“Why are you acting as if you suddenly hate me?”
He closed the laptop with a loud snap. “I’m not going to discuss this right now, Eve.”
“Then when?”
His phone rang. He looked down at it before he gave her a narrowed glance. “You’ll know everything soon enough.” Turning from her, he opened the phone and barked, “Xenakis.”
As he spoke on the phone in Greek, she glanced down at the bright diamond ring on her finger. It sparkled at her, sharp facets without a soul. With a sense of foreboding, she looked up through the window at the darkly sprawling city of ancient white buildings and olive trees surrounded by cragged mountains.
Why would Talos marry her if he intended to treat her like this?
She placed her hand on her belly, where their baby was growing inside her. Her stomach was starting to grow more rounded beneath the swell of her breasts.
I wouldn’t have given him my virginity unless he was worthy of my love, she told herself.
How do you know? the gleefully sadistic whisper asked. How do you know what sort of person you are?
Shut up, she told the voice sharply. I know.
But it was too late. Fear had already crept inside her, a dull poison of fear she could neither dispel nor reason away.
She hadn’t wanted to marry him so quickly. She’d tried to resist, to delay. But he’d kept insisting. Courting her. Wooing her.
He’d been so loving. So patient. So perfect.
And then he’d kissed her on the bridge in Venice, and all of her objections had been swept away in a storm of fierce, blind desire unlike anything she could possibly withstand. His embrace had stolen her strength away, leaving her abject in his arms, with no choice but to surrender to his will.
Now, it seemed there would be no more kisses.
Had she made a horrible mistake marrying Talos?
You’re right to be afraid, he’d said with that strange light in his eyes.
Was it possible he’d married her just because she was pregnant with his child? Or for some other, darker reason of his own?
It couldn’t be for love—not when he acted like this!
The Bentley pulled up outside an elegant fin de siècle building, nine stories high, on an imposing square in the center of the city. Talos got out without a backward glance. For the first time, he allowed the chauffeur to assist her from the car.
Stepping out on the sidewalk, Eve looked up at the building and the Acropolis, lit up on the high crag above them. She nearly jumped at Talos’s voice behind her.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
She whirled around to see him looking at her with a cruel amusement.
“Yes,” she said over the lump in her throat. Beautiful and haughty and a bit savage, just like him.
As his driver and the bellman dealt with the luggage, Talos stepped closer to her. He was so close she could feel his breath, feel the warmth of his strong body beneath his clothes. Leaning forward, not touching her, he whispered, “You’ll love the view from the penthouse.”
She shivered as he leaned forward.
“It’s where you first gave yourself to me,” he whispered in her ear, brushing his lips against her tender flesh. “For weeks, we never left our bed.”
He stood away from her, his dark eyes gleaming. And though she tried to hide the reaction he’d caused in her, she knew he could read her tension. Her desire.
It infuriated her. Defiantly, she lifted her chin. “Well, I hope you enjoyed it, because it won’t happen again.”
His eyes darkened at her challenge. He grabbed her hand, and though she tried to pull it away, he would not release her. As the staff and bodyguards trailed them, they went through the exquisite lobby and up the elevator.