Eve’s response was to step around him and walk coldly away.
She had never felt so betrayed. He’d manoeuvred that discussion, worked it and her like a master conductor until he’d got her to say what he’d wanted to hear, before he’d told her what he’d known she had not wanted to hear.
And for what purpose? Had he received a telephone call from her grandfather also? Did he now know, as she did, that the Greek project was about to be awarded to Hayes-Frayne?
‘Don’t do this, Eve,’ he threaded heavily after her.
She didn’t want to listen—refused to listen, and just kept on walking out of the sitting room and down the hall into the bedroom. Their bedroom. The one they’d been sharing since the first night he’d brought her here. She hated him for that. She now hated him so very badly that she could barely draw breath over that burgeoning hate.
He arrived in the doorway just as she was flipping her case open on the bed. A sense of déjà vu washed over her; only, last time this scene had been played their roles had been reversed.
‘Eve—this is important.’ He tried an appeal.
She almost laughed at his choice of words, coming hard on the back of what she had just been likening this moment to.
‘We are talking about an Arab state here—a Muslim state where women are held sacrosanct. The smallest hint of a scandal and she can be cast out into the wilderness without a single qualm. I have to go.’
‘I’m not stopping you,’ she pointed out.
‘This is stopping me!’ he rasped back angrily.
‘Okay.’ She turned on him in the midst of her own sudden fury. ‘You don’t go and I don’t go!’
It was the gauntlet tossed down on the tiles between them. Ethan even looked down as if he could see it lying there—while Eve held her breath, though it didn’t stop her heart from thundering madly in her ears, or fine tremors from attacking her flesh.
Because this was do or die. He chose her over Leona or it was finished for them. He knew that, she knew that.
His eyes lifted slowly, dark lashes uncurling to reveal stone-cold reservoirs of determined grey. ‘The rumours are lies,’ he stated. ‘Just a cruel and ruthless pack of lies put about by Sheikh Hassan’s enemies with the deliberate intention of forcing him to reject his wife and take another one. His father is dying. A power struggle is on. Leona is caught right in the middle because she cannot bear his child. Those who don’t want to unseat Hassan from power are pressurising him to take a second wife who can give him that child. If you have one small portion of understanding what that must be like for her, then you will accept that I cannot turn my back on her need for my support now.’
‘How does your going to Rahman scotch those rumours?’ Eve questioned with an icy scepticism that made him release a short tight laugh.
‘If you knew the ways of Arab politics you would know that no Arab would invite his wife’s lover into his house,’ he explained. ‘I am to be placed on show.’ The laughter died. ‘Held up in front of Rahman’s best and most powerful as a man Hassan trusts and admires. And if you think I’m looking forward to that, then you’re wrong,’ he grimly declared.
‘So you love her enough to put her needs before your own pride,’ Eve concluded. And that was what this was really all about. Not whether he went or whether he stayed. It was about whether he still loved Leona enough to do it. The rest was just icing to cover an ugly cake.
‘I’m going home, to Athens,’ she told him flatly. ‘This is it. We are finished.’
Ethan released another very bitter laugh. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least you managed to do what you set out to do. You gave yourself two weeks to get around to jilting me. You’re even slightly ahead of time. Well done, Eve.’
With that, it was Ethan who walked away.
Why? Because he had his answer. If she’d loved him, she would have trusted him. If she’d cared about anyone but herself, she would have understood why he had to go.
Funny really, he thought, when only five minutes later he walked out of the villa and climbed into his car. A bit of encouragement on Eve’s part and he would probably have invited her to go to Rahman with him. She would have enjoyed the novelty of watching him be foisted up as a pillar of good old-fashioned gentlemanly honour, when she knew the real man could take a sweet virgin and turn her into a sex goddess.
Too late now. He didn’t want a woman that couldn’t trust his word, and she didn’t want a man who didn’t jump to her bidding every time she told him to. On that most final of thoughts on the subject of Eve Herakleides, he started the car and drove out of the courtyard then turned to skirt San Estéban so he could meet the main road to Malaga.
While Eve still stood where he had left her, staring at nothing, feeling nothing—was too scared to feel.
The sound of the front door closing only five minutes later came as a big shock though. She hadn’t expected him to leave so soon. She hadn’t realised the end was going to be so quick and so cold.
She even shivered, found herself staring at Tigger who was sitting where he always sat, on the table beside the bed. He was looking at her as if to ask what kind of fool she was.
Well, she knew she was a fool. She’d worked so very hard to bring Ethan to the point where he’d want her to keep his ring on her finger. Now she’d thrown it all away.
Was that good or bad? Staring down at the ring, she watched its sparkle grow dim behind a bank of tears, and knew her failure was not in making Ethan want her, but in failing to make him love her.
Malaga airport was packed as always. Ethan arrived just in time to catch his flight to London, where he would have time only to go to his apartment, catch a couple of hours’ sleep then pack a bag before he was due to link up with Victor for their trip to Rahman.