The Kanellis Scandal

‘It will have by the time we reach it,’ said the man used to organising anything. ‘Go and do what you need to do. You can leave the boy where he is,’ he added when she went to pick Toby up again. ‘I’ll watch over him.’

Zoe was about to demand if he knew how to look after a baby, but he’d already turned away and was talking on his phone. With a shrug, Zoe left him to it. There was a part of her—a lurking part—questioning if she knew what she was doing, placing herself and Toby in the hands of the enemy. But for some reason she did not want to look too deeply into the question. And it did not stop her from packing a couple of bags then slipping into the bathroom to take her shower.

By the time she came back downstairs again, Anton had been joined in the kitchen by a thick-set man wearing a black suit. They were talking in low voices but when they heard her step into the room both men stopped abruptly and looked at her. Zoe stilled, aware that she’d interrupted something important. Her gaze went from the newcomer’s tough, impassive features to Anton’s even harder-to-read face. Even his eyes had taken on a shadowy lustre which made her think of dark veils.

Those eyes scanned her then disappeared completely behind his thick black eyelashes for a second before he brought them back to her face. She thought she saw a muscle twitch at the corner of his mouth but could not be absolutely sure of it because the mouth then stretched out a brief smile.

‘This is Kostas Demitris, my head of security,’ he told her.

Drifting her blue gaze back to the other man she nodded her head in acknowledgment and he did the same back to her.

‘Kostas will make sure his men see that your home is secure once we have left it,’ Anton continued, bringing her gaze back to him. ‘Anything you think you might need from here that we cannot take with us now, tell Kostas and he will see that it follows us. It also would be wise if you gather together any personal documents you have around the place, so we can take them with us too—for safe keeping.’

She parted her lips with the intention of questioning that particular command—and it had been a command, even if he’d made it sound like advice—but Anton got in first with, ‘We can secure the house to the best of our ability but once we have left here we cannot predict the determination of certain—low life—if they decide to take a look around in here in search of a new scoop.’

Not liking the image that he’d just planted in her head, of some sleazy person deciding to ransack her home while she was away from it, once again Zoe parted her lips to say so.

‘It is a precaution, nothing more,’ he inserted again. ‘Kostas likes to be thorough in his forward planning.’

Shifting her eyes back to the other man, he offered a confirming nod. ‘Anton is used to this level of precaution, Miss Kanellis. It is the down side of living a high-profile life.’

Zoe took in a breath, ready to protest that her life wasn’t high profile, then stopped herself. She could not argue that it was certainly high profile right now.

Both men were standing there waiting for her agreement. That questioning voice in her head asked her again why she was allowing them to take control like this. Then she thought of Lucy next door, scared and upset by those people out there; too-close-to the-surface tears formed together with an aching lump in her throat. With a mute nod, she gave them what they wanted, then walked over to Toby’s cot and bent over it, glad that her freshly washed and dried hair slithered forward to hide the bleak expression on her face.

The scent of freshly sliced apples

filtered up along the sunbeam glistening in the silky fall of her shining hair and entered Anton’s nostrils. He had a battle on his hands not to inhale deeply. In truth he was struggling to keep a lot of things together, not least his libido, which had been in a state of stirring defiance since she’d walked back into the room. For the pale and thin, grief-stricken creature who had walked out of here half an hour ago showed little resemblance to the one he was looking at now.

This one was quite ravishingly beautiful, a breathtaking upgrade of the younger version he’d seen in the newspaper the day all of this had begun. Gone was the appalling baggy red cardigan, the scraped-back dull hair and the faded jeans. This version wore a dramatically plain shift dress in the most amazingly classy dove-grey jersey fabric which skimmed the fragile curves of her slender figure and finished halfway down the length of her long, slender thighs. OK, so the dress was a size too big right now because she had lost weight, but the promise of what still hid beneath it tantalised his imagination—as did the rest of her legs covered in stretchy black leggings and the delicacy of her slender white ankles elevated by her black platform shoes.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Kostas growled at him in softly spoken Greek.

The sharp-sensed devil had picked up on what was happening to him, Anton realised. ‘Just concentrate on your job,’ he flipped back.

‘She is—’

‘This is probably a good moment to tell you that I am bilingual,’ Zoe informed them both in beautifully fluid Greek as she straightened up from her brother’s cot. She looked at them, vivid blue eyes like icy darts now. ‘And I hope you do know what you are doing, Mr Pallis, because if you think you are softening me up to be a pushover, you could not be more mistaken if you tried.’

She did not miss the dark hue which coloured the face of Kostas Demitris as she said that, even though her gaze was focused on his employer, who showed no such embarrassment at being caught out discussing her in a language they’d believed she could not understand.

Anton Pallis merely relaxed his stance, leaning back against the kitchen sink again and slid his hands into trouser pockets. The action pushed back the edges of his jacket to display the long solidity of his muscular torso trapped inside the clean, crisp whiteness of his shirt and the delineating line of his slender silk tie. Something suspiciously close to sensual heat flared low in Zoe’s belly as she grazed her eyes lower over his narrow hips then the long length of his legs to the shiny tops of his handmade leather shoes.

‘So you don’t hate everything Greek, then?’ he murmured, bringing her gaze skittering all the way back up him again to become trapped by the spark of amusement she could see in his impossibly dark eyes.

She looked away again, but felt slightly breathless. ‘I would have to hate my own father to do that.’

‘And part of yourself, since you are half Greek. Get to it, Kostas,’ he tagged on without changing the soft intonation in his voice.

Kostas Demitris muttered something beneath his breath as he jerked into movement. Feeling as if she was about to be left alone with a dangerous animal, Zoe turned chicken and decided to escape. ‘Can I show you what I need bringing from upstairs?’ she asked Kostas. ‘And I will need to give you the box containing my personal papers.’

With that she walked back into the hallway, leaving Anton staring at his shoes, ruefully smiling to himself.

All hint of humour had left him as they assembled in the narrow hallway half an hour later. Kostas had control of the door; Anton stood against the wall, his demeanour silent and grim as he studied the downturned profile of Zoe Kanellis. What light application of make-up she had applied was useless as a cover up because the strain was back on her face—the ravaged hollows, the barely steady set of her lips. She had pulled on a black jacket and she was trying to fasten the buttons with fingers that shook. On the floor in front of her the baby slept on, oblivious to the silent tension pulsing all around him, Anton saw, looking at the contraption the child slept in which he’d been told doubled as a car safety-seat.

He wanted to touch her in reassurance. It played on his senses like an itch he could not scratch. The pulling-on of the jacket had somehow placed a defensive space around her that he recognised instinctively would earn him another shrinking rejection, like the one he had suffered when he’d first arrived here, if he tried to cross it.

She did not want to do this, which was another reason why he was holding himself back from making any risky moves. She’d had time to think about what she’d agreed to and he held a suspicion that the only thing stopping her from changing her mind was the tempting prospect of the sanctuary he had promised her, with the all-important no strings attached.