It sounded so coldly calculating; Zoe shivered. ‘But my father was only eighteen years old,’ she said. ‘How old was your mother?’
‘Thirty-two—not that the ages of either of them mattered.’ He grimaced. ‘My mother had grown up doing as her father told her. She strove all of her life to make him proud.’
‘She gave him a grandson. In Greek terms, that should have made him very proud.’
‘Defending my place in this sorry tale, agape mou?’ Anton murmured dryly. ‘You surprise me.’
‘I was thinking of your poor mother, not you,’ Zoe countered. ‘You said she’d been recently widowed. Did she love your father?’
‘“Love” is not a word I would use to describe their relationship, though I was perhaps too young to understand it. I recall frost and fights and long empty spaces in which we never saw him.’ He gave an idle shrug. ‘My grandfather ruled our home, not my father. My father changed his name to Pallis as part of the deal when he married my mother. The wonders of vast wealth,’ he tagged on cynically. ‘And my father?’ Zoe ventured. ‘Was he ruled by his father?’
‘Most people would have believed so until Leander disappeared on his way to the church. He surprised everyone when he did that,’ Anton recalled whimsically. ‘In fact, the shock was so great it gave my grandfather a heart attack which killed him. My mother shut herself away in a convent and eventually died there a few months later of humiliation and shame.
‘While she was doing that,’ he continued in the same shatteringly calm way, ‘Your grandmother, on her way to England to beg her son to come back home and do his duty to his family, was killed when the helicopter she was travelling in crashed into the Aegean—Theo lost the only woman he had ever loved.’
Edging carefully backwards, Zoe lowered herself down on the sofa before her trembling legs gave away. Her grandmother; dear God. ‘I can see now why Theo never forgave him,’ she murmured across the fragile edge of her breath.
But even more painful was the realisation that her father had been living for all those years since with the heavy burden of guilt for his own mother’s death.
Leander had never managed to forgive himself.
Suddenly it all began to make such a terribly sad kind of sense: her father’s refusal to talk about his Greek family, the way his eyes would cloud over whenever Greece was mentioned on the TV. Even her mother, her quiet, gentle mother, must have known that their marriage had been built on the worst of foundations—guilt and grief.
‘Theo was left alone, deeply embittered,’ Anton continued. ‘While I became a ten-year-old multi-millionaire orphan and was left to rot in a boarding school while my so-called trustees milked the Pallis Group of its most lucrative assets. I was twelve
years old by the time Theo won the right to take control of my interests. He took me in. He gave me a home and a more constructive education. When I reached the age of twenty-five, he handed the Pallis Group back to me in a healthier state than it had been before it all happened, then told me to go out there and get on with the job of keeping it that way.’
Zoe’s eyelashes fluttered across the glaze of her eyes. ‘You love him,’ she whispered.
‘I love him,’ Anton confirmed in a quiet statement of fact. ‘He appears hard and tough, but what he really was back then was a lonely man nursing a badly broken heart who needed someone to care about him, just as I needed someone to care what happened to me.’
‘So he adopted you.’
‘He did not adopt me. He took care of me.’ ‘And you h-hate my f-father.’
‘I don’t hate anyone.’ He sighed out heavily. ‘Unless it’s the media mob who threw us both into this situation we now find ourselves in. And even then I can only mildly hate them, because while they have been so busy trying to discover what we are going to do next they have forgotten to check out the past to find out the reason why Leander disappeared in the first place. No, don’t faint on me,’ he said as she swayed where she sat.
Closing the gap between them at speed, he came to squat down in front of her, picked up her discarded glass of brandy and tried to make her drink some of it, but Zoe shook her head in refusal. Her mind was spinning dizzily with what he’d just said. Her father’s death had thrown them into this situation.
A situation built on lies, sex and desperately dark secrets. ‘We are the past repeating itself,’ she whispered. ‘And you do want revenge.’
‘For crying out loud,’ Anton ground out impatiently, ‘I do not want revenge!’
‘So what is it you do want?’ Zoe fired back.
Snapping his lips together, he said nothing. Zoe let out a strangled choke of a disbelieving laugh. She could see it all suddenly, and so very clearly. ‘You’ve been pushing for marriage between us almost from the first hour we met. I should have known there was more to it than you wanting to throw the press off our case. What were you intending to do? Were you planning to avenge your mother’s humiliation by leaving me standing at the altar while the organ played, thanks for the memories but I’ve had what I wanted and made a fool of you, now I’m off?’
He dared to laugh. Zoe almost lashed out and hit him. Instead she scrambled out from within the circle of his spread thighs and sprang to her feet.
‘How, how many times do I have to tell you that I don’t want Theo’s money?’ he sighed out impatiently.
‘As many times as you’ve plugged the marriage thing and I still won’t believe you—on either count!’
Since he was still holding her glass of brandy, he tossed the liquid to the back of this throat then rid himself of the glass. ‘Theo’s will has not changed in twenty-three years,’ he informed her harshly. ‘His son has always been his heir, with any offspring of Leander’s next in line in the event of Theo outliving his son! And if you are about to demand how I know all that, then I will tell you,’ he ground out, stopping the very words from forming on her trembling lips.
‘I hold all of Theo’s personal papers because I am the only person he knows he can trust! I will keep faith with that trust no matter what labels others want to hang on me,’ he vowed. ‘Are you prepared to keep to your promises to me, Zoe?’ he said then, facing her off across a two-foot gap that sang with angry challenge. ‘Or do you intend to run away from your responsibilities to Theo like your father did?
The room literally rang with his final comment. Zoe stood shivering beneath its angry blast. Everything she had previously believed about her father’s exile from his father had just been tipped on its head. Now Anton was slaying her with the full, blunt truth of what her father had done. He’d run away from his responsibilities because he just couldn’t face up to them. She didn’t blame him for doing it. He’d loved her mother—oh God, how he had proved that—but that was not the issue here. Anton was asking if she was prepared to do for her grandfather what her father had not been prepared to do.