But, in the end, he gave in and picked up the receiver, if only to silence its persistent ring. It was Victor Frayne, his business partner, which did not improve his mood any. ‘What do you want, Victor?’ he questioned abruptly.
‘Still as mad as hell at me, I see,’ Victor Frayne drawled sardonically.
Mad as hell at the world, Ethan grimly extended. ‘What do you want?’ he repeated with a little less angst.
Victor went on to tell him that they had an emergency developing in San Estéban and that Leandros Petronades wanted Ethan back there to sort it out.
‘Can’t you see to it?’ Ethan snapped out impatiently. He had no will to feel accommodating towards Victor nor Leandros Petronades for that matter, the latter being the spreader of gossip about his rich and varied love life!
‘It’s a planning dispute with the Spanish authorities,’ Victor explained. ‘Apparently we’ve breached some obscure by-law and they are now insisting we pull down the new yacht club and rebuild it somewhere else.’
‘Over my dead body,’ Ethan pronounced in fatherly protection of what happened to be one of his proudest achievements in design. ‘We have not breached any by-law. I know because I checked them all out personally.’
‘Which makes you the man with the answers, Ethan,’ Victor relayed smoothly. ‘Therefore, it makes this your fight. I have to warn you that they are threatening to bulldoze the place themselves if we refuse to do it.’
‘I’ll be on the next plane,’ Ethan announced, and was surprised to discover how relieved he felt to reach that decision. Now he could get the hell out of paradise and leave the serpent to look for a fresh victim to mesmerise before she bit!
‘Have you heard from Leona?’ he then heard himself ask, and could have bitten himself for being so damned obvious.
‘She’s fine,’ Leona’s father assured him. ‘She is cruising the Med as we speak and thoroughly enjoying herself, by the sound of it.’
Which puts me right in my place, Ethan thought as he replaced the receiver. Out of sight, out of mind and where I belong.
‘Damn,’ he muttered. ‘Damn all women to hell.’ And, on that profound curse, he picked up the telephone again with the intention of reserving a seat for himself on the three o’clock plane to Nassau, where he could catch a connecting flight to London, and then on to Spain. Only he didn’t get quite that far because a movement at the door caught his eye.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE looked pale and fragile, as if someone had come along with an eraser and had wiped out all that wonderful animation which made Eve Herakleides the fascinating creature she was. His heart dipped. Had he done that? Or was the white-faced frailty Aidan Galloway’s handiwork, and it was just that he had been too angry with her earlier to remember that she had been put through one hell of an ordeal only the night before.
No, he then told himself as a softening in his mood began to weaken his firm stance against her machinations. Eve is trouble. You’ve done enough. Send her packing and get out of here.
‘What now?’ he demanded in a hard, grim tone that told Eve he only had to look at her now to see trouble standing at his door.
But Eve wasn’t Ethan Hayes’ real trouble, she’d just come to realise. No, his trouble had been evident in the deep dark husky quality of his voice when he had spoken that other woman’s name.
Suddenly she wanted to run, she wanted to hide, she wanted to pretend she had not overheard his conversation, because she knew for sure now that Ethan had lied before, and he was tragically, painfully in love with Leona Al-Qadim.
At that precise moment she felt like trouble because she had this blistering urge to knock some sense into him! Would someone like to tell her, please, how a man like Ethan Hayes could allow himself to fall in love with a very married woman? Was she a witch? Had she cast a spell over him? Had they been such passionate lovers that he’d been blinded by the sex and he couldn’t see it took a certain type of woman to cheat on her husband?
No wonder the Sheikh had bruised his jaw for him! He deserved it, the fool! And she only hoped to goodness that the lovely Leona had received her just desserts too!
‘Speak, Eve,’ Ethan prompted, when she still hadn’t managed to say anything. ‘I’m in a rush. I have a plane to catch.’
A plane to catch, she silently repeated. Well, didn’t that just about say everything else about him! Her eyes turned to crystal, backed by an ocean of burning green anger. ‘So.’ She stepped forward into his house and into his life with the grim intention to sort it out for him. ‘You’re going to leave the island and drop me in it because of one stupid phone call.’
The burning accusation flicked him like a whip. Ethan fielded it with the kind of small mocking smile that further infuriated Eve. ‘That one stupid phone call was from my business partner informing me of an emergency that has developed on one of our projects in Spain,’ he explained. ‘And you dropped yourself in it,’ he then coolly reminded her, ‘by telling a pack of lies to your grandfather.’
‘You had the chance to refute those lies. You didn’t,’ Eve pointed out. ‘So now I’m afraid you are stuck with me.’
/> ‘As my future wife? Not in this life, Miss Herakleides,’ he informed her. ‘You know already what I think you should do, but if you still can’t bring yourself to drop Aidan Galloway in it with your grandfather, then, with my speedy exit from here, at least you won’t have to worry about me destroying your grandfather’s trust in your honesty.’
With that cutting bit of arrogance he turned to walk away from this conversation—as if Eve was going to let him!
‘Oh, you’re so pompous sometimes.’ She sighed as she trailed him across the sitting room. ‘Do you ever stop to listen to yourself? I have no wish to be the wife of anyone,’ she announced as she arrived in the bedroom doorway in time to see him settle a suitcase out on the bed. ‘But, while we are on the subject of marriage, I’ll point out that at least I am at liberty to be your wife if I wanted to be!’
The remark made him turn. Eve felt her skin start to prickle as she was reminded of wild animals again. ‘Meaning—what?’ he demanded.
She offered a shrug, that warning prickle forcing her to backtrack slightly. ‘Meaning I don’t have the wish, so why are we arguing about it?’