Читать книгу Irresistible Greeks: Red-Hot and Rich: His Reputation Precedes Him / An Offer She Can't Refuse / Pretender to the Throne - Кэрол Мортимер, Emma Darcy - Страница 15

‘IF you will all excuse me…’ Eva turned and hurried blindly from the crowded drawing room as the felt the nausea rising at the back of her throat, only just managing to make it into the ladies’ powder room down the hallway and lock herself into one of the two marble-tiled cubicles before she was violently ill.

This couldn’t be happening!

On top of every other humiliation Eva had suffered at Jack’s hands, his second wife was obviously at least six months pregnant, with a baby that Eva, at least, knew couldn’t possibly be his!

Unless—

No, it simply wasn’t possible that it was Jack’s baby. Jack was totally incapable of fathering a child of his own. And yet Yvette Cabot Grey was undeniably pregnant…

How? By another man? Or by the IVF that Eva was contemplating for herself? If that were the case, the baby Yvette carried wouldn’t be Jack’s…

That was perhaps the thing that hurt Eva the most. After tests had shown that Jack could never have a child of his own Eva had begged and pleaded with him to adopt, or for him to allow Eva the possibility of becoming pregnant by an anonymous donor. Tearful pleas Jack had always denied, with the disclaimer that he could never love a child that wasn’t truly his.

‘Eva?

‘Markos…’ She straightened abruptly as she recognised his voice on the other side of the cubicle door… inside the ladies’ powder room!

‘Are you all right?’

Was she all right? Of course she wasn’t all right! Not only had her ex-husband remarried, but his second wife was pregnant with the baby Eva had so longed for herself!

No, she certainly couldn’t claim she was ‘all right’. But what seemed more pressing right now was that Markos shouldn’t be in the ladies’ powder room in Jonathan Cabot Grey Senior’s house…!

Markos looked at Eva searchingly when she unlocked and opened the door, her gaze quizzical as she stepped out into the carpeted area where ladies usually freshened up. It was now empty of all but the two of them. Deliberately so, Markos having turned several of those ladies away before he stepped into the room and locked the door behind him to prevent anyone else from entering.

‘You really shouldn’t be in here.’ Eva gave a derisive shake of her head as she moved past him to one of the porcelain sinks to wash her hands and face before filling and drinking a glass of water. Her face was still that sickly grey colour.

He raised dark brows. ‘You are obviously unwell.’

‘That’s still no reason—’

‘The door is locked, and I will go where I want whenever I deem it necessary,’ Markos declared harshly.

Eva gave a pained wince. He now appeared every inch the arrogantly forceful Markos Lyonedes, joint owner of Lyonedes Enterprises. ‘And you deemed it necessary tonight to lock the two of us in a ladies’ powder room in my ex-father-in-law’s home?’

His jaw tightened. ‘Yes.’

That was what Eva had thought he would say. And he was right, of course; she could imagine nothing worse than that anyone else should witness her humiliating reaction to being introduced to Jack’s very pregnant second wife. It was enough that Markos must now be wondering why she had reacted so strongly…

She took another sip of water and deliberately avoided meeting Markos’s gaze in the mirror above the sink. ‘I’m sorry about this. I suddenly felt ill—I must have eaten something earlier that disagreed with me.’

‘Or met someone…?’ he suggested dryly.

Eva gave a humourless smile. ‘Or met someone,’ she acknowledged self-derisively.

Even in her distress Eva couldn’t help noticing how out of place Markos looked in this ultra-feminine room, with its rose and green floral wallpaper. Even the soaps next to the sinks were the same deep rose colour, and several bottles of expensive perfume and pale pink towel ling squares were arranged neatly on the onyx marble top. There were also two comfortable chairs covered in rose-coloured velvet.

‘Could we possibly leave now, do you think?’

He nodded tersely. ‘I have already asked for the car to be brought round.’

Eva’s tensed shoulders slumped with relief. ‘Have I mentioned before how wonderful you are?’

‘I do not believe so,’ Markos answered dryly. ‘But I will be happy for you to tell me so once we are well away from here.’ His face darkened grimly.

Eva couldn’t even begin to imagine how awkward this situation was for Markos. How awful to have brought her here, expecting to spend a pleasant evening at the home of a business colleague, only to learn that business colleague was in fact Eva’s ex-father-in-law—and, even worse, that her ex-husband was also here with his second and very pregnant wife…

‘Markos, I really am sorry.’

‘As I said, we will talk about this once we are well away from here.’ He continued to frown grimly as he took a firm grip of her elbow to hold her firmly at his side as he unlocked the door. ‘We will leave now.’

She blinked. ‘Without saying goodbye?’

Markos nodded abruptly. ‘Without speaking to anyone.’

Eva sensed the anger burning beneath the surface of Markos’s outwardly calm demeanour as they stepped out into the huge hallway, but she didn’t know him well enough yet to know who that anger was directed at: this uncomfortable situation or her.

‘Markos—’

‘Ah, there you are, angel. Feeling better…?’

Eva’s heart skipped a beat at the sound of Jack’s voice. Markos’s fingers squeezed her elbow reassuringly before the two of them turned to face the other man in the otherwise deserted vestibule of the entrance hall. Eva breathed an inward sigh of relief as she saw Jack was alone; she wasn’t sure she could bear to see the pregnant Yvette again this evening.

‘Markos and I are leaving now,’ she said coolly.

Jack raised blond brows. ‘You only just got here.’

‘And now we are leaving,’ Markos bit out coldly. ‘Please inform your father than I will telephone and speak with him some time next week.’

The other man’s cheeks became slightly flushed. He obviously resented Markos’s authoritative tone. ‘It would be more polite if you were to tell him that yourself.’

‘As I am sure you are only too well aware, the current situation is beyond politeness.’ Markos looked at the other man with coldly glittering eyes.

‘Markos—’

‘Stay out of this, angel!’

Markos released Eva’s arm and strode quickly across the hallway until he stood only inches away from the other man. He was slightly taller than Jack Cabot Grey. He was not touching him, but was still intimidating nonetheless.

‘Her name is Eva. And you will not speak to her in that way. Ever again! Do I make myself clear?’ he grated softly.

The other man’s jaw tightened. ‘You can’t just come into my father’s home and threaten me—’

‘I believe I just did,’ Markos purred softly. Dangerously.

‘I call her angel because her name is Ev-angel-ine.’ Jack Cabot Grey met his gaze challengingly for several seconds before those deep blue eyes slid away and he instead looked at Eva. ‘It would seem that your marriage to me gave you a taste for powerful men, angel,’ he drawled insultingly.

Markos drew in his breath sharply. ‘You—’

‘I only see one man who fits that description, Jack,’ Eva cut in scathingly. ‘And it isn’t you!’

‘Why, you little—’ Jack Cabot Grey broke off warily as Markos placed a hand against his chest.

‘I believe I have warned you never, ever to insult Eva in my presence again,’ he reminded him in an icily soft voice.

‘What on earth is going on here?’

Eva turned a stricken face to see her ex-father-in-law, Jonathan Cabot Grey, stride forcefully into the vestibule.

Shrewd blue eyes narrowed on his son and Markos Lyonedes as they faced each other challengingly. ‘Is there a problem…?’

Markos gave Jack Cabot Grey one last contemptuous glance before slowly stepping away from him to stroll back to Eva’s side. He faced his host. ‘Eva and I were just leaving.’

‘So soon?’

Markos might have been more impressed with the older man’s attempt at regret if he hadn’t seen the look of relief in Jonathan’s eyes before it was quickly masked by polite query. It was a politeness Markos was too displeased to indulge at this moment.

‘I am of the opinion that it would have been better if we had left some time ago,’ he said dismissively, giving Jonathan a disapproving look as he took a hold of Eva’s arm, his mouth tightening with displeasure when he realised she was trembling again as she leant into his side.

What could have happened between Eva and Jack Cabot Grey in the past to have caused this severe reaction in her? For her to be physically ill just from seeing him again?

Except…

Unexpected as it might have been, it hadn’t been seeing Jack Cabot Grey which had made Eva ill. That had only happened when the other man’s second wife had joined them.

Was it because Eva still had feelings for the man, and the existence of that second wife now made reconciliation impossible?

Her scathing attitude towards her ex-husband whenever she spoke to him would seem to imply otherwise. And yet… There was no denying that something had made Eva ill just a short time ago. The same something that was still causing her to tremble.

Markos had no idea what Eva was reacting to any longer, and that irritated him as much as everything else about this evening displeased him; he had believed earlier that they were coming to know each other, to like each other—and now this!

‘We will speak again later in the week, Jonathan,’ he assured the older man stiffly before turning to leave.

‘I’ll be in touch, angel.’

Eva stiffened as Jack called after her softly, not fooled for a moment by the pleasantness of his tone, and pretty sure she knew the reason Jack intended contacting her again…

Almost as soon as Eva and Jack had married, and had moved to New York to live, Jonathan had started talking of the possible arrival of his grandson—Jonathan Cabot Grey the Third. It was something which Eva and Jack had eventually realised was never going to happen, but Jack had never, at least to Eva’s knowledge, confided in his father. The fact that Yvette Cabot Grey was now pregnant, supposedly with Jack’s child, was either a medical miracle or something that Jack did not wish Eva to discuss with his father.

Eva didn’t know whether to be insulted, because Jack thought she would tell his father that the child Yvette carried couldn’t possibly be his, or angry, because Jack thought she would feel vindictive enough towards him that she would deliberately hurt the man who had once been her father-in-law.

The latter emotion won out as she turned to look coldly at Jack. ‘We have nothing to talk about,’ she assured him scathingly.

He quirked blond disbelieving brows. ‘No?’

‘Absolutely not,’ she snapped, before turning to her ex-father-in-law. ‘Goodbye, Jonathan. It was nice seeing you again.’ Her voice warmed slightly as she spoke to the man she had always rather liked.

Jonathan must have been surprised when Jack had returned from working in London for two years with Eva as his wife—a young Englishwoman who wasn’t in the least wealthy or of the same social strata as the Cabot Greys. But never by word or deed had Jonathan ever shown her anything but the respect and liking due to her as his son’s wife. The future mother of his grandchildren…

‘Take care,’ she added huskily, not sparing Jack so much as a second glance as she and Markos finally left together.

‘Not here and not now,’ Markos advised gruffly as Eva tried to speak once they were outside.

She shot him a fleeting glance. ‘I was only going to say thank-you.’

Markos’s tension eased slightly and he relaxed his grip on Eva’s arm. The last few minutes had been far from pleasant. For any of them.

‘If you insist, you may offer me suitable thanks once we are alone together in my apartment,’ he assured her gruffly.

She looked uncertain. ‘Your apartment…?’

He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘We have to return to Lyonedes Tower in order for you to collect your car. Once there, we might as well go up to my apartment and talk in comfort.’

An argument to which she had no rebuttal, Eva acknowledged ruefully. Her car was at Lyonedes Tower, and she did owe Markos a suitable thank-you—although she had a feeling her idea of suitable and Markos’s might differ greatly in content! He had been so supportive of her this evening and she owed him an explanation as to the reason he had needed to be so.

‘Coffee, wine or brandy?’ Markos offered dryly once they were once again in the anaemic sitting room of the penthouse apartment at Lyonedes Tower.

‘Oh, I think this situation calls for brandy all round, don’t you?’ She sighed wearily as she sank down in one of the boxy cream armchairs.

‘I am unsure as yet exactly what this situation is.’ He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over a chair, before moving to the bar situated at the other end of the room and pouring brandy into two glasses.

Eva grimaced as she took the glass Markos held out to her before moving to stand a short distance away from her. ‘It isn’t every day that you meet your ex-husband by accident!’ She sipped the brandy, instantly feeling the effects of the fiery alcohol as it slid easily down the back of her throat. ‘The last I heard of Jack he was living and working in France.’

‘Which is obviously where he met and married Yvette.’

‘Obviously,’ Eva echoed noncommittally as she stared down at the beige carpet.

‘Are you still in love with him?’

She gave Markos a startled look and the glass shook precariously in her hand. ‘What?’

His smile lacked humour. ‘In the circumstances it is a relevant question, I would have thought.’

Eva drank down the rest of her brandy before answering him, in the hopes that its warmth would melt the block of ice that seemed to have formed in her chest. ‘What circumstances?’

Markos kept his expression deliberately bland. ‘You did not appear to become ill until after the appearance of Grey’s second wife. Do not cry, Eva.’ All attempts to remain detached fled as he saw the tears shimmering in Eva’s huge gold-coloured eyes, and Markos quickly placed his brandy down on the glass-topped coffee table before moving onto his haunches beside the chair where she sat, to take her icy cold hand in his. ‘Talk to me, Eva. Tell me why you are crying.’

‘I’m not,’ she denied, even as those tears began to fall down the paleness of her cheeks. ‘I just… You’re right. Seeing Yvette…it was a shock—’ She broke off and began to cry in earnest.

It was as if a dam had burst inside Eva—the dam that had held back all the grief and pain she had buried deep inside her when her hopes and dreams of having a family of her own, a baby of her own, had been dashed five years ago, when the specialist had told them that Jack could never father a child.

A child Jack now appeared to be having with his second wife.

It didn’t matter by what means Yvette Cabot Grey had become pregnant, only that she was. With the baby Jack had denied Eva five years ago.

Markos was completely at a loss as to what he should do or say as Eva buried her face in her hands and sobbed as if her heart were breaking. Which perhaps it was.

Over Jack Cabot Grey?

Having no experience upon which to draw, it wasn’t for Markos to criticise whom others might choose—or not choose—to love. Except that Jack Cabot Grey was everything Markos disliked in a man: shallow, selfish and, where Eva was concerned, in Markos’s opinion cruelly vindictive. None of which changed the fact that Eva could not seem to stop crying as if her heart were breaking.

Markos reached out and gathered Eva up into his arms, lifting her and cradling her tenderly against his chest before sitting down in the chair himself. Her tears quickly dampened the front of his shirt. Markos ran his fingers soothingly against her temple, considering the irony of holding the woman he desired in his arms as she cried over another man.

If his cousin Drakon could only see him now.

‘It was the baby,’ Eva finally choked out painfully. ‘I—we—we tried for so long to have a baby of our own, and—we finally had tests. The specialist told us it wasn’t possible,’ she sobbed.

Oh, dear God! And that cold-hearted bastard Cabot Grey had stood there and calmly introduced his pregnant second wife to Eva, all the time knowing that Eva wasn’t able to have a baby herself. The absolute bastard!

Could this also be the reason Eva’s self-confidence was so fragile beneath her veneer of derision? The reason she was so determined not to become involved with another man? Possibly also the reason she and Jack Cabot Grey had divorced?

Markos could certainly believe the latter. Even on such short acquaintance Markos knew that Jack Cabot Grey was the sort of vindictive bastard who would never have let Eva forget she was unable to give him the Cabot Grey son and heir.

‘It’s all right, Eva,’ he assured her softly, speaking into the silky softness of her hair. ‘Everything is going to be all right.’

She gave a choked laugh. ‘Of course it isn’t.’

No, as far as Eva was concerned perhaps it wasn’t… ‘You are a beautiful young woman, with all your life still ahead of you. Not all men are like Jack Cabot Grey—’

‘Thank goodness!’ She gave a shiver of revulsion.

Markos looked down at her quizzically. ‘You really do not love him still?’

Eva straightened before attempting to stand up, but she was prevented from doing so as Markos’s arms tightened about her to keep her firmly sitting on his knee.

Which was pretty embarrassing, now that Eva thought about it. In fact the whole of this evening had been embarrassing, she realised, now that she had got over her shock and calmed down a little.

First of all she had completely flipped out when they’d arrived at Jonathan’s house. Then she had almost collapsed with surprise when she had realised Jack was also at the party. Even worse, she had run from the room and been violently ill in the ladies’ powder room once she had seen that Jack’s second wife was pregnant. An embarrassment that Markos had witnessed when he followed her. And now she had cried all over Markos’s white shirt, probably ruining it, no doubt giving him completely the wrong impression as to why she had become so upset in the first place.

Not the best first date she had ever been on.

She doubted Markos had ever had one like it before, either.

She gave a shake of her head. ‘I’m not sure that I ever did love Jack,’ she answered him honestly. ‘Not really.’

‘And yet you married him…?’

Eva nodded. ‘I was a student when we met at a party given by one of my father’s friends. Jack was six years older than me, and he seemed so mature and self-assured in comparison with my other friends—taking me out to the theatre and wining and dining me at expensive restaurants.’ She grimaced as she saw Markos’s raised brows. ‘I’ve had plenty of time to think about this, and I know now that I allowed myself to be dazzled by Jack’s easy charm and self-confidence. I mistook being dazzled for being in love.’

Markos looked down at her quizzically. ‘It was a big thing to move to New York with him—away from your family and friends—after you were married.’

‘I’m afraid that was probably in an effort to get away from most of my family. My parents aren’t the happiest married couple in the world,’ she explained at Markos’s questioning look. ‘They should probably never have married each other, and they certainly shouldn’t have had a child together. My childhood was like a battlefield.’

Markos gave a pained frown as this further knowledge of Eva’s life only added to those reasons why she now felt so cynical towards love and relationships. His own childhood hadn’t been without trauma, when his mother and father had died so suddenly when he was only eight, but when he’d gone to live with his aunt and uncle he had been lucky enough to find another set of parents who had loved and cared for him as their own. Whereas Eva didn’t seem to have had even one set of parents to love and nurture her.

‘You haven’t had an easy time of it, have you?’ Markos observed.

Eva smiled bravely. ‘No worse than a lot of people.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘Markos, I seem to be doing this a lot recently where you’re concerned—but I really am sorry for blubbing all over you just now.’

‘No apology is necessary.’

‘What if I were to make it a “suitable” one…?’ Eva quirked her brows at him as she pulled his bow tie undone, before starting to unfasten the buttons down the front of his shirt.

Markos regarded her warily. ‘I am not sure this is a good idea—’

Eva didn’t allow him to finish as she moved to lean into the hardness of his bared chest before pressing her lips against his.

Markos sat completely unmoving, his arms still lightly about Eva’s waist as those deliciously sensual lips moved softly against him, as light as butterfly wings. The lightness of her perfume was invading his senses, and he felt the heaviness of her breasts pressing against the hardness of his chest.

She moved back slightly, her palms hot against his chest, her breath warm against his lips as those golden eyes looked directly into his. ‘Make love with me, Markos…’

His body reacted instantly to that husky invitation, his pulse racing, heart pounding, and his shaft becoming rock hard and throbbing in seconds. It was impossible for him to deny how much he wanted to accept that invitation.

But he wasn’t going to do so.

Eva might have stopped crying, but there was no forgetting how upset she had been earlier. And the reason for that distress wasn’t going to go away any time soon—which probably meant she wasn’t completely responsible for her actions right now. For Markos to make love with her under these circumstances would surely make him as much of a bastard as her ex-husband. Even if he did literally ache to just pick Eva up in his arms and carry her to his bed!