Bought: The Greek's Baby(19)
For the rest of the day, they explored the charms of Venice, from walking beneath the medieval overhangs of the Calle del Paradiso to sharing lunch on the wide outdoor terrace of the Hotel Cipriani.
The fog thickened throughout the afternoon as the capricious autumn weather turned melancholy. But Eve barely noticed that the Italian sunshine had disappeared. As they strolled along canals as gray as the lowering sky, she felt warm and contented. Talos smiled down at her, his dark eyes warming her with the heat of burning coal as they laughed and talked, walking down the tree-lined paths through the grassy Giardini.
He bought her a fiery orange rose from a stall in an outdoor market. When he told her in a low voice how beautiful she was to him, how much he wanted her to be his wife, she glowed from within. She barely heard the sad, plaintive cries of the gulls soaring through the heavy clouds overhead.
As the afternoon drew on, rain finally started to drizzle. The fair-weather tourists had scattered beneath the cold-blowing winds, but Eve had never felt more gloriously lit up inside.
In her new clothes, she got occasional second glances from men, but only from up close—not from across the street. She wasn’t forced to endure the endless hot stares of strange men, while knowing that only the presence of powerful, darkly dangerous Talos kept the other males at bay.
Now, she felt safe.
She felt…free.
She never wanted the day to end. She glanced down at his hand in hers as they walked. He was so possessive, so attentive. So romantic and loving.
She felt his eyes on her constantly. Any time she turned her head, she caught his gaze. Even when he didn’t touch her, she felt his presence like electricity. Like fire.
As the rain started to fall more heavily, he drew her back inside an elaborate Gothic doorway. Then, to her surprise, he turned around to knock on the door of the palazzo.
“What are we doing here?” she asked, confused.
“You’ll see.”
They were admitted by a housekeeper. She told them in heavily accented English that, sadly, his friends the marchese and marchesa were away on vacation. But when Talos, with his most charming smile, asked to see the ballroom, she could not resist.
Who could? Eve thought.
Once the housekeeper left them alone in the enormous gilded ballroom, beneath the medieval fifteenthcentury timbers and decorated stucco rosework, Eve could not believe the ballroom’s size or beauty. To get a better view, she walked halfway up the sweeping stairs.#p#分页标题#e#
“And that is where I first saw you,” Talos said in a low voice behind her.
She whirled around. “Here?”
“At the charity ball the first weekend in June.”
The sun shone weakly through the tall windows of the palazzo, leaving a tracery of the Gothic rose pattern of the facade on the marble floor. She could almost imagine long-ago pirates coming to plunder the wealth of La Serenissima.
“Before that day,” he said, staring at the sunlight through the multicolored glass of the windows, “I’d scoffed at the rumors about you. No woman could be that beautiful, I said. No woman could be that mesmerizing.” Slowly, he turned to look at her. His dark eyes sizzled through her as he said in a low voice, “Then we met.”
Talos looked just like the dark corsair she’d imagined, the Barbary pirate who’d come to plunder the medieval city—to take what he wanted and burn the rest.
She blinked. How had she come up with such a brutal, cruel image? Where had that come from?
“I saw you coming down those stairs in a long red dress,” he said softly. “You were on the arm of my greatest business rival, but I knew at once that I would take you from him.” Slowly, he walked up the stairs toward her. “I would have taken you from the devil himself.”
As he came up the stairs toward her, she was unable to move. Unable to breathe.
“You made me pursue you across Venice for a week before you finally surrendered and agreed to accompany me to Athens. Where I finally discovered to my surprise that you were a virgin.” He fixed his dark eyes on her and a flash of heat coursed through her body. “For the first time in my life, I found myself wanting a woman more after I had bedded her, instead of less.”
He bent his head toward her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
“The more I had of you,” he whispered, “the more I wanted.”
But as he lowered his head to kiss her, he suddenly stopped, then stiffened. Without touching her, he wrenched away, his eyes cold. “Come. We’re done here.”
After thanking the housekeeper, he led her from the palazzo. Outside, as the storm clouds brewed above them, she could feel a storm building between them as well, a tension that had nothing to do with tenderness.