by Kim Lawrence
‘I thought, after the day you have had, you might like something slightly less...formal?’ He had phoned ahead to ask for the staff presence to be kept to a minimum to give her some breathing space.
Her eyes flew to his face, then, aware that her pleasure at the small consideration was excessive, she turned and walked across to the open doors to breathe in the fragrance blowing in from the water.
‘I can hear the sea!’
‘Hard to escape it. We are on an island.’
She swivelled around to face him. ‘Well, I have never lived on a private island so I can’t be quite so bored about it as you.’
What amazed him was she appeared utterly oblivious to the fact that, standing there with the moonlit, star-studded sky as backdrop, the spider’s-web-fine curtains blowing around her face like a bride’s veil, she looked utterly beautiful.
In this era of air-brushed perfection, she stood out, not just for her natural beauty, but her total lack of artifice. The inner sexuality that she was totally oblivious of added another transfixing layer to her appeal.
The idea of enjoying that sensuality, of wrapping himself in it, and her hair, raised his core temperature several degrees, which made him a little more effusive than he might normally have been when Selene arrived before he could say something really stupid, like, Let’s skip the food and go to bed.
‘Wow, multitasking tonight, Selene? Isn’t this a bit below your pay grade?’
Mouth prim, but smiling with her eyes, the housekeeper gestured to the two maids in uniform who appeared, pushing a trolley on wheels.
‘I have followed your instructions. It will be informal, but I wanted to see personally that Kat is comfortable.’ She nodded to the girls and said something in Greek that prompted them both to busy themselves with the items on the trolley.
Kat approached the chair that Zach held, nodding a silent thank you as she took her seat. ‘I’m very comfortable, thank you,’ she said, thinking it was almost true now she couldn’t feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek, just the tingle it had left behind. There were disadvantages to the sense of intimacy this room gave.
The housekeeper lifted the lids from the dishes on the trolley, inspecting each one before she nodded and turned back to the diners. ‘Eloise...just put it down.’ The young maid nodded and put a dessert she carried onto the serving table.
‘Right, I’ll leave you to open the wine, shall I?’ She looked at Zach and at the champagne cooling in a cut-glass bucket.
‘So does he...my grandfather eat here when he’s alone?’
Selene gave a choke that might have been laughter before she whisked from the room.
‘Did I say something wrong?’
His sensual lips quirked into a half-smile. ‘Actually, Alekis eats in the main dining room, which is the size of a football pitch, and he would find it strange if he had to pour his own wine...or, for that matter, water.’
‘So this is?’
‘This is a private dining room used exclusively when your grandfather is entertaining one of his...friends.’
For a moment she looked blank, then comprehension dawned. ‘He has...’ Her eyes widened some more. ‘But he’s old!’
Zach’s lips twitched. ‘Not too old, apparently.’ He leaned back in his seat and looked at her. ‘So is any of this what you were expecting?’
‘I’m not sure what I was expecting. Mum used to tell me that one day I’d have beautiful dresses, and I have.’ She had found a wardrobe the size of her flat in London crammed with designer labels. A small smile played across her soft lips as her wistful gaze drifted to the fluttering candles on the table. ‘A birthday cake with lots of candles. Apart from the birthday bit, it’s all here.’
‘Do you like seafood?’
She jumped a little, jolting away the memories that curved her lips into a soft smile. ‘I like everything,’ she said honestly. ‘But I’m allergic to nuts.’
Zach could tell by her expression that another memory had been triggered—he didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to find himself rediscovering how uncomfortable empathy was. It was masochistic, but somehow, he couldn’t stop himself.
‘What are you thinking about?’
Her eyes fell from his as he walked with his own plate back to his seat. ‘This looks delicious.’ She looked up from her plate and their glances connected. ‘When Mum... When the police went to the flat.’
Kat could remember but hadn’t understood at the time the glances the policewomen had exchanged when she’d given her name and address. Though pretty gentrified now, at that time it was not a nice area.
‘She had left a note. I have it. I had access to my files after I decided to look for her,’ she explained. The decision had not been made lightly. She’d known there were risks, most importantly the risk of being rejected all over again. ‘I thought she might have another family and I might be a reminder of a past she wanted to forget.’
‘You went ahead anyway.’ They had both retraced their pasts, but with very different aims. He had wanted closure and, if he was honest, to rub his success in their faces, show them what he had achieved despite them. And she, as far as he could tell, had simply wanted to reconnect, to satisfy her craving for family.
She had forgiven, he never would. This would always set them apart.
She gave a little shrug. ‘It took longer than I thought. She seemed to have dropped off the grid after she...left. It never even occurred to me that she might be...not alive.’
He watched as she lowered her eyes so he couldn’t see the tears and waited as she speared a prawn onto her fork and slowly chewed it, cursing himself for asking for an answer that he knew was going to make him feel emotions that had no purpose, and yet he was being controlled by something stronger than logic—a primal need to protect.
He might have been able to fight his reaction to her beauty, but when that beauty came attached to a vulnerability not masked by her air of independent fighting spirit, it awoke something in him that he had never felt before. He didn’t want to feel it.
‘The note she left said...’ Kat stared at her plate as she began to recite, ‘“He made me choose, and Katina is a good girl, and I’m no good for her anyway. PS: She’s allergic to nuts.”’ Her flat delivery did not disguise the fact that reciting the words hurt her.
The fingers around his heart tightened as she lifted her head and said defiantly, ‘She wanted me to be safe.’
If she ever had a child, Kat thought, he or she would know they were safe. She would never leave them, not for a man, not for anything.
Zach bit back the retort on his tongue. Maybe she needed to think that her mother had cared about her. What did he know? Maybe the woman had. Why was he worrying one way or the other? he asked himself, resenting how she had intruded into the emotional isolation. Yet when he looked at her, he couldn’t be angry. He felt empathy; like a limb deprived of blood flow, the reawakening of this dormant emotion was painful.
‘And were you?’
Deliberately misunderstanding him, she grinned and patted a pocket. ‘I always carry my EpiPen just in case.’ She speared another prawn. ‘This is delicious.’
‘I’ll let the kitchens know about the nut allergy.’
‘Don’t worry, if in doubt I don’t eat it. The allergy is not as serious as some. I know someone who went into anaphylactic shock because she kissed her boyfriend and he’d just eaten a curry with nuts in.’
‘So your boyfriends have to swear off nuts?’
The way he was looking at her mouth made the heat climb into her cheeks, and other places. She shifted uneasily in her seat. ‘I’m not that bad.’ She pushed aside her plate and took a sip of the champagne. It seemed a good time to change the subject. ‘So it sounds like Selene has known you for a long time.’
He arched a satiric brow. ‘You mean she doesn’t treat me with suff
icient deference.’
The fact that he could mock himself was a pleasant surprise.
‘I was quite young when I first visited the island.’
It frequently seemed to him that Selene still saw him as the young truculent teen with a massive chip on his shoulder and on more than one occasion the family silver in his pockets. His convalescence had been eventful for the new housekeeper, as Selene had been back then.
Kat, trying to imagine what young Zach had looked like, wondered if Selene had some photos of him too. She laid her napkin down on her side plate and decided against another sip of the fizz. The first had gone to her head after the long day. Her appetite after the first few bites had vanished too. She lifted a hand to hide a yawn.
‘You’re tired.’ Of course she was—how could she not be after the day she’d had? He felt the painful twisting sensation in his chest as he watched her stifle another yawn, realising she’d been running on adrenaline all evening.
She shook her head. ‘No, not really.’
‘You are,’ he said, laying down his napkin. ‘You need your rest. Tomorrow is another long day. We’ll go over the guest list in the morning.’ The morning made him think of the night that preceded it. Waking up together, her head on his chest, their limbs tangled. Tangled—the word jolted him free of the images flickering through his head.
He did not do tangled—emotionally or in any other way. He liked clean-cut defined lines, minus entanglements, which were far more likely to occur if a man spent the entire night in a woman’s bed. Any woman, let alone the granddaughter of his mentor!
Her brows twitched. ‘Guest list?’
‘I’ve compiled a who’s who list of the guests for tomorrow along with a bio.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Is there an exam...?’
Her comment wrenched a bark of deep laughter from his throat. Then, as their eyes connected, dark on amber, the amusement faded first from his, and then hers.
The air suddenly crackled with a sensually charged tension that seemed to suck the oxygen from the atmosphere, drawing them deeper into a sensual vortex that swirled around them.
Light-headed, Kat didn’t connect the sound she could hear with her own laboured breathing, her heart thudding like a dull metronome in her chest as she experienced a surge of deep, strength-sapping longing.
Zach watched the pupils in her eyes expand until only a rim of gold remained. He could hear the roar of hunger in his blood and wanted... Theos, how badly he wanted to give himself up to it, sink into her softness and... The muscles in his brown throat rippled as he swallowed and dug deep into the reserves of his frayed self-control.
Kat blinked, confused as Zach suddenly surged to his feet, not quite meeting her eyes as he bent forward, the flickering candlelight throwing the planes and angles of his face into stark relief as he blew out the candles.
The gesture seemed weirdly symbolic to Kat because, along with the candlelight, the intimacy had vanished. Been snuffed out, to be replaced by a cool, businesslike atmosphere as he walked towards the door, having donned the persona of the ruthless tycoon with computer chips, not emotions, in his eyes.
‘I’ll get someone to walk you back to your room.’
She blinked, getting to her feet in confusion as his mercurial mood change made her head spin. ‘Aren’t you—?’
His quick smile was impersonal and distant. It seemed to her he couldn’t get out of the door fast enough. ‘I have some work to get through.’
In the corridor, Zach propped his broad shoulders against the wall and released a long, slow, sibilant sigh. It was not pride enhancing to realise that the only effective way he had been able to see to remove himself from temptation was to remove himself physically.
He levered himself off the wall, aware that if he had escorted her back to her room he might have ended up saying good morning and not goodnight. Even the thought of it now heated his blood in a way that drew a low snarling sound from his throat as he strode off, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the witch who had put a spell on him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE PLACE BOASTED a state-of-the-art gym that Zach doubted Alekis even knew existed, but he chose the beach ahead of the treadmill. Two hours of flat-out pushing-himself-to-the-limit running later, he felt he had regained a sense of proportion, enabling him to think past crippling lust and recognise that being thrown into the company of someone whose early life mirrored his own to some minor degree had dredged up some deeply buried memories, and added an intensity to his feelings when she was around.
A logical explanation, without falling back on the tired old clichés of soul mates, made him feel more comfortable and confident he was able to deal with the next few days without betraying Alekis’s trust.
He just needed to keep her at an emotional arm’s length and fulfil his commitment to Alekis.
* * *
Having breakfasted alone, Kat asked directions to the study, where apparently Zach was waiting for her.
The question in her mind was, which Zach?
It seemed to Kat that there were more than one. There was the Zach who seemed warm and interested, even sympathetic, when she told him about her past, or the one who was the distant and cool executive hiding behind defensive walls to keep emotions out.
She understood the decision to protect her heart in an emotional armour, but her heart had always ached for people who didn’t realise they had imprisoned themselves at the same time. Not your business, Kat, she told herself firmly.
The thought had been a recurring theme through the long night that had been punctuated by fitful dreams, a session of trying on shoes from the cavernous wardrobe and minutes spent on the balcony, listening to the soothing sound of the waves.
Thank God for caffeine!
‘Good morning, did you sleep well? Excellent.’
She blinked. So this was how it was going to be?
‘Coffee?’ He stood there with pot in hand, more good-looking than any man had a right to be in a black T-shirt and jeans. If his manner had been as informal as his clothes, she’d have been toast. It wasn’t, so she wasn’t. All positive—this was not the right time to develop a crush and this was not the Zach whose opinion she would ask about the outfit she had chosen for this evening.
‘Yes, please, black.’ Matching his manner, she took a sip of the scalding strong brew, though the effort was wasted on him as he’d already turned to the desk. ‘Right, there will be thirty-five guests tonight. I have subdivided them—society, business and social.’ He stabbed a long finger towards the screen of the tablet that was on the desk and tagged on casually, ‘Only one royal.’
‘Only one?’
He flashed her a look. ‘He won’t be a problem,’ he promised, dismissing blue blood with a snap of his long fingers. ‘However, these might. You can see...’
She couldn’t. She was still standing on the other side of the room. Seeing his look of impatience, she overcame her reluctance to move closer, and after a moment’s hesitation she reacted to his gesture to step in and look, planting her hands palms flat on the surface as she leaned in.
‘As you can see, I have red-flagged those who might be a problem,’ he explained. ‘Number one is probably Spiro Alekides.’ He leaned across her, causing her breath to hitch as he scrolled down the screen before moving back to a distance she found comfortable once more as he explained, ‘He can be slippery and has an unsavoury reputation when it comes to women.’
Kat turned her head. He had said that with no discernible trace of irony in his voice, and, yes, there was none at all on his face that she could see—staggering!
‘Unfortunately, Alekis has a joint venture with him,’ he tagged on, explaining the man’s presence.
‘You don’t sound as though you approve?’
‘Alekis does not need my approval.’
‘Who is s
he?’ Kat asked, looking curiously at the glamorous blonde woman whose photo was next to the red-flagged man.
‘That’s Ariana.’
Something in his voice made her turn again in response to a little spurt of something alarmingly close to jealousy tightening in her chest. ‘You know her?’
‘That sort of intuition will do you no harm,’ he complimented her smoothly. ‘We have both dated Ariana, as it happens at the same time. Spiro sent her to do a little industrial espionage and I used the situation to my advantage to plant a little false information. He has never actually forgiven me, so keep clear,’ he warned.
Kat caught her breath. This was not close to jealousy, and more a flood than a spurt. This was the real thing with bells on! The shaft that pierced her was so intense that she would not have been surprised to see a knife hilt protruding from her chest.
Kat was as deeply shocked by her visceral reaction as she was scared by it. Lowering her gaze to hide the emotions she felt were written across her face in neon letters, she amazed herself by responding in a relatively calm voice.
‘So she used you, and you used her. Does that cancel out all the using?’ she wondered in a voice that sounded too bright. ‘I’ll look at this myself later. Don’t worry, I always did my homework.’
Aware that Zach was watching her with a puzzled frown, she struggled to control her expression and presumably failed; she could hear the suspicion in his voice as he asked, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Not a thing.’ She tucked the tablet under her arm. ‘I promised myself I’d explore this morning.’
‘Want a guide?’
‘I think I’ll be fine on my own.’ She had to get out of the room before he guessed, which would be the ultimate humiliation!
He stared at the door, fighting the impulse that gripped him to follow her before he slumped down into one of the chairs. It was time to stop pretending and face facts. When it came to this woman his normal iron control did not apply.