He just continued to stand there as if it wasn’t happening, protected by a semi-circle of space created by three big-set men wearing immaculate black suits who stood with their backs to him forming a tough-guy ring of protection around his personal space.
Finally managing to drag her gaze downwards a little, Zoe found herself staring at the uncompromisingly sensual shape to his unsmiling mouth. Inside she was a mixed-up mess of stirring emotions she couldn’t even recognise. She was even mesmerised by his whole dynamic breath-stopping stance—the never-a-hair-out-of—place demeanour he was displaying, the relaxed set of his wide shoulders inside the dark jacket which didn’t quite obscure the long lean rock-solid contours of his body beneath a crisp white shirt and sober dark tie. The sheer elegant quality of his whole manner screamed indomitable self-confidence at Zoe and drove the power of his personality home, a million stinging pinpricks attacking her unsuspecting flesh.
For the first time in three weeks, she became acutely aware of her own shabby appearance—the old pair of jeans she had dragged on this morning that had seen better days and the itchy knowledge that her hair was in need of a good wash. One of her hands clutched the edges of an old red cardigan together across the pounding pump going on behind her ribs. The cardigan was her mother’s and she’d been wearing it all week, a big, fluffy, unsightly thing she hugged to her for comfort and because it kept giving her wafts of her mother’s delicate scent.
He parted those beautifully moulded pair of lips and spoke to her. ‘Good morning, Miss Kanellis,’ he greeted in the most quietly modulated and beautiful voice. ‘I believe you are expecting me.’
He sent Zoe’s head reeling for a completely different reason: for the smooth, deep cultured tones of his Greek accent sounded so like her father’s voice to her that it actually physically hurt.
Anton watched as Zoe closed her eyes and swayed in front of him. She looked as if she was going to faint. If he’d thought she’d looked stricken when she’d stood on the steps of the hospital in the photograph three weeks ago, it was nothing to how she looked right now—brittle. She looked painfully brittle, white-faced, pinched and frail enough for a puff of wind to blow her off her feet.
Biting back a soft curse, he acted on instinct and stretched out a hand with the intention of catching hold of her but she opened her eyes again, saw his hand coming towards her and shrank away from it as if it was an attacking snake.
Shock stunned him into stillness for a second. Something close to affront clawed down his front; it took grim grit and determination to stop his feelings from showing on his face. Aware of the media circus going on behind him, he tried to think fast. She did not need all of these witnesses watching her every move and expression. He did not want them to read her expression. What he needed was to get the two of them inside the house with the door shut before she stopped staring at him like that and started spitting insults at him—or, worse, slammed the door in his face.
‘Shall we …?’ he murmured very smoothly and took a step forward into the house.
As he was about to take the door from her grasp so he could close it, Zoe snatched her hand away from the risk of his touch. A fresh flare of affront struck at his pride but he kept on going, swinging the door shut behind him without allowing his expression to reveal anything—he hoped.
Silence clattered around them the moment the door closed. She was several feet away from him by now, hovering like a trapped bird, with her face still frighteningly pale and her eyes still fixed on his face.
She had the most startling pair of electric-blue eyes, he noticed, and a trembling crushed-strawberry mouth. Something kicked into life low down in his gut but he ignored the sensation, annoyed with himself for feeling such a fierce sexual tug at a time like this.
‘My apologies,’ he said gravely, ‘For entering your home without your invitation to do so. I thought it best that we conduct our business without all the witnesses looking on.’
She didn’t speak. She just blinked at him, long—indecently long—golden-brown eyelashes moving in a slow movement; he had the weirdest feeling that she wasn’t even seeing him. And she was clutching the most peculiar red garment across her breasts as if it was the only thing holding her upright.
‘Let me try again,’ he persisted, vaguely aware that they were standing in a hellishly narrow hallway with a set of steep stairs shooting up on his left. ‘My name is—’
‘I know who you are,’ Zoe breathed out in a trembling whisper.
He was the man whose name had been bandied about in the media as much as her own name had been. He was the man Theo Kanelli
s had put in her father’s place. ‘You’re Anton Pallis.’ Theo Kanellis’s adopted son and heir.
CHAPTER TWO
A NEW kind of silence tumbled down between them. It crackled and spat with what Zoe Kanellis was not saying, though Anton saw her contempt for him beginning to write itself on her face.
He offered a wry smile. ‘You have heard of me, then.’
The way she shot his smile a shrivelling glance killed it dead. ‘I would need to be deaf and blind not to have heard of you, Mr Pallis,’ she cut back, then just spun on her heels and walked off towards the rear of the house, leaving him to follow—or not. Her manner told him she was certainly not going to give him encouragement either way.
You are going to owe me big time for this one, Theo, Anton mused grimly as he took a moment to take in more of his surroundings. The house was tiny, a typical Victorian mid-terrace property with a steep, narrow staircase and two pine doors leading off the hall. It was all nicely decorated and a fawn-coloured carpet covered the floor. But, if he’d ever bothered to wonder how Leander Kanellis had lived since he’d walked away from one of Greece’s wealthiest families, not in a million years would he have imagined he lived like this.
Zoe had disappeared through the farthest door; pulling in a breath, Anton followed in her wake. He found her standing in a surprisingly large kitchen which seemed to double up as a sitting room, a big, blue sofa and chair forming a comfortable seating-area. A television occupied one corner. A coffee table littered with tabloid newspapers stood between it and the sofa. The other half of the room was mainly taken up by a large wooden table dominating the floor space around which cheap, pine units were fixed to the walls.
He saw the baby paraphernalia stacked up on top of one of the units, the kind of things that were completely alien to him except in a purely abstract sense. A tiny cot-like thing stood near the sofa, though he could see no baby lying in it.
‘He’s asleep upstairs.’
She’d caught him looking. Turning around to face her, Anton opened his mouth to ask if the boy was doing OK, but she got in first.
‘The media hype out there disturbs him when he’s down here, especially when they start ringing the bell. So I put him to sleep upstairs at the back of the house where the noise doesn’t carry so much.’
‘You did not contact the police to have them moved away?’ he asked, frowning.
She stared at him as if he’d just grown an extra head. ‘We are not the royal family, Mr Pallis. The police say they can’t do anything, and asking that lot to give us our privacy at this sad time doesn’t work for us. Excuse me for a moment.’