“Where are we going?” she asked, crinkling her forehead. “You never said.”
“Home,” he replied, guiding her into the backseat of the limousine. He closed the door behind her.
His body’s reaction to her was irritating—and troubling. He didn’t like it. Because he hated her.
When he’d first seen Eve in the hospital, she’d been curled up on the single bed beneath a thick blanket. She’d looked pale and wan, nothing like the vivacious, tempestuous vixen he remembered. Sleeping, she’d looked innocent, far younger than her twenty-five years.
She’d looked small. Fragile.
Talos had come to London specifically to destroy her. For the last three months, he’d been dreaming of it.
But how could he take his revenge if she not
only had no memory of her crimes, but she was pregnant with his baby?
Tightening his hands into fists, he stalked to the other side of the car. Though it was only September, summer had abruptly fled London. A steady drizzle was falling from low gray clouds.
He climbed in beside her and she turned to him without missing a beat. “Where is our home?”
“My home—” he closed his door with a bang “—is Athens.”
She gaped at him. “Athens?”
“It’s where I live, and I must take care of you.” He gave her a brief, tight smile. “Doctor’s orders.”
“So I live there with you?”
“No.”
“We don’t live together?”
“You like to travel,” he said ironically.
“So where are my clothes?” she said in a small voice. “And my passport?”
“Likely at your stepfather’s estate. My staff will collect your things and meet us at the airport.”
“But…” She looked out the window, then turned back to face him and said in a rush, lifting her chin, “I want to see my home. My childhood home. Where is it?”
He gave her an assessing glance. “Your stepfather’s estate is in Buckinghamshire, I believe. But visiting there won’t help you. You spent one night there before the funeral. It hasn’t been your home for a long time.”
“Please, Talos.” Her sapphire eyes gleamed. “I want to see my home.”
His brow furrowed as he looked down at her pleading face.
Eve really had changed, he thought. His mistress had never begged him for anything. She’d never even said please.
Except…
Except for the first night he’d taken her to his bed, when all her defenses had been briefly stripped away and he’d discovered the most desired woman in the world was, against all expectations, a virgin. As he’d pushed himself inside her, she’d looked up at him in a breathless hush with those violet-blue eyes, and he’d thought…he’d almost thought…
He cut off the memory savagely.
He wouldn’t think about how it had once been with her. He wouldn’t think how she had nearly made him lose everything, including his mind.
Eve Craig was a fatal habit that he’d finally broken—and he intended to keep it that way.
“Very well,” he ground out, turning back to face her. “I will take you home—but just to collect your things. We cannot stay.”