SHE looked pale and fragile, as if someone had come along with an eraser and had wiped out all that wonderful animation which made Eve Herakleides the fascinating creature she was. His heart dipped. Had he done that? Or was the white-faced frailty Aidan Galloway’s handiwork, and it was just that he had been too angry with her earlier to remember that she had been put through one hell of an ordeal only the night before.
No, he then told himself as a softening in his mood began to weaken his firm stance against her machinations. Eve is trouble. You’ve done enough. Send her packing and get out of here.
‘What now?’ he demanded in a hard, grim tone that told Eve he only had to look at her now to see trouble standing at his door.
But Eve wasn’t Ethan Hayes’ real trouble, she’d just come to realise. No, his trouble had been evident in the deep dark husky quality of his voice when he had spoken that other woman’s name.
Suddenly she wanted to run, she wanted to hide, she wanted to pretend she had not overheard his conversation, because she knew for sure now that Ethan had lied before, and he was tragically, painfully in love with Leona Al-Qadim.
At that precise moment she felt like trouble because she had this blistering urge to knock some sense into him! Would someone like to tell her, please, how a man like Ethan Hayes could allow himself to fall in love with a very married woman? Was she a witch? Had she cast a spell over him? Had they been such passionate lovers that he’d been blinded by the sex and he couldn’t see it took a certain type of woman to cheat on her husband?
No wonder the Sheikh had bruised his jaw for him! He deserved it, the fool! And she only hoped to goodness that the lovely Leona had received her just desserts too!
‘Speak, Eve,’ Ethan prompted, when she still hadn’t managed to say anything. ‘I’m in a rush. I have a plane to catch.’
A plane to catch, she silently repeated. Well, didn’t that just about say everything else about him! Her eyes turned to crystal, backed by an ocean of burning green anger. ‘So.’ She stepped forward into his house and into his life with the grim intention to sort it out for him. ‘You’re going to leave the island and drop me in it because of one stupid phone call.’
The burning accusation flicked him like a whip. Ethan fielded it with the kind of small mocking smile that further infuriated Eve. ‘That one stupid phone call was from my business partner informing me of an emergency that has developed on one of our projects in Spain,’ he explained. ‘And you dropped yourself in it,’ he then coolly reminded her, ‘by telling a pack of lies to your grandfather.’
‘You had the chance to refute those lies. You didn’t,’ Eve pointed out. ‘So now I’m afraid you are stuck with me.’
‘As my future wife? Not in this life, Miss Herakleides,’ he informed her. ‘You know already what I think you should do, but if you still can’t bring yourself to drop Aidan Galloway in it with your grandfather, then, with my speedy exit from here, at least you won’t have to worry about me destroying your grandfather’s trust in your honesty.’
With that cutting bit of arrogance he turned to walk away from this conversation—as if Eve was going to let him!
‘Oh, you’re so pompous sometimes.’ She sighed as she trailed him across the sitting room. ‘Do you ever stop to listen to yourself? I have no wish to be the wife of anyone,’ she announced as she arrived in the bedroom doorway in time to see him settle a suitcase out on the bed. ‘But, while we are on the subject of marriage, I’ll point out that at least I am at liberty to be your wife if I wanted to be!’
The remark made him turn. Eve felt her skin start to prickle as she was reminded of wild animals again. ‘Meaning—what?’ he demanded.
She offered a shrug, that warning prickle forcing her to backtrack slightly. ‘Meaning I don’t have the wish, so why are we arguing about it?’
He knew she had backed out of what she had been going to say. It was there, written in the way she lowered her eyes from his—which in turn had his own narrowing threateningly. ‘I don’t know,’ he incised. ‘You tell me.’
His was an outright challenge for her to get off her chest whatever was fizzing inside it. He knew she knew about Leona. He knew she’d overheard his discussion with Victor just now.
But Eve was discovering that she just did not want to discuss his very married lover with him. She wanted to discuss them. ‘Aidan Galloway,’ she prompted, watching his face toughen up like a rock. ‘I came here, because something you said on the path just now made me realise we seem to have been talking at cross purposes about what actually happened last night.’
Some of the challenge leaked out of him. ‘He attempted to rape you.’ Ethan named it.
‘No.’ Eve frowned. ‘It wasn’t—’
Ethan spun his back to her and walked over to the wardrobe to begin removing clothes from their hangers. ‘Still protecting him, I see,’ he drawled.
The comment stung. ‘No,’ she denied the charge. ‘I don’t need to protect Aidan. Not in this context anyway,’ she felt pressed to add. ‘And will you stop doing that and listen to me!’ she snapped out, when he continued to pack his suitcase as if she wasn’t even there.
Ignoring her demand, he made to walk back to the wardrobe. On a fit of irritation she went to stand directly in his path. She felt like a mouse challenging a giant and, the worst of it was, it excited her. Her insides came alive as if sparkling diamonds were showering her with the urge to reach out and touch.
‘I am trying to tell you that Aidan Galloway was not the one who spiked my drink last night!’ she told him furiously. ‘You’ve been blaming the wrong man!’
Looking down into those rich green earnest eyes, Ethan had to wonder how such beautiful eyes could lie as well as they did? For some unaccountable reason the way she was still insisting on defending the bastard made him want to kiss that lying little mouth senseless.
Instead he released a very soft, very deriding laugh, took hold of her stubborn chin between finger and thumb and gave it a condescending shake. ‘But you would say that, being so in love with him,’ he taunted softly, then he sidestepped her and continued with what he was doing.
I knew I hated him, now I remember why, Eve thought, and took in a deep breath of air to give her the will to continue when really she wanted to beat out an angry tattoo on his back!
‘We were at Aidan’s beach house. It was my birthday party and we were all enjoying ourselves…’ Except for me, because I was brooding over you! she added silently. ‘Aidan was the one who was mixing the drinks. But it was not Aidan who slipped something potent into my drink. It was not Aidan who brought me home and—did what he did!’
‘Who then?’ he shot at her.
Ah, Eve thought, and snapped her lips shut. Having seen his burning desire to rip Aidan from limb to limb, she decided it might be wise to keep the name of the real culprit to herself for now. ‘Who it was doesn’t matter any more.’ She therefore evaded the question. ‘I just needed to tell you that it wasn’t Aidan.’
‘You’re lying,’ he pronounced with a withering glance at her.
‘I’m not!’ she denied. ‘Aidan is one of the nicest people I know!’ she insisted in defence of that look. ‘And he’s going through his own bit of hell right now—so he doesn’t need you accusing him of something he would not think of doing in a million years!’
‘Are we talking about the same man who could lose himself in the embrace of another woman while his fiancée, his cousin and myself, looked on from the sidelines?’ he mocked. Then on a sudden burst of impatience, he tossed the clothes he had been holding onto the bed and took a hard grip her shoulders. ‘Stop protecting him, Eve,’ he shook her gently. ‘The man just isn’t worthy of it!’
‘I am telling you the truth,’ she insisted. ‘If you will just shut up and listen, I will explain about the kiss—’
‘You’re in love with him,’ he repeated the outright accusation. ‘That doesn’t need explaining.’
‘You’re in love with another man’s wife,’ Eve retaliated in kind. ‘What does that say about your right to moralise over me?’
His eyes began to darken ominously. Eve’s senses began to play havoc with her ability to breathe or think. His mouth was hard and tight and angry, hers was soft and quivery and hurt. He was too close—she liked it. Her hands even went up to press against his shirt front. She felt his heat, the pound of his heart, the elixir of sheer masculine strength.
She wanted him to kiss her so very badly that it hurt.
Damn it all, but he wanted to kiss some sense into her, so badly it actually hurt, Ethan was thinking helplessly. ‘He bruised your mouth, here,’ he murmured, making do with running a finger over the soft smooth padding where the slight discolouration was still evident.
‘She let her husband bruise yours,’ Eve responded with a mimicking touch of a finger to the corner of his mouth.
He wasn’t listening. ‘And here,’ he continued, moving that same gentle finger to the mark at her throat. ‘I want to kill him for doing this to you.’
‘It wasn’t Aidan.’ Somehow, some way she managed to hang onto a thread of sanity long enough to say that, even though she was becoming more engrossed in the pleasure of touching him.
‘It wasn’t Leona’s husband who put the bruise on my face.’
‘I still want to kill her just for breathing,’ she confessed with enough green-eyed jealousy to make him laugh.
It was a strained, low, husky sound though, thick with other things, that made her insides begin to melt. Then he wasn’t laughing. Instead he was taking her trailing finger in his and feeding it slowly into his mouth. Moist heat enveloped each sensitised nerve end, then spread right down to her toes. She released a soft breath of air and watched his steel-grey eyes turn to smoke. He was going to kiss her.
Yes, please, she begged him silently, and let him lower her hand back to his chest, let him lower his dark head, and parted her lips in readiness for when his met them.
Then he was kissing her, kissing her hotly, kissing her deeply, kissing her urgently like a man stealing something he knew he shouldn’t take. But Eve wanted him to take. In fact she wholly encouraged him by sliding her hands up his shirt front until they joined at the back of his neck, then she parted her lips that bit more to invite him to take as much as he liked.
Heat poured from one to the other. One of them released a pent-up sigh—maybe both of them did. His hands left her shoulders and spread themselves across her slender spine, firm yet gentle in the way they urged her into closer contact with him. She liked it—loved it. This man had been threatening to ignite her like this from the first moment she had ever set eyes on him.
She was warm, she was sweet, she was seduction itself. She was everything he had been fantasising she would be for so long now he couldn’t remember when it had begun. His hands felt enlivened merely by touching her. His body was slowly drowning in sensual heat. If she moved any closer, he’d had it, he was sure of it; that dragging sensation between his thighs was telling him he was ready to leap.
And the kiss? It just went on and on as a fascinating swim through a million pleasure zones. He didn’t want it to end. Yet it had to end.
‘What is this?’ he murmured, against her mouth. ‘Mutual consolation?’
He was trying to cool things, though Eve could tell he didn’t really want to cool anything. So what if it was consolation to him? she asked herself. If the power of his hunger was anything to go by, Ethan Hayes was more than ready to be consoled. ‘I’m game, if you are,’ she therefore confided with enough breathy seduction to slay any man.
‘Eve the flirt, Eve the temptress.’ Ethan fought a hard battle between his desire to be tempted and a need to break free from her magic spell. But, in doing so, he hadn’t realised he had said the words out loud.
Eve broke all connection. It was so abrupt he didn’t even have time to respond. She turned away—walked away—then wrapped her arms around her body in a way he recognised all too well.
Eve trying to hug her pain away. He named it with a sense of bitter self-contempt for being the one to make it happen this time.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Yes, you did,’ she cut in on him in a thin little voice.
A sigh eased itself from his body. ‘All right,’ he admitted it. ‘So I think you like to tease men’s senses.’ She had been teasing his senses since the day they’d first met—was still teasing them! Even with whole chasms between them right now, he could still feel her lips and the impression of her body where it had pressed against his.
Damn it to hell! ‘Aidan Galloway isn’t the only man I’ve watched you turn inside out with a smile,’ he added, angry with himself now for allowing that kiss to happen at all! ‘Jack Banning isn’t immune and neither is Raoul Delacroix.’
She stiffened sharply. ‘Meaning what?’ She spun on him. ‘That I did get what I deserved last night?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Ethan sighed wearily. ‘I will never say that!’
‘But it’s interesting that you’re clocking up a whole list of men who could have been mad enough for me to want to spike my drink! We could even add your name, since you’ve just given in against your better judgement and kissed Eve the flirt!’
Ethan had no defence. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could say helplessly. ‘But I was not making a judgement on you! If anything I was making a judgement on them! On me—it—oh, I don’t know.’ He sighed, heavily aware that he’d dug his own grave as deep as it needed to go.
‘In other words the name doesn’t really matter, just the one they revolve around,’ Eve misunderstood him—deliberately he suspected.
‘One name matters.’ He grunted.
‘As in, who tried the big seduction of Eve the flirt?’ Ethan winced. Eve nodded, feeling that she’d more than deserved that telling wince. ‘Well, let’s go through all the candidates shall we?’ She was beginning to warm to her sarcastic theme. ‘We both know it wasn’t you, so we can cross your name from the list. Jack Banning has a job to protect, so, even if it was him, he isn’t going to come out and admit he so much as looked at me the wrong way. If it was Aidan, I’m in trouble because the Galloways are rich and powerful, and very clannish, they protect their own in ways you would not believe. As for André Visconte, he will defend his half-brother to his very last breath—as he has done on countless occasions before! Then there is my grandfather to consider—another rich man with too much power at his fingertips. If he finds out someone has dared to overstep the line, he will yell very loudly for the head of the man who tried to seduce his innocent granddaughter while she was under the influence of drink. War will be declared between the two involved families. But who do you think will come out of it with the damaged reputation? Me,’ she threw at him. ‘Eve the flirt. Eve the temptress. Eve the spoiled little rich girl who likes to lead men on for the fun of it and has finally received her just desserts!’
She was near to tears and didn’t want him to know it, so she spun away again taking with her the image of him just standing there staring at her as if she’d just grown two heads. Well, maybe she had! She certainly felt as if she had two heads rocking on her neck. She was tired through lack of sleep, exhausted with lingering shock and whatever else was still permeating her bloodstream. And she was hurting inside because she still couldn’t bring herself to understand why Raoul had believed he could do to her what he had tried to do! Nor could she quite manage to justify that she hadn’t deserved what had happened.
That was the toughest pill to swallow. Self-contempt. She named it bleakly as she stared out of the window, while a deathly silence crowded in from behind. What was he thinking? she wondered painfully. What was now going on inside his cynical head?
Ethan was struggling to think anything much. She was amazing, was his one main impression, and that came from the gut not the brain. But, standing there with the light coming in from behind her, she seemed to shimmer like a proud goddess sent down from the heavens to mess up his life. No wonder her grandfather worshipped her. He was beginning to understand what that felt like.
He was also stunned by what she’d thrown at him. Worse, he wanted to refute what she’d predicted was bound to happen but knew that he couldn’t. It was the way of the world. Since the beginning of time, woman had been cast in the role of temptress and man merely as a slave to her seductive wiles. He was as guilty as anyone of assuming the same thing about Eve. He’d even likened her to the serpent in paradise, when in truth the serpent had been his own desire to tap into that special magic that was Eve. Man being man at the expense of woman, in other words, blaming her for his weakness.
It was not a nice thing to admit about oneself.
‘So…’ He sighed in what he knew was his surrender to the whole darn package that was Eve. ‘Tell me what it is you want to do,’ he invited.
Eve turned to look at him. All he saw was a pair of tear-washed wounded eyes. ‘Do you mean it?’ she asked him in an unsteady voice that finally finished him.
Ask me to bite the apple, Eve, and I will do it, he mused ruefully, well aware that man’s oldest weakness was still very much alive inside him; after all he had just admitted to himself. ‘Yes, I mean it,’ he confirmed and even felt like smiling at his own downfall.
Her fingers released their comforting clutch on her arms. He watched them lower to her sides then turn themselves into two tight, hopeful little fists. He wanted to claim those fists. He wanted to prize those fingers open and feed them inside his shirt so they could roam at their leisure.
‘Continue to play the charade—just for a few weeks,’ she begged him. ‘Give me time to let Grandpa down about this marriage thing—without my having to admit the truth to him.’
Well, he’d asked, now he knew. He was to play the love-struck lover of Eve until she decided it was no longer necessary. Why not? he asked himself. Why the hell not? At this precise moment he was even prepared to lie down on the floor and let her walk all over him.
Time to move, time to react. She was waiting for an answer. Dragging his eyes away from the inner vision of himself lying at her beautiful feet, he looked at his watch and tried to concentrate well enough to read it.
Twelve o’clock, he saw. ‘You’ve got approximately two hours to pack a bag and say your farewells,’ he announced with a smoothness that in no way reflected what was really happening inside him.
‘Why, where am I going?’
Well, there’s an interesting question, he mused. And wished he knew the answer. ‘You can’t come to despise me enough to jilt me while you’re here in the Caribbean and I’m in Spain,’ he pointed out. ‘So you are going to have to come to Spain with me.’