‘Well, open your eyes and look at me while you repeat that!’ Slamming her untouched glass down, Zoe lurched to her feet on a quiver of trembling limbs.
He did it. He lifted up his heavy eyelids and looked at her. Zoe tensed up on a protesting gasp. ‘How dare you look at me in that way right now?’
Easy, thought Anton, watching her quiver with fury inside the apricot-coloured dress. One swift move on his part and he could take her away from all of this, here, right now, on Theo’s couch. It was a much more tempting prospect than allowing this particular conversation to drag out to its miserable conclusion. Hot sex on the crest of a tidal wave of wild emotions; he could even taste the pleasure of it inside his mouth. And he could read from her body language that she was struggling not to let herself respond to it from the warm cheeks, the shivering heave of her breasts, the hands curled into tight fists at her sides.
She looked him in the eyes and she wanted him. It had always been like that from the start.
‘Say no to your grandfather’s money, agape mou …’ Distract to divert; he knew exactly what he was doing. ‘Walk away from it—with me—right now. I can promise you, you will never regret it. An hour, and we can be back home enjoying the kind of siesta that turns your beautiful bones to wax.’
‘My—my grandfather is sick and you want to—’ Almost choking on the words, she turned her back on him in disgust—though which of them the disgust was aimed at was a moot point, Anton mused as he watched her wrap her arms around the hammering thump of her heart.
‘And Toby?’ she flung back. ‘You were the one who told me I should think about him instead of myself.’
‘I can take care of my own,’ he countered. ‘Toby will want for nothing so long as he remains in my care.’
It was strange how a few supposedly reassuring words could turn her crowding senses into pin pricks of ice. She swung back around to face him. ‘In your care as what—guardian of his fortune, by any chance?’
So they were back to that again. Narrowing his eyes on her challenging stance, he warned carefully, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t turn this back into a gold-digging charge unless you’re ready for a hard fight.’
Zoe flicked her hair back off her shoulders, the desire to remain suspicious of him warring with a deeper instinct that told her he wasn’t in this for the money-spinning power. ‘So, if you are not in this to get control of Theo’s money, tell me again why you bothered to bring us here at all,’ she demanded. ‘And then tell me why he accused you of wanting revenge.’
His silence held a kind of power of its own as he continued to lounge on the sofa, studying her through those narrowed, simmering sardonic eyes. She was not able to read the look, and it made the silence hang like an axe between them because nothing on earth was going to make her back down until he had answered the charge. But beneath her folded arms her stomach muscles felt quivery and tight because she needed so badly to hear him crush the life out of that word revenge, with some crystal-clear reasoning she had not managed to work out for herself just yet.
When he continued to say nothing, and eventually uncoiled his long body until he was on his feet, she found herself having to fight the urge to take a defensive step back. The enemy … Those two little words floated into her head and stayed there, reminding her of what she had stubbornly allowed herself to forget.
He stood there in what he considered casual clothes and looked a million dollars, the tall, tough tycoon with fabulous good looks and eye for style bred into him. There wasn’t an inch of him that she could find to criticise—of a physical nature, that was. But what did she know about the real man, that inner core that never showed itself even when he trembled in her arms as they made love?
He was a stranger to her, and a ruthless one, or she would not even be here in Greece, Zoe concluded. She did not like herself right now for allowing herself to be seduced into believing he was anything else.
‘Answer me, Anton,’ she demanded, too worried now to bother to hide the anxious quaver in her voice.
He glanced down at the glass he was still holding, noticed it was empty and walked back to the drinks cabinet. Following him with her eyes, Zoe felt an aching clutch of pending agony begin to stir in her chest because she knew she was about to hear something that was going to rend her apart.
‘I am not out for revenge on anyone.’ It came out cool and flat as he splashed brandy into the bottom of the glass.
She felt for the right words. ‘But there is—is a reason why you might be?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded.
Zoe took a moment to pull in a breath. ‘And this—reason concerns my father.’ This time it wasn’t a question but a measured assumption. ‘Why did Theo choose you to take my father’s place all those years ago?’
There it was—the big question. The one Anton had been waiting for her to ask him from the moment the two of them had first met. Pulling a wry face at the golden liquid resting temptingly in the glass, he set it aside, schooled his expression into an impassive mask then turned around to face her again.
‘Because Theo felt he owed it to me,’ he answered levelly.
The way she was standing there with her arms still tensely folded and her vivid blue eyes fixed on him, showing her strain, he knew that she knew she was about to learn something that was going to crucify her perfect vision of the father she loved.
And he was the man who was going to do it. If he’d ever considered taking revenge on Leander Kanellis, then the success should taste very sweet right now.
But it did not taste sweet. It tasted like poison.
‘You already know that your father ran away from an arranged marriage.’ He made himself go on. ‘What you do not seem to know is that the woman he left standing at the church altar was my recently widowed mother.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘YOUR … mother?’ He’d said it so calmly Zoe almost missed the horrendous impact of the words themselves.
‘It was supposed to be the great business-merger of two formidable families,’ he said with a brief, grim smile. ‘Theo wanted to merge his company with my grandfather’s company. My grandfather drove a hard bargain, insisting the only way they would merge was if their two children married to cement the deal.’