Modern Romance March 2021 Book 5-8 by Carol Marinelli (most romantic novels .txt) 📕

she’d been so sure she would never, ever have to come face-to-face with Balthazar Skalas again.

She smoothed down her pencil skirt, but didn’t give in to the urge to jump back in the car and check her carefully minimal makeup for the nineteenth time. There was no point. This was happening, and she would face him and the truth was, she was likely flattering herself to think that he would even recognize her.

The flutter low in her belly suggested that it was not so simple as mere flattery, but Kendra ignored that as she marched across the concrete toward the bank of elevators, clearly marked and unavoidable.

It had been years, after all. And this was an office building, however exquisite, not one of her family’s self-conscious parties packed full of the rich and the powerful, where Kendra was expected to present herself as her mother’s pride and her father’s indulgence. Such gatherings were the only reason she’d ever met or mingled with the kinds of people her father and brother admired so much, like Balthazar Skalas himself—feared and worshipped in turn by all and sundry.

Because Thomas certainly had no interest in letting Kendra work alongside him in the company.

Tommy had always laughed at her ambitions. She’d love to think, now, that he’d wanted to keep her at bay because she’d have discovered what he was up to sooner. But she knew the truth of that, too. Tommy didn’t think of her at all. And was certainly not threatened by anything she might or might not do, as he’d made clear today in no uncertain terms.

A reasonable person might ask herself why, when her father and brother had always acted as if she was an interloper as well as an afterthought—and her mother cared about her but only in between her garden parties and charity events—Kendra was carrying out this unpleasant task for them.

That was the trouble.

It was the only task she’d ever been asked to perform for them.

She couldn’t help thinking it was therefore her only chance to prove herself. To prove that she was worthy of being a Connolly. That she was more than an afterthought. That she deserved to take her place in the company, be more than her mother’s occasional dress up doll, and who knew? Maybe get treated, at last, like she was one of them.

And maybe if that happened she wouldn’t feel so lonely, for once. Maybe if she showed them how useful she was, she wouldn’t feel so excluded by her family, the way she always had.

No matter how many times she told herself it was simply because she was so much younger than her brother, or because she represented a strange moment in her parents’ otherwise distant marriage, it stung that she was always so easily dismissed. So easily ignored, left out, or simply not told about the various issues that affected all of them.

Maybe this time she could show them that she belonged.

So even though the very idea of what she might have to do made her stomach a heavy lead ball, and even though she thought Tommy would be better off accepting whatever punishment came his way for his behavior—for once—she marched herself to the elevator marked Executive Level, put in the code she’d been given, and stepped briskly inside when the doors slid soundlessly open before her.

That her heart began to catapult around inside her chest was neither here nor there.

“I don’t understand why you think a man as powerful and ruthless as Balthazar Skalas will listen to me,” she’d told her father, sitting there in the uncomfortable chair on the other side of his desk. She had not said, My own father doesn’t listen to me, why should he? “Surely he’d be more likely to listen to you.”

Thomas had given a bitter laugh. He’d actually looked at her directly, without that patronizing glaze that usually took him over in her presence. “Balthazar Skalas has washed his hands of the Connolly Company. As far as he’s concerned, I am as guilty as Tommy.”

A traitorous part of Kendra had almost cheered at that, because surely that would encourage her father to finally face the truth about his son. But she knew better.

“All the more reason to want nothing to do with me, I would have thought,” she’d said instead. “As I, too, am a Connolly.”

“Kendra. Please. You have nothing to do with the company.” Thomas Connolly had waved one of his hands in a dismissive sort of way, as if Kendra’s dreams were that silly. “You must appeal to him as...a family man.”

Her head had been alive with those too-bright, too-hot images of Balthazar Skalas she carried around inside and tried to hide, even from herself. Especially from herself. Because he was... Excessive. Too dangerous. Too imperious. Too arrogantly beautiful. Even his name conjured up the kind of devil he was.

But it didn’t do any justice to the reality of him, that cruel mouth and eyes like the darkest hellfire. And oh, how he could make the unwary burn...

She’d flushed, but luckily her father paid little attention to such inconsequential things as his only daughter’s demeanor or emotional state. This was the first time he’d ever wanted more from her than a pretty smile, usually aimed at his lecherous business associates at a party.

“What does he know of family?” Kendra had been proud of herself for sounding much calmer than she felt, though it had taken an act of will to keep from pressing her palms to her hot cheeks. “I thought he and that brother of his were engaged in some kind of civil war.”

“He can be at war with his brother, but I do not suggest anyone else attempt it. They are still running the same company.”

“I’m sure I read an article that claimed they’d balkanized the corporation so that each one of them need not—”

“Then you must appeal to him as a man, Kendra,” her father had said, very distinctly.

And they’d stared at each other, across the width