married her a lifetime ago on this very same, endless day. The ruins of the old chapel gleamed in the starlight and for moment, when he saw movement, he thought it was an apparition.
Or better still, that dream of his, come to comfort him once more.
But as she moved closer, he saw that it really was Kendra.
His heart skipped a beat.
She still wore her wedding gown, that flowing, frothy gown that gleamed an unearthly white in the starlight. And she looked wilder than she had this morning, as if the daylight had required compliance, but here in the dark, there was only her.
Her hair was a tousled flame, and he longed to run his hands through it all over again. He could see traces of the tears she’d cried, there on her cheeks as she drew closer, but she was not weeping now. If anything, she looked determined.
His own little warrior, who could not stop fighting, no matter what.
Balthazar had a vision of her in his New York office so long ago and felt his heart lurch all over again. In those moments before she’d seen him she’d stood at the window, staring out at the glittering sprawl of Manhattan. Her face had been so soft, suffused with that sweet heat that had entranced him, even then.
He had told himself he was unmoved, but that had been a lie.
And he’d waited longer than he should have, drinking her in. Something he would have denied to the death if she’d called him on it.
Something he couldn’t have admitted then, especially to himself.
Kendra stopped before him, the breeze making her seem half ghost, though he knew better. She was made of warmth and sunlight, even in the dark.
Maybe especially in the dark.
“I was sure that you would be halfway to New York by now,” she said.
There was a roaring thing in him, but he ignored it. “I intended to be.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Here I am,” he agreed.
And it felt...portentous. Huge. The roaring in him and that white gown in the breeze and the stars all around them, as if they knew.
Her gaze searched his. Balthazar wished that he could understand what he saw there. And he wished even more that he could find the words to tell her what had happened to him. In him. What she’d done to him.
But it all seemed inadequate when there was Kendra, staring up at him with that same openness as if he had not hurt her. Again and again.
“You should run from me, little one,” he said then. “Screaming, and in the opposite direction.”
“What would be the point of that?” she asked. Her lips curved. “This is a very small island. And I have no interest in drowning myself.”
He frowned at that, and that hint of levity when he wished to take responsibility, at last, for who and what he had become—
Kendra swayed closer to him, placing her hands on his chest.
And Balthazar...was unarmed.
He stared down at her hands, one of them bedecked in the rings he’d put there this morning. As he did, he became vaguely aware that he’d thrown on trousers and a haphazardly buttoned shirt, so that both of them were in white.
As if that made up for anything.
But it was her touch that astonished him. That would have broken him, he thought, had there been anything in him left to break.
“I told you that I’m your enemy,” he said then, his voice severe. “Since the moment I knew who you were, I have thought of nothing but crushing you, Kendra. You must know this.”
“I know it.” And though her lips were still curved, there was a certain steel in those golden eyes of hers. “But you are also my husband. And the father of my child. And I do not choose to be crushed, Balthazar.”
“Is it your choice?” he asked, though even as he did, he found himself moving to trap her hands there against his chest. To hold her, despite himself.
When he knew he should not tempt himself. That he did not deserve it. Or her.
“I want to be outraged, but I’m not,” she told him, almost solemnly. “I want to defend my father’s behavior, but I can’t. I tried to come up with excuses, but I don’t have any. The truth of the matter is that I’m not surprised to hear what he did to your mother. To you. Disappointed, maybe. But not, I’m afraid, surprised.”
“Do not forgive me, Kendra,” Balthazar gritted out. “Not so easily. You have no idea the kind of darkness that lives in me.”
“But I do know it,” she replied, to his astonishment. And that gaze of hers was steady on him, the sun to the earth. “I know your darkness, Balthazar. I know your fury, your retaliation. I know your absence and I know your touch. And I can tell you, with every part of my soul, that there is nothing you can do that would make me abandon you. Or I would already be swimming for the mainland.”
All the broken parts of him seemed to vibrate with the same ferocity, then. And still all he could see was her gaze, as if the sun had not yet set. As if she lit up the world.
She did it effortlessly.
“I don’t know how to do anything but plot revenge,” he threw at her. “I could stand here and tell you all the things I think I feel, but how would I know? Feelings were my first enemy and I vanquished them long ago. You deserve more than a broken man.”
“I deserve you,” she countered. Then she leaned in, to underscore the intensity on her face. “Because you have haunted me, Balthazar, since the moment I looked up and found you in that gazebo. My brother and my father might have had their own reasons for sending me to see you in New York, but I didn’t have to go. I wanted to. I wanted to see you. And let’s be very clear. I wanted to strip for you. I wanted your touch. I wanted everything that’s happened between us, because if I hadn’t, I could have walked away at any time.”
He wanted to believe that. Which was why he couldn’t. “I kidnapped you, Kendra. You can’t handwave that away.”
“I’m not the hapless maiden sent off to sacrifice herself to the village dragon, despite appearances,” Kendra said, with laughter in her voice. Actual laughter. “I could have ducked away from you when we went to your doctor in Athens. Failing that, Panagiota might have restricted access to the internet here but if I’d really, truly wanted to get online I could have found a way. I didn’t want to.”
“Kendra...” He managed to breathe. Barely. “Kendra, I can’t...”
The stars were upon them and around them, the sea whispered their names, and Balthazar felt caught somewhere between that light from up above and all the sunlight in her gaze. As if all that brightness could make of him a better man.
“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.