‘It is not your place to be ashamed of me.’ Yanking out the sheet she pinned it tight across her breasts. ‘You are my captor not the keeper of my morals. Look after your own morals, Anton, since they have more sins to answer than mine do.’
‘I can’t believe I fell for this,’ he muttered, having turned himself back into a statue again.
‘Fell for what?’ Pulling herself up against the pillows, Zoe stared at him in growing anger.
‘You and your clever bit of reverse psychology,’ he enlightened her. ‘You accused me of being a manipulating gold-digger, when all the time you’ve been busy plotting how best to protect your own interests!’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Zoe told him. ‘Where,’ she demanded, ‘In what just happened between us, was I protecting my own interests?’
‘You were a virgin.’
Flushing to the roots of her tumbled hair, she peeled out sarcastically, ‘Oh, thanks for reminding me. I forgot.’ ‘You are Theo Kanellis’s granddaughter.’
‘Just another unfortunate truth I would much rather not be reminded of.’
‘If you wanted to stick a knife through my relationship with Theo, you could not have come up with a better way of doing it.’
‘That’s one Machiavellian conversation you’ve got going with yourself there,’ said Zoe, picking up a spare pillow from the bed and hugging it tightly to her front. ‘Tell me, how does it work that me having sex with you sticks a knife in your relationship with Theo?’
‘You were a virgin.’
‘Will you stop saying that?’ Zoe launched at him, trembling in disgust.
At last he turned to look at her, his proud dark head thrown back. His nostrils flared as he took in some air, contempt spilling from his polished jet eyes onto her hot embarrassed face. ‘You were a virgin!’ he repeated like it was the vilest swearword. ‘Now I will have to marry you before Theo finds out what I have done!’
Marry her? Beginning to feel as if she was stuck in one of those living nightmares which never ever made any sense, Zoe stared at the spectre playing the starring role. She would not have been surprised if he’d grown horns and hooves. He had the body of a Greek god and the mind of a convoluted madman. And the hard, arrogant and beautiful face of a prince of darkness.
Shuddering inside the sheet at her own crazed imagination, she hugged the pillow all the tighter. ‘I am not about to confess to him that I let you do this to me,’ she assured him icily. ‘I mean, why would I want to? You were right, by the way. I am now very ashamed of myself.’
‘You are deliberately not following me.’ He sounded oddly strained suddenly. Glancing up, Zoe tracked where he was looking and realised the sheet was not covering a creamy hip and a long thigh.
Yanking the sheet into place, she decided to say nothing. It was useless to try anyway because she could feel hot tears beginning to build in her eyes and her throat burn.
‘In all honour, I will have to tell him. So you’ve won, Miss Kanellis. You have damned me in your grandfather’s eyes and protected your inheritance!’
‘In all honour?’ Zoe forced past the tears. ‘How dare you talk to me about your honour? You don’t have any honour!’ Hanging on to the pillow she scrambled off the bed because she could no longer sit there while he spilled his disgust out all over her.
‘Twenty-four hours ago you were a stranger to me—just the the substitute son standing in place of my father with your lofty head stuck into Theo’s billions, while Toby and I hid away like sewer rats from your sleazy press! I have just lost both of m-my parents.’ Her voice thickened and wavered as the tears momentarily won out. She pulled in a strained, unsteady lungful of air.
‘Did you care about that when you turned up on our doorstep? No. You just doubled the press hype without a care because it was more important that you jumped and danced to m-my grandfather’s tune in an effort to protect your own position in his life!’
‘Zoe …’
‘Shut up!’ she whipped out thickly, too upset now to see the pallor currently robbing his face of its tan. ‘You’ve had your say, now it’s my turn! I will repeat this very clearly and will even have it written down and sign it in triplicate if you like: I do not want my grandfather’s money! So you’re safe, Mr Pallis—safe from me, from marriage and from any other rotten thing you feel like throwing at me!’
It was only when she felt his fingers tremble slightly as he brushed a tear from her cheek that she realised he’d moved in that close. She stepped back, raising up the pillow to swipe the tears away for herself.
‘I thought that we had both just lost control tonight, but …’ she mumbled.
‘We did.’
She turned her back on that one, having forgotten that she was wearing nothing but the pillow, unaware that Anton was clenching his teeth, his jaw and his fists in an effort not to reach for the sheet to cover her up. It felt so wrong to further embarrass her. He had done enough. He wished he knew what had been driving him to say all of those things because, now that sanity had returned to him, he knew he had been spouting a load of rubbish.
‘I thought it was kind of inevitable—the way we’ve been sparking off each other all day.’
‘It was,’ Anton husked, then gave in to the need to protect her dignity and reached for the sheet, carefully dropping it across her trembling shoulders. ‘You’re so cold you’re shivering,’ he used for an excuse.
Zoe grabbed the flowing edges of the white cotton and hugged them to her, then spun around.