Carole Mortimer - Irresistible Greeks - Red-Hot and Rich

‘So soon?’

Markos might have been more impressed with the older man’s attempt at regret if he hadn’t seen the look of relief in Jonathan’s eyes before it was quickly masked by polite query. It was a politeness Markos was too displeased to indulge at this moment.

‘I am of the opinion that it would have been better if we had left some time ago,’ he said dismissively, giving Jonathan a disapproving look as he took a hold of Eva’s arm, his mouth tightening with displeasure when he realised she was trembling again as she leant into his side.

What could have happened between Eva and Jack Cabot Grey in the past to have caused this severe reaction in her? For her to be physically ill just from seeing him again?

Except…

Unexpected as it might have been, it hadn’t been seeing Jack Cabot Grey which had made Eva ill. That had only happened when the other man’s second wife had joined them.

Was it because Eva still had feelings for the man, and the existence of that second wife now made reconciliation impossible?

Her scathing attitude towards her ex-husband whenever she spoke to him would seem to imply otherwise. And yet… There was no denying that something had made Eva ill just a short time ago. The same something that was still causing her to tremble.

Markos had no idea what Eva was reacting to any longer, and that irritated him as much as everything else about this evening displeased him; he had believed earlier that they were coming to know each other, to like each other—and now this!

‘We will speak again later in the week, Jonathan,’ he assured the older man stiffly before turning to leave.

‘I’ll be in touch, angel.’

Eva stiffened as Jack called after her softly, not fooled for a moment by the pleasantness of his tone, and pretty sure she knew the reason Jack intended contacting her again…

Almost as soon as Eva and Jack had married, and had moved to New York to live, Jonathan had started talking of the possible arrival of his grandson—Jonathan Cabot Grey the Third. It was something which Eva and Jack had eventually realised was never going to happen, but Jack had never, at least to Eva’s knowledge, confided in his father. The fact that Yvette Cabot Grey was now pregnant, supposedly with Jack’s child, was either a medical miracle or something that Jack did not wish Eva to discuss with his father.

Eva didn’t know whether to be insulted, because Jack thought she would tell his father that the child Yvette carried couldn’t possibly be his, or angry, because Jack thought she would feel vindictive enough towards him that she would deliberately hurt the man who had once been her father-in-law.

The latter emotion won out as she turned to look coldly at Jack. ‘We have nothing to talk about,’ she assured him scathingly.

He quirked blond disbelieving brows. ‘No?’

‘Absolutely not,’ she snapped, before turning to her ex-father-in-law. ‘Goodbye, Jonathan. It was nice seeing you again.’ Her voice warmed slightly as she spoke to the man she had always rather liked.

Jonathan must have been surprised when Jack had returned from working in London for two years with Eva as his wife—a young Englishwoman who wasn’t in the least wealthy or of the same social strata as the Cabot Greys. But never by word or deed had Jonathan ever shown her anything but the respect and liking due to her as his son’s wife. The future mother of his grandchildren…

‘Take care,’ she added huskily, not sparing Jack so much as a second glance as she and Markos finally left together.

‘Not here and not now,’ Markos advised gruffly as Eva tried to speak once they were outside.

She shot him a fleeting glance. ‘I was only going to say thank-you.’

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.