Irresistible Greeks: Dark and Determined
‘Toby,’ she whispered tautly.
‘Right here.’ Arching an eyebrow as if to question where else her brother could be, he glanced down at the space between them.
And he was. Following the downward movement of Anton’s eyes, Zoe discovered her brother lying there fast asleep. He looked relaxed and angelic, his tiny face pink with contentment.
‘He drank a full bottle of that awful stuff he seems to find delicious,’ Anton informed her. ‘Then I tackled a job no man of my superior breeding should ever have to undertake.’
‘You fed and changed him?’ Turning onto her side, Zoe gathered the baby close to her and dropped a kiss on his silky dark head.
‘He suffered my first few fumbling attempts remarkably well. My suit received a—dousing,’ he drawled lazily. ‘However, since you had already drenched the jacket with your tears earlier, it was no hardship to me to remove it and change into something else.’
He did not add that he had refused plenty of offers from people out there who’d offered to take over the job for him. It had been his punishment to care for the baby, as it was his punishment to endure the frost his staff had been treating him to since he’d walked out of this room over an hour ago.
‘I—I don’t know what to say,’ Zoe mumbled. ‘A simple “thank you” will be adequate.’ Not while she still lived and breathed, thought Zoe. ‘You don’t warrant the waste of good manners. You kidnapped us.’
‘Back to hostilities already?’ Sighing heavily, he slid off the bed, rising to his full height with fluid grace.
‘You lied and you conned me and scared me out of my wits.’
‘Well, something made you lose your wits,’ Anton agreed, moving across the compact cabin to open a narrow cupboard. ‘I did wonder for a while if it was the kiss.’
The moment he mentioned the kiss, Zoe refused to look at him. Her hostility towards him only half-covered what she really felt. ‘I suppose I should have expected it from a man reared under Theo Kanellis’s influence.’ Sitting up in the bed, she lifted her brother into her arms. ‘Ruthless, heartless and a calculating bully, as well as a conscience-free rake.’
‘You summed me up quite nicely there, Zoe,’ Anton agreed again as he slid a jacket off a hanger then closed the cupboard door again. ‘Would you like me to apologise for frightening you so badly?’
‘Will you turn this plane around to take us back to England?’
In the process of shrugging into his jacket, he paused.
‘No.’
She looked up at him when she’d been determined not to. A tight little stabbing feeling skittered down her front. He looked a million dollars again, she saw, and hated him for it because he made her suddenly aware of her own limp, dishevelled state.
‘Then your apology has about as much substance as you do as a man of honour.’ As soon as she’d said that last word it rang a fuzzy kind of bell in her head.
Frowning, she looked away from him again. But when his steady walk took him across the end of the bed then down along her side of it, she had to flick him a wary glance from beneath her eyelashes to check what he was about to do next.
Anton stopped beside her. She looked like an earth mother sitting there in a mound of feathery bedding with the boy cradled to her breasts. Only he had never heard of an earth mother with electric-blue eyes, tumbling, golden hair and a soft, pink, pouting mouth that just begged to be—
‘If I had been up front and honest with you about bringing you to Greece, would you have agreed to come?’
Pushing her hair away from her face, she shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Then my honour is intact,’ he said. ‘You could not stay where you were, and I could not place you anywhere you would have been free from the media circus except in Greece, on my private estate.’
‘On Theo Kanellis’s private island, by any chance?’
‘No, and your sarcasm is starting to wear a bit thin on me, Zoe, so be careful. I will accept that my methods were—brutal. And I will acknowledge that you have a right to feel angry and betrayed by me. But that child you cradle in your arms is half-Greek. As are you. He has a right to know his Greek family even if you don’t want to know them. Or were you planning on extending the family feud into the next Kanellis generation? If so, then you are no better than the man you refuse to call grandfather. Think about it,’ he advised as he turned to stride to the door. ‘We land in an hour. Your bag is in the bathroom; I suggest you tidy yourself before you come out of here.’
Zoe glared at his back as he reached to pull the door open. ‘Gold-digger,’ she muttered.
It froze him where he stood. She hadn’t a clue why she’d just blurted that insulting label out, but she felt her pulses pick up pace as he turned around.
The all-powerful Greek tycoon was back, she noticed. She felt tingly and breathless, the one she’d met on her doorstep this morning when he’d stood there looking as if he ruled the world. Every angle of his face was hard, cold and disturbingly immobile—and those eyes had turned back into polished jet.
‘You came to my house,’ she rushed on with defiance. ‘You sweet-talked me into letting you kidnap us. You—you scared me.’ As he was doing again now, though she was determined not to show him that. ‘For all I know you deliberately agitated the situation with the press because you knew it would work in your favour.’
A spark of self-preservation made her place her brother safely aside then scramble up off the bed. ‘What was it your henchman said in my kitchen? I hope you do know what you’re doing, Mr Pallis.’ Zoe quoted word for Greek word. ‘Well, you did know, didn’t you? Theo wants his grandson and you are going to deliver him even if it means hauling me along too.’
‘So how does all of this make me a gold-digger?’ He spoke at last, so softly Zoe felt the danger in him like a living thing reaching out towards her with long fingers coming for her throat.
Clenching her hands into fists at her sides, she tried not to be intimidated. ‘Everyone knows that until three weeks ago you were Theo’s undisputed heir. Then up we pop—Toby and me. Two previously unheard-of grandchildren of the great man himself. You’re the lawyer—you tell me how inheritance laws work in Greece. Or, better yet, explain to me again why you’ve gone to all of this trouble to get us on to this plane going to Greece?’
He was listening with a narrow-eyed intensity that caused a sudden rush of those tremors she’d been trying to hold back. She envied him his self-control in the way he continued to stand there refusing to speak.
‘Say something!’ she launched at him tautly.
‘I am waiting to hear your own conclusions before I comment,’ he responded, smooth as silk.
Zoe folded her arms across her front. The way his eyes flickered down to view this piece of screamingly defensive body language made her unfold her arms again and stick them back down at her sides.
‘You told me that Theo Kanellis is ill—so ill he can’t travel. You told me that he wants my brother and I’m only really along for the ride.’
‘I do not recall saying the latter.’
‘Yes you did. And, let’s face it, causing a huge scandal by walking off with my brother without me would not have done your reputation much good. So why have you gone to all of this trouble? Just to keep your credit sweet with my grandfather?’
She pushed on despite the shrill voice in her head telling her to stop. The man was so still he was dangerous. ‘Or do you have more far-reaching plans to do with death, inheritance and baby-boy heirs who will need a mentor? Are you planning to offer my grandfather a deal, whereby you do for Toby what Theo did for you so that you can hang on to control of his fortune and power?’
For a minute she thought he was going to throw back his handsome dark head and laugh at her. In fact there was a quivering part of her that wanted him to do that and turn her ‘gold-digger’ accusation into a complete joke—but he didn’t. Instead he held her pinned to the spot with the hard gleam in his eyes.
‘And that is your definition of a gold-digger?’ he murmured.
Pressing the tremor out of her lips, Zoe nodded.
‘Then you have missed one very salient point—there is a much less tacky way for me to keep control of Theo’s fortune, and that is through you, Miss Kanellis.’
She didn’t like the way that he’d said her name like that. ‘I—I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘I know you don’t.’ He started walking towards her. ‘Actually I feel rather sad for you that you undervalue your own importance so much.’
‘I h-have no importance.’ Twenty-two years with no word from her own grandfather had told her that.
‘You have a lot of importance,’ he insisted. ‘You see, I can achieve every one of my gold-digging ambitions by simply making you my wife and taking your brother as my son. Two for the price of one.’ He smiled, though it wasn’t a nice smile. ‘The financier in me loves the sound of that scenario. Why are you staring at me like that?’ he questioned ever so curiously. ‘You think my sense of honour won’t allow me to do it? As we have already established I have no honour. I lie and cheat and kidnap innocents.’
‘Stay where you are,’ Zoe shot out jerkily.
The gleam in his eyes became a glint like a challenge and he just kept on coming, stalking her backwards like a long, lean hunting-cat.
‘But I think your grandfather will be delighted with this marriage plan,’ he continued, talking as he stalked. ‘Greek men love such sensible business arrangements. They appeal to our macho need to be in control. A merging of our two names would be a formidable coup for me and will send Theo to his grave a very happy man. Now your eyes are flashing a very derisive electric-blue colour as you back away from me,’ he observed silkily. ‘What is it you fear the most, Miss Kanellis—me, your grandfather … or yourself?’
The final comment made her aware that her heart was racing, that she was breathing fast yet feeling strangled of breath at the same time; that her cheeks had flushed and her lips felt tingly because she could not stop staring at the crazily seductive movement of his mouth as he spoke.
‘Perhaps you are thinking that you will not agree to such a deal,’ he offered up as an answer for her, his eyes gleaming with mocking humour when her spine hit the bulkhead, leaving her nowhere else to go.
‘I have this contingency covered, of course. I will send you to Theo, and he will lock you up until you decide to change your mind. We Greek men are so ruthlessly unscrupulous I might even …’
Reaching up with a hand, he placed the tips of his fingers on the wall right beside her head. ‘Kiss you again,’ he murmured. ‘Bed you,’ he added, bringing the lean length of his body closer and closer with each silkily punctuated threat. ‘Make you my woman before we even step on to Greek soil and turn you into my—’
Zoe slapped him. She lifted her arm up and crashed the flat of her hand against the side of his face. Her palm stung because his bones were so hard but she didn’t care. She’d enjoyed slapping him!
‘Get out of my face,’ she hissed.
CHAPTER FIVE
HE DID. It actually stunned her when he did exactly that by straightening up and taking a tense step back.
For an endless space of time afterwards, they just stared at each other. The whole ugly scene they’d just enacted hovered between them in a hyperbolic spin of emotions—not all of them of the hostile variety. And that really worried Zoe. Hadn’t someone once said that a person in a captive situation can suffer a dangerous attraction for their captor? Well, she was feeling like that right now as she stood with her back flattened to the bulkhead and her legs feeling as if they were about to give way. She was sure that she hated him, but she’d also wanted him to kiss her, and that was the reason why she’d slapped his face—to smash through the frightening allure of her own feelings.
His eyes were like jet again, but burning at their centres with something so terribly intense she knew he could feel the confusion too. He’d gone pale beneath his tanned complexion, a white ring of tension circling the tense compression of his mouth. Her finger marks stood out red on his cheek like a brand and she watched with a trembling mix of defiance and fascination as they slowly faded to white.
When he moved she jumped, wrenching her wary eyes back to his, but all he was doing was releasing a low, grating breath. ‘It seems I have succeeded in behaving badly twice in one day,’ he acknowledged. ‘Please accept my apologies—again.’
Zoe couldn’t say anything because her tongue had cleaved to the roof of her mouth. After a shockingly taut few seconds of silence, with a twist of his lips he turned away from her and walked back to the door. It was only after the door closed behind him that Zoe peeled away from the wall and sank weakly down on the bed.
Phew, she thought as she released the pent up breath from her body. She felt like she’d just done ten rounds in a boxing ring—shattered, in other words, limp like a rag. And, what was worse, she was aware that she’d been the one to start that confrontation, goading him on with her ‘gold-digger’ accusations until he’d reacted.
Why had she done that? Did she really believe that he was a calculating, gold-digging monster prepared to sink to any low depth just to get his hands on her grandfather’s power and wealth? Somehow she just did not believe it yet she couldn’t work out why she did not believe it.
But then, she didn’t feel as if she knew anything for a certainty any more. When she’d got up this morning and found the letter from her grandfather lying on the doormat she’d been angry and bitter that he’d dared to write to her at all. When she’d opened her front door to find Anton Pallis standing there, she had been more than ready to take him on. Yet the more they had talked—or sparred, she amended with a quivering grimace—the more she’d begun to like him, instinctively sensing he was someone she could trust.
Did anyone with an ounce of good sense inside them trust a liar? No. So why was she sitting here wanting to believe that everything he had just said was just his angry retaliation to her ‘gold-digger’ charge?
Toby let out a yelp, reminding her that he was there.
Turning to look at him, she smiled when he hiccupped. ‘Someone didn’t wind you properly,’ she told him.
Then she remembered who that someone was: the exotic dark prince who had messed up his Italian-cut suit in his attempts care for her brother while she’d been asleep. She frowned at the pale-blue sleepsuit Toby was wearing, with its studs only half-fastened because the complicated order in which to fasten them had clearly defeated the famously intelligent Anton Pallis.
The dratted man was a disorientating mix of hard and soft, ruthless and sweet. For she did not doubt that he had taken up the task of caring for Toby as an act of penance for the way he’d scared her into a fit of blind, grief-stricken hysterics.
Stretching out across the bed, she rearranged her brother’s clothing into order then lifted him onto her shoulder to coax away the hiccups. ‘So what do we do, Toby?’ she asked him. ‘Give in to Mr Hard And Soft and agree to this trip to Greece to meet dear old grandpa? Or do we take the fight with us into the next generation?’
The baby hiccupped again, which was no help, but at least he rid himself of the problem causing them. She laid him back down on the bed. ‘Since we are almost in Greece, I suppose for now we have to put up and shut up,’ she decided heavily.
Then a sudden thought hit her. Greece … Frowning again, Zoe sat up. To enter Greece they needed passports …
Ten minutes later, freshly washed and tidied, Zoe stepped out of the door into the main cabin. As her blue eyes were about to take in the sheer opulence of her luxurious surroundings she’d been too busy panicking to notice before, she was startled into staring at the half-dozen men who rose in unison to their feet.
Lounging comfortably in his own seat, Anton raised his attention from the laptop he had open on his lap and reviewed this unilateral demonstration of respect from his staff for their passenger. He compared it ruefully to the deep freeze they had been treating him to in silent objection to his driving a grieving young woman to the place into which Zoe had tumbled due to his ruthless method for getting her onto this flight.
Even Kostas wasn’t speaking to him. His head of security did not spare him a glance as he passed by his seat on his way to greet Zoe. Returning his gaze to the computer screen, Anton sat in his splendid isolation and listened to Kostas enquiring of Zoe if she had enjoyed a comfortable rest. Polite to an inch, his tough, bulky security chief then offered to settle the boy in the installed flight-bassinette, while the rest of his staff returned to their seats.
He had glimpsed a new side to Kostas Demitris today, Anton mused ruefully, one which had wobbled years of total loyalty to him. Kostas had cornered him the moment he’d stepped out of the bedroom cabin after leaving Zoe to sleep, and he’d told him to his face that he should feel shame for the way he had behaved.
That he did feel shame was something he chose not the share with Kostas. Nor was he going to share the other forces that had been driving him at the time: sex … desire … a dangerous attraction, unwillingly felt but felt all the same. Theo’s slender young granddaughter with the vivid eyes, flowing golden hair and pale, pinched vulnerability, stoked up his senses in ways which shocked even him.
That she was prepared to take him on in a fight as if she was his equal only fired him up even more. She had Theo’s spunk, though she would be insulted if he told her so. A courageous creature with her life ripped apart, yet valiantly determined to cope. He admired her and lusted after her in equal measures. He’d felt so in tune with her from the moment he’d stepped into her tiny house that he’d failed to question if she would see what he had planned for her and her brother in the same sensible light.
He’d been a man on a mission, focused, driven by the tactical cut and thrust, and so had failed to recognise that she was so fragile the slightest knock to her defences was bound to shatter them. Now he knew he was going to live for a long time with the crucifying sounds of her grief as it poured from her.
His punishment; he deserved it. He even deserved the ‘gold-digger’ tag, when he still had not bothered to offer up a better side of himself.
Her perfume arrived first, that distinct scent of apple shampoo assailing his nostrils, and he looked up. She had changed her clothes, he noticed, the creased grey dress and black jacket had been replaced by a black tunic that made her skin look startling white and her hair, which she’d brushed away from her face then caught loosely back at her nape, was finer than silk.
‘I need to talk to you,’ Zoe said, still warily on the defensive but anxious at the same time.
‘Of course.’ He set the computer aside on the table in front of him. ‘Please,’ he invited. ‘Take a seat.’
He’d removed his jacket again, Zoe noticed, it lay folded on the seat opposite. As he indicated with one of those long brown hands to the chair beside him she bit down into the soft flesh inside her lower lip for a few seconds, not really wanting to sit down so close to him, but too aware of all the other people seemingly dedicated to observing her every move. In the end she sat down on the edge of the chair, so tense her back was ramrod straight.
‘You’ve forgotten something important,’ she told him.
‘I have?’ He frowned as he cast his mind over his meticulous planning.
‘Passports.’ She nodded. ‘Mine is in the box I gave to Kostas to look after, but Toby doesn’t have one. You’re going to have to turn this plane around because he can’t enter Greece without a passport, and I won’t have him taken away from me and stuck in some detention centre while I sort out the problem, so—’
‘All sorted,’ he cut in, feeling curiously pleased with himself that in this one area of concern he had everything covered.
Leaning down to pick something up from the side of his seat, he lifted it onto the table.
Zoe watched in frank bewilderment as he produced a fine leather document-case, set it down then fed back the zip. Sliding out the contents, he sifted through pieces of paper until he came across one bearing the official stamp of a UK government department which he passed across the table to her. Her eyelashes flickered as she looked down at it.
‘Your brother is travelling on an emergency visa,’ he explained. ‘I applied for it on the grounds of your grandfather’s ill health.’
While Zoe sat trying to absorb this information, two more pieces of paper arrived beside the first one.
‘This one is a letter from your general practitioner saying that Toby is fit to travel, and this one is from Social Services giving you permission to take your brother out of the UK. We—’
‘You—you arranged all of this without any of these people applying to me to check if I was OK with it?’ Zoe interrupted.
He nodded. ‘Mainly as a precaution because of the complications due to probate and your pending legal rights over Toby,’ he enlightened her. ‘A full passport for Toby will be couriered to you from the British Embassy in Athens in the next few days.’
Zoe was still staring at the accumulation of formal letters lined up in front of her. ‘You need a photograph for a passport,’ she murmured.
‘I took one on my phone and texted it over to the appropriate government body.’
‘When did you do that?’ she demanded, beginning to simmer inside.
‘While you were upstairs packing your things,’ was the beautifully modulated response she received. ‘With all the press you have been receiving, it needed little explanation for everyone to sympathise with your plight and be eager to fast-track the process. And I know a few useful people.’
He knew a few useful people, Zoe echoed, feeling a nice fresh wave of anger flush up from her chest until it mottled her cheeks. ‘Wealth and power have their uses, then.’
He must have heard something in her voice because he turned his dark head. There was a moment of stillness in which he tapped the tips of his fingers against the table and Zoe glared at them as the pressure inside her built and built.
‘I’m in trouble again,’ he sighed out.
‘Where is my input?’ she responded tautly.
‘I did not need it.’ His tone had turned very dry now. ‘I put myself up as your attorney, you see.’
‘And nobody thought to contact me to check your credibility?’
‘As I said—’ one of those hands made a rolling gesture ‘—everyone was very sympathetic and understood that you already had enough on your plate.’
Zoe released a little choked laugh. ‘And you are so darned charming and clever at manipulating people, aren’t you?’
‘I am told it is one of my most annoying traits.’
At last she turned her head to look at him. He was wearing a hint of a smile on his lips and a hint of a rueful apology in his eyes. Sitting back in her seat, she gave a helpless shake of her head. Charm did not even begin to cover what this man was capable of, she thought as she felt her anger die beneath the weight of her incredulity, then felt her own lips being tugged at the corners, wanting to grin.
Sensing an easing in the threatened resurgence of hostilities, Anton caught the eye of his flight steward and brought him striding down the aisle. ‘Tea for my guest,’ he ordered smoothly. ‘And ask Kostas if he will check on the baby. I heard a sound from that direction.’
Nodding, the steward went back down the aisle again. Zoe went to stand up so she could go and check Toby for herself but he covered her hand with his. ‘Stay and talk to me,’ he said huskily.
She hesitated, which was probably her undoing. It wasn’t that she wanted to stay and talk to him—he was the enemy, after all—but those fingers resting on her fingers were gentle, requesting not insisting. She looked down them, saw the difference in his skin, warm and dark against the cool paleness of her own. A now familiar heat flared in her belly, locking her into an argument with herself. She either hated him or she fancied him, but she was sure she couldn’t feel both things.