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She’d only met the man half an hour ago yet already this scene felt so unnaturally natural, she mused as she stroked Toby’s baby-soft cheek: her sitting here feeding a baby, while he leant against the kitchen sink at the other end of the room, coolly relaying a series of instructions in what sounded remarkably like Russian to her.
A vision of domestic bliss, she mocked it, catching hold of Toby’s waving starfish hand and lowering her head to brush it with a kiss.
He finished his call, and all went quiet in the kitchen. She could hear the wall-clock ticking and soft hum of the fridge. There was tension in the air too, mostly due to the last words she had thrown at him before she’d gone to get Toby, she supposed. She should not have said it, and remorse had been eating away at her ever since. She had no right whatsoever to blame this man for being Theo Kanellis’s substitute son. She might not be sure just how old Anton Pallis was, but it didn’t take many brain cells to work out that he could only have been a child when he’d been put in her father’s place. And her father had always claimed that he’d walked away from that life of his own volition and had never felt the slightest desire to go back to it again.
For a man who had never experienced discomfort in any environment, Anton discovered he was feeling it here in the home of Leander Kanellis. Zoe’s remark about him walking in the other man’s shoes was still cutting deep, he acknowledged.
‘You and your brother could have so much more than this,’ he heard himself utter as one thought led him to another place—the natural negotiator in him, Anton recognised.
Zoe looked up at him over the back of the sofa and caught him indulging in a rueful grimace.
‘And the price?’ she asked out of sheer curiosity.
Attempting to ease some of the tension out of his shoulders without her noticing, Anton strode forward, skirting around the table to come to a halt at the armchair which matched the blue sofa.
‘May I …?’ he requested politely.
She shrugged a narrow shoulder then nodded, and he lowered himself into the chair. It was surprisingly comfortable, he discovered, though he did not relax into it but sat forward to place his forearms on his thighs.
He seemed about to open negotiations by extolling Theo’s virtues; she spoke first. ‘I’m sorry for what I said to you earlier. It was totally unfair.’
‘No, don’t do that.’ Anton frowned and shook his head. ‘Don’t apologise to me for anything you say. You have the absolute right to speak what you believe is the truth. And you know why I’ve come here.’
‘Perhaps you’d better put it in words so there will be no misunderstandings, then.’
It was not a climb down from hostilities which made her offer the invite, and Anton did not take it as one. But at least she was opening a line of discussion he was more comfortable with—business. The business side of their meeting was about to begin.
‘I am here to negotiate terms on which you will agree to hand Theo his grandson. Theo does not mind if you come with the deal, but if you want to return to your studies he’s offering to support you all the way.’
‘Well, thank him for me, but tell him no thank you,’ Zoe returned politely. ‘Toby is my brother and we stick together—here in England.’
‘And if Theo decides to push for custody of his grandson?’
She didn’t even flinch at the suggestion. ‘I am Toby’s legal guardian,’ she stated. ‘And I don’t think Theo Kanellis will risk the bad press by attempting to contest me on that.’
His eyes were intent on her. ‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Absolutely.’ She nodded.
So did Anton, and pressed his lips together and dropped the subject. ‘Theo is not a bad man.’ He tried a different tack. ‘He is tough and he is stubborn, and sometimes he is infuriatingly impossible to deal with, but he is not dishonest or corrupt or cruel to children.’
‘But he couldn’t be bothered to send a representative to his own son’s funeral.’
‘Admit it,’ Anton fired back. ‘You would have despised him for it if he had done.’
‘No-win situation then,’ she acknowledged, and brought his attention to the scrap of a thing she held in her arms when she deprived the boy of his bottle and he let out a protesting squeak.
Lifting him up onto her shoulder, she began gently patting his tiny back. The half-finished bottle of formula rested in the crook of her lap. She looked incredibly young and vulnerable suddenly—they both did—Anton observed and felt like the devil’s messenger come to steal a baby—cold, ruthless and sure of himself.
‘Your grandfather has been very ill and is unable to travel far.’
For a second he thought he detected a flicker of softening in her eyes until she said, ‘Ill for twenty-three years, at a guess.’
He did not pretend to misunderstand her. ‘Your father—’
‘Don’t!’ Suddenly, warning sparks were flying from her electric-blue eyes. ‘Don’t even attempt to heap the blame on my father because I won’t listen! He is not here to defend himself any more which makes that line of negotiation low and cheap.’
‘My apologies,’ Anton said instantly.
‘Not accepted,’ Zoe threw back, still fizzing inside with anger on behalf of her father. The baby let out a whining squeak. Settling the small boy into the crook of her arm again, she retrieved his bottle and offered it to the cherub-like mouth.
Anton watched, momentarily fascinated. He had no experience with babies, or children of any age for that matter, but the one thing he noticed about this baby was that, in every way he could see from here, he was Greek. The head of black hair, the light olive tone to his skin, even the demand for attention, said ‘typical Greek male’ to him.
‘That boy you are holding deserves the best kind of life you can offer him, Zoe.’ Tough though it was, Anton knew from experience that it was the truth. ‘To deprive him of the best because you refuse to forgive your grandfather his sins is unforgivably selfish and wrong.’
‘Why don’t you just shut up and go away?’ She launched at him in shocking full volume, making his soot-black eyelashes flicker in surprise and Toby jerk in her arms.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I hATE you,’ she could not resist whispering before she pulled in a deep tear-thickened breath in an effort to calm herself for the baby’s sake.
‘Because you know I am right,’ Anton persisted. ‘You know you cannot even afford to maintain this roof over your two heads, which will mean you moving into cheaper accommodation. It is a slippery road to destitution and misery, Zoe. A road you don’t have to take.’
His mobile phone started ringing. With soft curse Anton rose to his feet, retrieving the phone from his pocket before striding off back down the kitchen to take the call. It was Kostas, his head of security, calling to warn him that trouble was brewing outside the house.
‘The neighbours are out in force, and they are not happy,’ Kostas told him. ‘Their lives have been turned upside down by what’s going on here. They want it to stop.’
Another phone started ringing. Anton turned to watch as Zoe uncurled from the sofa and went to answer it. He watched her face go pale as she listened to whoever it was doing all the talking, and witnessed the slump of her narrow shoulders as if someone had dumped a heavy weight on them.
‘OK, Susie,’ she mumbled. ‘Yes. Thanks for warning me.’ ‘It’s been coming for days, Zoe,’ Susie told her. ‘We can’t even park on our own street. Our doorbells are constantly ringing. They accost us if we dare to step outside. Lucy started crying when we came home this lunchtime because we were jostled as we tried to get into our own house.’
Toby sighed against her shoulder. Zoe felt the tremors of a helpless weariness take control of her legs. Eyes stinging, heart stinging, she tried to think of something reassuring to say but she just didn’t have anything. And in the end she was actually glad when the phone was removed from her trembling fingers by a long-fingered hand.
‘Go and sit down,’ Anton Pallis instructed quietly.
She didn’t even argue. It seemed pointless to try when she was barely managing to stand on her own two feet. Coiling back down on the sofa, she hugged Toby to her shoulder and listened to the deep voice speaking quietly behind her. He sounded like her father again. He was using the same even, mellow tones of a natural mediator.
The tears began to flow. This time she didn’t bother to try and stop them. She’d never felt so miserable or so alone in her entire life. She missed them. She missed her father coming home from working at the local garage and stripping off his grease-stained mechanic’s boiler-suit. No matter how tired he was, his handsome face had always broken into that wonderful, charismatic grin. She missed her mother, her soft, gentle mother—plump because she loved baking—walking down the kitchen and straight into his waiting arms. She missed the warmth, the homeliness and the laughter, the way they’d all squeeze onto the sofa to watch the current reality-TV show and argue constantly over who was the best contestant.
And she missed the love, the all-over, all-encompassing shelter of love they had surrounded themselves with here in this modest, always slightly untidy little house.
A love Toby was never going to know now.
The sofa sank as Anton came to sit down beside her. He passed an arm around her shoulders and drew her against his side like a coiled foetus. Toby was fast asleep. He was oblivious to everything.
‘Listen to me, Zoe,’ Anton urged her deeply. ‘You must know you cannot continue to stay here. The situation out there is impossible for everyone concerned.’
‘Make them go away, then,’ she sobbed into his shoulder.
‘I wish I could but I don’t have that kind of power.’
‘It’s only got worse because you came here.’
‘Then let me offer a way to make amends. I have a house with big secure gates and a high fence all around it. I can have you transported out of here and on your way there within the hour if you will agree. No strings attached,’ he added when she pulled away from him, keeping her head down to hide her tear-blotched face. ‘Think of it as a bolthole away from all of this. Somewhere to stay while you give yourself a chance to catch your breath and recover, build your strength up before we start negotiations again.’
Anton could see that she was listening, fighting back the tears while keeping her head tucked down over the boy’s sleeping head.
‘Think about it,’ he urged, piling on the pressure while producing a neatly folded handkerchief from his pocket and handing it to her. She took it from him, which felt like a mild triumph. ‘This has nothing to do with Theo. This is just me offering you what I believe you need right now—a sanctuary, if you like, set in pleasant surroundings. I will not be living there. I have business to attend to overseas for the next few weeks anyway, so you will have the place all to yourself.’
Anton knew he was not telling the absolute truth here. He knew that his killer instincts had kicked in and taken control the moment Zoe Kanellis had revealed her weakened state.
Zoe was trying to talk herself out of Anton’s offer of a bolthole. She hated it that she had burst into tears in front of him too. He was a shark by nature and he knew when to circle his prey. She wasn’t fooled by his ‘no strings attached’ offer. She knew the pulse of concern he was giving off was probably false and that what he was really doing was inching control of the situation over to himself.
But she also knew he was right about it being impossible for her to stay here while the press were still so interested in their story. Just thinking of little Lucy crying because she had been frightened by those awful people out there made her want to start weeping all over again.
‘I want you to promise that you won’t try to pressure me.’ She sniffed into the handkerchief.
‘You have my word.’
‘And you won’t tell my grandfather where I am.’
Did she know she’d just used the forbidden word ‘grandfather’? ‘That is a tough one, but I will try my best to keep him out of the loop.’
‘And when I’m ready to come back home you won’t try to stop me.’
‘Scouts’ honour,’ Anton said.
It startled her into glancing up at him through her tear sparkling eyelashes. Anton responded to the glimpse of electric-blue suspicion by raising a black eyebrow and she released a tear-thickened laugh. He liked Zoe Kanellis, he realised. He liked her courage in the face of all this adversity and her— Well, he liked her in other ways that were totally inappropriate, given the situation.
Still, he could not resist daring another gesture by reaching up to brush a damp strand of hair from her cheek. She did not flinch away. In fact she didn’t do anything. It was really quite weird, he decided, how they’d ended up sitting here staring at each other without either seeming to want to look away.
He did it; he blinked to break the connection then climbed gracefully back to his feet. ‘Tell me what needs to be done here.’
Brisk and businesslike again, Zoe noted, as he glanced at his watch then dipped his hand in his pocket to collect his mobile phone. He looked energised, dynamic, excitingly gorgeous …
Standing up just as abruptly as he had done, she went to settle Toby into his cot, feeling awkward suddenly and unwilling to look at him again. ‘I need to pack some things for myself and Toby, and I need to take a quick shower and change my clothes …’ she rattled off quickly in an effort to cover up an attack of confusion. ‘Does your house have baby facilities?’
‘It will have by the time we reach it,’ said the man used to organising anything. ‘Go and do what you need to do. You can leave the boy where he is,’ he added when she went to pick Toby up again. ‘I’ll watch over him.’
Zoe was about to demand if he knew how to look after a baby, but he’d already turned away and was talking on his phone. With a shrug, Zoe left him to it. There was a part of her—a lurking part—questioning if she knew what she was doing, placing herself and Toby in the hands of the enemy. But for some reason she did not want to look too deeply into the question. And it did not stop her from packing a couple of bags then slipping into the bathroom to take her shower.
By the time she came back downstairs again, Anton had been joined in the kitchen by a thick-set man wearing a black suit. They were talking in low voices but when they heard her step into the room both men stopped abruptly and looked at her. Zoe stilled, aware that she’d interrupted something important. Her gaze went from the newcomer’s tough, impassive features to Anton’s even harder-to-read face. Even his eyes had taken on a shadowy lustre which made her think of dark veils.
Those eyes scanned her then disappeared completely behind his thick black eyelashes for a second before he brought them back to her face. She thought she saw a muscle twitch at the corner of his mouth but could not be absolutely sure of it because the mouth then stretched out a brief smile.
‘This is Kostas Demitris, my head of security,’ he told her.
Drifting her blue gaze back to the other man she nodded her head in acknowledgment and he did the same back to her.
‘Kostas will make sure his men see that your home is secure once we have left it,’ Anton continued, bringing her gaze back to him. ‘Anything you think you might need from here that we cannot take with us now, tell Kostas and he will see that it follows us. It also would be wise if you gather together any personal documents you have around the place, so we can take them with us too—for safe keeping.’
She parted her lips with the intention of questioning that particular command—and it had been a command, even if he’d made it sound like advice—but Anton got in first with, ‘We can secure the house to the best of our ability but once we have left here we cannot predict the determination of certain—low life—if they decide to take a look around in here in search of a new scoop.’
Not liking the image that he’d just planted in her head, of some sleazy person deciding to ransack her home while she was away from it, once again Zoe parted her lips to say so.
‘It is a precaution, nothing more,’ he inserted again. ‘Kostas likes to be thorough in his forward planning.’
Shifting her eyes back to the other man, he offered a confirming nod. ‘Anton is used to this level of precaution, Miss Kanellis. It is the down side of living a high-profile life.’
Zoe took in a breath, ready to protest that her life wasn’t high profile, then stopped herself. She could not argue that it was certainly high profile right now.
Both men were standing there waiting for her agreement. That questioning voice in her head asked her again why she was allowing them to take control like this. Then she thought of Lucy next door, scared and upset by those people out there; too-close-to the-surface tears formed together with an aching lump in her throat. With a mute nod, she gave them what they wanted, then walked over to Toby’s cot and bent over it, glad that her freshly washed and dried hair slithered forward to hide the bleak expression on her face.
The scent of freshly sliced apples filtered up along the sunbeam glistening in the silky fall of her shining hair and entered Anton’s nostrils. He had a battle on his hands not to inhale deeply. In truth he was struggling to keep a lot of things together, not least his libido, which had been in a state of stirring defiance since she’d walked back into the room. For the pale and thin, grief-stricken creature who had walked out of here half an hour ago showed little resemblance to the one he was looking at now.
This one was quite ravishingly beautiful, a breathtaking upgrade of the younger version he’d seen in the newspaper the day all of this had begun. Gone was the appalling baggy red cardigan, the scraped-back dull hair and the faded jeans. This version wore a dramatically plain shift dress in the most amazingly classy dove-grey jersey fabric which skimmed the fragile curves of her slender figure and finished halfway down the length of her long, slender thighs. OK, so the dress was a size too big right now because she had lost weight, but the promise of what still hid beneath it tantalised his imagination—as did the rest of her legs covered in stretchy black leggings and the delicacy of her slender white ankles elevated by her black platform shoes.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Kostas growled at him in softly spoken Greek.
The sharp-sensed devil had picked up on what was happening to him, Anton realised. ‘Just concentrate on your job,’ he flipped back.
‘She is—’
‘This is probably a good moment to tell you that I am bilingual,’ Zoe informed them both in beautifully fluid Greek as she straightened up from her brother’s cot. She looked at them, vivid blue eyes like icy darts now. ‘And I hope you do know what you are doing, Mr Pallis, because if you think you are softening me up to be a pushover, you could not be more mistaken if you tried.’
She did not miss the dark hue which coloured the face of Kostas Demitris as she said that, even though her gaze was focused on his employer, who showed no such embarrassment at being caught out discussing her in a language they’d believed she could not understand.
Anton Pallis merely relaxed his stance, leaning back against the kitchen sink again and slid his hands into trouser pockets. The action pushed back the edges of his jacket to display the long solidity of his muscular torso trapped inside the clean, crisp whiteness of his shirt and the delineating line of his slender silk tie. Something suspiciously close to sensual heat flared low in Zoe’s belly as she grazed her eyes lower over his narrow hips then the long length of his legs to the shiny tops of his handmade leather shoes.
‘So you don’t hate everything Greek, then?’ he murmured, bringing her gaze skittering all the way back up him again to become trapped by the spark of amusement she could see in his impossibly dark eyes.
She looked away again, but felt slightly breathless. ‘I would have to hate my own father to do that.’
‘And part of yourself, since you are half Greek. Get to it, Kostas,’ he tagged on without changing the soft intonation in his voice.
Kostas Demitris muttered something beneath his breath as he jerked into movement. Feeling as if she was about to be left alone with a dangerous animal, Zoe turned chicken and decided to escape. ‘Can I show you what I need bringing from upstairs?’ she asked Kostas. ‘And I will need to give you the box containing my personal papers.’
With that she walked back into the hallway, leaving Anton staring at his shoes, ruefully smiling to himself.
All hint of humour had left him as they assembled in the narrow hallway half an hour later. Kostas had control of the door; Anton stood against the wall, his demeanour silent and grim as he studied the downturned profile of Zoe Kanellis. What light application of make-up she had applied was useless as a cover up because the strain was back on her face—the ravaged hollows, the barely steady set of her lips. She had pulled on a black jacket and she was trying to fasten the buttons with fingers that shook. On the floor in front of her the baby slept on, oblivious to the silent tension pulsing all around him, Anton saw, looking at the contraption the child slept in which he’d been told doubled as a car safety-seat.
He wanted to touch her in reassurance. It played on his senses like an itch he could not scratch. The pulling-on of the jacket had somehow placed a defensive space around her that he recognised instinctively would earn him another shrinking rejection, like the one he had suffered when he’d first arrived here, if he tried to cross it.
She did not want to do this, which was another reason why he was holding himself back from making any risky moves. She’d had time to think about what she’d agreed to and he held a suspicion that the only thing stopping her from changing her mind was the tempting prospect of the sanctuary he had promised her, with the all-important no strings attached.
Kostas was talking quietly into his mobile; he turned to send Anton a look. With a nod of his head he acknowledged it, aware that his conscience was not happy right now. He was a liar and he knew it. And the only reason why he was determined to let this continue was his belief that what he was doing was for hers and the boy’s own good.
‘My car is parked right outside the door.’ He broke through the tension with his voice carefully level. ‘My people will attempt to maintain a corridor for us to reach it. However, I am afraid we can do nothing about the way the media will react once they see us. It will be noisy and intimidating. The trick is to fix your attention on the open car door and walk straight into it.’
