It took ten minutes to get there. Ten long minutes of throat-locking hell. Eve gripped her birthday gift. Ethan gripped the wheel. They slid into a parking spot by the car-hire shop and both of them almost tumbled out of the car in their eagerness to breath hot humid air.
The nine-seat Cessna was waiting on the narrow runway. A porter ran up to collect their luggage to take it to the plane. Ethan appeared out of the car-hire shop, still feeding his credit card back into his wallet as he came. His dark head was bent, his hair gleaming blue-black against his deeply tanned face. He was wearing another blue shirt with grey trousers, and over his arm lay a jacket to match. Eve clutched at the strap to her shoulder bag, over which hung the cardigan that matched her top—and wished she didn’t find the man so fascinating to watch.
He looked up. She looked quickly away. She looked beautiful, and his heart pulled a lousy trick on him by squeezing so tightly it took his breath away.
Nassau was a relief. They had a two-hour stopover, which meant they could both make excuses to go their separate ways for a while. Eve went window-shopping; Ethan went to hunt out somewhere he could access his website and download some documents so he could read them on the flight.
On his way back to find Eve, he spied a furry tiger with its tail stuck arrogantly in the air. He began to grin. Eve would never get the joke, but he couldn’t resist going into the shop and buying if for her. While the toy was being gift-wrapped, he went browsing further down the line of shop windows and came back to collect the tiger with a strangely stunned expression on his face.
Eve was sitting with a fizzy drink can and a whole range of gifts packed into carrier bags. ‘Souvenirs for my friends in London,’ she explained. ‘They expect it.’
Ethan just smiled and sat down beside her, then offered her his gift. ‘Happy birthday,’ he said solemnly.
She stared at him in big-eyed surprise. It was amazing, he mused, how much he adored those eyes. ‘Open it,’ he invited, tongue-in-cheek. ‘I’m not at all sensitive to disappointment.’
He was smiling, really smiling, with his mouth, with the warm soft grey of his wonderful eyes. Eve smiled back, really smiled back, then handed him her can so she could give her full attention to ripping off the gold paper from her present. Meanwhile Ethan drank from her can and watched with interest as the tiger emerged.
There was a moment’s stunned silence, an unexpected blush, then she laughed. It was that wonderfully light, delighted laugh he’d heard her use so often for other people but never for him before. ‘Good old Tigger—you idiot.’ She turned to him. ‘How did you know I have a whole roomful of Tiggers back home?’
He hadn’t known, but he did now, which rather sent his private joke flat, because Tigger was not quite the animal he had been thinking about when he’d bought the furry toy. Still, did it matter? She liked it, that was enough.
‘ESP,’ he confided, tapping his temple.
With her old exuberance, Eve leaned over to kiss him, realised what she was about to do and hesitated halfway there. Wary eyes locked on his, and a black eyebrow arched quizzically over one of them. Her heart gave a thud. Irresistible, she thought. I’m falling head over heels and don’t even care any more. She closed the gap, knowing by the dizzying curling sensation inside that a kiss was about the most dangerous thing she could offer right now, even here in the transit lounge of a busy airport with hundreds of people playing chaperone…Because he might think he was fatally in love with Leona Al-Qadim, but he fancies the pants off me!
And I’m available, very available, she added determinedly. Their lips met—briefly—and clung in reluctance to part.
Yes, Eve thought triumphantly, he does want me. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured softly.
‘You’re welcome,’ he replied, but he was frowning slightly. Eve wished she knew what thoughts had brought on his frown.
Thoughts of Leona Al-Qadim? Was he sitting here with one woman’s kiss still warm on his lips and daring to think of another? Like a coin flipping over, she went from smiling certainty of her own power to win this man, to dragging suspicion that the other woman would always win.
Tigger was receiving a mangling, Ethan noticed, and wondered what the poor tiger had done to deserve such abuse? Then he had to smother a sigh, because he knew it was him she was thinking about as she twisted the poor animal’s tail round in spirals. They kept kissing when they shouldn’t. They kept responding to each other when they shouldn’t. He was not the right man for her, and she was most definitely not the right woman for him.
‘Here, do you want this?’ He offered the drink can back to her.
Eve shook her head. ‘You can finish it if you want.’
He didn’t want it, but he knew what he did want. On that grim thought he got to his feet, too tense and restless to sit still any longer in this—crazy situation that should never have begun in the first place!
Walking over to the nearest waste-disposal bin he dropped the can in it, took a deep, steadying breath, then turned to go back the way he had come. Eve was no longer sitting where he had left her. Alarm shot through his veins like an injection of adrenalin, that quickly changed to a kind of thick gluey stuff that weighed him down so heavily he couldn’t move an inch.
Why? Because her hair lay like silk against her shoulders, her bags of shopping hung at her sides. Tall and tanned and young and lovely, she was drawing interested gazes from every man that passed her by because she had class, she had style. She was an It girl, one of the fortunate few—and right at the present moment in time she was looking in the same jeweller’s window he’d stood looking in only minutes before. Same place, same tray of sparkling jewels, he was absolutely certain of it. His feet took him over there
, moving like lead in time with the heavy pump of his heart.
‘Which one do you like?’ he asked lightly over her shoulder.
She jumped, startled, glanced up at him, then looked quickly away again, blushing as if he’d caught her doing something truly sinful. ‘The diamond cluster with the emerald centre,’ she answered huskily.
Husky was back, he noticed, and husky he liked. Reaching down, he took her bags from her then placed a free hand to the small of her back. ‘Let’s go and try it,’ he murmured softly.
‘What—? But we can’t do that!’
She was shocked, she was poleaxed—he even liked that. The lead weights dropped away from his body; he sent her a wry grin that made her eyes dilate. ‘Of course we can,’ he disagreed. ‘It’s tradition.’
Tradition, Eve repeated and felt her mind start turning somersaults, as the hand on her back firmly guided her into the shop. Ethan placed her bags on the floor at his feet, kept her close and calmly asked for the tray of rings. It arrived in front of them, sparkling beneath the lights. Long, lean, tanned male fingers plucked the diamond and emerald cluster off its velvet bed. While the assistant smiled the smile used for lovers, Ethan lifted up her left hand and gently slid the ring onto her finger.