LITMIR.BIZ

      Alexei watched her go. This time he let her run. He didn’t want to. He wanted to stride after her and seize her back. Stop her running. Keep her.

      Hold her.

      Fold his arms around her and hold her very close.

      Instead, he let her go. He had no choice, he knew.

      Reality had flooded back. The reality of what his life was about.

      And what it was about was not this. Not holding in his arms a woman who had taken his breath away, who had been, for these few brief, fleeting moments, like a sip of purest spring water after stagnant dregs. Whose lips had touched his and in that touch touched more. Touched something deep inside…

      No. Grimly he shrugged on his tuxedo jacket again. This was just some fantasy he could not afford. Not now.

      Reality was waiting for him. Waiting for him as it had waited all his life. Hard and unyielding. And there was no escape from it.

      He headed back to the hotel.

      CHAPTER TWO

      EVE walked back into the casino. The heat, the constant murmur, the smell of wine and cognac, the fumes of cigars and cigarettes, the heavy perfumes and scented air, oppressed her instantly. But she ignored it. Steadily, she threaded her way towards her father. The pile of chips at his side had diminished. So had the level of cognac in his glass. There was the stub of a cigar in the ashtray, and another was between his thick fingers as he pushed more chips onto a square.

      Silently, she took her place behind him. He acknowledged her resumed presence only by a low, perfunctory admonition.

      ‘You took your time.’

      ‘I needed some fresh air,’ she said. Her voice was very calm, her manner composed. After all, what else was there for her to be? What else was there to do but what she had been brought here to do, to be a social foil for her father?

      Who else was there for her to be except her father’s daughter? Eve Hawkwood.

      She wasn’t anyone else. She wasn’t a woman who could weave dreams about a man she had seen for no more than a few minutes walking towards her, who’d made her body still, her heart race, her breath stop. She wasn’t a woman who could kiss that same stranger in the moonlight. It was a fantasy, nothing more, conjured by her own longing for escape.

      For a second, piercing and anguished, she felt again what she had felt as she had lifted her mouth to his, felt again the cool slide of his hands to cup her face, long fingers grazing in her hair, felt again her eyes start to shut…

      No. Rigidly she held them open again. Made them look, with her habitual composure, her inexpressive indifference, at the scene in front of her, at the spinning whirl of the roulette wheel, the chips conducting their remorseless dance around the table, from player to chequered cloth, to croupier to player. Hypnotic in its remorselessness.

      Then, with an awareness of her father’s mood that her instinct for survival and self-preservation had honed since childhood, she saw his shoulders tense.

      She looked up from the table.

      Blackness drummed in on her. Her hand groped automatically for the back of her father’s chair. Vision blurred, then cleared.

      The man she had just kissed was walking towards the roulette table.

      For one blazing, incandescent moment, Eve’s heart leapt. Then, like a slow draining, she realised that he was not looking at her.

      Not looking for her.

      And even as she realised that, she realised too that somewhere, buried deep inside, there had been a hope—frail, pathetic, but there all the same—that the man who had turned her limbs to water with a single glance from his dark, compelling eyes would not let her run from him. Would not let that single, momentary kiss be enough. The slow draining of that frail pathetic hope was complete.

      He had not even seen her. Had not even registered her presence.

      She was invisible to him.

      He had kissed her so short a time ago, but now he did not know her. Did not see her.

      But even as she let go of the last remnant of her futile hope, leaving a dry, drained emptiness inside her, she realised why he was not looking at her.

      And as she did, a dark, ominous foreboding began to gel inside her.

      He was not walking towards the roulette table. He was walking towards her father.

      And something about the way he was walking sent a chill down her spine.

      Controlled. Purposeful.

      Deadly.

      The word formed in her mind, and she could not unform it. It hung there, making her stomach pool with cold.

      She tensed in every muscle.