But as time had drifted on without him hearing a peep from Eve, he’d begun to get edgy. Now he felt like pacing the terrace because the tiger inside him was making its presence felt again.
What time was it? Six p.m., his watch told him. Two minutes later than it had been the last time he’d looked. He grimaced, then sighed to himself and walked over to the terrace rail to look down the hillside where San Estéban lay basking in the early evening sun. This time yesterday he had been sitting in the bar on the beach in the Caribbean drinking local rum and chatting with Jack Banning.
No, you were not, you were watching Eve dance with her eager young men and wishing you weren’t there to witness it, a grim kind of honesty forced him to admit.
A sound further along the terrace caught his attention. His stomach muscles instantly tightened when he recognised the sound as one of the terrace doors opening. Eve appeared at last, wearing a plain straight dress with no sleeves, a scooped neck and a hemline that rested a quiet four inches above her slender knees.
Quiet—why quiet? he asked himself as he watched her walk over to the rail then stand looking out over the bay. There was nothing quiet about Eve Herakleides, not where he was concerned anyway. Her hair, her face, her wonderful figure—Even that sudden and unexpectedly shy expression on her face rang bells inside him as she turned and saw him standing there.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘SORRY,’ she murmured in apology. ‘I fell asleep.’
‘That’s okay,’ he replied, feeling all of that restlessness ease out of him to be replaced with—damn it—sex. The thought of it anyway. ‘I’ve been working. Didn’t notice the time.’
‘This is a lovely view,’ she remarked, turning her attention back to the bay. ‘Nothing looks new or out of place; everything simply blends as if it’s been like this for centuries.’
‘That was the plan.’ After a moment’s hesitation he went to stand beside her and began to point out the different features the resort had to offer. She smelt of shampoo and something subtly expensive. Her voice, when she inserted a comment, played feather-like across his skin. ‘We haven’t even begun developing that area yet,’ he said, indicating toward one of the farthest edges of the bay, and went on to describe what would be seen there within the next year or two.
His arm caught her shoulder, his voice vibrated along her flesh, raising goose-bumps on her skin as she listened to him—no—that she absorbed with a breathless kind of concentration every detail he relayed to her and wished she could remember a single one of them.
But she couldn’t. It was the man who held her wrapped in fascination, the rest was just wallpaper pasted on for appearances’ sake. ‘Quite utopian,’ she murmured eventually. ‘And all your own?’
‘No.’ He denied that with a wry shake of his head. ‘I would love to say it was, but a very austere Spaniard called Don Felipe de Vazquez owns all the land. Victor and I are just the men who transformed his ideas into reality.’
‘All of this doesn’t reflect an austere temperament.’ Eve frowned. ‘I see the heart of a romantic at work here.’
‘Maybe he has hidden depths.’ But, by his tone, it seemed he didn’t think so. ‘It’s more likely he has a good instinct for what will return a healthy dividend on his land.’
‘You don’t like him,’ Eve said, presuming from that.
‘It’s not my place to like or dislike him.’ Ethan took the diplomatic line.
Turning against the rail, Eve folded her arms beneath her breasts then looked up at him sagely. ‘But you don’t like him,’ she repeated stubbornly.
Ethan laughed, it was a soft dryly rueful sound that brought his eyes down to meet with hers. It was a mistake; the wrong move. Things began to happen to him that he had been determined he would not let happen. Don Felipe was tossed into oblivion; San Estéban with all its beauty may as well have not been there at all. Eve the witch, the beautiful siren, was all that he was seeing. She had relaxed with him at last, was actually smiling with her eyes, with her lovely mouth. Don’t spoil it, he told himself. Don’t so much as breathe in case you ruin the mood.
This wasn’t easy, Eve was thinking. Maintaining this level of relaxed friendliness was tough when what she really wanted to do was kiss him so badly that it was like a fire in her brain. She’d fallen asleep thinking of this man, had woken up thinking of this man and didn’t dare look into what had gone on in between.
Dreams were ruthless truth-tellers, she mused. ‘Don Felipe,’ she prompted, though she wasn’t interested in the slightest in the Spaniard; it was important that she kept the conversation going, or she might give in and make an absolute fool out of herself.
His eyelashes flickered—long dark silky things that made her lips tingle as if they’d flickered against them. He took in a measured breath that expanded his ribcage and made her breasts sting into peaks. His mouth parted to speak but it wasn’t what he was going to say that held her captive.
‘You have to know a man to draw a considered opinion as to whether you like him or not…’ Ethan dragged his eyes away from her before he did something he shouldn’t. ‘He’s a strange man: very private, cold and remote. Rumour has it that he was disinherited by his father in favour of his half-brother, and didn’t take the decision very well. Went a bit mad for a while, got into a couple of fights, had an accident, which left him scarred in more ways than one. Since then he has been out to prove something—with this resort
