‘Where is he?’
‘Not here.’
Her tetchy tone had not been lost on Luke, who had not done the tactful thing and vanished but instead had hung around, wanting the gruesome details, enjoying immensely the joke at her expense.
Eva liked to think that she didn’t take herself seriously, that she could laugh at herself with the best, but there were limits and someone laughing his socks off because she’d been stood up was definitely over her limit.
She’d been pretty cranky and terribly unappreciative with Luke, but anyone who observed with a grin, ‘Looks like the guy is not as enthusiastic as you thought, Princess,’ in her opinion deserved cranky!
Luke had carried on digging the hole when he’d added, ‘You’ve got to appreciate the irony, Evie!’
At this point Eva had opened the door and invited him to leave, ignoring the jibe about a sense-of-humour bypass.
As she stepped into the shower, Eva decided to draw a line under the entire ‘prince’s prospective bride’ scenario. If the wretched man’s flunky rang back to schedule a meeting again, she would be washing her hair.
In the meantime she was revolving in the warm spray of the shower when she heard the strident shrill of the doorbell.
Damn! It would be Luke, who, since he had made the big move out to the leafy suburbs, had got into the annoying habit of using her sofa when he had missed his last train home. Well, actually, she didn’t normally find it annoying, but tonight she wasn’t feeling exactly hospitable.
Lifting her face briefly to the water to rinse off the remnants of soap, she pulled off the shower cap and shook out her hair before fighting her way into a towelling robe, muttering, ‘Hold your horses,’ under her breath as she dashed to answer the door.
This time her sofa was not going to be available even if Luke did the ‘pathetic puppy dog’ look.
Her problem, she told herself, was she was too damned nice, and niceness, as her mother had always told her, was an open invitation for people to walk all over you.
Was it any wonder she got stood up? She clearly sent out victim messages even over the phone!
Mid-mental rant, she came to an abrupt halt when she saw the shadow of a large figure through the frosted glass of the door.
Too large to be Luke?
Surely the damned Prince wouldn’t have the cheek to think she’d still be dutifully waiting until he deigned to show up? Her eyes narrowed wrathfully at the idea as she reached up and slid the bolt on the door. In his world did women wait patiently? Eva’s temper fizzed. For sheer, mind-numbing vanity, this man really did take the cake.
Sucking in a deep sustaining breath, she really couldn’t wait to explain that she only gave a man one chance and he’d blown his. Pleased with the line, she closed her eyes before pinning a combative smile on her face and checking the towelling robe was covering everything it ought. It was and more—it reached her toes.
She opened the door with a flourish.
The tall figure who had been standing with his back to the door turned and Eva’s vocal cords froze. Actually pretty much everything she had, including her ability to think—correction, especially her ability to think—froze.
CHAPTER THREE
FOR some reason Eva had been expecting the Prince to in some way resemble the royal male relatives of her new family—well, he was both male and royal—who were squarely built men whose height enabled them to carry the extra pounds that most did indeed carry.
The man she tilted her head up to look at was indeed tall but he had no spare pounds. Not that Eva immediately registered his lean, athletic frame—it was his face that initially totally transfixed her.
Never had she expected to connect beauty to a face that was so essentially masculine—if you made an exception for the sweep of those curling ebony eyelashes that any woman would have traded an inch of cleavage for.
But he was beautiful, each sybaritic carved line and sculpted angle of the face she gazed at, from the sternly sensual mouth, slashing cheekbones, strong jaw, strongly defined dark brows to the spookily silver—really silver—eyes was without flaw. Even his skin was flawless, a deep even gold.
Eva gathered her wits and, expelling a tiny gusty sigh, closed her mouth with an audible click. Her lashes came down in a protective screen as she dropped her chin and took a deep sustaining breath.
This was really her prince?
The one her grandfather had conceded was quite good-looking when pressed.
Well, not hers, obviously. Men like this did not belong to women who looked like her, though belonged was actually the wrong word. Belonged implied a degree of domestication that she was unable to mentally connect with this feral, though admittedly completely magnificent creature.
He might be dressed in western clothes, but this was not his natural habitat. It was not a leap to imagine him framed against a cerulean desert sky, his tall, lean frame covered in flowing desert robes.
Eva imagined it and felt her stomach muscles quiver at the sybaritic image … what was her grandfather thinking of? Suitable match, he’d said! Suitable? For heaven’s sake, they were about as suited as an Arab stallion and a shaggy Shetland pony!
One thing was clear, she realised as she lifted her chin and tried to collect her wits, her elaborate plans to convince him she was unsuitable were fairly pointless. This tall man who oozed male arrogance from every perfect pore was not going to buy what was on offer.
On offer … like I’m a commodity on a market stall! Eva’s temper cut through the thrall that had held her immobile. She opened her mouth to say something cold and cutting, but before she could the eyes that had been focused on some place over her left shoulder suddenly connected with her own.
The unfocused blankness and lack of recognition, the pain mirrored in those silvery depths, sent the words from her head.
The last time she had seen an expression like that it had been in the eyes of a young man who had stood watching the car he had been thrown from consumed by tongues of orange flames.
‘I should be in that,’ he had said over and over when Eva, along with another driver who had pulled off the road to help, had tried to pull him back from the heat.
Shock, the paramedics, after one glance at the shivering figure, had explained as they led him to the ambulance.
She angled an assessing glance at her late-night caller, and struggled to be objective. It was hard when the person you were trying to be objective about oozed animal magnetism…. It was frankly distracting even for someone like her, who did not go for the muscular macho type.
As she continued to subject the strong lines of his handsome face to a critical scrutiny the last sparks of annoyance in her green eyes morphed into anxiety. Despite that sinfully sexy mouth he did have the look of the walking wounded.
Had the Prince done the equivalent of walking away from a burning car? She was no paramedic, but the man standing
