He’d been wrong.
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Eve must have planned this since she was a fourteenyear-old girl. Talos thought suddenly of those books he’d seen in her teenaged bedroom in a newly chilling light. How to Get Your Man.
Her whole life since her father’s death—the whole meaning of her life—had been to get revenge on the man she thought had destroyed her father, ruined her family.
She must have studied the models and actresses Talos had dated. She’d emulated them. It had all been a carefully constructed facade. She’d done it perfectly, down to the last detail. Except for one thing—unlike his other women, she’d always remained emotionally detached.
Now he knew why.
How she must have hated him.
Now, he looked at her across the crowd, watching the brilliance of her smile as she sifted through a selection of hand-knitted baby booties at a stall.
Dalton would have told his daughter that he was innocent. He would have insisted he was the injured party, told her Talos had turned on him for his own gain. Dalton was charming and manipulative. It was how he’d swindled his own shareholders of nearly ten million dollars before an inside source had alerted Talos to the theft.
Would Eve believe him if he told her the truth?
Yes, surely she would forgive him.
He started to walk toward her. Then he stopped.
He would have to tell her the truth about parents she idolized, two people who were both dead. It would break her heart.
And would it even matter? If she ever regained her memory, she would still hate him. It wouldn’t matter if he told her the truth. After a lifetime of loving her father, no explanation Talos could give would ever compete with that. And fairly or unfairly, she would hate him for destroying her most cherished memories and beliefs.
If she ever regained her memory, he would lose her.
Completely.
Forever.
It was simple as that.
Talos closed his eyes. The last time he’d seen Dalton Hunter, the man had been drunk when they’d run into each other in a New York hotel. “You’ve ruined me, you bastard,” Dalton had cried out, staggering on his feet. “I taught you everything, saved you from the gutter and this is how you repay me.”
“You were stealing from your stockholders,” Talos had replied coldly. He’d left the man without guilt, knowing he’d done the right thing. The man had broken the law and now he was getting what he deserved. He hadn’t felt guilty. Not even after Dalton had driven his Mercedes into the Hudson River. He’d cheated—and not just his stockholders.
Talos had believed it to be justice.
He’d never thought of the child Dalton had left behind. He’d never checked up on the man’s brokenhearted widow.
Talos’s first year in America, he’d gone to the Hunters’ Massachusetts estate for Thanksgiving dinner. He remembered Bonnie’s glow as she kissed Dalton, right before serving the turkey she’d lovingly prepared. Their daughter—Evie—had been just a chubby kid then, reading books and eating apples in a sprawling farmhouse outside Boston.
Eve had changed herself completely since then. But now that she was pregnant and her cheekbones had softened to a more gentle, feminine curve, he could for the first time see the resemblance to the girl she’d been.
Christ, he was the one who’d had amnesia—except it had been by choice.
In the scandal that followed Dalton’s death, there must have been no money left. Bonnie Hunter had gone back home to England. Loving Dalton almost to madness, what would it have been like for her to marry John Craig after his death, to get security for her only child?
She died a few months after she moved the kid to England. Something about heart trouble.
Heart trouble?
No! Thee mou. He ran his fingers back through his dark hair, suddenly sweating in the cool morning. No one died of a broken heart anymore.
He looked across the market at Eve. No, they just took revenge.