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

And she’d found herself fantasizing about far different things these days.

Still, if she’d thrown together a few wedding ideas off the top of her head, it would not have been...this.

It was a small affair on a particular stretch of the island that Panagiota informed her, with great seriousness, had been sanctified.

“Is that...good?” she asked.

“It is more than good,” the other woman had replied. “It is necessary.”

She’d woken the morning of her sanctified wedding her mouth feeling swollen and bruised from Balthazar’s kiss the night before, though her inspection of her lips had indicated that sensation was rather more emotional than physical. Panagiota had come in, smiling merrily, her arms filled with a flowing white gown. Kendra was tempted to tear it up. Or demand something more suitable for the occasion, like a black shroud.

Maybe she would have done both of those things, but she made the mistake of running her hand over the filmy, flowy material of the gown when Panagiota carefully laid it out. And the next thing she knew, she was slipping it on.

Her body was changing, thickening by the day. She already had a significant belly. She was aware of her body in different ways these days. Clothes never quite fit the way she expected them to, and stranger still, her center of gravity had shifted.

But when she slipped the dress on, it was like a caress. It made her feel sensual and beautiful.

When she looked in the mirror, her heart constricted. Then it began to beat at her, hard.

Kendra told herself that she could make this forced wedding anything she wanted it to be.

She’d said a lot of things to Balthazar last night and then had stayed awake the rest of the night, wondering if any of them were true—because all he had to do was look at her and she trembled.

And after six weeks of solitude, she’d found she enjoyed that trembling. Maybe more than she should have.

“I want what I said to be true,” she said out loud now as she stared at the vision in flowing white before her in the glass, her hand over her belly. Her baby grew by the day. Time was moving right along no matter what she said or didn’t say to the man as caught in this as she was. “That will have to be enough.”

She would make it enough.

Kendra did her own hair, bundling it up on the top of her head into a messy bun, then pinning it into place so it looked artistic rather than sloppy. She slicked on some lip gloss and decided against any blusher, as she could see she didn’t need it. She didn’t hide her freckles. She didn’t bother to accentuate her eyes.

And strangely enough, she almost felt...free.

Because she knew that if one of those florid-cheeked boys her mother had forever been pushing on her was waiting for her today, her wedding would look nothing like this. She would have been sitting in her parents’ house in Connecticut in a far more traditional gown, looking out at a huge tent on the lawn above the water. There would have been veils and churches and brigades of attendants. Guest lists filled with people she didn’t know and didn’t wish to know.

Maybe, Kendra thought, she’d never bothered to fantasize about her wedding day because it had always been a foregone conclusion. She certainly wouldn’t have looked happy the way her reflection did.

Her heart did a cartwheel in her chest as she told herself, hurriedly, that was merely the pregnancy talking. The baby was giving her this glow. It wasn’t happiness. It was hormones.

Either that, she thought when Panagiota came to collect her, or she’d taken leave of her senses entirely. Because as much as she might have shot her mouth off to Balthazar last night, she’d done what he wanted. She’d signed his agreements. She’d put on this dress.

For a woman who had claimed she had no intention of marrying him, Kendra was doing a terrific impression of a blushing, eager bride.

She waited for reality to slap her awake, but it didn’t. Because this was reality. The baby inside her and the man waiting for her.

And both were better than anything involving the life she’d left behind in Connecticut.

That was the truth that slapped her.

Hard.

Kendra tried to catch her breath from the wallop of it as the housekeeper led her through the sprawling villa, whitewashed walls and raucous flowers on all sides, then outside. Past all the terraces, past the ruins of a long-ago chapel, to a small altar on the side of a cliff.

There were three people waiting for her, seemingly suspended between the wide blue sky and the sun-drenched sea. Balthazar in his usual black, severe and unsmiling. The unfathomable priest. And another man she did not know, yet recognized instantly all the same.

Constantine Skalas, looking faintly rumpled and amused, as if he’d just that moment rolled off a supermodel and slouched his way to the ceremony.

As she drew closer, clutching the white gardenias Panagiota had handed her as they walked, Balthazar and the priest stared at her in varying degrees of condemnation. Constantine only smirked.

Kendra reminded herself that she was choosing to be as happy as she liked because she’d escaped the life her family wanted for her, which had to be worth a celebration, and beamed at all of them in turn.

“A white wedding,” Balthazar murmured darkly as he took her arm. He did not quite scowl. “Let us hope God does not smite us down where we stand.”

“This is the day our child becomes legitimate, Balthazar,” she replied, smiling at him. Then more wildly when he actually did scowl at her. “Let us give thanks and be glad.”

The ceremony was conducted in Greek and English. There were three rounds of blessings. Constantine exchanged their rings three times. There were candles and crowns, the joining of hands, and a ceremonial procession three times around the altar.

Kendra couldn’t help being moved