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.”