She saw his head start to lower, realised in that fraction of a second what he was going to do. Realised, in that same fraction of a second, that she would let him. That she would rather die than not let this man kiss her here, now, like this, in this moment out of time, out of reality. Out of sanity.
She closed her eyes.
Closed her eyes and let him kiss her. A stranger whom she would never know, whom she could never know. A stranger she would walk away from. She would never have this moment again.
But she would have it now. Just for these few, precious seconds. An eye-blink in time.
But hers now. Here.
And nothing, no one, could take it away from her.
Her lips parted.
He kissed her slowly, like honey, grazing her with a velvet touch, moving over her mouth like softest silk.
Then his head lifted away, his hands dropped from her face.
She opened her eyes.
His face was different somehow, his eyes different.
And at that moment something tremored through her. The world went still again. So still.
Then, into the stillness and the silence, she heard the sound of a motor boat intrude, coming out of the marina on the far side of the hotel and heading out to sea, towards one of the rings of lights that marked the presence of a motor yacht moored in deep water.
Her eyes flared. Reality flooded back. The world started up again.
‘I have to go!’
She slipped out from where she was, undraping the tuxedo jacket as she did so, and thrusting it towards him.
‘Wait—’
It was a command. She obeyed. Her breath was tight in her chest.
‘I have to go,’ she repeated.
Her hand lifted, almost as if to reach to touch his sleeve, so short a distance away. Then, her eyes flaring again, she whirled around, gathered her skirts, and ran.
Like Cinderella from her ball.
But leaving behind no glass slipper.
Alexei watched her go. This time he let her run. He didn’t want to. He wanted to stride after her and seize her back. Stop her running. Keep her.
Hold her.
Fold his arms around her and hold her very close.
Instead, he let her go. He had no choice, he knew.
Reality had flooded back. The reality of what his life was about.
And what it was about was not this. Not holding in his arms a woman who had taken his breath away, who had been, for these few brief, fleeting moments, like a sip of purest spring water after stagnant dregs. Whose lips had touched his and in that touch touched more. Touched something deep inside…
No. Grimly he shrugged on his tuxedo jacket again. This was just some fantasy he could not afford. Not now.
Reality was waiting for him. Waiting for him as it had waited all his life. Hard and unyielding. And there was no escape from it.
He headed back to the hotel.
CHAPTER TWO
EVE walked back into the casino. The heat, the constant murmur, the smell of wine and cognac, the fumes of cigars and cigarettes, the heavy perfumes and scented air, oppressed her instantly. But she ignored it. Steadily, she threaded her way towards her father. The pile of chips at his side had diminished. So had the level of cognac in his glass. There was the stub of a cigar in the ashtray, and another was between his thick fingers as he pushed more chips onto a square.
Silently, she took her place behind him. He acknowledged her resumed presence only by a low, perfunctory admonition.
‘You took your time.’
‘I needed some fresh air,’ she said. Her voice was very calm, her manner composed. After all, what else was there for her to be? What else was there to do but what she had been brought here to do, to be a social foil for her father?
Who else was there for her to be except her father’s daughter? Eve Hawkwood.
She wasn’t anyone else. She wasn’t a woman who could weave dreams about a man she had seen for no more than a few minutes walking towards her, who’d made her body still, her heart race, her breath stop. She wasn’t a woman who could kiss that same stranger in the moonlight. It was a fantasy, nothing more, conjured by her own longing for escape.
For a second, piercing and anguished, she felt again what she had felt as she had lifted her mouth to his, felt again the cool slide of his hands to cup her face, long fingers grazing in her hair, felt again her eyes start to shut…
No. Rigidly she held them open again. Made them look, with her habitual composure, her inexpressive indifference, at the scene in front of her, at the spinning whirl of the roulette wheel, the chips conducting their remorseless dance around the table, from player to chequered cloth, to croupier to player. Hypnotic in its remorselessness.
Then, with an awareness of her father’s mood that her instinct for survival and self-preservation had honed since childhood, she saw his shoulders tense.
She looked up from the table.
Blackness drummed in on her. Her hand groped automatically for the back of her father’s chair. Vision blurred, then cleared.
The man she had just kissed was walking towards the roulette table.
For one blazing, incandescent moment, Eve’s heart leapt. Then, like a slow draining, she realised that he was not looking at her.
Not looking for her.
And even as she realised that, she realised too that somewhere, buried deep inside, there had been a hope—frail, pathetic, but there all the same—that the man who had turned her limbs to water with a single glance from his dark, compelling eyes would not let her run from him. Would not let that single, momentary kiss be enough. The slow draining of that frail pathetic hope was complete.
He had not even seen her. Had not even registered her presence.
She was invisible to him.
He had kissed her so short a time ago, but now he did not know her. Did not see her.
But even as she let go of the last remnant of her futile hope, leaving a dry, drained emptiness inside her, she realised why he was not looking at her.
And as she did, a dark, ominous foreboding began to gel inside her.
He was not walking towards the roulette table. He was walking towards her father.
And something about the way he was walking sent a chill down her spine.
Controlled. Purposeful.
Deadly.
The word formed in her mind, and she could not unform it. It hung there, making her stomach pool with cold.
She tensed in every muscle.
Hawkwood had paused in his play. Alexei saw his hand still a moment, before continuing to position the next batch of chips he was pointlessly sacrificing to his own arrogant bluff—the bluff that said he could afford to lose, and go on losing, the way he was tonight.
Alexei knew better. Giles Hawkwood could not afford to lose a penny more. His yacht, his properties, every possible asset, had all been securitised to raise cash to buy up his own company shares wherever he could find them. But he was too late. As of this morning, AC International had agreed to acquire—in a very friendly and mutually profitable merger—an Australian company that just happened to possess a sufficient number of Hawkwood shares to give Alexei the undisputed majority holding.
Giles