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  She dragged her mouth slightly away from his. “Please,” she said, her fingers moving wildly through his hair, pulling him away, drawing him near.

  He withdrew his finger, put together two, then thrust them in deeply at once, readying her for him, trying to make the moment when he entered her pleasurable.

  She thrust her hips forward, against his hand, wanting more, increasing his need to give her what she craved. But not yet. He didn’t want to end it yet. He wanted to savor these incredible sensations with Eva. Draw them out, build them up, then finally, urge them to climb to their ultimate climax.

  She fumbled with the button of his slacks, and within moments her slender hand grazed the length of his erection. She pulled him out and her fingers wrapped around his width. Then she slid her hand slowly up and down, up and down, matching the rhythm of his fingers inside her, driving him wild, out of his mind with need.

  She worked her way to his ear, laving the outer shell, then searing a path down his neck and back up to his mouth. Adam was filled with the need to be inside her, to feel her slick muscles around him, to watch her mirror the movements of her hand with her body. Then he realized the one thing that would make the fantasy reality was missing. He didn’t have a condom.

  The revelation came on the brink of climax. Thrusting his fingers more deeply inside her, his thumb working madly, he didn’t allow himself the release until he heard her sharp intake of breath, her echoing cry…then he followed right after her, reveling in the tightness of her hand around him even as he bucked against it, keeping up the rhythm of his fingers, even as she melted around him. The sultry heat of the night moved in him and around him. Fusing him with the woman on his lap. Joining their harsh breaths as they sought air. Intensifying their kiss as she pressed her open mouth against his.

  For several long moments they stayed like that, rocking with the aftershocks, and clinging to each other like the Spanish moss that covered the nearby live oaks. Feeling the contractions of her muscles ease, he slowly slipped his fingers out and grasped either side of her head, ending their kiss.

  “More,” she murmured ardently, her eyes dark with passion, her body even now seeking him, rubbing against the length of him.

  “No, Eva. No more. Not now.”

  Maybe not ever. He closed his eyes and languidly claimed her lips one last time. God, if her mere touch could do so much to him, he couldn’t fathom what might happen if they made love.

  He pulled her away again and slowly began straightening her dress. “We have to go back now, Eva.”

  “Back…yes.”

  He captured her gaze, reading the passionate hope in her eyes. He shook his head. “I’m not going to sleep with you tonight.”

  She started to say something then caught her bottom lip between her straight white teeth. She blinked back what he guessed might be tears of frustration. It struck him with fierce intensity that she might think he didn’t want her because she was pregnant. Pregnant with another man’s child. Even though that couldn’t be further from the truth—or maybe nearer than he thought—Adam wouldn’t allow himself to soothe her pain. He couldn’t. No matter how much he wanted to make love to Eva, he couldn’t allow himself the ultimate mind-blowing pleasure. Could never claim her as completely as he was coming to want to. Because what lay at the bottom was his knowledge that Eva was not his for the taking. And she never would be. Not because of his assignment. Not even because she was unwilling to give herself to him. But because he would never, could never, let her.

  Deep down in the dark shadows of his soul, Adam knew he could never be the everything Eva Mavros Burgess wanted. The everything she—and her child—deserved.

  9

  EVA WAS TORN. Between life as she knew it…and the reality that Adam had a large part in changing.

  Reality.

  Sitting on the wooden seat of the swing that hung from the old willow tree in the front yard, the early-morning sun dappling the grass around her feet, Eva questioned the meaning of the word. Especially within the framework of her present situation. She tightened her hands on the swing’s ropes, wondering where Adam had slept last night. Wondering further why it hurt so that he had refused her, rejected her in the light of her moon.

  She had awakened a half hour earlier, hot and bothered, and very alone. She had taken a cool shower, but the water did little to alleviate the sultry heat pressing in and around her. Rather than going to the kitchen where her mother and grandmother were, she’d slipped out the front door and sat in the swing. Above her, warblers and mourning doves called to each other.

  If anyone had told her the week before that she had the capacity to love again, Eva would have shot the messenger for being insane. She smoothed her hands over her slightly rounded stomach, then rested them there, reminding herself of the reason she hadn’t intended to date another man, much less find herself falling in love with one. At least until the child she carried had graduated from college sometime far into the future.

  Then again, if somebody had told her three months ago that she would be divorced and pregnant, she would have shot that person as well.

  She rested her cheek against one of the ropes and tried to make sense out of the emotions ebbing and flowing through her.

  Bill. Nothing. Closing her eyes and breathing in the heady scent of jasmine, she tried to summon some sort of remorse for having little feeling for her ex-husband. As it was, she was finding it difficult to imagine what he looked like. Not the specifics. Those, of course, she saw clearly. But she couldn’t seem to isolate the individual expressions that defined their relationship. She was having a harder time, still, reinforcing any of her own distant emotions for him, except for the dull pain she felt at his betrayal.

  Had their relationship been so shallow that she could forget him so easily? Or was her growing affection for Adam—and the lack of feeling for Bill—not to be trusted? If Adam had allowed their so very tentative relationship to advance the way she had wanted the night before, would she have awakened this morning filled with regret? Or would that have come somewhere down the road when the newness faded?

  An ache the size of Louisiana filled her chest. At that moment, she couldn’t imagine any of the many wonderful sensations she felt for Adam fading. When he touched her, something elemental responded, something so elusive, she suspected it flowed from a source greater than her.

  But the very fact that the explanation was elusive made her warier of that source. How could she fall for another man when just a few scant weeks ago, she’d thought herself in love with Bill?

  No, that wasn’t true. She had never really been “in” love with Bill. She knew that the minute she’d accepted his cool marriage proposal a year before. Instead her reaction had been similar to the feeling she experienced when adding up long columns of debits and credits, and finding they reconciled. It had nothing to do with love, but rather a calm acceptance that she would never find that one person who would sweep her off her feet.

  Then there was Adam.

  Idly pushing a foot against the soft earth, Eva brought the swing to a lazy rock. Her body tingled and a liquid yearning pooled in her belly at the mere thought of Adam and what he had done to her the night before. Her feelings for him, and his apparent attraction for her, refused to be neatly tucked into columns of any sort.

  And it was the very nature of those feelings that caused her to doubt them.

  Pushing herself off the swing, Eva smoothed her dress, then stepped toward the house that shone almost pink in the hazy morning sun. She longed to turn to her mother for advice, but that was out of the question, given her little ruse.

  She swept through the house and entered the kitchen where she listlessly greeted her mother and grandmother where they sat in their usual chairs. She made herself a cup of herb tea, then sat down at the table.

  “Did Papa and Adam go oystering again?” Her question was more of a comment, an acceptance that of course her father would take Adam oystering with him, than a need for
an answer.

  Her grandmother eyed her over the rim of her reading glasses. “Yes, they did. They said they’d be back early this morning.”

  Eva blew on the steaming surface of her tea, then took a sip, gazing at the one-foot-long, two-feet-wide blanket draped across her grandmother’s lap. A blanket that grew stitch by wondrous stitch as she worked. Eva reached out and lovingly fingered the soft, colorful creation.

  “It’s pretty,” she murmured, running her fingertips over the perfect loops.

  Her mother’s chair creaked as she shifted, working on what looked like a tiny sweater. “I think the baby will like it. It’s heavy enough for winter in New Jersey.”

  Winter. As in next March. Her due date.

  Eva smiled. She hadn’t officially told her mother or grandmother about the baby yet. But somehow both of them knew.

  In the weeks since she’d found out she was pregnant, Eva had had a hard time accepting it in the midst of everything else that had happened. Now she reveled in the surge of warmth and expectation that spread across her chest.

  Tears pricked the corner of her eyes and she moved her hand back to hold her teacup. She was not going to cry.

  “You and Adam must be very excited,” her mother said.

  She and Adam? Added on top of the contradictory emotions already vying for attention in her heart, Eva didn’t feel up to dealing with how much she would like it if Adam was excited about the baby. Or the feeling that she would give everything that was her, everything Adam said he envied, if only the child was his.

  A fat, hot tear rolled down her cheek and she rubbed it away. The harsh truth was that this child wasn’t Adam’s. He wasn’t even her husband.

  And the fact that the two precious women next to her knew nothing about that truth suddenly overwhelmed her.

  Unable to blink them back, tears popped over her lower lashes. Eva tightened her fingers around her cup.

  “Oh, Mama, what have I done?”

  ADAM READJUSTED the dredge lever, the hazy sun hot on his shoulders, the thick, salty smell of the gulf filling his nose.

  “Bring it up that way,” Tolly shouted from the other side of the boat.

  Adam did, then released the lever, his present chore done.

  Sitting in the seat where he and Eva had nearly made love the night before, he reached for the thermos of coffee Tolly gave him earlier. He poured out the last of the still-warm liquid.

  “My daughter, she locked you out of the bedroom last night, no?” Tolly overturned a bucket then sat in front of Adam.

  Adam took his time sipping the coffee from the plastic cup, weighing his response. He couldn’t very well deny that he and Eva had slept apart. Tolly had shaken him awake at four that morning where he lay on the front-porch swing, hours after he’d forced Eva to go upstairs…alone.

  “Actually, no. It was too hot and I couldn’t sleep so I went for a walk. Falling asleep on the swing was an accident.”

  Adam dragged the back of his hand across his damp forehead, hating to continue this charade. Playing roles was part of his job, and he’d never had a problem keeping in character…until now. Lying to Eva’s family was becoming harder and harder.

  Tolly hmmphed and Adam eyed him warily. Lying to Tolly was especially difficult because Adam had the distinct feeling the weathered Greek didn’t believe a word he said. Briefly, he was thankful Tolly Mavros was an honest man, because he would be deadly if he were a criminal.

  “An accident,” Tolly repeated, pushing the bill of his fisherman’s cap back on his head.

  “Certainly, over the years you and Katina have slept apart every now and again.”

  “Never.” Tolly passionately waved his meaty hand. “Not one night in almost thirty-five years of marriage.”

  Adam raised an eyebrow, believing him. “Not once?”

  Tolly gave his graying bushy eyebrows a quick raise and brought his head up once with a terse tsk that Adam had come to see was his way of answering in the negative.

  He grinned. “You have a good marriage, then.”

  “The best,” Tolly gruffly agreed. “But it is not my marriage I’m worried about.”

  Adam stared down into his empty cup, giving vent to a series of silent curses. He’d stepped right into that one.

  For what seemed to be the millionth time, he vehemently questioned Eva’s motives for setting up this scheme. While he recognized that even she couldn’t have known things would spin so out of control, how could she continue with a plan that had lost its viability after the first night?

  He watched Tolly take his cap off. He rubbed the wrist of his long-sleeved shirt across his forehead then plunked the fisherman’s cap back down on top of his salt-and-pepper hair. Adam could certainly sympathize with Eva’s motives. Tolly was a rough man who lived by traditional rules that were hard and fast. And the breaking of those rules likely exacted a response few people could live with. The past two mornings had made Adam wish he’d had a father who cared about his family the way Tolly obviously cared about his own. But he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that living with his overbearing ways would have been easy. He could even see how feelings of animosity and detachment could develop, being under the constant thumb of the well-meaning but brusque man. But didn’t Eva understand that she was only making matters worse?

  Damn, but he had gotten himself into a mess with this case. Forget that he’d mucked things up terribly by losing focus on the case itself, rendering him completely unprepared for the break-in yesterday. He couldn’t fight the feeling that he’d gotten himself in way over his head personally as well as professionally. And that was what scared him more than anything else.

  “Do you love my Eva?” Tolly asked abruptly.

  Shocked out of his uncomfortable reverie, Adam shifted his gaze to the older man’s face.

  “Love her?” Remembering his role, he pushed up his glasses. “Of course I love her. I wouldn’t have married her otherwise.”

  Tolly stared at him unblinkingly.

  Adam shifted. He was going to have to do better than that. “I love her insofar as my definition of love goes,” he said. “She…satisfies something inside of me.”

  Tolly made a fist out of one hand and tapped it against his own head. “Here?” He moved the fist to his chest. “Here?” Then he dropped it to his groin. “Or here?”

  Adam could have said all three and suspected he was coming to mean it. Which was a revelation in itself. Instead he fisted his own right hand. “Sure, I feel it in those places. But mostly I feel it here.” He nestled his fist against his solar plexus, thinking the imagery of the fist accurately portrayed the knotted emotions lodged directly in the area he indicated. Emotions he didn’t have to pretend. Feelings that were there whether he wanted them to be or not. Tight sensations he feared he’d never rid himself of…not with one passionate, steamy night with Eva, or a thousand.

  Tolly’s grin was brighter than any Adam had seen him give. He reached out and slapped Adam’s shoulder. “Good.”

  Tolly got up and began whistling as he returned to work. Adam couldn’t help thinking he’d just been outsmarted by a man who was wiser than he had given him credit for.

  Grinning wryly, he surmised he hadn’t been the only one outwitted. Eva had been, too. Because Tolly Mavros’s questioning told Adam that he must have seen those divorce papers on the floor of Eva’s bedroom yesterday. Tolly’s behavior also told him that despite his traditional values, it didn’t much matter to him. Not so long as everything would be right from there on out.

  Adam swiped at a dragonfly as it zoomed past his ear in the humid air. Making everything right was a promise he couldn’t make. Not to Tolly. Not to Eva either.

  “Funny you should mention love, Tolly,” he said quietly. “Because I get the impression that your daughter questions your love for her.”

  Tolly’s whistling stopped abruptly, but he continued working, his back to Adam. He mumbled something in Greek. “Nonsense. My daughter questions no such
thing.”

  Adam got up from the bench, grabbing on to a rope hanging from the dredger and lazily leaning his weight against it. “No?”

  “No.” Tolly’s movements were jerky and impatient.

  “She thinks everything she does makes you unhappy.”

  “Nonsense,” he said again.

  Adam squinted in the hazy sunlight. “You know, it might be a good idea to let her know your feelings every now and again.”

  “She knows my feelings.” He gestured around the deck. “I named my boat for her, no?”

  “A boat she’s never been on,” Adam said, neglecting to mention their interlude last night. He drew a long breath. “You’ve never told her you love her, have you?”

  Tolly finally stopped working and stared at him. Long moments slid by with nothing but the sound of buzzing flies, the lap of the water against the boat and the call of a bird nearby. “Love, you show. Not tell.”

  Adam gave the old salt a sad smile. “Then maybe you should brush up on your showing, Tolly. Because there’s been a breakdown in communications and Eva’s getting the wrong messages.”

  Tolly made his usual hmmph and Adam pushed away from the rope. But as he bent to pick up the coffee thermos, he saw Tolly staring out thoughtfully across one of his privately owned beds. Maybe, just maybe, he had reached the crusty Greek. The way Adam figured it, if he couldn’t make things right between himself and Eva, at least he could try to repair the ties between father and daughter. Ties he had never had with either of his parents. Ties he now saw were more precious than gold.

  He twisted the cap back onto the thermos. If everything was all right between Eva and Tolly, it would make his own leaving that much easier. But was it easier for them…or himself?

  EVA HAD TRIED to get Adam alone to explain what happened that morning. But between her mother’s insistence that she needed help with dinner, and her grandmother’s trying to teach her how to crochet, Eva hadn’t a moment to herself. She stood in the kitchen doorway, trying to get Adam’s attention where he sat at the dining-room table. But her father was talking to him in hushed tones so that all Eva could do was drop her hand back to her side and give herself over to the inevitable fact that Adam would have to deal with this one on his own.