gaze still locked on Eva, Kyle strolled back to his Maserati. Now that he knew Eva wasn’t the bride, he should drive back to Auckland. Back to his ultrabusy, smoothly organized life. If he left right away, he could even make the uncomplicated dinner date he had with Elise, a fellow banking executive he had been seeing on and off for the past few months, mostly at business functions.
But as he approached the Maserati, which was nose to tail with Eva’s white sports car, he couldn’t shake the sense that something about the way Eva had stormed off had not rung true. It occurred to him that the tears he thought Eva had been about to cry could have been fake. After all, she had taken acting classes. She had been good enough that she had even been offered a part in a popular soap, but had turned it down because it had conflicted with her desire to start her own wedding planning business.
Suddenly positive that he had been duped, he dropped the Maserati’s key back into his pocket. There could be only one reason why Eva wanted him to feel guilty enough that he bypassed the reception. She had already found a new candidate for groom and he would be attending as her guest. Since she only had three weeks to organize her final shot at a wedding, keeping her new prospective groom close made sense, because time was of the essence.
Certainty settled in when he caught the tail end of a conversation with someone named Troy. His jaw tightened. Troy Kendal, if he didn’t miss his guess. A flashy sports star Eva had met less than a week ago in a last, desperate attempt to recruit a groom. Out of nowhere, the jealousy he had worked hard to suppress because it was just as illogical as the desire that haunted him, roared to life.
If Eva had been crying, they had been crocodile tears.
She had been getting rid of him.
In no mood to leave now, Kyle waited until Eva terminated the call and dropped the phone in her bag. “We need to talk.”
“I thought we just did.”
Dropping her bag on the passenger seat, she dragged off her sunglasses and checked her watch, subtly underlining the fact that she was in a hurry to leave. Without the barrier of the lenses, and with strands of hair blowing loose around her cheeks, she seemed younger and oddly vulnerable, although Kyle knew that was an illusion, since Eva’s reputation with men was legendary. “There’s a solution to your problem. If you marry a Messena, there are no further conditions, other than that the marriage must be of two years’ duration.”
Her brows creased as if she was only just considering an option that had been bluntly stated in the will. “Even if I wanted to do that, which I don’t, that’s hardly possible, since Gabriel and Nick are both married, and Damian’s as good as.”
Kyle’s jaw clamped at the systematic way she ticked his brothers off her fingers, deliberately leaving him off the list. As if her fingers had never locked with his as they’d strolled down the dimly lit path to Dolphin Bay, as if she had never wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“There’s one other Messena,” Kyle said flatly, his patience gone. “I’m talking you, me and a marriage of convenience.”
Eva choked back the stinging refusal she wanted to fling at Kyle. She didn’t know why she reacted so strongly to him or the idea that they could marry. Mario’s previous attempts to marry her off to other Messena men had barely ruffled her.
A year ago, when she had read the terms of the will and absorbed the full import of that one little sentence, she had been so horrified she had wanted to crawl under the solicitor’s desk and hide. The whole idea that Kyle, the only available Messena husband—and the one man who had ditched her—should feel pressured to marry her, had been mortifying. “I don’t need a pity proposal.”
The wind dropped for a split second, enclosing them in a pooling, tension-filled silence that was gradually filled with the timeless beauty of the wedding vows floating from the church.
“But you do need a proposal. After two years, once you’ve got your inheritance, we can dissolve the marriage.”
Kyle’s clinical solution contrarily sent a stab of hurt through her, which annoyed her intensely.
A former Special Air Service soldier, Kyle had the kind of steely blue gaze that missed nothing. He was also tall and muscular, six foot two inches of sleek muscle, with close-cut dark hair and the kind of grim good looks and faintly battered features, courtesy of his years in the military, that mesmerized women.
All of the men in the Messena and Atraeus families seemed to possess that same formidable, in-charge quality. Usually, it didn’t ruffle her in the slightest, but Kyle paired it with a blunt, low-key insight that was unnerving; he seemed to know what she was going to do before she did it. Added to that, she wouldn’t mind betting that he had gotten rid of some of her grooms with a little judicious intimidation.
The idea of marrying Kyle shouldn’t affect her. She had learned early on to sidestep actual relationships at all cost. The plain fact was, she wouldn’t have trusted in any relationships at all if it hadn’t been for Mario and his wife picking her up when they’d found her on the sidewalk near their home one evening twelve years ago.
When they’d found out she was on the run from her last home because her foster father had wandering hands, they had phoned the welfare people. However, instead of allowing her to be shunted back into another institutional home, Mario had made a string of phone calls to “people he knew” and she had been allowed to stay with them.
Despite her instinctive withdrawal and the cold neutrality that had gotten her through a number of foster homes, Mario and Teresa had offered her the kind of quiet, steady love that, at sixteen, had been unfamiliar and a little scary. When they had eventually proposed adopting her, the plain fact was she hadn’t known how to respond. She’d had the rug pulled emotionally so many times she had thought that if she softened and believed that she was deserving of love, that would be the moment it was all taken away.
In the end, through Mario’s dogged persistence, she had finally understood that he was the one person who wouldn’t break his word. Her resistance had crumbled and she had signed. In the space of a moment, she had ceased to be Eva Rushton, the troubled runaway, and had become Eva Atraeus, a member of a large and mystifyingly welcoming family.
However, the transformation had never quite been complete. After watching her own mother’s three marriages disintegrate then at age seventeen finding out why, she had decided she did not ever want to be that vulnerable.
She caught a whiff of Kyle’s cologne and her stomach clenched. And there was her problem, she thought grimly. Although, why the fiery tension, which should have died a death years ago—right after he had dumped her when she was seventeen—still persisted, she had no clue. It wasn’t as if they had ever spent much time together or had anything in common beyond the youthful attraction. Kyle had married someone else a couple of years later, too, so she knew that what they had shared had not affected him as deeply as it had her.
Now, thanks to Kyle’s interference, she had three weeks to marry anyone but him, and the clock was ticking...
Frustration reignited the nervous tension that had assaulted her when Jeremy had informed her he was backing out of their arrangement, but now that tension was laced with a healthy jolt of panic. Mario Atraeus couldn’t have chosen a better watchdog for the unexpected codicil he had written into his will if he had tried.
She
