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

by the ancient words, the traditions, the press of Balthazar’s hands against her own.

Like the baby inside her, her baby, the wedding felt bigger than her. It connected her to something far larger than herself or this man she was marrying or all the dark little squabbles that had brought them here.

Somehow, this wedding she hadn’t wanted gave her hope.

She clung to that when it was over. Balthazar and his brother went off somewhere. Panagiota pressed a small bag of what she called koufeta into her hands—the word for sugared almonds, it seemed—then left with the priest.

Kendra spent her first moments as a married woman—as the wife of Balthazar Skalas—in a beautiful dress with gardenias and sugared almonds in her hands, alone at an altar. Unwilling to let go of that undeserved hope that ran through her as surely as the breeze.

She moved over to the railing and looked out at the deep blue Aegean Sea, because that felt like the same thing.

And she couldn’t have said how long she stood there, but she was all too aware of it when Balthazar returned. She could feel him. That brooding, crackling energy, whipping all around her as if he brought his own storm with him wherever he went.

Kendra already knew he did.

“I’ll admit it,” she said, without looking over at him as he came to stand beside her, a dark and brooding cloud. “I expected to feel different.”

“You should feel different. You are no longer a Connolly.” He said that as if Connolly was a synonym for rat. The way he always did. “You are a Skalas.”

“Oh, happy day.”

They both stood there as the helicopter rose into the air from the pad on the other side of the villa, presumably taking Constantine and the unamused priest back to the mainland. Long after the sound of the propellers died away, they stayed there at the wedding altar.

Silent except for the beat of that same, familiar tension between them and the waves against the rocks below.

Until Kendra could take it no more and turned toward him, gazing up at the forbidding face of this man who was now her husband.

Her husband.

She had a heavy set of rings on her finger to prove it. More, she carried his baby inside of her—and felt the baby move, then. As if in agreement.

And Kendra tried to hold on to her sense of hope. To the beauty of the ceremony that had bound them together. She did. But she didn’t understand how she could feel connected to this man in all these different ways, yet see no hint of that intimacy on his stern, remote face.

“What now?” she asked quietly. “Do the humiliations and punishments begin today? Or are we easing into them?”

“Such bravado. I wonder, would you retain it if I called your bluff?”

Kendra shrugged carelessly, though she did not feel careless in the least. Last night she had. Last night she’d felt powerful, because she’d grown comfortable here. The reality of this—of them—grew bigger within her all the time. She hadn’t been hiding from it as he had.

She didn’t know when that had changed. Was it the vows they’d spoken, in two languages? Had that made something shift inside of her?

“Go right ahead and call my bluff,” she invited him. “But I intend to eat first. No one likes to be humiliated on an empty stomach.”

She took her meal, still dressed in her full wedding regalia, on a different terrace with a different view of the enduring sea. Teach me how to endure like that, she thought, though she knew better than to say it aloud.

And then she applied herself to her wedding feast. There was a seafood salad of mussels and scallops, crab and calamari, all heaped together and marinated in lemon and the oil from the island’s olives. There was a platter of tender lamb with tomato and orzo, topped with cheese. And when she was finished, heavenly baklava drenched in honey.

Kendra was not wholly surprised that Balthazar joined her, though he did not eat. Instead, he sat across from her. Brooding, clearly. She wondered if he meant to put her off her food, so she viewed it as a kind of rebellion that she ate her fill anyway.

Hope took many forms, she assured herself.

Then they both sat there, in more fraught silence, as their brand-new forced marriage entered its second hour.

“Well,” she said after that went on for some time. “I will say that so far, I’m finding marriage a delight. But I didn’t realize that we took a vow of silence. Was that the Greek part?”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. “We have yet to agree to terms.”

“And here I thought I signed all kinds of papers last night. What was that, if not terms?”

“That was about money,” Balthazar said in a certain, silken way. “But now you and I must decide the rest of it.”

Her pulse picked up, kicking its way through her. And there was an answering surge of heat between her legs. But Kendra didn’t want to show him her reaction, so all she did was lean back, smile, and wait.

“You have options, of course,” he said, his dark eyes glittering and blocking out all the sun and sky. “But these choices have ramifications.”

“Are we talking about consequences? Already?”

“I told you. I require a great deal of sex.” And he said it so coldly. So devoid of passion that if she hadn’t been looking directly at him she might have thought this was a clinical discussion. But she could see the way his eyes blazed. More, she could feel it, sharp and hot, in the softest part of her. Almost better than a touch. “Do you wish to provide it?”

“Why, Balthazar,” she said softly. “Are you asking me to be your mistress as well as your wife? My cup runneth over.”

It occurred to her to wonder as she said that, why, when he seemed to get grimmer by the moment, she was...moving in the opposite direction. Maybe it