another person in the long line of people Zoe had had walking in and out of her life over the last three horrible weeks: doctors, midwives, care workers, a hundred different departments from social services wanting to check if she was a fit carer for her baby brother, or if she qualified for any handouts. Each one of them had arrived sporting tediously long tick-box questionnaires that had intruded on her privacy but which she’d had to answer if she wanted to hang on to Toby. Yes, she had left her university studies to look after her brother. Yes, of course she was prepared to take employment if child-care facilities came with the job. No, she did not have a boyfriend she might be thinking of moving in with her. No, she was not promiscuous or irresponsible. Of course she wouldn’t leave Toby alone in the house while she went off to enjoy a girly night out. The inquisitions had gone on and on, each one of them filled with such horribly intrusive questions her skin still prickled with pique.
And then there had been the funeral people, she remembered, quiet, calm and very professional as they had walked her gently through the decisions regarding the worst arrangements a grieving daughter could ever have to make. Those arrangements had taken place three days ago and her grandfather had sent no representative to watch his only son and daughter-in-law being lowered into the ground. Had that absence been due to an awareness of the media hype, or due to sheer indifference?
Zoe didn’t know and right at this precise moment she did not care. He had not turned up. He’d stayed hidden away in his ivory tower while the press had crawled all over the funeral like feeding locusts.
Which brought her nicely to the final list of people she’d been forced to deal with these last three awful weeks—the cockroaches out there who’d crawled out of the woodwork the same day the sensational story had broken. The ones that had come banging on her door to offer her big money for exclusive rights to her story, and the ones that still camped outside her home just waiting for her to step out of the door so they could pounce. Were they out there because they cared about her and Toby’s tragic loss? No. They were there because Theo Kanellis was a recluse who hid himself away on his private island somewhere in the middle of the Aegean, and protected his privacy so well that this story was like a juicy, ripe peach they couldn’t resist gobbling up—even if the juice was messy and the centre held a nasty, crawling worm.
Even the worm had a juicy name: Anton Pallis. The tall, dark and gorgeous global sex-icon and seriously clever CEO of the heavyweight Pallis Group. Pallis wasn’t so picky about getting his name in the papers, business or pleasure. She’d often seen him making a name for himself. What she hadn’t known until this story had broken, was that he was the man who had reaped the rewards of her father’s exile.
A buzz of anger fizzed inside her like a tightly wound ball of living energy, generated almost exclusively by that name—Anton Pallis. Every so often, especially when she let herself dwell on the name, that ball of energy broke free from its restraints and totally overwhelmed her need to remain sunk inside her desperate grief. Was this the Greek side of her she had never previously known she had coming to the surface—this burning desire to feed an unforgiving hate?
The front doorbell gave a sharp double ring suddenly. The two women tensed then looked at each other.
Susie got to her feet. ‘Could just be one of the press trying their luck again,’ she suggested.
But somehow Zoe just knew it was Theo Kanellis’s representative. The letter had stated he would be calling on her at eleven-thirty and it was exactly eleven thirty as far as she could tell from the old clock hanging on the wall opposite. Wealthy men with loads of power expected their instructions to be carried out to the second, she thought grimly as she straightened up to her full five feet six inches, pushed back her narrow shoulders and pulled in a breath.
So this was it, the moment she found out what Theo Kanellis really wanted. She didn’t doubt for a second that he was about to place an utterly obscene price on Toby’s vulnerable little head.
‘Do you want me to stay?’
Heavily pregnant with her second baby, Susie sounded genuine in her offer, but Zoe could read the uncertainty in her face. For all she’d been a wonderful neighbour and friend over the last devastating weeks—sneaking in the back way so no one could catch her, refusing to speak to the press each time she left her own house to do ordinary things like shopping or collecting her little girl from her playgroup up the street—Zoe knew Susie would prefer to back out of this particular scene.
‘It’s almost time for you to go and collect Lucy,’ she reminded Susie, knowing that this was something she needed to face all by herself.
‘If you’re sure? I’ll just slip out the back way, then.’
The doorbell rang again, jerking both women into movement. Susie made for the back door as Zoe went in the other direction. She heard the back door closing behind Susie as she came to stop at the solid wood door at the front of the house. Her throat felt dry suddenly and she swallowed. Her heart had acquired a couple of extra beats. Rubbing her palms nervously down the sides of her jeans, she took a minute to school her expression into something cold and unforthcoming then finally reached out to unlock the door.
In her mind she was expecting some short and stocky middle-aged Greek, with ‘tough lawyer’ stamped all over him. So when she drew open the door and saw exactly who it was standing there, surprise rendered her frozen by shock.
Tall, dark, immaculately presented, he looked like an exotic, dark prince clothed in an Italian suit. Handsome didn’t even begin to describe his smooth, gold, angular features, or the pair of deep-set eyes the colour of midnight which held her own blue eyes trapped like powerful magnets. She had never looked into eyes like them. They made her feel slightly queasy because it felt as if they were trying to draw her in. When the noise suddenly started up as the media frenzy erupted, she still couldn’t break free of them. He was so tall, he almost blocked out everything that was happening behind him—reporters shouting questions at them, TV camera-men and photographers locked in scuffles as they vied for position in their efforts to get the best shot.
He just continued to stand there as if it wasn’t happening, protected by a semi-circle of space created by three big-set men wearing immaculate black suits who stood with their backs to him forming a tough-guy ring of protection around his personal space.
Finally managing to drag her gaze downwards a little, Zoe found herself staring at the uncompromisingly sensual shape to his unsmiling mouth. Inside she was a mixed-up mess of stirring emotions she couldn’t even recognise. She was even mesmerised by his whole dynamic breath-stopping stance—the never-a-hair-out-of—place demeanour he was displaying, the relaxed set of his wide shoulders inside the dark jacket which didn’t quite obscure the long lean rock-solid contours of his body beneath a crisp white shirt and sober dark tie. The sheer elegant quality of his whole manner screamed indomitable self-confidence at Zoe and drove the power of his personality home, a million stinging pinpricks attacking her unsuspecting flesh.
For the first time in three weeks, she became acutely aware of her own shabby appearance—the old pair of jeans she had dragged on this morning that had seen better days and the itchy knowledge that her hair was in need of a good wash. One of her hands clutched the edges of an old red cardigan together across the pounding pump going on behind her ribs. The cardigan was her mother’s and she’d been wearing it all week, a big, fluffy, unsightly thing she hugged to her for comfort and because it kept giving her wafts of her mother’s delicate scent.
He parted those beautifully moulded pair of lips and spoke to her. ‘Good morning, Miss Kanellis,’ he greeted in the most quietly modulated and beautiful voice. ‘I believe you are expecting me.’
He sent Zoe’s head reeling for a completely different reason: for the
