The Kanellis Scandal

by Michelle Reid

  ‘Say no to your grandfather’s money, agape mou …’ Distract to divert; he knew exactly what he was doing. ‘Walk away from it—with me—right now. I can promise you, you will never regret it. An hour, and we can be back home enjoying the kind of siesta that turns your beautiful bones to wax.’

  ‘My—my grandfather is sick and you want to—’ Almost choking on the words, she turned her back on him in disgust—though which of them the disgust was aimed at was a moot point, Anton mused as he watched her wrap her arms around the hammering thump of her heart.

  ‘And Toby?’ she flung back. ‘You were the one who told me I should think about him instead of myself.’

  ‘I can take care of my own,’ he countered. ‘Toby will want for nothing so long as he remains in my care.’

  It was strange how a few supposedly reassuring words could turn her crowding senses into pin pricks of ice. She swung back around to face him. ‘In your care as what—guardian of his fortune, by any chance?’

  So they were back to that again. Narrowing his eyes on her challenging stance, he warned carefully, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t turn this back into a gold-digging charge unless you’re ready for a hard fight.’

  Zoe flicked her hair back off her shoulders, the desire to remain suspicious of him warring with a deeper instinct that told her he wasn’t in this for the money-spinning power. ‘So, if you are not in this to get control of Theo’s money, tell me again why you bothered to bring us here at all,’ she demanded. ‘And then tell me why he accused you of wanting revenge.’

  His silence held a kind of power of its own as he continued to lounge on the sofa, studying her through those narrowed, simmering sardonic eyes. She was not able to read the look, and it made the silence hang like an axe between them because nothing on earth was going to make her back down until he had answered the charge. But beneath her folded arms her stomach muscles felt quivery and tight because she needed so badly to hear him crush the life out of that word revenge, with some crystal-clear reasoning she had not managed to work out for herself just yet.

  When he continued to say nothing, and eventually uncoiled his long body until he was on his feet, she found herself having to fight the urge to take a defensive step back. The enemy … Those two little words floated into her head and stayed there, reminding her of what she had stubbornly allowed herself to forget.

  He stood there in what he considered casual clothes and looked a million dollars, the tall, tough tycoon with fabulous good looks and eye for style bred into him. There wasn’t an inch of him that she could find to criticise—of a physical nature, that was. But what did she know about the real man, that inner core that never showed itself even when he trembled in her arms as they made love?

  He was a stranger to her, and a ruthless one, or she would not even be here in Greece, Zoe concluded. She did not like herself right now for allowing herself to be seduced into believing he was anything else.

  ‘Answer me, Anton,’ she demanded, too worried now to bother to hide the anxious quaver in her voice.

  He glanced down at the glass he was still holding, noticed it was empty and walked back to the drinks cabinet. Following him with her eyes, Zoe felt an aching clutch of pending agony begin to stir in her chest because she knew she was about to hear something that was going to rend her apart.

  ‘I am not out for revenge on anyone.’ It came out cool and flat as he splashed brandy into the bottom of the glass.

  She felt for the right words. ‘But there is—is a reason why you might be?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded.

  Zoe took a moment to pull in a breath. ‘And this—reason concerns my father.’ This time it wasn’t a question but a measured assumption. ‘Why did Theo choose you to take my father’s place all those years ago?’

  There it was—the big question. The one Anton had been waiting for her to ask him from the moment the two of them had first met. Pulling a wry face at the golden liquid resting temptingly in the glass, he set it aside, schooled his expression into an impassive mask then turned around to face her again.

  ‘Because Theo felt he owed it to me,’ he answered levelly.

  The way she was standing there with her arms still tensely folded and her vivid blue eyes fixed on him, showing her strain, he knew that she knew she was about to learn something that was going to crucify her perfect vision of the father she loved.

  And he was the man who was going to do it. If he’d ever considered taking revenge on Leander Kanellis, then the success should taste very sweet right now.

  But it did not taste sweet. It tasted like poison.

  ‘You already know that your father ran away from an arranged marriage.’ He made himself go on. ‘What you do not seem to know is that the woman he left standing at the church altar was my recently widowed mother.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘YOUR … mother?’ He’d said it so calmly Zoe almost missed the horrendous impact of the words themselves.

  ‘It was supposed to be the great business-merger of two formidable families,’ he said with a brief, grim smile. ‘Theo wanted to merge his company with my grandfather’s company. My grandfather drove a hard bargain, insisting the only way they would merge was if their two children married to cement the deal.’

  It sounded so coldly calculating; Zoe shivered. ‘But my father was only eighteen years old,’ she said. ‘How old was your mother?’

  ‘Thirty-two—not that the ages of either of them mattered.’ He grimaced. ‘My mother had grown up doing as her father told her. She strove all of her life to make him proud.’

  ‘She gave him a grandson. In Greek terms, that should have made him very proud.’

  ‘Defending my place in this sorry tale, agape mou?’ Anton murmured dryly. ‘You surprise me.’

  ‘I was thinking of your poor mother, not you,’ Zoe countered. ‘You said she’d been recently widowed. Did she love your father?’

  ‘“Love” is not a word I would use to describe their relationship, though I was perhaps too young to understand it. I recall frost and fights and long empty spaces in which we never saw him.’ He gave an idle shrug. ‘My grandfather ruled our home, not my father. My father changed his name to Pallis as part of the deal when he married my mother. The wonders of vast wealth,’ he tagged on cynically. ‘And my father?’ Zoe ventured. ‘Was he ruled by his father?’

  ‘Most people would have believed so until Leander disappeared on his way to the church. He surprised everyone when he did that,’ Anton recalled whimsically. ‘In fact, the shock was so great it gave my grandfather a heart attack which killed him. My mother shut herself away in a convent and eventually died there a few months later of humiliation and shame.

  ‘While she was doing that,’ he continued in the same shatteringly calm way, ‘Your grandmother, on her way to England to beg her son to come back home and do his duty to his family, was killed when the helicopter she was travelling in crashed into the Aegean—Theo lost the only woman he had ever loved.’

  Edging carefully backwards, Zoe lowered herself down on the sofa before her trembling legs gave away. Her grandmother; dear God. ‘I can see now why Theo never forgave him,’ she murmured across the fragile edge of her breath.

  But even more painful was the realisation that her father had been living for all those years since with the heavy burden of guilt for his own mother’s death.

  Leander had never managed to forgive himself.

  Suddenly it all began to make such a terribly sad kind of sense: her father’s refusal to talk about his Greek family, the way his eyes would cloud over whenever Greece was mentioned on the TV. Even her mother, her quiet, gentle mother, must have known that their marriage had been built on the worst of foundations—guilt and grief.

  ‘Theo was left alone, deeply embittered,’ Anton continued. ‘While I became a ten-year-old multi-millionaire orphan and was left to rot in a boarding school while my so-called trustees milked the Pallis Group of its most lucrative assets. I was twelve
years old by the time Theo won the right to take control of my interests. He took me in. He gave me a home and a more constructive education. When I reached the age of twenty-five, he handed the Pallis Group back to me in a healthier state than it had been before it all happened, then told me to go out there and get on with the job of keeping it that way.’

  Zoe’s eyelashes fluttered across the glaze of her eyes. ‘You love him,’ she whispered.

  ‘I love him,’ Anton confirmed in a quiet statement of fact. ‘He appears hard and tough, but what he really was back then was a lonely man nursing a badly broken heart who needed someone to care about him, just as I needed someone to care what happened to me.’

  ‘So he adopted you.’

  ‘He did not adopt me. He took care of me.’ ‘And you h-hate my f-father.’

  ‘I don’t hate anyone.’ He sighed out heavily. ‘Unless it’s the media mob who threw us both into this situation we now find ourselves in. And even then I can only mildly hate them, because while they have been so busy trying to discover what we are going to do next they have forgotten to check out the past to find out the reason why Leander disappeared in the first place. No, don’t faint on me,’ he said as she swayed where she sat.

  Closing the gap between them at speed, he came to squat down in front of her, picked up her discarded glass of brandy and tried to make her drink some of it, but Zoe shook her head in refusal. Her mind was spinning dizzily with what he’d just said. Her father’s death had thrown them into this situation.

  A situation built on lies, sex and desperately dark secrets. ‘We are the past repeating itself,’ she whispered. ‘And you do want revenge.’

  ‘For crying out loud,’ Anton ground out impatiently, ‘I do not want revenge!’

  ‘So what is it you do want?’ Zoe fired back.

  Snapping his lips together, he said nothing. Zoe let out a strangled choke of a disbelieving laugh. She could see it all suddenly, and so very clearly. ‘You’ve been pushing for marriage between us almost from the first hour we met. I should have known there was more to it than you wanting to throw the press off our case. What were you intending to do? Were you planning to avenge your mother’s humiliation by leaving me standing at the altar while the organ played, thanks for the memories but I’ve had what I wanted and made a fool of you, now I’m off?’

  He dared to laugh. Zoe almost lashed out and hit him. Instead she scrambled out from within the circle of his spread thighs and sprang to her feet.

  ‘How, how many times do I have to tell you that I don’t want Theo’s money?’ he sighed out impatiently.

  ‘As many times as you’ve plugged the marriage thing and I still won’t believe you—on either count!’

  Since he was still holding her glass of brandy, he tossed the liquid to the back of this throat then rid himself of the glass. ‘Theo’s will has not changed in twenty-three years,’ he informed her harshly. ‘His son has always been his heir, with any offspring of Leander’s next in line in the event of Theo outliving his son! And if you are about to demand how I know all that, then I will tell you,’ he ground out, stopping the very words from forming on her trembling lips.

  ‘I hold all of Theo’s personal papers because I am the only person he knows he can trust! I will keep faith with that trust no matter what labels others want to hang on me,’ he vowed. ‘Are you prepared to keep to your promises to me, Zoe?’ he said then, facing her off across a two-foot gap that sang with angry challenge. ‘Or do you intend to run away from your responsibilities to Theo like your father did?

  The room literally rang with his final comment. Zoe stood shivering beneath its angry blast. Everything she had previously believed about her father’s exile from his father had just been tipped on its head. Now Anton was slaying her with the full, blunt truth of what her father had done. He’d run away from his responsibilities because he just couldn’t face up to them. She didn’t blame him for doing it. He’d loved her mother—oh God, how he had proved that—but that was not the issue here. Anton was asking if she was prepared to do for her grandfather what her father had not been prepared to do.

  ‘Theo s-said he didn’t want us to get married,’ she reminded him.

  Reaching out, he grabbed hold of her shoulders. For a few seconds she thought he was going to give her a good shaking but all he did was to hold her in front of him, his eyes and his voice when he spoke intense.

  ‘He was testing you. He told you that himself. He was trying to discover if you were going to let him down like your father did! He needs to know that his life’s legacy will be in safe hands when he dies. So, I am asking you again, are you prepared to be gracious and give your grandfather something good to take with him to his grave?’

  Was she prepared to marry the son of the woman her father jilted, to soothe a sick old man’s broken heart before he slid quietly out of this life?

  Quivering within his grasp, she wished she wasn’t looking into his eyes because when she did that she always—always—lost the will to keep on fighting him.

  ‘Yes,’ she heard herself whisper. ‘Until my grandfather has—gone,’ she extended, because her pride demanded she keep hold of the one concession she had won the last time they had had this kind of fight. ‘I will do everything you want me to do until this whole h-horror is over but afterwards I go back to my own life and you will let me go.’

  Anton turned as cold as ice, as though she’d thrown a switched that turned off all the passion alight inside him. She did not understand why, and she watched for a sign to give her a hint, but nothing showed in his tough, handsome face. And his continuing silence gnawed on her shivering nerve-ends.

  Then he unclasped his fingers. ‘Fair enough,’ he agreed and turned away.

  ‘Fair enough’ sealed their deal in what felt to Zoe like her own fresh blood.

  ‘I’ll go and check how Theo is,’ he then said flatly, and strode out of the room without looking at her again.

  They married a week later right on schedule. Only the venue had changed, moving from the little church on Thalia to a room in her grandfather’s house with a magistrate in attendance to hear their vows.

  Theo insisted on standing beside Zoe. It was her grandfather who placed her hand into Anton’s hand. Only then did he surrender to his wheelchair to watch the rest of the proceedings with a fierce look of satisfaction that was missing on the faces of the other two participants. Once the formalities were over, they drank a glass of champagne each, then Theo caved in and retired to his bed.

  He’d looked increasingly frail throughout the short ceremony, and impulsively Zoe asked if she could see him before she and Anton flew back to Thalia. He was asleep, but she sat with him for a little while, her hand covering one of his, wishing, wishing he’d known her father. Because she was sure he would have been proud of the man he grew to be, even if perhaps he would never have been the kind of son Theo would have preferred him to be. When Anton came in to tell her quietly that it was time for them to leave, she stood up, then she leant down and kissed his cheek before turning and walking quickly away with her head down so that a grimly silent Anton could not see her tears.

  Within an hour of arriving back at Anton’s house, she felt as if nothing had changed. The simple white wedding-gown she had worn—delivered that morning by special courier—was now hanging in its bag in her dressing room. And, though everyone else had smiles and congratulations for them, she and Anton felt more like strangers to each other than they had done when he had first strode into her Islington home.

  It had been like that between them since her visit to see her grandfather. They even slept in their separate bedrooms. Anton was busy, he worked long hours, and though he came home from Athens every evening in time to eat dinner with her, he excused himself and disappeared into his study afterwards and that was the last Zoe would see of him until dinner the next evening.

  Seven long days of it, she thought as she stood by the window in her bedroom, having thrown it open to breathe some
cooler air coming in from the sea. It wasn’t late but she’d retired early. A silvery moon hung just above the tops of the trees. One of the maids—clearly an incurable romantic—had laid out the finest slip of blush-pink silk on her bed, and after taking a shower, she hovered over it for a few moments before giving in to the temptation of slipping the nightdress on.

  She caught sight of herself in the mirror, and saw how the silk clung to every contour of her figure, from the slopes of her breasts to her slender ankles.

  She looked what she was, a bride dressed for her wedding night. Only this bride had no groom to admire the alluring effect.

  Oh, just look at yourself, Zoe told herself crossly, standing here staring at the moon and pining for your love when— The soft sound of her bedroom door closing spun her around. As if she’d summoned him up just thinking about him, there he stood, looking tall, dark and breathtakingly real.

  ‘Stargazing, glikia mou?’ he quizzed as he walked towards her, his voice sounded so deep and so dark it sank through her body like warm honey.

  ‘W-wishing on the moon, more like,’ she laughed, trying her best to make it sound light even though her heart began to beat very fast. ‘Is—is there something you want?’

  ‘Now that—’ he came to a halt in the circle of moonlight ‘—is a pretty stupid question to ask your husband on our wedding night.’

  Her lips parted nervously. ‘I thought we had decided to keep this m-marriage strictly business.’

  ‘We did?’ He was looking down at her intently but there was no sign that Zoe could see that he’d even heard what she’d said.

  And he looked—gorgeous. He had come in here directly from the shower and was wearing a dark cotton robe and nothing else, so her heightened instincts told her. His hair was still damp and as she grabbed at a tense breath she inhaled the tantalising scent of his soap.

  She could also feel the tension stretching up through her body like a fine thread of fire. It was all in the eyes—it was always in the eyes for them. He looked down at her and she looked up at him …