Ethan's Temptress Bride

He’s remembered he hates me, Eve realised nervously. Ethan had washed and changed before coming up to the main house, but even wearing a smart blue shirt and grey trousers she could still see the man sitting in the beach bar feeding her his utter contempt.

‘Please, Ethan,’ she said, panting as she hurried after him down the path that led the way back to the beach. ‘Let me explain—’

‘You set me up,’ he rasped. ‘That doesn’t need explaining.’

‘It was the only way I could think of to—’

‘Get a marriage proposal?’ he cut in contemptuously.

‘You’re not that good a catch!’ she retaliated.

He stopped striding and swung round to face her. Sensational, Eve thought with an inner flutter. Ethan Hayes in the throws of a blistering fury was exciting and dangerous and—

‘Then, why me?’ he bit out.

‘He dotes on me…’

Ethan responded to that with a hard laugh. ‘Now tell me something I haven’t worked out.’

‘He’s built this shining glass case around me that he likes to believe protects me from the realities of life.’

‘Take my advice, and smash the case,’ Ethan responded. ‘Before someone else comes along and smashes it for you.’ On that he turned and started walking again.

So did Eve. ‘That’s the whole point,’ she said urgently. ‘I know I need to smash the case, but gently, Ethan!’ she pleaded with him. ‘Not with a cold hard blow of just about the ugliest truth I could possibly think of to hurt him with.’

‘He deserves the truth,’ he insisted. ‘You are insulting him by protecting him from it!’

‘No.’ Her hand gripping his arm pulled him to a stop again, like a miniature tyrant she stepped right in front of him to block his path. Her eyes pleaded, her mouth pleaded, the fierce grasp of her fingers pleaded. ‘You don’t understand. He’s—’

Eve watched him go from sizzling fury to another place entirely. His shoulders flexed, his teeth gritted together, his wide breastbone shifted on an excess of suppressed air. ‘Don’t tell me again that I don’t understand,’ he bit out roughly, ‘when all I need to understand is that you are using me, Miss Herakleides. And that sticks right here.’ He stabbed two long fingers at his throat.

‘Yes, I

can see that…’ she nodded ‘…and I’m sorry…’

‘Good. Now let me pass so I can go and do what I need to do.’

‘Which is what?’ she asked warily.

The morning sun dappling through the tree tops suddenly turned his face into a map of hard angles that made her insides start to shake. ‘Find the cause of this mess and make him wish he’d never been born before I deliver him into the hands of your grandfather,’ Ethan answered grittily and went to step around her.

‘You can’t!’ Once again Eve stopped him. ‘H-he isn’t here!’ she exclaimed. ‘H-he left the island by launch at first light. I know because I checked before I went to see Grandpa. H-he must have known I—’

‘You checked,’ Ethan repeated, his eyes narrowing on her pale features and her worriedly stammering lips. ‘Now, why should you want to go and do that?’ he questioned silkily.

‘I w-wanted to talk to him, f-find out why he did it,’ she explained. ‘I really needed to know if I had brought it all upon myself! H-he was a friend—a long-standing friend. Friends don’t do that to each other, do they? So I had to at least try to find out why!’

Ethan really couldn’t believe he was hearing this. ‘After everything he put you through last night.’ Grimly he stuck to the main issue here. ‘You went to confront him—on your own?’

Anxiety was darkening those big green eyes again. ‘If I’d asked you to come with me, I knew you would want to kill him!’

Time to stop looking in those eyes, he decided. ‘And you don’t want him dead,’ he persisted.

‘No,’ she breathed. ‘I’m trying to avoid trouble not stir it up! A war will erupt between the two families if what happened last night ever got out.’

But that wasn’t the real reason, Ethan thought grimly. She was hiding something, he was sure of it.

Then that something was suddenly clawing its way up his spine and attacking the hairs at the back of his neck. It was written all over her, in those big green apprehensive eyes, in the unsteady tremor of her lovely mouth—in the very words she had said!