Do I love you? Do you love me?
Then she stopped.
There was something beneath his darkly penetrating eyes. Something he wasn’t saying. Something hidden beneath his words.
But before she could understand what her intuition was telling her, Talos placed his broad hands over hers. The warmth of his fingers burned her, intertwined with her own. Trapping her, but not against her will. Her heart pounded faster.
“Get ready to leave.” He lowered his head to kiss her on the temple, running his hands up and down her bare forearms. “I want to take you home.”
Her breathing became short and shallow as he touched her skin. Little prickles of sensation sped up her arms, down her back, making her hair stand on end. The tingle swirled across her earlobes, down her neck, making her naked breasts beneath her thin hospital gown suddenly feel tight and full. She tried to remember the question she’d been asking, but it had already swept from her mind.
“All right,” she breathed, looking up into his handsome face.
Gallantly, he helped her from the bed, lifting her gently to her feet. She was more aware than ever of how much taller he was, how much more powerful. He was at least six inches taller, with an extra hundred pounds of pure muscle. Looking up at him, she forgot everything but her own longing and fascinated desire for the man towering over her like a dark angel.
“I’m sorry it took so long for me to reach you, Eve,” he said in a low voice. “But I’m here now.” He kissed her head softly, his arms tightening around her as he pulled her into an embrace. “And I’m never going to let you go.”
CHAPTER TWO
BENEATH heavily lidded eyes, Talos watched Eve as he led her to the black Rolls-Royce purring on the street in front of the hospital.
She wasn’t faking her amnesia. In spite of his initial incredulity, he now had no doubt. She had no idea of who he was or what she’d done.
And now she was pregnant with his child.
That changed everything.
He gently helped her to the car. She had no luggage. One of his men had taken her smashed Aston-Martin to the garage, while the other had gone to make quiet amends for the smashed postbox. She wore the black silk dress and carried the black clutch purse from her stepfather’s funeral yesterday.
The black dress clung to her breasts and hips when she walked, the silk shimmering and sliding against her hips and breasts. Her dark, glossy hair had been brushed into a fresh ponytail.
She wore no makeup. It made her look different. Talos had never known her to go out without lipstick before—although God knew, with her lustrous skin, full pink lips and sparkling blue eyes, she didn’t need it to cause every man she met, from the elderly hospital porter to the teenaged boy walking past them on the sidewalk, to stop and catch his breath.
And as she turned back to face him on the sidewalk with a sweetly innocent smile, Talos was grimly aware that he was far from immune to her charm.
“Where are we going?” she asked, crinkling her forehead. “You never said.”
“Home,” he replied, guiding her into the backseat of the limousine. He closed the door behind her.
His body’s reaction to her was irritating—and troubling. He didn’t like it. Because he hated her.
When he’d first seen Eve in the hospital, she’d been curled up on the single bed beneath a thick blanket. She’d looked pale and wan, nothing like the vivacious, tempestuous vixen he remembered. Sleeping, she’d looked innocent, far younger than her twenty-five years.
She’d looked small. Fragile.
Talos had come to London specifically to destroy her. For the last three months, he’d been dreaming of it.
But how could he take his revenge if she not only had no memory of her crimes, but she was pregnant with his baby?
Tightening his hands into fists, he stalked to the other side of the car. Though it was only September, summer had abruptly fled London. A steady drizzle was falling from low gray clouds.
He climbed in beside her and she turned to him without missing a beat. “Where is our home?”
“My home—” he closed his door with a bang “—is Athens.”
She gaped at him. “Athens?”
“It’s where I live, and I must take care of you.” He gave her a brief, tight smile. “Doctor’s orders.”
“So I live there with you?”
“No.”
“We don’t live together?”
“You like to travel,” he said ironically.
“So where are my clothes?” she said in a small voice. “And my passport?”
“Likely at your stepfather’s estate. My staff will collect your things and meet us at the airport.”
“But…” She looked out the window, then turned back to face him and said in a rush, lifting her chin, “I want to see my home. My childhood home. Where is it?”
He gave her an assessing glance. “Your stepfather’s estate is in Buckinghamshire, I believe. But visiting there won’t help you. You spent one night there before the funeral. It hasn’t been your home for a long time.”
“Please, Talos.” Her sapphire eyes gleamed. “I want to see my home.”
His brow furrowed as he looked down at her pleading face.
Eve really had changed, he thought. His mistress had never begged him for anything. She’d never even said please.
Except…
Except for the first night he’d taken her to his bed, when all her defenses had been briefly stripped away and he’d discovered the most desired woman in the world was, against all expectations, a virgin. As he’d pushed himself inside her, she’d looked up at him in a breathless hush with those violet-blue eyes, and he’d thought…he’d almost thought…
He cut off the memory savagely.
He wouldn’t think about how it had once been with her. He wouldn’t think how she had nearly made him lose everything, including his mind.
Eve Craig was a fatal habit that he’d finally broken—and he intended to keep it that way.
“Very well,” he ground out, turning back to face her. “I will take you home—but just to collect your things. We cannot stay.”
Her lovely face brightened. She looked so young without makeup, with her hair in the casual ponytail. She looked barely old enough to be in college, far younger than his own thirty-eight years.
“Thank you,” she said warmly.
Thank you. Another phrase he’d never heard from her before.
He turned away, leaning back in the beige leather seat as his chauffeur drove smoothly through the city, turning right from Marylebone to the Edgware Road. As the car merged onto the M1 heading north, Talos stared out at the passing rain, then closed his eyes, tense and weary from jet lag and the whiplash of the past two days.
Eve, pregnant.
He was still reeling.
No wonder she’d crashed her car, he thought dully. Just the thought of losing her figure and not fitting into all her designer clothes must have made her crazy. All those months of not being able to drink champagne and dance till dawn with all of her rich, beautiful, shallow friends? Eve must have been more than shocked—she must have been furious.
Eve, pregnant.
He would not trust her to take care of a house plant, much less a child. She was not