The irritation morphed into something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. “Thirty,” she muttered shortly.
“I wouldn’t call that old. More...interesting.”
Something inside Eva snapped. “Forget Kyle Messena. He isn’t available.”
Jacinta sent her a glance laced with the kind of curiosity that informed Eva she hadn’t been able to keep the sharpness out of her voice. “Kyle Messena. I thought he looked familiar. Didn’t he lose his wife and child in some kind of terrorist attack overseas? But that was years ago.” She pointedly returned her gaze to Kyle, underlining the fact that she could look at him any time she liked, for as long as she liked.
Even more annoyed by the speculation on Jacinta’s face, as if she was actually considering making a play for Kyle, Eva consulted her watch. “We’re ten minutes behind schedule,” she said crisply. “You check the timing for service with the chef. I’m going to get a cold drink then have a word with the musicians. With any luck we’ll get out of here before midnight.”
With a last glance at Kyle, Jacinta closed the folder with a resigned snap. “No problem.”
But there was a problem, Eva thought bleakly. The kind of problem she had never imagined she would suffer from ever again. For reasons she did not understand, Jacinta’s interest in Kyle had evoked the kind of fierce, primitive response she had only ever experienced once before, years ago, when she’d heard that Kyle was dating someone else.
She needed to go somewhere quiet and give herself a stern talking-to, because somehow, she had allowed the unwanted attraction to Kyle to get out of hand, to the point that she was suddenly, burningly, crazily jealous about the last man she wanted in her life.
Kyle strolled to the bar, although if he were honest, the drive to get a cold beer over settling for the champagne being served had more to do with the fact that Eva was headed in that direction.
Eva’s expression chilled as he leaned on the bar next to her. The faint crease in her smooth brow as she sipped from a tall glass of what he guessed was sparkling water somehow made her look even more spectacularly gorgeous, despite the disfiguring glasses. It was a beauty he should have been accustomed to, yet it still made his stomach tighten and his attention sharpen in a completely male way.
She met his gaze briefly before looking away. An impression of defensiveness made him frown. Normally Eva was cool and distant, occasionally combative, but never defensive.
She placed the glass down on the counter with a small click. “I thought you had left.”
The unspoken words, now that you’d made sure I hadn’t secretly gotten married, seemed to hang in the air. Kyle shrugged and ordered a beer. “I decided to stick around. We still need to have a conversation.”
“If it’s about the terms of the will, forget it. I’ve read the fine print—”
“You’ve ignored the fine print.” She had certainly failed to notice that he was her primary marriage candidate.
The faint blush of color in her cheeks flared a little brighter, sharpening Kyle’s curiosity. Eva was behaving in a way that was distinctly odd. He was abruptly certain that something had happened, something had changed, although he had no idea what.
She sent him a breezy professional smile, but her whole demeanor was evasive. “If you don’t mind, I really do need to work.”
Usually, Eva was as direct and uncompromising as any man. The blush and the avoidance of eye contact didn’t fit, unless... His heart slammed against his chest, spinning him back to the long summer days they had spent on the beach as teenagers. For a split second he wondered that he had missed something so obvious. But he guessed he had been so absorbed with trying to control the desire that had come out of left field that he had failed to see that Eva was fighting the same battle.
She tried to sidestep him, but the bar area was now filling up with people, lining up for drinks. Feeling like a villain, but riveted by the discovery, he moved slightly, just enough to block her in. She stopped, a bare inch from brushing against his chest.
Kyle’s stomach tightened as he caught another whiff of Eva’s perfume. He knew he should leave her alone and let her get on with her job. But the desire to evoke a response, to make Eva admit that she wanted him, was too strong. “The whole point of Mario’s will was that he wanted you to marry someone who would actually care about you and who wasn’t in it for the money.”
“I know what Mario wanted, no one better. What I don’t get is why you’re so intent on enforcing a condition that is patently ridiculous?”
Kyle’s gaze narrowed at the way Eva carefully avoided the issue of his proposal. “You’re family.”
“Distant and only on paper. It’s not as if I’m a real Atraeus.”
Kyle’s brow’s jerked together. “Your name is Atraeus.”
Eva dragged in a breath, relieved that the unnerving sense that Kyle had seen right through her desperate attempt to seem normal and completely impervious to him had dissipated. “That doesn’t change the fact that I’m adopted. I’m not blood.” And that she could still remember what it felt like to wear secondhand clothes, eat cereal for dinner and fend off her mother’s boyfriends. She was a very poor cuckoo in a diamond-encrusted nest.
“Mario wanted to help you. He wanted you to be happy.”
She drew a breath. The clean scent of his skin deepened the panicked awareness that was humming through her. “I’m twenty-eight. I think that by now I know what it takes to be happy.”
“And that would be paying some guy to marry you?”
Eva’s brows jerked together. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but barely fifty years ago, arranged marriages were common in both the Messena and the Atraeus families.”
“Last century, maybe.”
“Then someone should have told that to Mario. And it underlines my point that a marriage of convenience is not the worst thing that could happen.” And it wasn’t as if she actually wanted to be loved. She had seen what had happened to her mother when she had become emotionally needy. Relationship train wreck followed by train wreck, the plunging depression and slow disintegration of Meg Rushton’s life. It had all been crowned by her mother’s inability to care for Eva, the one child who had survived the disorder.
A young man tried to squeeze in beside Eva. Kyle blocked him with a wolf-cold glance and a faint shift in position. In the process, his arm brushed against hers, sending a tingle of heat through her that made Eva even more desperate to get away. With grim concentration, she stared over Kyle’s broad shoulder at the bottles of spirits suspended at the rear of the bar and tried not to love the fact that Kyle’s behavior had been as bluntly possessive as if they had been a couple. That was exactly the kind of thinking she could not afford.
Kyle’s gaze, edged with irritation, captured hers. “Let’s put this in context. If a man is unscrupulous enough to take your money for marriage, chances are he won’t have a problem pressurizing you until you give in to sex.”
Eva’s heart thumped hard in her chest at the thought that Kyle could possibly have a motivation that was tied in with caring about her, that in his own hard-nosed way, he had been trying to protect her. The next thought was a dizzying, improbable leap—that Kyle had a personal interest in stopping her from having sex with other men because he wanted her.
Annoyed that she should even begin to imagine that Kyle’s concern was based on some kind of personal desire for her when she knew he regarded her as a spoiled, shallow good-time girl, she put the revelation in context. Kyle was gorgeous, megawealthy and successful, but the reality was that, like his older brothers and her