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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.’

Zoe pressed her pale lips together and nodded that she understood.

‘Try to keep in your mind that once we have left here they will leave, and your neighbours will retrieve their peace and quiet.’

Staring down at Toby sleeping snugly in his car seat, she nodded again.

‘Will you allow me to take care of your brother?’

This time she looked up. Those amazing eyes were burning with so many conflicting things, from uncertainty in what she was doing to straight-out anxiety and fear, that Anton broke his own constraints, reached out and rested his fingers beneath her chin. Her skin felt like the finest silk.

‘Trust me.’ He uttered his biggest lie yet, then watched her lips tremble as they parted. ‘I do,’ she told him.

It was no reassurance. In fact his own expression turned so tough even he felt its harshness as he bent to grasp the handle of the child’s seat. As he straightened up again he looked at Kostas, who said something into his mobile then turned to open the door.

Zoe’s heart was throbbing in her mouth even before the din hit her. The afternoon sunlight spilled over the threshold just before it was blocked out by Kostas’s bulky shape. Anton placed an arm around her shoulders. She didn’t protest when he drew her close into his side. They walked through the door in a huddle of dipped heads and baby seat. She did as she had been told to do and focused on the limousine standing there with a man at the ready to throw open the rear door.

There were flashes, shouts, the vague impression of a swirling crowd-surge. ‘What does it feel like to be Theo Kanellis’s granddaughter, Zoe? Hey, Anton, how does it feel to lose a fortune? Is it true Theo Kanellis wants the boy?’

His handsome face locked in austere lines, lips pinned together, Anton kept them walking. His own body blocked Zoe’s transfer into the car. The baby seat followed, grabbed and hugged to Zoe’s lap as he dipped his long body and followed her inside. One of his men closed the door. Her eyes were wide and stark with alarm. She almost jumped out of her skin when people started banging on the glass beside her, making her swing around wildly to find camera flashes blinding her eyes.

They started moving. Peeling her eyes forward, she saw the shadowy bulk of a uniformed driver separated from them by a partition of glass.

‘Oh my God,’ she choked as the sound of sirens suddenly wound into life. Blue lights started flashing in front and behind them. She twisted one way then the other. ‘We have a police escort?’ she gasped.

‘It was the only way we could have forged a passage out of here,’ her companion explained.

Clutching Toby’s seat to her, she turned her wide eyes onto him. ‘You’re that important?’

‘We are that important,’ he corrected, almost nailing Zoe to her seat with the salient point.

Life as she knew it had just taken a hike, she registered fully for the very first time. It was never going to be the same again. She’d spent three weeks living in fairyland, blithely telling herself that if she just sat it out everyone would eventually go away and leave her and Toby alone.

Twisting in her seat, she glance backwards. ‘The press are going to follow us,’ she whispered, staring beyond the rear police-car to where she could see people making frantic dives towards their own transport.

‘Though not, I hope, once we are in the air.’

That grabbed her attention away from the chasing pack, Anton noted, as she focused those incredible eyes back on him. ‘The air?’ she echoed.

He nodded. ‘A private helicopter awaits us not far away. It will transport us to our destination. Tell me what we need to do to make your brother’s seat secure …’

Distract to divert. The knowledge that he was using boardroom tactics to keep his passenger in line did not impress Anton’s sense of fair play, but then, hell, fair play had flown out of the window the moment he’d decided he was not leaving her home without both of them.

She took on the task with focused diligence, placing the baby seat in the gap between the two of them and sliding the spare seat-belt into place. Anton rested his shoulders into the corner of the car and watched, mildly intrigued by the simplistic efficiency of the engineering, while the small baby slept on unaware.

‘He is remarkably placid,’ he remarked idly.

‘He is three weeks old. At this age they sleep, they eat, they sleep again, so long as they are comfortable.’ Leaning down, she placed a soft kiss on the boy’s button nose.

Her hair spilled over one shoulder as she did so, a shimmering flow of the purest gold he had ever seen. Her hands were nice, he noticed, slender-boned with long, delicately formed fingers and elegant fingernails filed in smooth crescents, unpolished yet shining, not too long, not too short.

‘Who is the man in your life?’ he asked, curious suddenly because his own attraction to her told him that she must attract them in droves.

Easing back into her own seat, Zoe used one of her hands to smooth her hair back from her cheek before she looked at him. ‘Who said there was one?’

‘You were locking the back gate after someone’s swift exit this morning,’ he reminded her. ‘I was just curious as to what kind of guy scarpers fast instead of hanging around to offer you support.’

The idea of a heavily pregnant Susie staying around to defend her against this man brought a smile to Zoe’s lips. She’d had her share of boyfriends, of course—she was reasonable to look at and popular—but in truth there had never been anyone special in her life, at least not anyone she had felt passionate enough about to lose her head over.

Not that she was about to tell Anton Pallis that. ‘I don’t think my personal life is any of your business,’ she murmured.

‘It is if he’s willing to sell the inside story about your personal life.’

He was referring to pillow talk, Zoe realised, and how much information she would have confided to a lover about her family skeletons—namely Theo Kanellis.

‘What about the woman in your life?’ She threw the question back at him. ‘Is she likely to sell her kiss and tell story?’

As a counter response, it earned her a slow smile. ‘I don’t confide intimate family secrets, and anyway I asked first.’

‘Well.’ She did not like the way her insides responded to that smile. ‘Neither do I. And if there was a man in my life before I climbed into this car with you, then I should imagine he’s decided he’s been pushed out of the running.’

‘Because he knows he can’t compete with my fabulous good looks and overall sexy charm?’

He was teasing her, goading her to shoot him down. The problem was that he did have fabulous good looks and loads of sexy charm. ‘I was thinking more on the lines of your wealth—and Theo Kanellis’s, of course—money giving you both way too much clout for most men to want to try and compete with. However,’ she added, ‘I will give it to you that you’re physical attributes make you a daunting competitor all on your own.’

He laughed out loud this time, low and husky, because he was relaxed so it came from deep within the walls of his chest. Zoe found herself laughing too, softly and ruefully, her eyes connecting with his.

Her first burst of laughter in three long, horrible weeks, she realised suddenly, and then felt guilty because she could still laugh.

‘So, your turn.’ She shifted the attention onto him. ‘What about the current woman in your life?’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘That isn’t what your press says.’

‘The press likes to exaggerate.’

‘There was the model in New York three weeks ago,’ Zoe recalled. ‘She intimated you were both in it for the long haul.’

Anton affected a sigh. ‘The problem with women in high-profile careers is they see any kind of press as better than none at all. I broke the relationship off after that interview appeared in the papers.’

‘As you mentioned before, you are high profile.’

‘I am not hankering after a wealthy wife.’

Fair comment, Zoe conceded. ‘My father always says—’

She stopped, her lips coming together with a tremulous snap. Turning her face away, she stared blindly at the back of the chauffeur’s head and tried to swallow down the new lump in her throat.

‘Your father used to say—what?’ he prompted very gently.

But Zoe shook her head. The subtle change he’d made to her words didn’t stop her from feeling deeply that she’d mentioned her father in the present tense. She did it a lot. She still turned to speak to her mother only to find she wasn’t there. She had been going to say that her father had always said material wealth did not matter. Love mattered.

‘I met him a few times,’ Anton said quietly, bringing her face slowly back around so she could look at him. Her eyes looked huge again, and so damned vulnerable. ‘I was quite small and he appeared very much a grown-up to me, though he could have been only eighteen. He took me out on the lawn to play football. No one had ever done that with me before.’

Needing to swallow before she could speak, Zoe prompted, ‘Your own father?’

‘He’d died the year before. I barely remember him. He was always going off somewhere on a business trip and was much too busy being powerful to play football with me. We are here,’ he said, sounding as if he was glad of the excuse to call a halt to that line of conversation.

Zoe turned her head in time to watch the front police-car peeling away. The next second the car they were travelling in was slowing down to make a left turn and they were driving through a pair of big gates. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the two police cars had pulled across the gap into which the gates were in the process of closing behind them. Beyond the police cars the chasing pack had all pulled to a stop in a long line. She could feel their frustration as they climbed out of their vehicles and stared helplessly at their disappearing car. There was even the promised big fence cordoning off the area. Relief skittered down her spine as she turned to look forwards again.

And that feeling of relief died immediately. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded jerkily.

‘Our next mode of transport,’ Anton replied.

‘But—but that’s a plane!’

Taking a look out of the car window at the sleek lines of the Pallis private jet, Anton drawled, ‘So it is.’