Bought: The Greek's Baby (3 page)
Home? But it wasn’t her home. Apparently, she’d barely set foot in this place for years!
But looking at the elderly housekeeper’s sad face, Eve felt a sympathetic pang. She put an arm around her.
“He was a good man, wasn’t he?” she said softly.
“Yes, that he was, miss. The best. And he loved you as his own natural-born child. Even though you weren’t,
and American to boot,” she added, wiping her eyes. “He’d be so happy you’ve finally come back after so long.”
Eve paused delicately. “Has it been so…?”
“Six, no, seven years. Mr. Craig always invited you back for Christmas, but…”
Her voice trailed off as she wiped tears with her apron.
“But I never came, did I?” Eve said.
The older woman shook her head wistfully.
Eve swallowed. Apparently she’d taken her stepfather’s money and let him pay her bills as she shopped and partied her way around the world, but hadn’t even had the grace to return for an occasional visit!
And now he was dead.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered over the lump in her throat.
“Let me take you to your room. You’ll find it’s just as you left it last.”
Shortly afterwards, the quietly sobbing housekeeper left them in Eve’s old bedroom. In the darkness, with Talos behind her in the only light of the double doorway, Eve yanked back the black curtains, filling the room with gray light.
Turning back to get a good look at her room, she choked back a gasp of dismay. Everything was red and black, down to the king-sized black lacquer bed. Dramatic. Modern. Sexy.
Garish.
Talos leaned against the door frame as Eve looked
through the room, desperate for something, anything that would tell her what she needed to know. She opened closet doors, running her hands idly over the new clothes that hung there. The clothes were like the room, sexy and dramatic. Powerful clothes for a woman who desired attention and knew how to wield it.
Eve shivered.
She pulled open the shelves, touching each item lightly with her hands. Black stiletto heels. A Gucci handbag. A Louis Vuitton suitcase. Finding her passport, she thumbed through it, searching for answers that weren’t there. Zanzibar? Mumbai? Cape Town?
“You weren’t kidding,” she said slowly. “I do travel constantly. Especially for the last three months.”
When he didn’t reply, she turned back to face him. His face seemed carefully expressionless.
“Yes,” was all he said. “I know.”
She tossed the passport into her suitcase with the sexy clothes and shoes that all seemed foreign, as if they belonged to someone else. Leaning against the modern black four-poster bed, she looked around her with a heavy sigh. “There’s nothing here.”
“I told you.”
Desolately, she went to the bookshelf. It held only faded fashion magazines, years out of date, and a few slender volumes on etiquette and charm. She picked up the book on top, a splashy pop-culture book and read the title out loud in dismay.
“How to Get Your Man?”
“That’s never been your problem.” There was a distinct edge to his voice.
“Look, Eve,” he said evenly. “It all doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter—these things tell me who I am!” She jabbed her finger toward the closet. “I’ve just found out I was the kind of girl who only cared about her looks, who ignored a stepfather who loved me, and who never bothered to come home at Christmas.” Tears rushed into her eyes. “And I let him die alone,” she whispered. “How could I have been so cruel?”
Desolately, she picked up a dusty photo in a gilded frame. She saw the image of a man giving a cheeky wink, his arm around a beautiful dark-haired woman who was laughing with joy. Between them was a plump little girl with a big beaming smile and two missing front teeth.
She stared at the adults in the photo for a very long time, but no memories came back to her. They had to be her parents, but she couldn’t remember them. Was she really that heartless? Did she truly have no soul?
“What did you find?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t help.” She threw the photograph across the room, where it bounced softly against her bed. She covered her face with her hands. “I can’t remember them. I can’t!”
Crossing the bedroom in three long strides, he took her by the shoulders. “I barely knew my parents, but it hasn’t hurt me.”
“It’s not just the past,” she whispered. “Why would
you want to be with a person like me? Without substance, without heart?”
He didn’t answer.
“And now it’s all too late,” she said over the lump in her throat. “I’ve lost my only family. I have no home.”
“Your home is with me,” he said in a low voice.
She looked up at him. The sunlight from the tall windows gently caressed his face, illuminating floating dust motes like tiny stars all around them in the red-and-black bedroom.
“Let me show you.” He slowly stroked up her bare arms, his fingers light against her skin. “Marry me.”
Electricity spread up her arms and down her body. She fought the urge to step closer to him, to press her body against his chest. Shaking her head, she breathed, “I can’t.”
“Why?” he growled.
“I don’t want you to marry me out of pity!”
His hands suddenly moved around her, caressing her back through her dress, causing the black silk to slide deliciously over her body with his featherlight touch. “Pity is the last thing I feel for you.”
She closed her eyes, leaning forward in spite of herself. Wanting more of his touch. Wanting to feel his warmth. His heat.
He pulled her more deeply into his arms. She felt the scent of him, the warmth of his body beneath his clothes.
“Come away with me,” he whispered into her hair. “Come to Athens and be my bride.”
She swallowed, trembling. She licked her lips, moving her cheek against his shirt as she looked up at him. “I can’t just run away,” she sighed. No matter how she wished she could. “I need my memory back, Talos. I can’t just float through the world not knowing who I am. I can’t marry a virtual stranger, even if you’re the father of my child—”
“So I’ll take you to the place where we first met. To where we began.” She felt his dark gaze fall upon her mouth as he said softly, “I’ll show you the place where I first kissed you.”
Her bones turned to liquid. She looked up at him, her heart pounding as she licked her lips involuntarily. “Where is that?”
His eyes were hot and dark. “In Venice.”
“Venice,” she repeated, and the word was a wistful sigh. She looked up at him with yearning, knowing she should refuse—knowing she should stay in London and see the specialist Dr. Bartlett had recommended. But her refusal caught in her throat. Caught by her romantic dreams.
Caught by him.
Talos reached down to stroke her tender bottom lip with his thumb, caressing her face with his powerful hands.
“Come to Venice,” he said darkly. “I will show you
everything.” He cupped her face with both hands, holding her hard against his body as he looked down at her, commanding her with his gaze. “And then,” he whispered, “you will marry me.”
S
UNLIGHT
reflected off the water as they took the
motoscafo
, a private water taxi, from the Marco Polo Airport. The September weather was bright and warm as they crossed the lagoon, passing by the Piazza San Marco and the Bridge of Sighs on the way to their hotel.
Venice. Talos had never expected to return here again.
But sometimes, he thought grimly, a man had to change the playbook in the middle of the game. He would do whatever it took, be as romantic a fool as any man could be, in order to lure Eve into marriage before her memory returned.
He looked down at her in his arms as they crossed the water of the canal. Her eyes shone with wonder, her full pink lips were slightly parted as she gazed around the city with awe.
The same way every man who saw Eve looked at
her.
Even right now in this water taxi. The young Italian driver kept glancing back in his mirror. Talos’s bodyguard, Kefalas, was sitting in the seat behind them, and
even he had looked at Eve a bit longer than strictly necessary.
Eve was freshly showered and had changed her clothes on his private flight from London. Her dark hair now fell in thick, glossy waves past her bare shoulders, brushing the nipples Talos could easily picture beneath that clinging red jersey dress. The dress showed off the top swell of her overflowing breasts beneath the spaghetti straps, and barely reached halfway down her creamy thighs. She’d put on lipstick, a red color that matched her dress. Her legs were slender and perfect, ending in sharp black stiletto heels.
He couldn’t blame either of them for staring. Even though he wanted to kill them for it.
Strange, Talos thought, he’d never been jealous before of other men staring at Eve. He’d always accepted it as his due. He’d taken it for granted that other men would always want what he, Talos, possessed.
But for the first time it caused his stomach to curl. Why? Because Eve was carrying his child? Because he intended to make her his wife?
His wife in name only, he reminded himself. To protect his unborn child. Not because he cared for Eve. He felt nothing for her but scorn. And, he was forced to admit, lust.
Giving the driver a hard stare until the young man blushed and returned his focus to the wheel, Talos pulled Eve closer against him on the seat. She leaned back against his chest, reaching her arms over his neck and smiling up at him.
He smiled down at her. Taking her hand, he brought it to his lips.
“Nothing is inconvenient to me if it gives you pleasure,” he said, and softly pressed his mouth against her skin.
He felt her shiver beneath his touch in the warm afternoon sun. The air was salty and fresh. In the distance, he could hear the calls of seagulls, hear the distant chiming of medieval church bells.
“You’re so good to me,” she whispered, visibly affected by the way he’d kissed her hand. The realization that she was almost like an innocent, easily swayed by sensual desire, lit a dark fire in his heart.
The femme fatale she’d once been had disappeared along with her memories, it seemed. Dressed in the red dress and lipstick she still looked just like the same arrogant, cruel, fascinating creature she’d been three months ago, but she’d changed completely. With her skittish reactions, her youthful naïveté, she was almost like a virgin.
Except she wasn’t—she was pregnant with his baby. And while she’d certainly been a virgin before they’d met, she’d never been innocent!
Remembering how they’d conceived that baby, all of his limbs suddenly seemed to burn where he had contact with her. Looking down into her beautiful face, he saw
the vulnerability in her blue eyes, saw her pupils dilate. He was reminded of those hot breathless weeks in Athens when her naked body had been beneath his own. When he’d thought that beneath her achingly beautiful, shallow surface something existed that might be truly rare—truly worth possessing.
And he’d kept right on thinking that up until the day he’d seen her having breakfast with his rival, coldly giving him evidence to destroy Talos’s company.
Remember that moment
, he told himself harshly.
Remember how she betrayed you—and why.
But as Eve looked up at him dreamily beneath the elegant, decrepit palazzos of Venice, with the sunlight shining off the canals, all he could suddenly think was that he wanted to kiss her. Now. Hard. To brand her permanently as his, to punish those cherry-red lips until she gasped and cried out in his arms.
His hands tightened around her shoulders, his fingers gripping into her slight frame as he remembered their days and nights in June. He’d been addicted to bedding her. He’d been lost in a woman, in a way he’d never experienced before or since.
He considered himself ruthless. He considered himself strong. But she’d bested him and he’d never seen it coming.
Now, he hated her with all his heart.
But he still wanted her. Wanted her with a consuming desire that could destroy him, if he ever let down his guard.
He would never give in to her temptation. Even if his
weeks of bedding her had been the most erotically charged experience of his life, he would never take her again. If he ever even kissed her, he might be lighting a flame that he could not control.
He watched her nervously lick her lips—those full, cherry-red lips that had once made him shudder and scream with desire so intense he’d literally thought it might kill him.
He could tell she was bewildered by the electric connection between them. She didn’t understand it. Unlike the Eve he’d known, who’d kept her feelings so carefully hidden, this girl didn’t guard her expression. Her thoughts were clearly bare on her angelically beautiful face.
Good, he told himself harshly. The perfect weapon to use against her. He would convince her to marry him. He would romance her. Woo her. Court her.
Lure her
. He would take her as his wife—today. By any means necessary.
Except one.
He would not take her to his bed.
He would not.
Eve turned her face up toward the bright Italian sun from the windows of the boat, leaning back against Talos’s strong, powerful body as the
motoscafo
bounced across the waves. The leather seat hummed beneath her thighs from the vibrations of the engine.
She took a deep breath of the sharp, salty air. Her skin felt warm. Her body felt hot all over as she leaned
against Talos’s hard chest. Even through his black shirt she could feel the heat off his skin.
Then he smiled down at her. His smile did all kinds of strange things to her, making her heart pound. Her days of darkness and emptiness in rainy London now seemed like a lonely dream. She was in Italy with Talos. And their baby. She placed her hand on her still-flat belly.
The water taxi slowed, pulled near the dock of a fifteenth-century palazzo. She stared at the high pointed windows that embellished the crumbling red stucco facade with awe at its exotic Gothic beauty. “Is that where we’re going?”
His black eyes gleamed as he looked down at her. “Our hotel.”
Oh. Their hotel.
She swallowed as she climbed from the taxi to the dock, picturing what it would be like to share a room with this man. To share space.
To share a bed.
Just thinking of it, she stumbled on the dock.
“Careful,” Talos said gruffly, grabbing her arm to steady her. “You don’t have your sea legs yet.”
All the colors of Venice, the twisting, sparkling water, the bright blue sky and tall, red campanile tower of the nearby piazza, seemed to fade into the background with a swirl of color behind him.
“You’re right,” she said over the lump in her throat. “I don’t.”
They stood on the dock as his bodyguard-assistant,
Kefalas, paid the young Italian taxi driver and organized the luggage. But all Eve could see was Talos.
He was so handsome and tall and strong, she thought. She felt his arms tighten around her, and she suddenly wondered if he was going to kiss her. The thought scared her. She jerked away from him nervously. “We will, um, get separate rooms, won’t we?”
She heard a low, sensual laugh escape him as he shook his head.
She licked her lips. “But—”
“I don’t intend to let you out of my sight.” He came forward toward her on the dock, and it took every ounce of her courage not to back away. He loosely brushed a tendril back from the blowing salty breeze. Kissing her temple, he whispered, “Or out of my arms.”
Enfolding her hand in his own, he drew her toward the palatial hotel, where they were whisked inside by the waiting staff.
As Eve walked through the exquisite lobby, past soaring gilded arches and the sweeping staircase, she became slowly aware of men’s heads whipping around to stare at her, almost like spectators following a tennis match.
It would have been funny, if she hadn’t felt like the yellow ball.
Why were they staring at her?
What was wrong with her?
The doorman gaped at her, then jumped to open the door.
The male clerk did a double take from the elaborate desk before he looked away, clearing his throat.
The group of Italian businessmen crossing the lobby weren’t so discreet. Three young men in pinstriped suits stopped in place on the marble floor, staring at her with open jaws. One man jabbed another in the ribs with a grin. Speaking rapidly in Italian, he started to come toward her. His friend stopped him by grabbing his wrist, gesturing toward Talos with palpable fear. Apparently too cowed by Talos to approach her, all three men continued to stare at her, murmuring soft words of appreciation.
Eve felt vulnerable.
Exposed.
Her cheeks went hot beneath all the scrutiny. She was grateful when Talos took her hand and led her toward the elevator. She could feel all the men in the lobby stare after her, hear their mournful sighs meld with the click of her stiletto heels on the marble floor. They were probably staring at her backside right now.
Her neck broke out into a cold sweat.
Why were they staring at her?
Then in a flash, she knew.
The dress.
The tiny red dress that she’d taken from her bedroom closet in Buckinghamshire. Compared to the rest of the wardrobe, she’d thought it the simplest, easiest choice, comfortable and casual. It had seemed like a nice, though somewhat small, sundress in stretchy fabric. And since she apparently owned no comfortable shoes
whatsoever, she’d chosen the black stiletto sandals, which at least wouldn’t squeeze her toes. After her shower, she’d brushed out her dark hair and tentatively put on the lipstick in her handbag.
She’d hoped she would get used to her own clothes, feel confident in them.
Boy, had she been wrong.
Though the knit fabric was indeed soft and stretchy, it was no match for her pregnant breasts, which spilled out quite distressingly over the top. The stiletto heels made her legs very long but also caused her hips to thrust forward and sway with every commanding step.
Comfortable? Casual?
Her clothes cried out for male attention, and no matter where they went, men’s eyes centered on her. No matter their nationality, no matter their age or profession, men couldn’t stop staring!
She didn’t just look trashy, she realized with a horrified intake of breath. She looked like a tart who got paid by the hour!
When the penthouse door finally closed, and the teenaged bellhop left them with one last surreptitious, appreciative glance at Eve’s breasts, she let out a huge sigh of relief. Thank heaven, she was finally alone with Talos!
Then she realized…
She was alone with Talos.
Nervously, she glanced around the lavish suite. Beneath the frescoed ceiling, a crystal chandelier sparkled over the old paintings, marble fireplace and gilded furniture.
Thick, tasseled curtains parted at the wide windows to reveal a veranda that overlooked the canal. Multiple rooms graced the suite, including a living area and elegant bathroom.
But there was only one bed.
The enormous four-poster stood at the center of the suite. Eve couldn’t take her eyes off it.
“Shall we go to dinner?” Talos purred from behind her.
Red-faced, she whirled around to face him, praying he wasn’t able to read minds.
“Dinner? Out?” Thinking of all those leering masculine eyes, she shook her head desperately. “I don’t really feel like going out tonight.”
“Perfect,” he said with a sensual curve of his lips. “So we’ll stay in.”
He came another step toward her, larger and more powerful than any man had a right to be. This royal suite was the size of a house, and yet he somehow filled every inch of the space, filled it to a breaking point. And if he did that to a four-thousand-square-foot suite…
She could only imagine what he’d do to a woman.
No! she wouldn’t think about that. Her cheeks flushed with heat. Nervously, she turned toward the window, feeling for all the world like a teenage virgin. She looked out the window across the sparkling water toward the Venetian island on the other side of the lagoon. She could see hotels, palazzos, ferries. She could see parked black gondolas rise and fall in the
water in the wake of each passing speedboat bringing tourists to St. Mark’s Square.
She felt him touch her shoulder.
“Is this the same hotel we stayed at before?” she stammered. “When we first met?”
“I stayed here alone,” he said, looking down at her. “You refused to come up to my suite.”
She whirled around to face him. “I did?”
“I tried to change your mind.” Reaching down, he caressed her cheek. She took a deep breath at the gentleness of his touch, of his woodsy masculine scent that caused such shivers down her body. He said softly, “You resisted me.”
“I did?” she blurted out. “How?” Then she blushed.
He gave a low laugh. His featherlight fingertips moved down her cheek toward her lips. He touched her so softly that she had to strain to feel him, almost as if he weren’t quite touching her—forcing her to rise to meet him, whether she willed it or no. His fingers ran softly above the length of her tender bottom lip.