‘No,’ Sally declared steadily, her troubled face set with strong determination. ‘This is my moment to make a sacrifice for everything I took from the two of you years ago and nothing you can say or do will change my mind on that score.’
Well, we’ll just see about that, Elvi thought defiantly as she lay in her bed that night, listening to her mother toss and turn, as unable to find sleep as her daughter. The mother she loved as much as she loved her little brother. Yet her mother had been her father’s first wife, a Finnish nurse, tragically mown down by a car in a hospital car park within months of Elvi’s birth. Her father had met and married Sally when Elvi was two years old and Elvi had no memories whatsoever of her birth mother. Her Scandinavian background came down to some faded photos and a handful of letters from an elderly Finnish grandma, who had died while she was still a child. For Elvi, family meant everything and she truly wished that her mother would accept that she and Daniel had long since forgiven her for her blunders.
After all, it wasn’t as though Sally had wanted to become an alcoholic. Shattered by the sudden death of the husband she had adored, left alone to raise a six-year-old and a toddler, Sally had fallen apart in the grip of her grief and had slid into addiction by using alcohol as a crutch. Sally had had no other relatives to turn to for support and no close friends either because shortly before her husband’s death, he had moved them all across the country to accept a new job. No, Elvi had sufficient compassion and understanding not to blame her mother for all their woes, nor was she willing to stand by and watch Sally undo all the progress she had made in recent years.
But realistically, what could she do?
Go and speak to Xan Ziakis in the hope that there was a streak of mercy beneath that designer suit and that frightening reputation for ruthless aggression and financial self-aggrandisement? Some hope, she mused wretchedly, feeling horribly weak and small and powerless. Xan Ziakis was feared in the City of London for his refusal to ever play as one of a team and his disdain for alliances, temporary or otherwise. He worked alone and her mother had never seen any evidence of a woman having been in his penthouse. Maybe he was gay...
No, not him, Elvi decided, shifting quietly beneath her duvet, remembering with shame a period when she had been almost obsessed by a need to see him daily. She didn’t like to think about it but a sort of juvenile crush had engulfed her when she first saw Xan Ziakis. Not before time, she told herself drily; after all, life might have been all swings and not much roundabout throughout her unsettled and unhappy adolescence, but she was now twenty-two years old even if she was still almost as innocent as a child. Even so, she still recalled the single scorching appraisal Xan Ziakis had given her months ago and the flame that had leapt through her like a soaring torch along with the surprise of its effects on her body. No, he definitely wasn’t gay, she was convinced. But the shock had been that a man who looked as he did could look at her that way.
She was no show-stopping beauty and she bore not the smallest resemblance to the giraffe-legged bone-thin models she had seen on his arm in images on the Internet. Five feet two inches tall, she had white-blonde hair down to her waist, blue eyes and the sort of generous curves that made buying clothes a nightmare. She kept her hair long because the unusual colour was the one thing she liked about herself. As for the big breasts, the overly large bottom and the thick thighs, anyone was welcome to them. If only she had been the gym-bunny type, she reflected, but she hated gyms, hated dieting, hated getting on the scales and loved her food far too much. He must have been looking at the boobs, she thought ruefully.
Would the boobs get her into his presence? Embarrassed by her own thoughts, she winced, but she wasn’t in a position to be precious about what it might take to get a meeting with Xan Ziakis. He was a very powerful, influential and wealthy man, whose staff probably guarded access to him as if he were a solid platinum trophy to be seen only by the fortunate and equally rich and important few. So, approach him at home? Or at his office?
He was way too private in his lifestyle to be approached at his penthouse. It would have to be the office. Shortly before dawn when Sally had fallen into a restless sleep, Elvi crept out of bed, having finally decided what to do next. Since she doubted the likelihood of Xan being willing to grant her a personal interview, she would write him a letter, telling him what she needed to say. It was worth a try, she thought limply, and better than doing nothing. Only just, her intelligence warned her.
On Daniel’s laptop, she began to tell their family history, but only after humbly apologising for both troubling Xan and the theft. She wished it had been possible to tell him the truth but, like her mother, she reckoned it would be too dangerous to put Daniel back in the suspect corner. If she told Xan Ziakis the truth, he could easily drop the charges against her mother and instead pursue her brother and, even worse, he could then use the very letter she was writing against her family. Maybe writing anything down on paper was too dangerous, she thought fearfully, stopping in her task several times with a chill on her skin as she tried not to envisage even worse consequences coming their way.
But what other option did she have? Appealing to a man who might well have no heart was the only road she could take, and only then, if he was willing to see her, would she see him and plead her family’s case to the best of her ability. Having to lie and state that her mother must have succumbed to an inexcusable moment of temptation distressed Elvi, but since Sally had already owned up to the theft with the police she didn’t have much choice. She begged him to drop the charges because he had got his valuable artefact back. Did Xan Ziakis have any compassion? Was it possible that a man who had so much could be decent enough to be human and caring too?
The letter in an envelope squarely marked ‘private and confidential’ in one corner, Elvi waited on the pavement outside the Ziakis headquarters at eight that same morning. An assistant in a craft shop, she didn’t start work until nine. And, according to her mother’s idle chatter over the months, Xan Ziakis had a schedule that ran like clockwork. He left the penthouse at eight and travelled by limousine to his office seven days a week. Seven, she reflected wryly, a man who worked every day of the week for his success. Well, she could hardly criticise his work ethic.
The big black limousine drew up. The driver only opened the door after another car drew up behind and four men in dark suits sprang out. Looking on in dismay, Elvi registered that Xan Ziakis was guarded by a ring-of-steel protection before he even got a polished shoe out of his limo. Even so, she moved forward, her legs turning strangely wobbly as Xan himself emerged into daylight, blue-black hair gleaming like polished silk, his flawless bronzed cheekbones taut below dark deep-set eyes, his lean, powerful body encased in an elegant suit that fitted him like a second skin, and there she froze.
‘Get back!’ someone said to her and, disconcerted, she retreated several steps still clutching her envelope.
Her quarry stalked on into the building...out of sight, out of reach, and she felt sick with failure, her face drained of colour, her eyes bleak.
A man appeared in front of her then, an older man, and there was something vaguely familiar about his craggy face. ‘Is that letter you’re gripping about your mother?’ he asked bluntly. ‘I work for Mr Ziakis too—’
‘Oh,’ Elvi said, taken aback by his approach. ‘Yes, it’s about Mum—’
‘Then give it to me,’ he urged. ‘I’ll see that it reaches the boss’s desk.’
In a daze Elvi looked up and saw the kindness in his gaze. ‘You’re—?’
‘Dmitri,’ he supplied, twitching the letter out of her loosening grasp. ‘I know your mother. I can’t promise that the boss will read it or anything but I can put it on the desk.’
Elvi blinked. ‘Thank you very much,’ she murmured with warmth.
‘No problem. She’s a lovely lady,’ Dmitri told her, walking off again at speed and vanishing into the building while tucking her letter into a pocket.
And Dmitri, whoever he is, doesn’t think Sally Cartwright’s a thief, Elvi realised as she climbed on a bus to get to work and mulled over that surprising encounter. Just as well, considering that she had frozen like an ice sculpture when she saw Xan Ziakis, not that she thought his bodyguards would have allowed her anywhere near him, because someone had told her to get out of the way. Dmitri? One of the other three men?
It didn’t matter, she decided as she stocked shelves of knitting wool at work. The letter might land on Xan’s desk but, as Dmitri had said, that didn’t mean he would actually bother to read it or even more crucially respond to it.
But in that Elvi was mistaken. Xan was so disconcerted by the unexpected sight of his head of security covertly sliding an envelope onto his desk, when Dmitri clearly thought he was unseen, that nothing would have kept him from opening up that letter out of sheer human curiosity. Xan skimmed down to the signature first: Elvi Cartwright. He knew that name w
ell enough and he also knew he should’ve been prepared for the tactic in such a situation. Instantly he wanted to crumple the letter up and bin it without reading it. That would have been the cautious way to deal.
Even so, although Xan was very cautious with women, he couldn’t bring himself to dump the letter unread. A couple of months ago, he had noticed her, well, really, really noticed her, he acknowledged grimly, and he had instructed Dmitri to find out who she was, assuming that she lived in the same apartment block. He had, however, learned that she was his maid’s daughter, which had naturally concluded his interest. Billionaires did not consort with the daughters of their domestic staff. The gulf was too immense, the risk of a messy affair too great.
And yet, all the same...the letter still unread, Xan drifted momentarily into the past, recalling Elvi Cartwright with intense immediacy. The shining pale-as-milk hair, the wonderful blue eyes, the crazy natural glow of her, not to mention the extraordinary fact that she looked very different from the sort of women he usually slept with and yet, inexplicably, one glance at her turned him on harder and faster than any of them.
She was a bit overweight, he supposed abstractedly; hard to tell when he had only ever seen her in a loose black jacket that swamped her. Very short in stature, not his type, absolutely not his type, he told himself sternly as he shook out the letter, more concerned by Dmitri’s bizarre involvement in its delivery than by what it might say. If he couldn’t trust his head of security, who could he trust? Why had Dmitri got personally involved in so tawdry an incident?
Xan had a scientific approach to everything he read. Elvi’s use of English was far superior to what he would have expected and then he began reading and what he read was most educational from his point of view even if, by the end of it, he couldn’t think why she expected him as the victim to want to do anything about Sally Cartwright’s self-induced predicament.