Markos’s tension eased slightly and he relaxed his grip on Eva’s arm. The last few minutes had been far from pleasant. For any of them.
‘If you insist, you may offer me suitable thanks once we are alone together in my apartment,’ he assured her gruffly.
She looked uncertain. ‘Your apartment…?’
He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘We have to return to Lyonedes Tower in order for you to collect your car. Once there, we might as well go up to my apartment and talk in comfort.’
An argument to which she had no rebuttal, Eva acknowledged ruefully. Her car was at Lyonedes Tower, and she did owe Markos a suitable thank-you—although she had a feeling her idea of suitable and Markos’s might differ greatly in content! He had been so supportive of her this evening and she owed him an explanation as to the reason he had needed to be so.
‘Coffee, wine or brandy?’ Markos offered dryly once they were once again in the anaemic sitting room of the penthouse apartment at Lyonedes Tower.
‘Oh, I think this situation calls for brandy all round, don’t you?’ She sighed wearily as she sank down in one of the boxy cream armchairs.
‘I am unsure as yet exactly what this situation is.’ He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over a chair, before moving to the bar situated at the other end of the room and pouring brandy into two glasses.
Eva grimaced as she took the glass Markos held out to her before moving to stand a short distance away from her. ‘It isn’t every day that you meet your ex-husband by accident!’ She sipped the brandy, instantly feeling the effects of the fiery alcohol as it slid easily down the back of her throat. ‘The last I heard of Jack he was living and working in France.’
‘Which is obviously where he met and married Yvette.’
‘Obviously,’ Eva echoed noncommittally as she stared down at the beige carpet.
‘Are you still in love with him?’
She gave Markos a startled look and the glass shook precariously in her hand. ‘What?’
His smile lacked humour. ‘In the circumstances it is a relevant question, I would have thought.’
Eva drank down the rest of her brandy before answering him, in the hopes that its warmth would melt the block of ice that seemed to have formed in her chest. ‘What circumstances?’
Markos kept his expression deliberately bland. ‘You did not appear to become ill until after the appearance of Grey’s second wife. Do not cry, Eva.’ All attempts to remain detached fled as he saw the tears shimmering in Eva’s huge gold-coloured eyes, and Markos quickly placed his brandy down on the glass-topped coffee table before moving onto his haunches beside the chair where she sat, to take her icy cold hand in his. ‘Talk to me, Eva. Tell me why you are crying.’
‘I’m not,’ she denied, even as those tears began to fall down the paleness of her cheeks. ‘I just… You’re right. Seeing Yvette…it was a shock—’ She broke off and began to cry in earnest.
It was as if a dam had burst inside Eva—the dam that had held back all the grief and pain she had buried deep inside her when her hopes and dreams of having a family of her own, a baby of her own, had been dashed five years ago, when the specialist had told them that Jack could never father a child.
A child Jack now appeared to be having with his second wife.
It didn’t matter by what means Yvette Cabot Grey had become pregnant, only that she was. With the baby Jack had denied Eva five years ago.
Markos was completely at a loss as to what he should do or say as Eva buried her face in her hands and sobbed as if her heart were breaking. Which perhaps it was.
Over Jack Cabot Grey?
Having no experience upon which to draw, it wasn’t for Markos to criticise whom others might choose—or not choose—to love. Except that Jack Cabot Grey was everything Markos disliked in a man: shallow, selfish and, where Eva was concerned, in Markos’s opinion cruelly vindictive. None of which changed the fact that Eva could not seem to stop crying as if her heart were breaking.
Markos reached out and gathered Eva up into his arms, lifting her and cradling her tenderly against his chest before sitting down in the chair himself. Her tears quickly dampened the front of his shirt. Markos ran his fingers soothingly against her temple, considering the irony of holding the woman he desired in his arms as she cried over another man.
If his cousin Drakon could only see him now.
‘It was the baby,’ Eva finally choked out painfully. ‘I—we—we tried for so long to have a baby of our own, and—we finally had tests. The specialist told us it wasn’t possible,’ she sobbed.
Oh, dear God! And that cold-hearted bastard Cabot Grey had stood there and calmly introduced his pregnant second wife to Eva, all the time knowing that Eva wasn’t able to have a baby herself. The absolute bastard!
Could this also be the reason Eva’s self-confidence was so fragile beneath her veneer of derision? The reason she was so determined not to become involved with another man? Possibly also the reason she and Jack Cabot Grey had divorced?
Markos could certainly believe the latter. Even on such short acquaintance Markos knew that Jack Cabot Grey was the sort of vindictive bastard who would never have let Eva forget she was unable to give him the Cabot Grey son and heir.
‘It’s all right, Eva,’ he assured her softly, speaking into the silky softness of her hair. ‘Everything is going to be all right.’
She gave a choked laugh. ‘Of course it isn’t.’
No, as far as Eva was concerned perhaps it wasn’t… ‘You are a beautiful young woman, with all your life still ahead of you. Not all men are like Jack Cabot Grey—’
‘Thank goodness!’ She gave a shiver of revulsion.
Markos looked down at her quizzically. ‘You really do not love him still?’
Eva straightened before attempting to stand up, but she was prevented from doing so as Markos’s arms tightened about her to keep her firmly sitting on his knee.
Which was pretty embarrassing, now that Eva thought about it. In fact the whole of this evening had been embarrassing, she realised, now that she had got over her shock and calmed down a little.
First of all she had completely flipped out when they’d arrived at Jonathan’s house. Then she had almost collapsed with surprise when she had realised Jack was also at the party. Even worse, she had run from the room and been violently ill in the ladies’ powder room once she had seen that Jack’s second wife was pregnant. An embarrassment that Markos had witnessed when he followed her. And now she had cried all over Markos’s white shirt, probably ruining it, no doubt giving him completely the wrong impression as to why she had become so upset in the first place.
Not the best first date she had ever been on.
She doubted Markos had ever had one like it before, either.
She gave a shake of her head. ‘I’m not sure that I ever did love Jack,’ she answered him honestly. ‘Not really.’
‘And yet you married him…?’
Eva nodded. ‘I was a student when we met at a party given by one of my father’s friends. Jack was six years older than me, and he seemed so mature and self-assured in comparison with my other friends—taking me out to the theatre and wining and dining me at expensive restaurants.’ She grimaced as she saw Markos’s raised brows. ‘I’ve had plenty of time to think about this, and I know now that I allowed myself to be dazzled by Jack’s easy charm and self-confidence. I mistook being dazzled for being in love.’
Markos looked down at her quizzically. ‘It was a big thing to move to New York with him—away from your family and friends—after you were married.’