CHAPTER THREE
‘HE’SYOURGRANDFATHER.’
He watched as the bemused confusion drawn on her face froze and congealed. As her wide eyes flickered wide in shock.
It took a conscious effort for Zach to hold on to his objectivity as she gasped like a drowning person searching for air. She sucked in a succession of deep breaths.
‘I have no family.’ Her voice was flat, her expression empty of the animation that had previously lit it. ‘I have no one, so I can’t have a grandfather.’
He pushed away an intrusive sliver of compassion and the squeeze of his heart and hardened his voice as he fell back on facts, always more reliable than sentiment.
‘We all have two grandfathers, even me.’
Another time she might have questioned the significance of the even me but Kat was in shock. The sheer unexpectedness of what he had said had felt like walking...no, running full pelt into a brick wall that had suddenly appeared in the middle of a flower-filled meadow.
‘I don’t even know who my father is, other than a name on a birth certificate.’ It had never crossed her mind to track down the man who had abandoned her pregnant mother. The decision to search for her mother had not been one she had taken lightly, though, as it turned out, she had already been five years too late. ‘Why should I want any contact with his family?’
Zach narrowed his eyes, recalling the one line in the file on the man Alekis’s daughter had married in defiance of her father’s wishes. ‘He might have a family, but I don’t have that information.’
‘I don’t understand...’
‘It is your mother’s family, or rather her father, that I am representing.’
She listened to his cold, dispassionate explanation before sitting there in silence for several moments, allowing her disjointed thoughts to coalesce.
‘She had a family...’ She faltered, remembering bedtime stories, the tall tales of a sun-drenched childhood. Was even a tiny part of that fantasy based on reality? The thought made her ache for her mother, far away from home and rejected.
‘Your grandfather is reaching out to you.’
Shaking her head, Kat rose to her feet, then subsided abruptly as her shaking legs felt too insubstantial to support her.
‘Reaching...’ She shook her head and the slither of silk down her back rippled, making Zach wonder what it would look like loose and spread against her pale gold skin. ‘I don’t want anyone reaching out to me.’ Her angry amber eyes came to rest accusingly on his handsome face. She knew there was a reason she had never trusted too-good-looking men besides prejudice and the fact the man who had spiked her drink all those years ago had been the one all the girls in the nightclub had been drooling over. ‘Is this some sort of joke?’
‘It is real.’ As real as the colour of those pain-filled, angry, magnificent eyes.
‘He’s rich?’
Her words did make it sound as though a yes would be a good thing. This was not avarice speaking, he realised, but anger. The former would have made his life a lot easier.
‘He is not poor.’
Her trembling lips clamped tight, the pressure blanching the colour from her skin as she fought visibly for composure.
‘My mum was... She was poor, you see...very poor.’ She eyed him with contempt, not even bothering to attempt to describe the abject hand-to-mouth existence that had driven her mother to drugs and the men who supplied them. A man who looked like him, dressed like him and oozed the confidence that came from success and affluence could not even begin to understand that life and the events that trapped people in the living hell of degradation.
‘Yes.’
One of the reasons she rarely mentioned her early years was the way people reacted. She mentally filed them into two camps: the ones that looked at her with pity and those that felt uneasy and embarrassed.
His monosyllabic response held none of the above, just a statement of fact. Ironic, really, that a response she would normally have welcomed only added another layer to the antagonism that swirled inside her head as she looked at him. By the second he was becoming the personification of everything she disliked most in a person. Someone born to privilege and power without any seeming moral compass.
Ignoring the voice in her head that told her she was guilty of making the exact sort of rush or, in this case, more a stampede to judgement that she’d be the first to condemn, she sucked in a deep sustaining breath through flared nostrils.
Despite her best efforts, her voice quivered with emotion that this man would definitely see as a weakness. ‘He didn’t reach out to her...’
‘No.’
Her even white teeth clenched. ‘Where was he when his daughter needed him? If he makes the same sort of grandfather as he made father, why would I want to know him?’