sex, lousy aftermath. He shifted his shoulders against the cream leather back of his seat. He did not need to replay the way he’d laid into her in an effort to salve his own guilty conscience.
Women … He blamed all those other women who’d drifted in and out of his bed with their third eye focused on the vague chance that they might—just might—be the one he would decide to marry. And not merely for his handsome self; he mocked the good looks he was not too modest to acknowledge he had been blessed with. Or even his famous prowess between the sheets. No, money was the drug they fell in love with, the scintillating lure of becoming Mrs Anton Pallis with all the wealth, power and position the title would bring along with it.
So he’d become cynical about women before he’d reached the age of twenty. So he’d taken what they’d invited him to take, enjoyed their company and their bodies for as long as his interest lasted and never thought much about how it must feel to be in their shoes.
Well, he was feeling it now: rejection. In this case, a well-deserved rejection. The low ache of knowing he had been pushed out into the cold when, for the first time in his life, he’d wanted to stay in the warm. Somehow yesterday
Zoe Kanellis had wriggled her way past his usual guard. He even liked the baby. He’d got up from his chair at four-thirty this morning and rushed to pick the boy up when he’d cried. That Zoe had not come running into the boy’s room as well had surprised him, until he’d glanced across the landing and seen that her door was closed.
He had done that. He had closed her bedroom door on his way out of it, and she had been too upset to notice that he had. So he’d done his one good deed for this day and dealt with the baby’s needs without disturbing anyone else.
‘Anton?’
‘Hmm?’ he grunted, frowning because he did not want to be disturbed.
‘Fresh trouble,’ Kostas warned him grimly.
Zoe guided the buggy along one of the shady pathways which meandered through the garden. It was strange to think that this was Toby’s first taste of fresh air since she’d brought him home from the hospital.
The good side of her bolthole in paradise, she thought grimly. The serpent had flown out this morning—or so she’d been informed. She’d been out for the count when Anton had left here, having thrown herself back on the bed and buried her head between two pillows in an effort to hide away from what they had done.
A glint of light in the corner of her eye made her turn her head to see a silver Mercedes sweep in through the gates situated over on the other side of the garden. She froze. Surely he could not have come back? He would not come back. The man she’d been faced with after their senseless, wild frolic in her bed would clip his own wings off before he would come back here before the two promised weeks were up.
If even then, she added as she turned away to continue walking while shuddering inside now that the memories of last night’s horror had resurfaced. And it wasn’t even his behaviour that was making her shudder. No, it was her own. She hated herself. She hated him. He’d told her she should be ashamed of herself and she was. Though what his conscience had been telling him to feel had got lost in the bitterness that poured forth from his angry lips.
Guilty he’d admitted to, but only when it had been dragged out of him. Well, great. She was his guilty sin, because she would have to have been totally naive and stupid not to notice that he’d had the hots for her almost from the first moment he looked at her.
And you for him, that little voice in her head called honesty chimed in.
Zoe lifted and dropped her tense narrow shoulders as if trying to shrug honesty away. She was a twenty-two-year-old, reasonably attractive woman who’d been batting off the attentions of the opposite sex since she’d suddenly grown breasts and long legs at the age of fourteen. She was a self-confessed swat, a classic blue stocking who would rather spend her time battling with some complicated calculus than flirting with her peers. Her father used to laugh at the clutch of doe-eyed boys who’d used to loiter outside their house waiting for her to walk out of the door.
‘You don’t feel a thing for them, do you?’ His amused voice echoed inside her head and she had to blink the glaze of tears from her eyes.
She had been a late developer. He’d been proud of her blossoming beauty and kind of relieved at the same time that she wasn’t seduced by the pubescent yearnings of her followers. She’d sailed through the coming years of her slow adolescent development and come out of it the other end with any sudden waves of sexually hormonal rushes tempered by good old-fashioned common sense.
Good old-fashioned common sense … Zoe mocked the phrase which had been her uni mantra. She’d been friendly and popular but her compatriots had used to tease her for her level-headed approach to sex and the tumult of excitement that went along with it. They would probably laugh themselves silly if they could see her now, seduced and well bedded by a notorious womanizer within twenty-four hours of meeting him for the first time.
Knocked off her sensible pedestal. Tumbled by the darkly handsome Greek who was a dangerous mix of cold-blooded ruthlessness and annihilating charm.
The sound of hurried steps behind her made Zoe stop and turn. Martha was coming down the path towards her, her pretty face anxious. What now? Zoe thought wearily as she waited for the other girl to catch up with her.
‘Anton sent me to find you, thespinis,’ Martha explained as she came close. ‘He requests that you will please go to him in his study.’
‘You mean he’s here, at the house?’ Zoe started, frowning. ‘But I thought—’
‘He flew to Athens this morning but now he is back,’ explained Martha as if it was nothing unusual to her that Anton should shunt himself about the Aegean like a number fifty-two bus.
Martha waved a hand at Toby’s buggy. ‘I am to take care of the little one while you go.’
Relinquishing Toby into Martha’s care, Zoe walked back up the path towards the house. She tried to come up with a good enough reason that would bring him back here this fast, but couldn’t think of a single thing.
The door to his study stood open by a couple of inches. Still, she knocked lightly on the wood before she pushed it open that little bit wider and stepped warily through the gap. She’d peeped into this room during her quick exploration of the downstairs yesterday, so she remembered its basic layout which consisted of loads of honey-coloured book shelves and furniture, a big fireplace filled with unlit logs, a black leather sofa, a couple of matching chairs and a desk, behind which Anton was standing right now.
He was the lofty tycoon again, she saw with a sinking feeling. A tall, dark power-force of a man wearing an eye-poppingly elegant black silk suit with a fine white stripe running through it that made her think of hard-headed City types. She felt consumed suddenly by an unfamiliar urge to check out her hair and run her palms down the side of the pale-blue straight cotton skirt she’d put on this morning. He looked up and she went still, stricken by a sudden leap of feeling which made her hot with horrible awareness.
‘You asked to see me.’ She fought to keep her voice cool and level.
It was then that she saw his grim-faced expression, the formality with which he nodded. A shiver of alarm took care of the other hotter feelings, consigning them to the archives of her mind—where she preferred them to stay.
‘So what’s gone wrong now?’
