There was another person who was irritating the hell out of him. Since their tough talk in the Caribbean, he hadn’t had a single peep out of Eve’s grandfather. His own letter formally withdrawing his submission for the Greek project had not been acknowledged. The promised contract making sure Ethan didn’t get his greedy hands on the old man’s money had never appeared. No one at Hayes-Frayne could get to speak to Herakleides, and even Leandros was complaining that the Greek had dropped off the face of the earth. As far as Ethan could make out, Theron was only answering calls from his precious granddaughter. She’d been talking to him every day, but even she couldn’t get him to come clean as to what he was going to do about the Greek project. He’d just said, ‘I’ll see you in two weeks.’ Then it had been one week. Now it was down to just a few days.
Their official betrothal. His ring on Eve’s finger winked at him. ‘Nothing,’ he heard his secretary say.
The ring sparkled again as Eve lifted up her hand to brush some dry plaster from one man’s bulging bicep. The guy grinned a very macho, very sexy, Spanish grin. Ethan felt his gut tighten up in protest. Abruptly finishing the telephone conversation, he stood up and knocked on the window-pane.
Eve turned. So did the men. She sent him a wide white brilliant smile. The men’s smiles were more—manly, as in, You lucky devil, Mr Hayes.
‘He wants his souvenir back,’ he heard one man say to the others.
Eve laughed, as she had done from the first time she’d heard herself referred to as that. She liked it. Damn it, he liked it! He liked what it did to him when she sent him that teasing little smile that said, Some souvenir, hmm?
He was in love with her. He’d known it for days, weeks, maybe even months. She filled his every thought, his every sense, his every desire. He looked at her and felt a multitude of conflicting emotions, none of which on their own could adequately describe what he was having to deal with inside.
Bidding a light farewell to her macho fan club, she began walking towards his office door. He watched her come, watched her soft mouth take on a different look that was exclusively for him. It was a kiss, a sensual kiss, offered to him from a distance. She was a flirt; she was a tease; he found himself wearing an irresistible grin.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded though, the moment she came into the cool confines of his air-conditioned office. ‘I thought we’d agreed you would keep away from the site so you don’t cause accidents.’
She laughed; she thought he was joking, but Ethan wasn’t sure that he was. Heads turned when Eve walked by. The fact that those heads were on bodies with feet balancing on ladders or on scaffolding made it dangerous.
‘I needed to ask your advice about something.’
‘Try the phone.’
‘Oh, don’t be a grouch.’ She pouted up at him as she walked around his desk. Then she boldly pulled the cord that closed the sunblinds across the window and reached up to transform the pout into a kiss that wound its tentacles around him and left him wanting more.
I love this man, Eve thought, as she drew away again. I love him so much that I daren’t let myself think about Athens and the fact that we have only three days to go before we are expected there.
It was frightening. She held his cheek, looked deep into his eyes and wished she knew how much of what they relayed to her was just sexual desire and how much was still rooted in pretence. What she did know was that they had been so happy here. No spats, since the first day. No mention of anything likely to start a war.
Except for Grandfather, of course. He was discussed on a daily basis. But never in a way that could remind either of them of how this whole thing had started out.
‘Was that it?’ he prompted. ‘You wanted my advice on how well you kiss?’
Eve refocused her attention and saw one of his eyebrows had arched and his mouth was wearing a lazily amused smile. It would be the easiest thing in the world to say yes, and leave it at that, keep the rest until later when he came home.
But keeping Ethan on his toes was her aim in life. So, she said airily, ‘Oh, no. I already know what a great kisser I am.’
Stepping away from him, she applied her surprise tactics by unzipping her trousers and peeling them back from her hips. ‘What do you think?’ she asked innocently.
Innocent was not the word Ethan was thinking as he stared down at her silk-smooth abdomen. He was thinking, Minx, again. Outrageous and unpredictable minx. For there, nestling in the hollow of her groin, just above the tantalisingly brief panty line, and right on the spot of an erogenous zone he knew so well he could actually feel its response against the flat of his tongue, lay a heart. A small red painted heart.
‘It’s a tattoo,’ he announced.
‘What do you think?’ she repeated.
‘I think you’re not safe to be let out on your own,’ he replied. ‘What were you thinking of, marking your lovely skin with something like that?’
‘I thought you might like it.’ The pout was back, Ethan noticed, the one that begged to be soothed into something else.
Well, not this time. ‘You idiot,’ he snapped. ‘That’s going to hurt like blazes by tonight.’
‘No, it won’t,’ she denied. ‘Because it isn’t real. I found this amazing little shop down one of the back streets in San Estéban where they apply these temporary tattoos. It will disappear in about a month. I think its great.’ Eve looked down to view her latest impulse. ‘I might have it replaced with a permanent one next time.’
‘Over my dead body,’ he vowed, but
