relief at the business-as-usual attitude was cancelled out by his concern at the shaking of the blue-veined hand extended to him.
He hid his concern beneath a layer of irony as he scrolled down the screen to find the best of the requested snapshots he’d taken several days earlier for Alekis.
‘So how long before the news that I’m in here surfaces and the sharks start circling?’
Zach selected the best of the head shots he had taken and glanced up. ‘Who knows?’
‘Damage limitation is the order of the day, then.’
Zach nodded and extended the phone. ‘I suppose if you’re going to have another heart attack, you’re in the right place. I’m assuming that you will tell me at some point why you sent me to a graveyard in London to stalk some woman.’
‘Not stalk, take a photo...’
Zach’s half-smile held irony as he responded to the correction. ‘All the difference in the world. I’m curious—did it ever occur to you I’d say no?’
Zach had been due to address a prestigious international conference in London as guest speaker to an audience consisting of the cream of the financial world when Alekis had rung him with his bizarre demand, thinly disguised as a request.
Should he ever start believing his own press he could always rely on Alekis to keep his ego in check, Zach mused with wry affection as the short conversation of several days before flickered through his head.
‘You want me to go where and do what?’
‘You heard me. Just give the address of the church to your driver—the cemetery is opposite—then take a photo of the woman who arrives at four-thirty.’
‘Try not to let it give you a heart attack this time,’ Zach advised now, placing his phone into the older man’s waiting hand.
‘Waiting for you to deliver this picture didn’t give me a heart attack. Seventy-five years of over-indulgence did, according to the doctors who tell me I should have been six feet under years ago. They also said that if I want to last even another week I should deprive myself of everything that gives life meaning.’
‘I’m sure they were much more tactful.’
‘I have no use for tact.’
Greedy floated into Zach’s head as he watched the older man stare at the phone.
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’
Zach deemed a response unnecessary. There was no question mark over the haunting beauty of the woman captured by his phone. What he had questioned was not Alekis’s interest, but his own fascination, bordering on obsession, with the face he couldn’t stop thinking about. Until, that was, he had realised it wasn’t the face, it was the puzzle of her identity, the mystery of the affair, that had tweaked his imagination, not those golden eyes.
‘I’m always willing to lend a hand to a friend in need. I assume that you have lost all your fortune and no longer have access to your own personal team of private investigators in order to have needed me? How did you know she’d be there at four-thirty?’
‘I have had her followed for the past two weeks.’ He looked bemused that Zach would ask such an obvious question. ‘And hardly a team was required... Actually I had reasons for not wanting to use in-house expertise. I was employing someone who proved to be an idiot...’
‘The same person you had following her?’
‘And he can whistle for his money. He was utterly inept, took any number of photographs, mostly of her back or lamp posts. And as for covert? She noticed him and threatened to report him for stalking... Took his photo, then hit him with her shopping bag. Did she see you?’
‘No, I’m thinking of taking up espionage as my second career. I had no idea I was signing up for such a dangerous task. So, who is this scary lady?’
‘My granddaughter.’
A quiver of surprise widened Zach’s dark eyes as his ebony lashes lifted off the angle of his cheekbones. He really hadn’t seen that one coming!
‘Her mother was beautiful too...’ The older man seemed oblivious to Zach’s reaction as he considered the photograph, his fingers shaking as he held it up. ‘I think she has a look of Mia, around the mouth.’ His hooded gaze lifted. ‘You knew I had a daughter?’
Zach tipped his head in acknowledgement. He had of course heard the stories of the wild-child daughter. There was talk of drugs and men, but no one knew if Alekis had seen her since she’d married against his wishes, and so the story went that she’d been disinherited. This was the first time Zach had heard mention of a granddaughter, or, for that matter, heard Alekis speak of his family at all; though a portrait of his long-dead wife hung in the hallway of his palatial home on the island he owned.
‘She married some loser, Parvati, threw herself away on him—to spite me, I think,’ the older man brooded darkly. ‘I was right. He was a useless waster, but would she listen? No, he left her when she got pregnant. All she had to do was ask and I’d have...’ He shook his head, looking tired in the aftermath of emotional outburst. ‘No matter, she always was as stubborn and...’ His voice trailed away until he sat there, eyes half closed.
Zach began to wonder if he had fallen asleep. ‘Sounds like the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.’
To Zach’s relief, the older man opened his eyes and directed a scowl up at Zach, which slowly faded. The smile that replaced it held a hint of pride. ‘Mia was a fiery one. Like her mother to look at but...’ His voice trailed away again.
If the likeness in the painting he had seen was accurate, Alekis’s wife had been beautiful, though not in the same style as the granddaughter with the glowing amber eyes. Zach could see no similarity between the two. The portrait was of a beautiful woman with a beautiful face but not a face to haunt a man. Unlike the face of the woman with the golden eyes. She was Alekis’s granddaughter—he was still struggling to get his head around that.
Alekis’s lack of family had been something they’d had in common, part of their unlikely bond that had grown through the years. Now it turned out that there was family and he was assuming Alekis wanted to be reunited. If the older man had asked his advice, Zach would have told him it was a bad idea. But Alekis wouldn’t ask or listen any more than Zach would have if someone had told him beforehand that reconnecting with his own past would leave him with memories that would offer no answers and no comfort.
‘I suppose I could have made the first move. I was just waiting but she never...’ He wiped a hand across his eyes and when it fell away Zach pretended not to see the moisture on the old man’s cheeks.
The truth was, he was finding it uncomfortable to see the man he had always considered self-contained and unsentimental and way past being a victim of his emotions show such vulnerability. But then maybe that was what a reminder of his own mortality did to a man?
‘I suppose everyone has regrets.’
‘Do you?’
Zach raised his brows at the question and considered it. ‘We all make mistakes,’ he said, thinking of his grandmother staring out of the
