‘Yes—no.’ He changed his mind and began to frown. ‘It’s more an errand of mercy…’ Then he muttered, ‘Damn this, Eve—I’m trying to find out if you intend to still be here when I get back.’
Was that all? Staring at him, Eve couldn’t believe the sense of relief that went flooding through her. ‘Of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why ever not?’
For some bewildering reason, her reply only filled him with exasperation and he strode forward to grasp her left hand then lifted it up to her face. ‘Because this ring,’ he uttered tightly, ‘will become a formal engagement ring on Saturday in Athens. So if you want out, you have to say so now.’
‘Do you want out?’
‘No.’ He sighed. ‘I do not want out. I just needed to know where I stand with you before I—’
‘Well, I don’t want out,’ she cut in softly, and her smile came back to her eyes, to her slightly quivering mouth. ‘I want you.’
He loved that mouth, Ethan reaffirmed something he already knew. He loved this woman. But was her ‘I want you’ enough to make him declare himself?
Was it enough to get him through the rest of what he had to tell her. ‘Enough to trust me?’ he therefore had to ask.
‘Trust you about what?’
Well, here it comes, he thought, the bottom line to all of this. He took a deep breath, let it out again, desperately wanted to kiss her first, but held back on the need and looked deep into her beautiful green eyes. ‘Victor Frayne called me as you were leaving the office. He needs a very big favour from me. Due to unfounded rumours involving me and his daughter Leona, her marriage is under threat. So I am flying out to Rahman to help scotch those rumours—at her husband Sheikh Hassan’s request.’
He added Hassan’s name to give it all sanction. He hoped it would hold a lot of sway. But silence came back at him, though it wasn’t really silence because Eve’s eyes told him a lot; their warm green slowly froze over until they’d turned to arctic frost. Her kissable mouth became a hard cold untouchable line, and loudest of all, she snatched her hand out of his and curled it into a tight fist at her side.
‘You’re still in love with her, you bastard,’ she whispered.
‘No.’ He denied it. ‘Leona needs—’
‘To know she still has you dangling on a string.’
Coming from the very woman who had him dangling, Ethan couldn’t help but laugh at that.
Eve’s response was to step around him and walk coldly away.
She had never felt so betrayed. He’d manoeuvred that discussion, worked it and her like a master conductor until he’d got her to say what he’d wanted to hear, before he’d told her what he’d known she had not wanted to hear.
And for what purpose? Had he received a telephone call from her grandfather also? Did he now know, as she did, that the Greek project was about to be awarded to Hayes-Frayne?
‘Don’t do this, Eve,’ he threaded heavily after her.
She didn’t want to listen—refused to listen, and just kept on walking out of the sitting room and down the hall into the bedroom. Their bedroom. The one they’d been sharing since the first night he’d brought her here. She hated him for that. She now hated him so very badly that she could barely draw breath over that burgeoning hate.
He arrived in the doorway just as she was flipping her case open on the bed. A sense of déjà vu washed over her; only, last time this scene had been played their roles had been reversed.
‘Eve—this is important.’ He tried an appeal.
She almost laughed at his choice of words, coming hard on the back of what she had just been likening this moment to.
‘We are talking about an Arab state here—a Muslim state where women are held sacrosanct. The smallest hint of a scandal and she can be cast out into the wilderness without a single qualm. I have to go.’
‘I’m not stopping you,’ she pointed out.
‘This is stopping me!’ he rasped back angrily.
‘Okay.’ She turned on him in the midst of her own sudden fury. ‘You don’t go and I don’t go!’
It was the gauntlet tossed down on the tiles between them. Ethan even looked down as if he could see it lying there—while Eve held her breath, though it didn’t stop her heart from thundering madly in her ears, or fine tremors from attacking her flesh.
Because this was do or die. He chose her over Leona or it was finished for them. He knew that, she knew that.
His eyes lifted slowly, dark lashes uncurling to reveal stone-cold reservoirs of determined grey. ‘The rumours are lies,’ he stated. ‘Just a cruel and ruthless pack of lies put about by Sheikh Hassan’s enemies with the deliberate intention of forcing him to reject his wife and take another one. His father is dying. A power struggle is on. Leona is caught right in the middle because she cannot bear his child. Those who don’t want to unseat Hassan from power are pressurising him to take a second wife who can give him that child. If you have one small portion of understanding what that must be like for her, then you will accept that I cannot turn my back on her need for my support now.’
‘How does your going to Rahman scotch those rumours?’ Eve questioned with an icy scepticism that made him release a short tight laugh.
‘If you knew the ways of Arab politics you would know that no Arab would invite his wife’s lover into his house,’ he explained. ‘I am to be placed on show.’ The laughter died. ‘Held up in front of Rahman’s best and most powerful as a man Hassan trusts and admires. And
