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 smooth, deep cultured tones of his Greek accent sounded so like her father’s voice to her that it actually physically hurt.
Anton watched as Zoe closed her eyes and swayed in front of him. She looked as if she was going to faint. If he’d thought she’d looked stricken when she’d stood on the steps of the hospital in the photograph three weeks ago, it was nothing to how she looked right now—brittle. She looked painfully brittle, white-faced, pinched and frail enough for a puff of wind to blow her off her feet.
Biting back a soft curse, he acted on instinct and stretched out a hand with the intention of catching hold of her but she opened her eyes again, saw his hand coming towards her and shrank away from it as if it was an attacking snake.
Shock stunned him into stillness for a second. Something close to affront clawed down his front; it took grim grit and determination to stop his feelings from showing on his face. Aware of the media circus going on behind him, he tried to think fast. She did not need all of these witnesses watching her every move and expression. He did not want them to read her expression. What he needed was to get the two of them inside the house with the door shut before she stopped staring at him like that and started spitting insults at him—or, worse, slammed the door in his face.
‘Shall we …?’ he murmured very smoothly and took a step forward into the house.
As he was about to take the door from her grasp so he could close it, Zoe snatched her hand away from the risk of his touch. A fresh flare of affront struck at his pride but he kept on going, swinging the door shut behind him without allowing his expression to reveal anything—he hoped.
Silence clattered around them the moment the door closed. She was several feet away from him by now, hovering like a trapped bird, with her face still frighteningly pale and her eyes still fixed on his face.
She had the most startling pair of electric-blue eyes, he noticed, and a trembling crushed-strawberry mouth. Something kicked into life low down in his gut but he ignored the sensation, annoyed with himself for feeling such a fierce sexual tug at a time like this.
‘My apologies,’ he said gravely, ‘For entering your home without your invitation to do so. I thought it best that we conduct our business without all the witnesses looking on.’
She didn’t speak. She just blinked at him, long—indecently long—golden-brown eyelashes moving in a slow movement; he had the weirdest feeling that she wasn’t even seeing him. And she was clutching the most peculiar red garment across her breasts as if it was the only thing holding her upright.
‘Let me try again,’ he persisted, vaguely aware that they were standing in a hellishly narrow hallway with a set of steep stairs shooting up on his left. ‘My name is—’
‘I know who you are,’ Zoe breathed out in a trembling whisper.
He was the man whose name had been bandied about in the media as much as her own name had been. He was the man Theo Kanelli
s had put in her father’s place. ‘You’re Anton Pallis.’ Theo Kanellis’s adopted son and heir.
CHAPTER TWO
A NEW kind of silence tumbled down between them. It crackled and spat with what Zoe Kanellis was not saying, though Anton saw her contempt for him beginning to write itself on her face.
He offered a wry smile. ‘You have heard of me, then.’
The way she shot his smile a shrivelling glance killed it dead. ‘I would need to be deaf and blind not to have heard of you, Mr Pallis,’ she cut back, then just spun on her heels and walked off towards the rear of the house, leaving him to follow—or not. Her manner told him she was certainly not going to give him encouragement either way.
You are going to owe me big time for this one, Theo, Anton mused grimly as he took a moment to take in more of his surroundings. The house was tiny, a typical Victorian mid-terrace property with a steep, narrow staircase and two pine doors leading off the hall. It was all nicely decorated and a fawn-coloured carpet covered the floor. But, if he’d ever bothered to wonder how Leander Kanellis had lived since he’d walked away from one of Greece’s wealthiest families, not in a million years would he have imagined he lived like this.
Zoe had disappeared through the farthest door; pulling in a breath, Anton followed in her wake. He found her standing in a surprisingly large kitchen which seemed to double up as a sitting room, a big, blue sofa and chair forming a comfortable seating-area. A television occupied one corner. A coffee table littered with tabloid newspapers stood between it and the sofa. The other half of the room was mainly taken up by a large wooden table dominating the floor space around which cheap, pine units were fixed to the walls.
He saw the baby paraphernalia stacked up on top of one of the units, the kind of things that were completely alien to him except in a purely abstract sense. A tiny cot-like thing stood near the sofa, though he could see no baby lying in it.
‘He’s asleep upstairs.’
She’d caught him looking. Turning around to face her, Anton opened his mouth to ask if the boy was doing OK, but she got in first.
‘The media hype out there disturbs him when he’s down here, especially when they start ringing the bell. So I put him to sleep upstairs at the back of the house where the noise doesn’t carry so much.’
‘You did not contact the police to have them moved away?’ he asked, frowning.
She stared at him as if he’d just grown an extra head. ‘We are not the royal family, Mr Pallis. The police say they can’t do anything, and asking that lot to give us our privacy at this sad time doesn’t work for us. Excuse me for a moment.’
Feeling like he’d just received a slap on the wrist for being so stupid, Anton watched as she turned and let herself out through the back door. For the strangest few seconds he thought she was going to do a runner and leave him standing here like a dumped fool. But as he watched her through the kitchen window he saw her walk down the length of what looked like a flower bedecked bower crushed into a tiny space and stop at a solid-wood back gate, then proceed to slide home two heavy bolts.
Maybe he’d deserved the slapped wrist, he allowed as it hit him that she was having to virtually barricade herself in here—though the evidence that the gate required bolting made him wonder who had sneaked out the back way before she had allowed him in the front. A man? A boyfriend? Had they been forced by the media activity out there to carry on their love affair by stealth?
For some reason he did not want to delve into too deeply, the idea of Zoe Kanellis lying in her lover’s arms ten minutes before he’d arrived here did not sit well with him. He had plans for Zoe Kanellis that did not include the irritation of having to get rid of a lover.
Having secured the gate after Susie’s recent departure, Zoe used her time outside to pull herself together. To have, of all people, Anton Pallis turn up on her doorstep had been shock enough, but to hear his voice sounding so like her father’s had left her feeling weepy and faint. Could it not be enough for him that he walked in her father’s shoes? Did he have to sound like him too?
She used up another few minutes by un-pegging the clothes she had hung to dry on the washing line this morning, building up her defences at the same time. She could not afford to show vulnerability in front of Anton Pallis. She knew why he was here. It was just a case of staying strong enough to stone-wall whatever offer he was about to put on the table—while ignoring his voice at the same time.
Oh Dad, she thought helplessly, pausing to close her eyes for a second while she just wished he was here with her. Her wonderful father with his quiet, gentle ways and his oh, so understated air of pride. He would have known how to deal with the likes of Anton Pallis, especially with her beautiful mother standing by his side.
But none of this would be happening at all if they had been here, Zoe reminded herself. No, it was just her on her own left to protect Toby from the grasping clutches of Theo Kanellis—via the man standing in her kitchen right now.
Stepping back inside, she found he was still standing where she had left him, in the process of sliding a mobile phone into his pocket. He dwarfed the room with the sheer power of his personality. Everything about him was larger than life and so expensively honed and neat. His charcoal suit draped his powerful figure with creaseless silkiness; his facial features were so perfectly balanced even his high-bridged nose didn’t look out of place. Nor did the thick and glossy satin-black hair so perfectly cut to flatter the shape of his head nor the sheen to his closely shaven chiselled chin.
He glanced up and caught her staring at him, and Zoe felt those pin pricks attack her flesh again.
‘I have arranged for you to have some security to keep the media away.’
‘Oh good,’ she said, looking away from him and tipping her armload of washing onto the table. ‘Now Toby and I can go out surrounded by heavy bruisers instead of reporters. What a treat.’
Sensing a sharpening in his mood at her ungrateful tone, she began folding baby clothes.
‘Would you like me to do more?’ he enquired.
It was a serious question, Zoe recognised, cushioned with genuine concern. ‘I don’t recall asking you to do anything,’ she responded. ‘But then, hey—’ she shrugged ‘—I did not ask for any of this. Would you like a coffee or something before you begin your pitch?’
Anton narrowed his eyes. What he had seen in her as brittle and frail had been a dangerous miscalculation, he realised. For whatever the physical ravages grief had wrought on Zoe Kanellis, she was sharp-tongued and tough. In one way he supposed he should have been ready for it—she was Theo’s granddaughter, after all.
And she hated him; he’d seen that already. She probably hated Theo too. If she was as intelligent as her CV said she was, then she had also worked out exactly why he was here and was more than ready to take on the fight.
‘Your grandfather—’
‘Stop.’ Dropping the pale-blue body suit she had been folding, Zoe spun on her heels to send him a cold look. ‘Let’s get one thing clear before we start this, Mr Pallis—the person you refer to as my grandfather is nobody to me. So you will please use his proper name—or, even better, don’t mention him at all.’
‘Well, that cuts the need for conversation between us down to nil before it even gets started,’ he mocked.
Another shrug and she returned to folding the washing. Anton studied her while he contemplated the different ways he could tackle this. He had not come here expecting it to be easy, but nor had he come here expecting to find Zoe Kanellis so ravaged by grief or filled with so much bitterness for a man she had never been given the chance to meet.
‘I expected him to send a lawyer.’
‘I am a lawyer,’ Anton told her, surprised that she’d given him something with which to set the ball rolling. ‘I trained as one at least, though I rarely have the opportunity to use the skill these days.’
‘Too busy being the hot-shot tycoon?’
Relaxing slightly, he smiled. ‘Life in the fast
lane,’ he conceded, ‘I am rarely in one place long enough to utilise the concentration required by the law. I believe your thing is astrophysics—much more impressive.’
‘Was,’ she replied. ‘And before you start explaining to me how easy you can make it for me to go back to my studies, I am not willing to hand over my brother to anyone, even for a pot of gold,’ she added flatly.
‘I don’t believe I was intending to offer a pot of gold,’ Anton countered. ‘Or to explain to you what you clearly already know.’
‘Which is what?’
‘That you can probably get a government grant to help you with child care while you continue your studies.’
Picking up the stack of folding washing, she moved across the kitchen to put the things down on top of another pile of washing. ‘You’ve been doing your homework.’
‘It’s the lawyer in me,’ he answered. ‘I also know that you cannot remain living here to bring up your brother and continue your studies, because the mortgage on this house was not protected by life insurance so it still must be paid.’
Zoe turned to look at him again. It amazed her how he could dare to stand there looking so relaxed while discussing her life as if it was his business!
‘Did your boss tell you to mention that?’
‘My boss?’ he arched a sleek black eyebrow.
‘Theo Kanellis. The guy who gave you your great start in life, then turned you into his messenger boy.’
At last she had the satisfaction of seeing a stab of anger flare his nostrils. ‘Your grandfather is old and sick and unable to travel far.’
He’d used the ‘grandfather’ label deliberately, Zoe noted. ‘Though not too old and sick to throw his weight around,’ she countered.
The Kanellis Scandal Page 2