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.