‘And then what?’ Elvi prompted with anxious impatience.
Daniel studied her in almost childlike discomfiture. ‘Then the doorbell went and Mum rushed out to answer it and I kept the pot hidden in my hand because I didn’t want her to see what I’d been doing. Unluckily for me, the man at the door worked for Mr Ziakis too and he was there to tell me that I shouldn’t be in the apartment in the first place and that I should be waiting for my mother downstairs. He made me leave immediately, like...he was sort of nice about it but I had no chance of putting the pot back with him standing there—’
‘For goodness’ sake, Daniel!’ Elvi erupted in vehement protest. ‘You should’ve handed it to him straight away! The minute you stepped out of that apartment door with it, you labelled yourself a thief—’
‘Yeah, you think I don’t know that now?’ Daniel traded with laden irony. ‘But I gave way to panic and I concealed it, brought it home and stuck the blasted thing in a drawer. I planned to ask Mum to put it back for me tomorrow but apparently the housekeeper reported it missing when she turned in for work in the evening, so that was that. I missed the boat and—’
Stupid, stupid, stupid, repeated in Elvi’s head but she didn’t let the word pass her lips because she could see that her sibling was already painfully aware that he had acted like an impulsive and reckless total idiot. ‘When did the police get involved?’ she interposed.
‘This morning...they arrived with a search warrant and of course they found it. Mum asked me to go into her room to get her handbag and while I was in there she may have confessed to taking it because by the time I came back out again because I couldn’t find the blasted thing she was being arrested and read her rights,’ he revealed chokily, gulping back more unmanly sobs. ‘We need a solicitor—’
Elvi was thinking hard and fast but coming up with nothing. Her brain was still in shock. She wished she didn’t know as much about her mother’s fabulously wealthy employer as she did. He was the guy with the colour-coded closets and alphabetically arranged books. He had a desk that must never be touched and a bed that had to be changed every day. Her mother’s duties in his apartment were hedged in by a very detailed list of do’s and don’ts. That in the flesh the same male looked as though he had stepped straight out of a glossy magazine advertisement as a supermodel for designer apparel had struck Elvi as uniquely unfair.
She had read up about her mother’s employer on the Internet, learning more that had made her grind her teeth together. Why? Because, Xan Ziakis seemed to have been born under a very lucky star, blessed by every conceivable attribute, and all he seemed to have learned from his remarkable good fortune was a marked tendency to behave as though he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Of course, maybe he did, she allowed ruefully, because nobody could possibly be that perfect in the real world. When she was still meeting her mother out of work to accompany her to AA meetings, she had seen Xan Ziakis coming home on several occasions while she sat waiting in the foyer of the luxury apartment block. And he was gorgeous to look at, absolutely, unmistakably gorgeous.
* * *
‘I did the only thing I could,’ Sally Cartwright confided hours later as she sat with her adopted daughter in the bedroom they shared. In her forties, she was a slender brunette with anxious green eyes now lined and shadowed with strain.
‘It wasn’t the only thing,’ Elvi argued in a low voice, neither of them wanting Daniel in the next room to overhear them. ‘You could’ve told the truth, both of you—’
‘And do you really think anyone would have believed us?’ her mother demanded tearfully, her cynicism unhidden. ‘We’re poor and down on our luck. Why? Because I wrecked all our lives, brought us down from a normal happy family to this!’
‘This’, expressed by a shamed hand gesture, encompassed the grim surroundings of their council flat in a tower block. But it was the guilt infused by Sally’s bitten-back sob that worried Elvi the most, fearful as she was that her mother’s distress would drive her back to alcohol. She knew better than to fall into reasoned argument with her mother on the score of her culpability because essentially the older woman was stating the unlovely truth.
At the time of Elvi’s father’s sudden death, the Cartwright family had been financially secure. They had owned their home and Sally had been a respected teacher in a girls’ school but alcohol and a tide of growing debt had washed that safe, comfortable life away. Inevitably, Sally had lost her job and Elvi had left school at sixteen to find work. Like bricks tumbling down in a child’s game, everything they had once taken for granted had been taken from them until they’d reached rock bottom and became homeless.
From there it had been a slow climb back to security, a very slow climb, Elvi acknowledged wryly, but until this theft incident occurred their lives had steadily been improving. The three of them had rejoiced the day Daniel was accepted into medical school because it had been the first positive event they had had to celebrate in a very long time. Sally was so proud that, in spite of all that they had lost, Daniel had kept on studying and finally won through against such stiff competition because places to study medicine were very much oversubscribed in the UK. The threat of Daniel being ruined by one foolish mistake could destroy her mother all over again, Elvi thought with a sick sinking sensation in her stomach.
‘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.