‘So you love her enough to put her needs before your own pride,’ Eve concluded. And that was what this was really all about. Not whether he went or whether he stayed. It was about whether he still loved Leona enough to do it. The rest was just icing to cover an ugly cake.
‘I’m going home, to Athens,’ she told him flatly. ‘This is it. We are finished.’
Ethan released another very bitter laugh. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least you managed to do what you set out to do. You gave yourself two weeks to get around to jilting me. You’re even slightly ahead of time. Well done, Eve.’
With that, it was Ethan who walked away.
Why? Because he had his answer. If she’d loved him, she would have trusted him. If she’d cared about anyone but herself, she would have understood why he had to go.
Funny really, he thought, when only five minutes later he walked out of the villa and climbed into his car. A bit of encouragement on Eve’s part and he would probably have invited her to go to Rahman with him. She would have enjoyed the novelty of watching him be foisted up as a pillar of good old-fashioned gentlemanly honour, when she knew the real man could take a sweet virgin and turn her into a sex goddess.
Too late now. He didn’t want a woman that couldn’t trust his word, and she didn’t want a man who didn’t jump to her bidding every time she told him to. On that most final of thoughts on the subject of Eve Herakleides, he started the car and drove out of the courtyard then turned to skirt San Estéban so he could meet the main road to Malaga.
While Eve still stood where he had left her, staring at nothing, feeling nothing—was too scared to feel.
The sound of the front door closing only five minutes later came as a big shock though. She hadn’t expected him to leave so soon. She hadn’t realised the end was going to be so quick and so cold.
She even shivered, found herself staring at Tigger who was sitting where he always sat, on the table beside the bed. He was looking at her as if to ask what kind of fool she was.
Well, she knew she was a fool. She’d worked so very hard to bring Ethan to the point where he’d want her to keep his ring on her finger. Now she’d thrown it all away.
Was that good or bad? Staring down at the ring, she watched its sparkle grow dim behind a bank of tears, and knew her failure was not in making Ethan want her, but in failing to make him love her.
Malaga airport was packed as always. Ethan arrived just in time to catch his flight to London, where he would have time only to go to his apartment, catch a couple of hours’ sleep then pack a bag before he was due to link up with Victor for their trip to Rahman.
Eve took the easier option, and rang her cousin Leandros to beg the use of his helicopter to take her to Malaga. Therefore she arrived long before Ethan got there, and had taken off for Athens by the time he pulled his car into a long-stay slot.
London was cold. He didn’t mind; the heavy grey skies suited his mood. It wasn’t until he thought to check his emails before shooting off to meet Victor, that he found a note from his secretary telling him that Theron Herakleides had come out of hiding and was now making hopeful murmurings about Hayes-Frayne being awarded the Greek project.
‘Well, shoot that in the foot,’ he told the computer screen, and switched it off. As of now, Hayes-Frayne could kiss goodbye anything to do with Greece.
He wished he’d kissed Eve goodbye before he’d left…
Athens was hot, stifling beneath one of its famous heat-waves. Eve was glad to let the taxi cab drive her up into the hills where the air was more fit to breathe. Her grandfather’s mansion house stood in a row of gracious old houses occupying one of the most prestigious plots the rambling city had to offer.
He was just sitting down to dinner when she walked in, unannounced. ‘My angel!’ he greeted in surprise, and got to his feet to come down the table for his expected embrace.
He was not expecting her to burst into a flood of tears though. ‘Oh, Grandpa!’ She sobbed as she walked into his arms. ‘I hate him. I hate him so much!’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE palace of Al-Qadim made an impressive sight standing against a backcloth of a star-studded night sky. Its rich sandstone walls had been flood-lit from below and, as they drove through the arched gateway into its huge inner courtyard, Ethan was reluctantly impressed with the sheer scale and beauty that met his eyes.
But he didn’t want to be here. He was angry and fed up with role-playing for other people’s benefit. He was sick to his stomach with the Mr Honourable tab people seemed to like to stick on him. The Mr you-can-depend-on-me-to-bale-you-out label.
He grimaced. Somewhere back there across a large tract of land and an ocean, he was being summarily sacked from his latest role with the none too tasty word jilted to wear as an epitaph to that little affair. While here, he was about to become the focus of critical Arab eyes, when he received his second sacking in twenty-four hours from the role as wicked lover to the Sheikha Leona Al-Qadim.
‘Ethan—if you don’t want to go ahead with this, then say so,’ Victor murmured beside him.
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ he answered tersely, but then his whole manner had been terse since he’d climbed into his car in Spain and had driven away from Eve.
Eve the flirt, Eve the temptress, Eve the serpent, who’d made the last two weeks a perfect paradise—before she’d reverted
