not sit down. The stone would be too cold with nothing to protect her but her thin evening dress. Instead she leant against the balustrade, trying to steady her breath, her pulse, and gazed out over the night-darkened Mediterranean, at the tiny waves breaking on the rocks below the terrace. Above her, stars were pricking out, and behind her the moon was starting to rise. An almost imperceptible breeze came off the sea, tugging her hair into tendrils around her face, freeing them from the confines of the low chignon at the nape of her neck. The mild night air netted her, the scent of the sea and the pines quieted her. Slowly she felt the heat seep from her cheeks, her heart-rate slow.
And into its place came a yearning that was almost a sadness.
What did it matter that she’d just set eyes on a man who had had such an extraordinary effect on her? It was pointless thinking about him. Quite pointless. She was unlikely to see him again, as he had clearly been heading out of the casino, and very probably the hotel, but even if he weren’t, so what? Nothing whatsoever could possibly come of her reacting to him like that.
Nothing.
All he could ever be was a fantasy. No one real. No one who could possibly have anything to do with her. Just a vague dream of what might have been in a different life.
That was all. Nothing more than that.
She went on looking out over the dark sea, her eyes as shadowed as the night.
She should not have run. That had been a mistake.
Alexei watched for a fraction of a second as she hurried across the hotel lobby to the rear doors facing the sea.
If she’d simply gone on standing there as he’d walked past her he’d have let her be. There was every reason to let her be. None at all for what he was now doing—striding after her with long, lean steps. Deliberately he did not catch up with her. Deliberately he let her reach the outdoors and plunge off to the left of the hotel. He didn’t know where she was going, but he would find out.
The area she was heading into was far less brightly lit than the deck immediately behind the hotel. Only the occasional low-level light marked the pathway she was hurrying along. He watched her for a moment, watched as her speed gradually slowed and she gained a stand of pine trees, then was lost to view in the dim light.
Alexei’s eyes glinted.
At a relaxed, leisurely pace, he set off after her.
He knew he shouldn’t. He knew it was the wrong time and the wrong place.
But she was definitely the right woman.
The most right woman he’d ever seen.
He’d only seen her for an instant, but he’d never, ever had such a kick to his system from any woman before—and he was not, not prepared to let her walk out of his life before he’d even walked into it. He was being rash, he was being reckless, he was being stupid—he knew that all too well. But he knew what he wanted right now.
He wanted to find her.
It was the footsteps she heard first. With instinctive alarm, Eve whipped her head round at the sound of someone approaching. The hotel and grounds were private, and with so many wealthy people here security was high, if unobtrusive. But she was at the far end of the gardens, a place no one was likely to be at this time of night. So who on earth was—?
As he stepped out of the deep shadow of the pine trees her breath caught, and held. For a moment she thought it could not be real. That she’d simply conjured the tall, lean figure out of the air, out of her memory. But the man walking towards her now wasn’t a fantasy.
He was very, very real.
‘You shouldn’t have run,’ he said.
He spoke French. There was an underlying accent, she could tell, but she couldn’t identify what his native language might be. The part of her brain that was capable of any kind of rational thought was not functioning.
She gazed at him helplessly as he walked towards her. Her heart had started to beat. Not racing, but with slow, heavy beats that seemed to take an eternity. Time seemed to be slowing down around her.
He came up to her.
She could not see his face properly in the dim light. The moonlight slanted across his face, turning it to planes and shadows. Turning her limbs to sponge. Her hands tightened on the stone balustrade. She ignored the cold that bit into her flesh.
It was the only part of her that was cold. In the rest of her a slow heat was burning.
‘Why did you? Run?’
The sound of his voice, with its low-pitched, accented timbre, caught at her senses.
‘I don’t know.’
It sounded to her ears such a stupid answer to make. But it was an honest one. It drew a slight smile from him. An indentation of his mouth. Her eyes went to it, drawn irresistibly. It did something to her. Something that fanned the slow-burning heat inside her and sucked the breath out of her lungs. She felt herself stepping back from the balustrade, letting go of it. Her arms fell helplessly to her sides.
What was happening? What was happening here, now, with this man who had drawn her eyes like a magnet as he’d approached her, and from whom she had run, fled, sensing an imperative that she must if she had any sanity obey, because he was only a fantasy, could only be a fantasy, nothing more? And yet he had come after her, followed her here, now…and she did not know why…
‘I just knew that I had to run…’
Her voice was still low, strange even to her ears.
He took another step towards her.
‘You don’t have to run from me,’ he said.
Eve looked at him. The shadowed light was still etching his face, the moonlight glinting off his eyes. There was something in his eyes…
He murmured something. She did not understand it. It was not French, or English. There had only been a few words, and she could not identify the language. Then he was speaking again, this time in English.
‘Who are you?’
Expression flickered in her face. Her lips parted, but she did not speak. She did not want to speak. Did not want to tell him who she was. It didn’t matter whether this man had or hadn’t heard of her father—and anyway, why should he have? There were a lot of rich people in the world and they did not all know each other. It was because suddenly, urgently, she wanted to be…someone quite different. A woman who could, if she wanted, walk out under the Mediterranean sky and gaze into the eyes of a fantasy come to life…
Prevarication came to her.
‘Why do you think I’m English?’ she answered, sticking to French.
The smile indented at his mouth again, and yet again she felt her breath catch.
‘Aren’t you?’ he mocked, very gently, keeping to English.
His words, accented as they were, with that strange, elusive accent, resonated through her. She gave a tiny shrug of her shoulders.
