He gave a pained wince. ‘Eva, exactly what do you see when you look in the mirror?’
‘I don’t understand…’
Her puzzlement was so totally without guile or artifice that Markos was left in no doubts as to it being genuine. His expression softened. ‘Maybe if I were to tell you what I see when I look at you…?’
Eva eyed him warily. ‘This conversation isn’t going to get insulting, is it?’
‘Hardly!’ Markos grimaced as he recognised that’s exactly what he currently was: hard and hot and throbbing, as he always seemed to be when he was in Eva’s company. And when not in her company too, if the last two days were any indication. ‘Can it be that you really don’t know—don’t see—how stunningly, incredibly gorgeous you are?’
She shifted uncomfortably. ‘Could we get back to discussing a colour scheme for your sitting room—?’
‘Let’s see.’ Markos chose to ignore her change of subject as he looked across at her consideringly. ‘Your hair is the colour of midnight—black with a blue sheen—and your eyes—oh, God. I could talk about your eyes all night! They are the colour of the purest gold. Hot—’
‘Markos—’
‘Molten gold I could happily drown in,’ he continued remorselessly. ‘And your skin is as pale and unflawed as alabaster. And your mouth!’ His voice darkened smokily. ‘Would you like me to tell you the things I have imagined those softly sensuous and pouting lips doing to me these past two days?’
The blood in Eva’s veins was now pounding as ‘hot and molten’ as the way Markos had seconds ago described her pale brown eyes, and she shifted uncomfortably as she felt an echoing heat between her thighs, dampening her panties.
Her denims chafed against the arousal nestled there. An arousal that, until meeting Markos Lyonedes, she hadn’t believed herself capable of feeling. An arousal she didn’t want to feel. Not for Markos. Not for any man!
Jack had been only too eloquent in his criticisms of her on the day they’d parted for the last time. He had scathingly told her how it was her fault he had turned to other women, that she had let herself go since learning they wouldn’t have a baby together, that she had always lacked the social graces necessary in his wife, that her hair needed professional styling rather than being left to grow naturally, and that her fuller figure wasn’t only unfashionable but a total turn-off sexually.
Oh, Eva hadn’t been so without self-esteem by that time that she hadn’t known some of his remarks had been made out of pique, deliberately designed to hurt her because she had finally had enough of Jack and his affairs, but that didn’t mean his criticisms hadn’t hurt, or remained as a vulnerability buried deep inside her.
Which was perhaps the reason why she had decided she didn’t need another man permanently in her life.
There was no perhaps about it: her unhappy marriage to Jack and the hurtful things he had said to her that last day were precisely the reasons Eva had made the drastic decision not to remarry and to have the baby she craved on her own, through IVF.
And yet she couldn’t seem to find the words to stop Markos as he continued gruffly, ‘I’ve imagined you licking and kissing my chest and nipples, your lips and tongue hot and moist as they move down my stomach to my—’
‘Markos, please…!’ Eva groaned in breathless protest, even as she felt her own nipples ache beneath her blouse. Just from listening to Markos describe having her make love to him? Oh, God…!
His eyes were dark now, burning with the same desire that coursed through Eva. ‘But I have not yet finished telling you how beautiful you are.’ He gave a self-derisive shake of his head. ‘First let me say that you do not need to lose even one pound in weight. You are perfection just as you are,’ he added firmly, his voice once again clipped and precise, but this time with forceful decisiveness rather than anger.
She gave a rueful shake of her head. ‘I—’
‘Eva, there are very few men who actually prefer women with no breasts or hips,’ he continued determinedly. ‘That is a myth which has been perpetrated by dress designers and by women themselves, I believe.’ The darkness of his gaze swept over her appreciatively.
‘The fullness of your breasts is exactly the right size to fit perfectly into the palms of my hands.’
‘That’s only because you have large hands.’
‘And all of me is in proportion,’ Markos assured her as he reached across the table to clasp one of Eva’s smaller hands in his. ‘Eva, who told you that you are not sexy and beautiful? What ungrateful, stupid man could ever have told you such lies?’
Eva couldn’t breathe. Markos’s sensually descriptive words had aroused her to the point where she had briefly dropped the safeguards that had got her through the past five years—the last two years of her marriage to Jack, suffering his numerous affairs, and the past three avoiding any relationship that even looked as if it might touch her emotionally.
But Markos was a man who had refused from the first to take no for an answer. A man who was now demanding answers to questions that were too painful for Eva to answer.
She pulled her hands free of his before getting abruptly to her feet. ‘Has it occurred to you that maybe it was a woman?’ she challenged scornfully, deliberately. ‘That maybe the reason I’m not interested in a relationship with you is because I’m not into men?’
Markos sat back on the stool. ‘No.’
Eva blinked. ‘Just…no?’
‘Just no, Just Eva,’ he drawled dryly.
She eyed him scathingly. ‘Is that male arrogance talking?’
‘Or the knowledge that seconds ago you were as aroused as I am?’
Her gaze slid down from his, across the rapid and shallow rise and fall of his chest, the flatness of his stomach, down to—
Eva’s breath caught in her throat as she saw the thick hard length of Markos’s arousal clearly outlined against the press of his jeans.
He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said that everything about him was in proportion.
‘You are so beautiful you make my chest ache, and so desirable you obviously make another part of me ache.’
‘Please, Markos—did your years of living in England teach you nothing about our reserve?’ she cut in to prevent him making what she was sure was going to be another embarrassing—arousing!—statement.
‘Oh, yes.’ He walked slowly towards her. ‘But fortunately I am Greek, and we Greeks are far less reserved in our appreciation of a woman.’
He was standing so close to her now—just a heartbeat away—that Eva could feel the heat of his body, smell that lemon soap and sandalwood aftershave. That heat and the male smell that was uniquely Markos was now curling about her, invading her senses until she could no longer think straight.
If she had been thinking straight then she would never have allowed this situation to get so completely out of hand. So charged with sexual awareness she could almost reach out and touch it…
Markos drew his breath in sharply at the first touch of Eva’s hands against his chest. Her palms seemed to burn through the thin material of his shirt to sear the flesh beneath. His first instinct was to reach out and pull her into his arms before lowering his mouth to claim hers.
His first instinct.
His second instinct warned Markos against moving at all as he allowed Eva’s hands to tentatively seek out and touch the hard contours of his chest and the muscled width of his shoulders, sensing that the slightest movement on his part would result in her once again erecting those barriers around