Curling up onto her side, she waited in the pulsing silence for what she knew was coming next. She should have told him. She’d known that even while she could use the excuse that the passion had just taken her over. She’d kept quiet, though for reasons she was not ready quite to face yet. And her body was still busy indulging in the aftermath, the pounding beat of her heart refusing to ease. Down between her thighs, the new pulse point he had encouraged was still busy beating out a soft tattoo of lingering pleasure, the muscles inside her emitting tender little aches and quivers as they took their time settling back into their usual place.
But the beat of his anger rode over everything. It bounded off the walls and the tense stillness of his naked frame. He wasn’t looking at her—he hadn’t looked at her properly since they had tumbled into that totally mutual high-octane orgasm. He was staring at nothing, as far as she could see.
‘I knew what I was doing,’ she said; better late than never, she supposed.
The sound of her voice sprang him out from behind the locked door holding him so still. With a flaring blast of energy, he spun around, spied his boxers lying on the floor and bent to snatch them up. His anger crackled in every sharp movement as he dragged them on up his long legs then the taut contours of his golden flanks.
‘If you did, then I am ashamed of you,’ he incised so cleanly she was surprised the words didn’t draw blood.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN THE process of dragging out the crumpled sheet from beneath her naked body so she could cover herself with it, Zoe went still.
He was ashamed of her?
‘It is not your place to be ashamed of me.’ Yanking out the sheet she pinned it tight across her breasts. ‘You are my captor not the keeper of my morals. Look after your own morals, Anton, since they have more sins to answer than mine do.’
‘I can’t believe I fell for this,’ he muttered, having turned himself back into a statue again.
‘Fell for what?’ Pulling herself up against the pillows, Zoe stared at him in growing anger.
‘You and your clever bit of reverse psychology,’ he enlightened her. ‘You accused me of being a manipulating gold-digger, when all the time you’ve been busy plotting how best to protect your own interests!’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Zoe told him. ‘Where,’ she demanded, ‘In what just happened between us, was I protecting my own interests?’
‘You were a virgin.’
Flushing to the roots of her tumbled hair, she peeled out sarcastically, ‘Oh, thanks for reminding me. I forgot.’ ‘You are Theo Kanellis’s granddaughter.’
‘Just another unfortunate truth I would much rather not be reminded of.’
‘If you wanted to stick a knife through my relationship with Theo, you could not have come up with a better way of doing it.’
‘That’s one Machiavellian conversation you’ve got going with yourself there,’ said Zoe, picking up a spare pillow from the bed and hugging it tightly to her front. ‘Tell me, how does it work that me having sex with you sticks a knife in your relationship with Theo?’
‘You were a virgin.’
‘Will you stop saying that?’ Zoe launched at him, trembling in disgust.
At last he turned to look at her, his proud dark head thrown back. His nostrils flared as he took in some air, contempt spilling from his polished jet eyes onto her hot embarrassed face. ‘You were a virgin!’ he repeated like it was the vilest swearword. ‘Now I will have to marry you before Theo finds out what I have done!’
Marry her? Beginning to feel as if she was stuck in one of those living nightmares which never ever made any sense, Zoe stared at the spectre playing the starring role. She would not have been surprised if he’d grown horns and hooves. He had the body of a Greek god and the mind of a convoluted madman. And the hard, arrogant and beautiful face of a prince of darkness.
Shuddering inside the sheet at her own crazed imagination, she hugged the pillow all the tighter. ‘I am not about to confess to him that I let you do this to me,’ she assured him icily. ‘I mean, why would I want to? You were right, by the way. I am now very ashamed of myself.’
‘You are deliberately not following me.’ He sounded oddly strained suddenly. Glancing up, Zoe tracked where he was looking and realised the sheet was not covering a creamy hip and a long thigh.
Yanking the sheet into place, she decided to say nothing. It was useless to try anyway because she could feel hot tears beginning to build in her eyes and her throat burn.
‘In all honour, I will have to tell him. So you’ve won, Miss Kanellis. You have damned me in your grandfather’s eyes and protected your inheritance!’
‘In all honour?’ Zoe forced past the tears. ‘How dare you talk to me about your honour? You don’t have any honour!’ Hanging on to the pillow she scrambled off the bed because she could no longer sit there while he spilled his disgust out all over her.
‘Twenty-four hours ago you were a stranger to me—just the the substitute son standing in place of my father with your lofty head stuck into Theo’s billions, while Toby and I hid away like sewer rats from your sleazy press! I have just lost both of m-my parents.’ Her voice thickened and wavered as the tears momentarily won out. She pulled in a strained, unsteady lungful of air.
‘Did you care about that when you turned up on our doorstep? No. You just doubled the press hype without a care because it was more important that you jumped and danced to m-my grandfather’s tune in an effort to protect your own position in his life!’
‘Zoe …’
‘Shut up!’ she whipped out thickly, too upset now to see the pallor currently robbing his face of its tan. ‘You’ve had your say, now it’s my turn! I will repeat this very clearly and will even have it written down and sign it in triplicate if you like: I do not want my grandfather’s money! So you’re safe, Mr Pallis—safe from me, from marriage and from any other rotten thing you feel like throwing at me!’
It was only when she felt his fingers tremble slightly as he brushed a tear from her cheek that she realised he’d moved in that close. She stepped back, raising up the pillow to swipe the tears away for herself.
‘I thought that we had both just lost control tonight, but …’ she mumbled.
‘We did.’
She turned her back on that one, having forgotten that she was wearing nothing but the pillow, unaware that Anton was clenching his teeth, his jaw and his fists in an effort not to reach for the sheet to cover her up. It felt so wrong to further embarrass her. He had done enough. He wished he knew what had been driving him to say all of those things because, now that sanity had returned to him, he knew he had been spouting a load of rubbish.
‘I thought it was kind of inevitable—the way we’ve been sparking off each other all day.’
‘It was,’ Anton husked, then gave in to the need to protect her dignity and reached for the sheet, carefully dropping it across her trembling shoulders. ‘You’re so cold you’re shivering,’ he used for an excuse.
Zoe grabbed the flowing edges of the white cotton and hugged them to her, then spun around.
Her eyes glistened vivid blue in the pale oval of her face and he didn’t know what to say to her to put right what he’d just done. ‘I am sorry I reacted so—badly,’ seemed totally inadequate when he thought back over what he had accused her of. ‘It was just that—’
‘You’re worried because you’ve just had sex with Theo’s granddaughter,’ she finished for him.
‘I don’t give a damn about who you are!’ He sighed impatiently. ‘I don’t even know why I said it. But if you had only told me you were a—’
‘Get out,’ Zoe said because she didn’t want to listen to him using that word again. ‘If I have one small say in this horrible situation you’ve placed me in, then it’s the right to my own privacy in this room, so please, just get out!’
Spinning away again, she stood trembling inside the tight wrap of the sheet, aware that she was about to lose complete control and fall int
‘We both lost our heads.’ Still he persisted doggedly. ‘I did not expect … I feel so guilty!’ he said roughly. ‘I could have made the experience less uncomfortable for you but instead we went into it like …’
At last he ran out of words and Zoe was glad that he did. She did not need a running commentary on what they had done, or the way that they had done it. ‘Please,’ she begged him. ‘Will you just get out?’
‘We will talk tomorrow,’ he said finally, turning towards the door.
‘You’re flying off in the morning to—somewhere,’ she reminded him and hoped to goodness it was far, far away.
‘I don’t think so,’ he returned. ‘We need to—’
‘You are flying off tomorrow,’ Zoe repeated. ‘Because you promised me you would leave me alone in peace here for two weeks then allow me to go home—and I am insisting you keep those promises at least.’
Maybe he nodded in agreement. She had her back to him so she would not know. Yet somehow she knew that his lengthening silence was an agreement to her wishes. In all honour he could do little else.
Anton’s plane took off at sunrise. He had not been to bed. If he’d ever wanted to know how Leander Kanellis had felt when he’d been expelled from his home and family, then he knew now.
Two weeks … He had promised Zoe a two-week sanctuary and hell would have to freeze over before he would allow himself to break that promise now. Leaning back in his seat, he closed his weary eyes. Sleep deprivation was not a malady he usually suffered from but he was feeling the dragging pinch of it right now.
Or maybe it was the fault of the amount of brandy he had consumed while he’d sat in a chair in his bedroom with his feet up on the windowsill, drowning his restless sorrows while playing back gut-grinding snatches of what had turned out to be the most mind-blowing experience of his long sexual history.
Great sex, lousy aftermath. He shifted his shoulders against the cream leather back of his seat. He did not need to replay the way he’d laid into her in an effort to salve his own guilty conscience.
Women … He blamed all those other women who’d drifted in and out of his bed with their third eye focused on the vague chance that they might—just might—be the one he would decide to marry. And not merely for his handsome self; he mocked the good looks he was not too modest to acknowledge he had been blessed with. Or even his famous prowess between the sheets. No, money was the drug they fell in love with, the scintillating lure of becoming Mrs Anton Pallis with all the wealth, power and position the title would bring along with it.
So he’d become cynical about women before he’d reached the age of twenty. So he’d taken what they’d invited him to take, enjoyed their company and their bodies for as long as his interest lasted and never thought much about how it must feel to be in their shoes.
Well, he was feeling it now: rejection. In this case, a well-deserved rejection. The low ache of knowing he had been pushed out into the cold when, for the first time in his life, he’d wanted to stay in the warm. Somehow yesterday
Zoe Kanellis had wriggled her way past his usual guard. He even liked the baby. He’d got up from his chair at four-thirty this morning and rushed to pick the boy up when he’d cried. That Zoe had not come running into the boy’s room as well had surprised him, until he’d glanced across the landing and seen that her door was closed.
He had done that. He had closed her bedroom door on his way out of it, and she had been too upset to notice that he had. So he’d done his one good deed for this day and dealt with the baby’s needs without disturbing anyone else.
‘Anton?’
‘Hmm?’ he grunted, frowning because he did not want to be disturbed.
‘Fresh trouble,’ Kostas warned him grimly.
Zoe guided the buggy along one of the shady pathways which meandered through the garden. It was strange to think that this was Toby’s first taste of fresh air since she’d brought him home from the hospital.
The good side of her bolthole in paradise, she thought grimly. The serpent had flown out this morning—or so she’d been informed. She’d been out for the count when Anton had left here, having thrown herself back on the bed and buried her head between two pillows in an effort to hide away from what they had done.
A glint of light in the corner of her eye made her turn her head to see a silver Mercedes sweep in through the gates situated over on the other side of the garden. She froze. Surely he could not have come back? He would not come back. The man she’d been faced with after their senseless, wild frolic in her bed would clip his own wings off before he would come back here before the two promised weeks were up.
If even then, she added as she turned away to continue walking while shuddering inside now that the memories of last night’s horror had resurfaced. And it wasn’t even his behaviour that was making her shudder. No, it was her own. She hated herself. She hated him. He’d told her she should be ashamed of herself and she was. Though what his conscience had been telling him to feel had got lost in the bitterness that poured forth from his angry lips.
Guilty he’d admitted to, but only when it had been dragged out of him. Well, great. She was his guilty sin, because she would have to have been totally naive and stupid not to notice that he’d had the hots for her almost from the first moment he looked at her.
And you for him, that little voice in her head called honesty chimed in.
Zoe lifted and dropped her tense narrow shoulders as if trying to shrug honesty away. She was a twenty-two-year-old, reasonably attractive woman who’d been batting off the attentions of the opposite sex since she’d suddenly grown breasts and long legs at the age of fourteen. She was a self-confessed swat, a classic blue stocking who would rather spend her time battling with some complicated calculus than flirting with her peers. Her father used to laugh at the clutch of doe-eyed boys who’d used to loiter outside their house waiting for her to walk out of the door.
‘You don’t feel a thing for them, do you?’ His amused voice echoed inside her head and she had to blink the glaze of tears from her eyes.
She had been a late developer. He’d been proud of her blossoming beauty and kind of relieved at the same time that she wasn’t seduced by the pubescent yearnings of her followers. She’d sailed through the coming years of her slow adolescent development and come out of it the other end with any sudden waves of sexually hormonal rushes tempered by good old-fashioned common sense.
Good old-fashioned common sense … Zoe mocked the phrase which had been her uni mantra. She’d been friendly and popular but her compatriots had used to tease her for her level-headed approach to sex and the tumult of excitement that went along with it. They would probably laugh themselves silly if they could see her now, seduced and well bedded by a notorious womanizer within twenty-four hours of meeting him for the first time.
Knocked off her sensible pedestal. Tumbled by the darkly handsome Greek who was a dangerous mix of cold-blooded ruthlessness and annihilating charm.
The sound of hurried steps behind her made Zoe stop and turn. Martha was coming down the path towards her, her pretty face anxious. What now? Zoe thought wearily as she waited for the other girl to catch up with her.
‘Anton sent me to find you, thespinis,’ Martha explained as she came close. ‘He requests that you will please go to him in his study.’
‘You mean he’s here, at the house?’ Zoe started, frowning. ‘But I thought—’
‘He flew to Athens this morning but now he is back,’ explained Martha as if it was nothing unusual to her that Anton should shunt himself about the Aegean like a number fifty-two bus.
Martha waved a hand at Toby’s buggy. ‘I am to take care of the little one while you go.’
Relinquishing Toby into Martha’s care, Zoe walked back up the path towards the house. She tried to come up with a good enough reason that would bring him back here this fast, but couldn’t think of a single thing.
The door to his study stood open by a couple of inches. Still, she knocked lightly on the wood before she pushed it open that little bit wider and stepped warily through the gap. She’d peeped into this room during her quick exploration of the downstairs yesterday, so she remembered its basic layout which consisted of loads of honey-coloured book shelves and furniture, a big fireplace filled with unlit logs, a black leather sofa, a couple of matching chairs and a desk, behind which Anton was standing right now.
He was the lofty tycoon again, she saw with a sinking feeling. A tall, dark power-force of a man wearing an eye-poppingly elegant black silk suit with a fine white stripe running through it that made her think of hard-headed City types. She felt consumed suddenly by an unfamiliar urge to check out her hair and run her palms down the side of the pale-blue straight cotton skirt she’d put on this morning. He looked up and she went still, stricken by a sudden leap of feeling which made her hot with horrible awareness.
‘You asked to see me.’ She fought to keep her voice cool and level.
It was then that she saw his grim-faced expression, the formality with which he nodded. A shiver of alarm took care of the other hotter feelings, consigning them to the archives of her mind—where she preferred them to stay.
‘So what’s gone wrong now?’ she asked as she walked towards the desk.
She’d had too many bad shocks recently not to recognise when another one was on its way.
‘You need to see this.’ He waved a hand at something lying flat on the desk, Zoe looked down with caution.
It was a newspaper, she saw. A British tabloid conveniently placed to face in her direction so she didn’t have to strain her neck to see what was printed on it.
Pallis Crushes Opposition! the headline read.
Snatching the paper up, she just stared at the accompanying photographs until her hands started to shake. The totally humiliating sight of Anton carrying her onto the plane was bad enough, but to see the two of them captured in stark black-and-white, standing by the car locked in a passionate embrace, dropped her like a stone onto a nearby chair. Her face burned hot then paled in crushing mortification. They looked as if it would need a crowbar to prize them apart. The article below read:
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