the room without much interest. The room had a gentlemen’s club vibe with high ceilings and dark wooden panelled walls—not really his usual sort of environment. He had never been in a position to utilise the old-school-tie network, but he had never been intimidated by it and, more importantly, not belonging to this world had not ultimately hindered his progress. If he was viewed in some quarters as an outsider, it didn’t keep him awake nights, and even if it had he could function pretty well on four hours’ sleep.
He opened his tablet and scrolled onto the file that Alekis’s office had forwarded. It was not lengthy, presumably an edited version of the full warts and all document. Zach had no problem with that; he didn’t need the dirt to make a judgement. The details he did have were sufficient to give him a pretty good idea of the sort of childhood the young woman he was about to meet had had.
The fact that, like him, she had not had an easy childhood did not make him feel any connection, any more than he would have felt connected to someone who shared a physical characteristic with him. But he did feel it gave him an insight others might lack, the same way he knew that the innocence that had seemed to shine out from her eyes in the snapshot had been an illusion. Innocence was one of the first casualties of the sort of childhood she had had.
She had been abandoned and passed through the care system; he could see why Alekis thought he had a lot to make up for—he did. Zach was not shocked by what the mother had done—he was rarely shocked by the depths to which humans could sink—but he was mildly surprised that Alekis, who presumably had had ways of keeping tabs on his estranged daughter, had not chosen to intervene, a decision he was clearly trying to make up for now.
While many might say never too late, Zach would not. He believed there was definitely too late to undo the damage. He supposed in this instance it depended on how much damage had been done. What was not in question was the fact that the woman he was about to meet would know how to look after herself.
She was a survivor, he could admire that, but he was a realist. He knew you didn’t survive the sort of childhood she’d had without learning how to put your own interests first, and he should know.
The indent between his dark brows deepened. It concerned him that Alekis, who would normally have been the first to realise this, seemed to be in denial. The grandfather in him was putting sentiment ahead of facts, and the fact was anyone who had experienced what this woman had was never going to fit into her grandfather’s world without being a magnet for scandal.
As Zach knew, you didn’t escape your past; you carried it with you and learnt to look after number one. When had he last put someone else’s needs ahead of his own?
There was no occasion to remember.
The acknowledgement didn’t cause him any qualms of conscience. You didn’t get to be one of life’s survivors by not prioritising your own interests.
And Zach was a survivor. In his book it was preferable to be considered selfish than a victim, and rather than feel bitter about his past he was in some ways grateful for it and the mental toughness it had gifted him, without which he would not have enjoyed the success he had today.
He responded to the message on his phone, his fingers flying as he texted back. He looked down at the screen of his tablet. The vividness of the woman’s golden eyes, even more intense against the rest of the picture that seemed washed of colour, stared out at him before he closed it with a decisive click.
Maybe he was painting a bleaker picture. He might be pleasantly surprised—unless Alekis had deliberately hidden them, it seemed the granddaughter hadn’t had any brushes with the law. Of course, that might simply mean she had stayed under the radar of the authorities, but she did seem to hold down a steady job. Perhaps the best thing the mother had ever done for her child was to abandon her.
There was the lightest of taps on the door before Asquith stepped inside the room, his hand hovering in a paternal way an inch away from the small of the back of the woman who walked in beside him.
This wasn’t the fey creature from the misty graveyard, neither was it a woman prematurely hardened by life and experience.
Theos! This was possibly the most beautiful creature he had ever laid eyes on.
For a full ten seconds after she walked in, Zach’s entire nervous system went into shutdown and when it flickered back into life, he had no control over the heat that scorched through his body. The sexual afterglow of the blast leaving his every nerve ending taut.
He studied her, his eyes shielded by his half-lowered eyelids and the veil of his sooty eyelashes. He felt himself resenting that it was a struggle to access even a fraction of the objectivity he took for granted as he studied her. He expected his self-control to be his for the asking, irrespective of a bloodstream with hormone levels that were off the scale.
He forced the tension from his spine, only to have it settle in his jaw, finding release in the ticcing muscle that clenched and unclenched spasmodically as he studied her. She was wearing heels, which made her almost as tall as the lawyer, who was just under six feet. She was dressed with the sort of simplicity that didn’t come cheap, but to be fair the long, supple lines of her slim body would have looked just as good dressed in generic jeans and a T-shirt.
He categorised the immediate impression she projected as elegance, poise and sex...
Her attention was on the man speaking to her, so Zach had the opportunity to prolong his study of her. She stood sideways on, presenting him with her profile as she nodded gravely at something the other man was saying, eyelashes that made him think of butterfly wings fluttering against her soft, rounded, slightly flushed cheeks. It was a pretty whimsical analogy for him.
Stick to the facts, Zach, suggested the voice in his head.
He did, silently describing what he saw.
Her profile was clear cut, almost delicate. There was the suggestion of a tilt on the end of her nose, her brow high and wide. The fey creature in the snapshot had a face framed by a cloud of ebony hair; this elegant young woman’s hair was drawn smoothly back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck to fall like a slither of silk between her shoulder blades almost to waist level. Dark and cloud-like in the photos, in real life it was a rich warm brown, interspersed with warm toffee streaks.
The slight tilt of her head emphasised the slender length of her swan-like dancer’s neck; the same grace was echoed in her slim curves and long limbs, beautifully framed by the simplicity of the figure-skimming calf-length dress. The length of her shapely legs was further emphasised by a pair of high, spiky heels.
‘I’ll leave you.’
‘Leave?’ Kat echoed.
Zach registered the soft musicality of her voice as her feathery brows lifted in enquiry, then, the moment he had been anticipating, she turned her head. Yes, her eyes really were that impossible colour, a rich deep amber, the tilt at the corners creating an exotic slant and lending her beautiful face a memorable quality.
Kat had been aware of the man in the periphery of her vision, sitting at the head of the long table. Up to that point, good manners had prevented her from responding to her curiosity and looking while her escort was speaking.
She did so now, just as the figure was rising to his feet.
The first thing she had noticed about her escort was his expensive tailoring, his plummy accent and old-school tie. This man was equally perfectly tailored—minus the old-school tie. His
