Needed: One Convenient Husband(28)

She placed the note on the hall table, along with her wedding and  engagement rings and paused at the door to take a last look at the  house. Throat aching, tears misting her eyes, she unhooked the chain  then slowly turned the big old-fashioned key in its lock so it wouldn't  make a loud clunking noise and pushed the door wide.

Cool morning air swirled around her as she gently closed the door,  groaning at the audible click it made. Jogging to her car, which she had  parked around by the garage so that wedding guests would have plenty of  room out front to park, she loaded her tote and bag.

She glanced at the kitchen windows, her heart pounding because she half  expected to see Kyle, then climbed behind the wheel, started the engine  and backed out. Gravel crunched beneath the tires, preternaturally loud  in the early morning air. Certain Kyle must have heard, she spared a  last glance for the house, but the front door was closed and windows  were blank. Depressing the accelerator, she took off down the drive.

* * *

Kyle wrapped the towel around his waist when he heard the sound of  Eva's car starting. Cold knowledge hit him as he strode past her room  and noted that the dressing table was bare. Cursing beneath his breath,  he made it down the stairs and outside in time to see the taillights of  her little sports car wink as she went down the drive.

Stomach tight, he strode upstairs, found his phone and called her. When  he got her answering service, he tried again just in case she was stuck  in traffic and hadn't had time to pull over and answer the call. He  rang a couple more times then gave up.

He found clothes, pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt then tried  the phone again. Jaw tightening, he retrieved the keys to his Maserati  from the top of his dresser and took the stairs two at a time. It was  possible Eva had gone to work, although he didn't think so. He knew for a  fact that she didn't have any weddings happening for a couple of weeks,  and Jacinta was running the office meantime.                       
       
           



       

He yanked the front door open then stopped when something fluttered to  the floor. He picked up the envelope, which was covered with scrawled  writing, as if Eva had written it in a hurry, and read then reread the  words. His stomach hollowed out.

Eva had left him.

She knew that meant that she would not receive her inheritance, but she  would manage without it. Without the inheritance she couldn't buy the  house, so Kyle could keep it.

Except that Kyle didn't want the house if Eva wasn't going to be in it. He had bought it for her.

Correction, he thought grimly, he had bought it for them, in order to make marriage to him more palatable for Eva.

When push had come to shove, he had been just as manipulative as Mario in trying to entice Eva back into his life.

She had left him.

His heart was pounding, and he was having trouble thinking. The last  time he had felt like this had been in Germany when he had lost Nicola  and Evan, but at that point there had been nothing he could do.

He had to think. Something had happened. It had to be that Eva was pregnant.

In the moment he also understood that the secrecy about Eva's past-a  past he had only just begun to probe-was somehow tied in with the  pregnancy. He didn't know how, but it was a fact that Eva reacted to  children in a way that wasn't normal. She adored them but had seemed to  recoil from the idea of being pregnant and having her own.

Setting the note back down on the hall table, he decided there was no  point in driving to Eva's house or her business premises. She wouldn't  be at either place, because she knew he would look there.

He did a quick search of her room. The jewelry case with the pendant  and earrings was on top of a dresser. All of the dresser drawers were  empty. The wedding gown and the shoes she'd worn were in the closet, but  nothing else. There was no sign of the pregnancy test kit.

He checked his bedroom and the bathroom, but the small trash can was  empty. Frowning, he went back downstairs and did a systematic search of  the rooms. In the first-floor bathroom, he found the pregnancy test kit  discarded in the trash. When he pulled out the little stick, he noted  the two lines. At a guess, that meant she was pregnant. He scanned the  instruction leaflet, which confirmed it.

He stared at the stick with its positive result, took a deep breath  then another. He felt like he'd been kicked in the chest. Eva was  pregnant with his child. He was going to be a father. Again.

The thought filled him with a crazy pastiche of emotions-delight and  the cold wall he'd hit when Nicola and Evan had died; horror and grief  and self-recrimination.

One other salient fact registered. He loved Eva.

Correction, he was in love with her, because just saying the word love  didn't seem to encompass the intense out-of-control emotions that kept  gripping him. He was in love with Eva Atraeus, and if he was honest, by  varying degrees he had been in love with her since he was nineteen. But  Mario's complete veto of their relationship had closed that door.

She loved him.

There was no other reason for her to run. But he had been too concerned  with guarding his own emotional safety-the protective habit that had  dominated the past four years-to appreciate that love.

He had fallen for Eva, but he had ruthlessly suppressed any softer  feelings and focused on the sex. He had played it safe, using the  surface image Eva projected as his compass north, even when he knew it  was just a facade.

Now there was a child, and in that moment, he knew that nothing mattered but Eva and their child.

The specter of the past and his failure to protect his wife and child  was just that, a burden of guilt he'd hung on to for too long and which  hadn't changed anything. Logically, he had always known that he could  never have saved them. The terrorist attack had not been predictable.

But he would not fail again. Eva was pregnant. They were going to have a  child. He needed to be there for Eva and the baby-if she would let him.

That long-ago conversation with Mario suddenly made him go cold inside.  He had said Eva needed protection. Protection from what? He could  remember asking Mario at the time and not getting a straight answer. He  had assumed Mario had meant emotional protection, but what if it was  protection from something or someone else?

Suddenly the break-in at Eva's house took on an added significance. A  lot of items had been strewn over the floor, but a family photo had been  set on the dining room table. Annoyed with himself for missing clues  that should have alerted him to the fact that Eva had a problem, he  walked through to the kitchen, picked up the phone and rang Gabriel.

Gabriel picked up on the second ring, his voice gruff.

Kyle explained he was taking a few days because Eva had run out on him. "She's pregnant."                       
       
           



       

There was a small silence. "And the pregnancy's a problem?"

Put like that, Eva running out sounded like a simple reaction to an  unplanned pregnancy, but Kyle knew it was a whole lot more than that.  "She knows how I feel about having a child. She's gone, Gabe. She's  prepared to end the marriage and let the inheritance go into trust."

"I'm listening."

Kyle filled Gabriel in on the break-in and his suspicion that someone  from Eva's past was putting pressure on her, maybe with blackmail.

Kyle heard a voice in the background, Gemma, and Gabriel's voice,  muffled, as if his hand was over the receiver. "I had a conversation  with Mario shortly before he died. Eva had a stepfather. Apparently, he  stole all of Eva's mother's possessions shortly before she died. Not  content with that, he tried to blackmail Mario. There was also a medical  issue, although Mario didn't go into detail about it."

The thought that Eva could be sick made Kyle frown. She had seemed  perfectly healthy, but plenty of illnesses were invisible until the last  stages. "I need to know more about Eva's past. I think I need to access  Mario's safe deposit box."

"Meet me at the bank in thirty minutes."

Kyle hung up. Until the moment he had seen her car disappearing down  the drive, he had been able to fool himself that what he and Eva had was  controllable and, for want of a better word, convenient for them both.

It wasn't. Control had been an illusion. He had wanted her from the  beginning. But it was more than that now. Somewhere along the way, the  wanting had turned to a need that was bone deep and inexplicable.

He had always thought that love between a man and a woman came down to a  romantic cocktail of sex and companionship, but what he felt for Eva  was raw and primitive. She had made him see her and not the savvy  businesswoman, and she had stunned him with her capacity to love.

She loved him.

Until that moment, he hadn't understood what it must have cost her to  say those words. Still locked into the failure and guilt of his own  past, the goodbyes he had said at the graves the morning of the wedding,  he hadn't been able to respond.