‘So you decided to shoot off to New York to indulge in an affair with your modelling friend?’
Anton pulled a face at the quick sarcastic putdown. She might be down, but her brain was still functioning OK.
‘We had a trial separation.’ He covered that problem. ‘You were very busy with your university studies, and concerned how your father was going to react to our—romance. So we decided to go our separate ways for a time to see if what we felt for each other was just—’
‘Lust, not Romeo and Juliet.’
He dared to send her a grin that plucked at Zoe’s heart strings for some unfathomable reason. ‘You are catching on.’
Folding her arms across her front to crush the sensation, Zoe faced him squarely. ‘So let me see if I can have this right. You are the— How old are you?’ she paused to ask.
‘Thirty-one,’ he provided.
Zoe nodded. ‘So, you are the thirty-one-year-old lovelorn tycoon who flies off to find solace in another woman’s bed, while I remain the untouched virgin waiting for you to come back to me and claim your—gift?’
‘It was a fabulous gift, agape mou,’ he murmured softly. ‘I will treasure it for the rest of our lives.’
‘Don’t overstretch your ability to hold to a promise,’ snapped Zoe. ‘We both know you’re lousy at keeping them.’
‘I will keep this one.’ Suddenly he was deadly serious. ‘Bring to our marriage bed the passionate woman I met last night and I will endeavour to keep her happy and content.’
He was talking sex. A light bulb of alarm lit up in Zoe’s head. ‘We are not going to share a bed! Where the heck do you get the nerve to turn a cold business-arrangement into a promise of good sex?’
‘Easy, I have been thinking of little else since you walked in here.’
The dark and husky admission sent Zoe backing off a couple of steps in an attempt to distance herself from what he had said. Why hadn’t she noticed before that the whole room was loaded with sexual tension? she asked herself suddenly, noticing it now and feeling it in the new rush of awareness that swept down her front.
‘Ours will be a full and fruitful marriage, kardia mou, not an empty showcase filled with coldness,’ he continued in the same husky tone. ‘How else does it have a chance at success?’
He was talking long-term here. Zoe blinked slowly then gave an adamantly negative shake of her head. ‘This will be a temporary arrangement lasting only until—until this current crisis with the stock markets goes away.’
‘You think?’
‘I know.’ She was staring into his eyes again—a dangerous thing to do, especially when that glow took them over, the one that set her heart racing when he slowly straightened up from the desk.
Too late, she realised that she’d just challenged his sexual ego. That the sun flowing against the side of his face as he moved was adding a worryingly hypnotic effect to his eyes. She couldn’t look away from them, couldn’t halt the tingling tremor which hit the tips of her now aching breasts and that other place low down between her thighs.
‘S-stay back,’ she stammered when he took a step in her direction.
‘Why?’ With devastating simplicity he pinned her to the spot with the question when she knew she should be running for her life. ‘You want me. Do you think I cannot read your body language? You have been wishing I would strip my clothes off since you walked in here. In fact, if I did start stripping, you would probably rush to help.’
‘Isn’t that just typically arrogant of you to think that?’ Zoe heaved in a deep breath while managing to take another couple of steps backwards. ‘Just—just because you were my first lover does not make me suddenly obsessed with s-sex!’
‘Your pupils have dilated; your cheeks are wearing a very informative soft pink glow.’ Reaching out with a hand, he touched one of her cheeks with a fingertip. Zoe pulled back her head so sharply she hurt the muscles in the back of her neck. ‘And you are trembling,’ he observed as he took another step closer. ‘I can hear the husk of arousal in your breathless voice. And the most intriguing thing is that you are still such a stranger to your own feelings you don’t even recognise the signals you’re giving off.’
Her cheeks had fired into flames now. Anxiously she continued to back off. He likes stalking you like a predator, a little voice inside her head warned her. Stay still, hold your ground, outface him.
She pulled to a stop. ‘Well, there speaks the man of experience,’ she traded bitterly. ‘But what else can I expect of a man who’s been sleeping around since he knew there was a difference between male and female?’
‘You expected a thirty-one-year-old virgin in your bed?’ He actually sounded incredulous.
‘Yes!’ Zoe flung at him hotly, ‘Why not? My mother was my father’s first lover! She was his! They spent twenty-three years together and never wanted or took other lovers! They were both very proud of that!’
‘Oh, what it’s like to live with perfection,’ he mocked derisively. ‘Did they fill your head with the same ideals, Zoe? Are you waiting for your perfect virgin lover to come along and sweep you into lifelong married bliss?’
Her cheeks burned all the hotter. ‘Well, I won’t find him in you, will I?’
His dark head went back. ‘Definitely not. You will find a well-rounded, very experienced man who has played the field long enough to be ready to give you his complete loyalty and the pleasure of his sexual experience.’
‘If I decide to have you, that is!’
His eyes narrowed. He’d walked out of the sunlight now so all she saw was the dark glow of yet more predator challenge framed by eyelashes as black as night.
‘Oh, you will have me,’ he told her softly. ‘Do you know why you will have me?’
‘If you don’t s-stop all of this I will …’
The gap between them suddenly closed like a door being slammed shut on her resistance. Zoe could feel herself giving in to him even as he started to lower his dark head.
‘No—please don’t.’ She uttered this one final stab at resistance but she stared at the sensual shape of his mouth as she said it.
‘Liar,’ he whispered, then teased her with the gentlest touch of his tongue to the corner of her mouth. When she shivered, he laughed softly and did it again. ‘Think about how it will feel to get naked with me,’ he urged. ‘Think about acquiring exclusive rights on all of this …’
‘This’ was his hands taking hold of her hips and drawing her against him. ‘This’ was the evidence of his desire for her pressing against her and liquidising the bones in her legs. He settled light, moist kisses across her lower lip, coaxing it to part from its upper partner. When she refused to let it, he raised his head up a little, just enough to scan whatever was happening in her eyes. What he saw written there made him smile. Then he took her. He took her by storm and with lethal precision, covering both of her lips and prising them apart with a heated delving of absolute possession that rendered her helpless, because desire was swimming up inside her like a tidal wave.
It wasn’t fair. Zoe whimpered out a strangled protest just before all the defensive tension locking her muscles snapped. On a low, anguished groan she slid her clenched fists up over his shoulders, stretched out her fingers, curled them into the firm flesh of his nape then moulded herself up against his hardness and heat. Her surrender was rewarded by the fire of his passion. He kissed her so deeply she lost touch with everything but the river of pleasure pouring through her blood. Every nerve-ending came alive with a sexual sparkle that dizzied her brain and made her cling to him all the more. The flat of his hand laid claim to the base of her spine to hold her tight to the power of his muscular frame.
Inside she melted like butter. By the time he let them both up for air again, she was a quivering mess of shell-shocked heat. His tie had gone awry and the buttons on his shirt had been wrenched open—by her; it must have been her that did it—exposing the breadth of his chest with whorls of black hair and sexily ridged muscles. And he was br
‘Do yourself a favour,’ he ground out harshly. ‘And rethink your role as my wife.’
With that he stepped away from her. It was so ruthless a separation it left Zoe swaying where she stood. Then he swung his back to her and began to fasten up his shirt. A blinding kind of sensual confusion throbbed like an extra heart inside her chest, and even that came with a taunt because her breasts were so heavy and so tight they visibly palpitated against her white vest-top.
She felt she had only one course of action left open to her. She turned and walked as straight as she could, through the door and out of it without even trying to utter a single word.
Caught, tried and hung by her own body’s weakness, Zoe thought numbly as she paced her bedroom floor like someone trapped. How had it happened? How had they gone from complete strangers and hostile enemies to hot, greedy, passionate, insatiable lovers in the space of twenty-four hours?
‘I don’t see why you’re making me do this,’ Zoe complained tautly as the helicopter they were travelling in sped across the crystal-blue waters of the Aegean. ‘Couldn’t it have waited until I was ready for it? Af-after the wedding, maybe, or.?’
‘The world watches us, agape mou,’ Anton responded evenly, reminding her of that glass case he had mentioned just over a week ago when somehow—she still could not work out why she had done it—she had agreed to marry him.
‘What is there for them to see? I’ve been hiding away on your island all week while you do whatever it is you do each day when you leave.’
‘I work. It is expected of a power-mad, gold-digging empire builder.’
Zoe grimaced at his quotation from one of the more imaginative tabloids.
‘And Theo wants to see you,’ he added. ‘It was either bring you to him or watch him carry out his threat and come to see you. I could not risk that he might be bluffing,’ he explained, frowning. ‘The flight probably would have killed him.’
Toby let out a squeak in demand for attention then. He did not like the helicopter ride. He’d sobbed his heart out from the moment they’d taken off until Zoe couldn’t stand it, and had released him from his seat so she could pick him up and cuddle him. When he still would not calm down, Anton had plucked the baby out of her arms to try soothing him himself, and it still annoyed Zoe that it had worked. The moment Toby had felt Anton’s strong arms go around him, he had just shut up, as if he’d sensed safety and calmness there instead of the anxiety and tension Zoe had been giving off.
But then the baby and the man had become good friends over the last week. Whereas she and Anton had become—lovers. Proper lovers. Lovers who slept in the same bed.
The first night he had come to her. He’d slid between her sheets, ignored her furious protests, drawn her towards him and had taken up where he’d left off after her humiliating downfall in his study.
The second night he’d come to her room, dragged her out of bed and trailed her, protesting, along the landing into his room and bed. That was the same day the new nanny had flown in. Her name was Melissa Stefani; she spoke both Greek and English, and most irritating of all she was nice. Martha went back to her full-time studies. Melissa was currently occupying the seat up front next to their pilot.
Zoe had eaten, lived and slept with Anton as if they were already a married couple. And his bedroom door was firmly closed each night so she wouldn’t hear her brother when he woke up. That she knew she’d started to look less drawn around the edges, did not sweeten Zoe’s present mood at all.
Also, during the last week, she had been treated to a taste of what it was going to be like being Anton Pallis’s wife in a thousand little ways, like the way Anthea now deferred to her every decision about the general running of the household—as if she had a clue how to run a house that big.
She’d been expected to decide what they ate for dinner, and if they had flowers on the table, or candles, or both. When she would have preferred to curl up with a book somewhere quiet, she’d been treated to tours of linen closets and the long row of glass-fronted cabinets displaying extensive china dinner-services most of which, she had been proudly informed, were priceless. She knew nothing about art. It wasn’t her bag. But the walls were full of it. Even the huge, ornate mirrors hanging on the walls were apparently priceless antiques with lustrous histories attached to each one.
So what had she learnt? That Anton’s ancestors had been respected collectors of all that was beautiful. But she could not tell the difference between a Claude Monet and an Édouard Manet. However, what really struck her very hard was that her car-mechanic father probably had.
And now here she was, taking her first trip off the island since she’d arrived on it. And it was a trip to visit her grandfather, who probably had his home filled with the same status symbols of wealth and good taste.
‘I hope he’s not expecting all smiles and forgiveness from me,’ she sniped, so sharply on the defensive it was like she was sitting on pins.
‘I would think it would require a miracle for you to want to give Theo your understanding and sympathy.’
She had grown used to this form of passive sarcasm from Anton over the last week, but what she refused to get used to was being spoken to as if she was a sulky child.
‘We can always call the wedding off, if you’re having second thoughts?’ she offered coolly.
She heard him draw in an audible breath which brought her head around to look at him. He was lounging in his seat with Toby resting against his shoulder. For once he wasn’t wearing one of his million-dollar suits, though the faded jeans and a grey polo-shirt he had on beneath a linen jacket screamed stylish sophistication at her … Oh God, she thought restlessly, he looked gorgeous.
‘Was that a trick question?’ he posed curiously.
A sullen shrug of a narrow shoulder and Zoe decided she wished she hadn’t said it. She went to turn her head away again, only Anton wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily. His hand arrived on her arm, applying just enough pressure to make her aware of his strength.
‘Don’t talk down to me like I’m your kid sister, OK?’ She launched at him while seething inside for reasons really quite divorced from this particular complaint she was using as a vent. ‘There might be a huge gap of nine long years between my age and yours, and a whole lot of obnoxious arrogance, but unless you have a thing about bossing around minors treat with respect my adult right to an opinion or I will call off the wedding!’
She tugged her arm free, refusing to wince when it hurt as she did. Yet another silence clattered down around them. Zoe glared at the back of Melissa’s head and hoped to goodness the nanny and the pilot had not heard what she’d said. She didn’t even know what was the matter with her, yet on another level she did know very well that all this restless, bad-tempered tension was because she was at war with herself rather than with him. How had she allowed herself to become his puppet? How had he managed to seduce her so thoroughly that she’d stopped being herself? She looked at him and she wanted him—wanted. Every time. Even when she hated him.
‘Zoe …’
‘Shut up,’ she breathed tautly.
Right now she felt like a pubescent teenager, so switched on to her emotions they were swirling inside her like an unruly mob. They trampled over her self-control and her ability to think with her normal, calm logic. They choked her up and drove her to do and say things she would never normally have done or said.
‘We are here,’ Anton murmured.
Fluttering her glance sideways, a different set of emotions surged up and attacked her. For down there below them, rising up out of the glistening blue sea, was the tiny horseshoe-shaped island of her father’s birth.
CHAPTER TEN
HURRYING clear of the helicopter’s rotor blades, Zoe paused to look around her new surroundings. They’d landed on a stretch of grass spread between a pretty crescent-shaped beach and a surprisingly modest-looking single-storey house with bright white walls and a wooden veranda shaded from the sun by the slope of the roof.
Arriving at her side with Toby still curled into his shoulder, Anton followed the track of her gaze. ‘Theo does not like change,’ he told her quietly. ‘The original house—the middle part you can see is different from the two outer wings—belonged to his fisherman grandfather who built it himself. When Theo bought the island he changed nothing until he married your grandmother. It was she who insisted the house be extended to accommodate her love of throwing parties here. When she died, Theo stopped coming here for years and the house more or less stagnated. He preferred to use his house in Glyfada on the mainland. He said it was more convenient for his offices in Athens and the airport, but I think he just hated coming here because he missed her so much.’
‘Kassandra.’ Zoe murmured the name of her paternal grandmother.
‘The same as your middle name,’ Anton confirmed.
And one of the very few marks of recognition her father had made of his Greek roots. ‘Did—did you ever meet her?’
‘She died before I came here. Shall we go up to the house?’
If that was his polite way of telling her this was not the time for this kind of conversation, it succeeded in shutting her up. Anyway, she was too nervous to hold on to a particular thought for more than two seconds before her attention returned to the house and, more particularly, who was waiting inside it to meet his grandson.
Anton was feeling no less tense about this meeting. He had fought with Theo against it until the stubborn old man had threatened to fly over to Thalia and gatecrash what he’d called, ‘Anton’s damned arrogant hijacking of his plans.’
Kidnapper, hijacker. His sins were piling up.
Melissa was waiting for them beneath the shade of the veranda. As they reached the steps which led up onto the wooden decking, the front door opened and an elderly woman dressed all in black stepped out. She shot a curious glance over Zoe and Melissa then turned the look at the small baby he held in his arms.
-->