Reaching up with a hand, he placed the tips of his fingers on the wall right beside her head. ‘Kiss you again,’ he murmured. ‘Bed you,’ he added, bringing the lean length of his body closer and closer with each silkily punctuated threat. ‘Make you my woman before we even step on to Greek soil and turn you into my—’
Zoe slapped him. She lifted her arm up and crashed the flat of her hand against the side of his face. Her palm stung because his bones were so hard but she didn’t care. She’d enjoyed slapping him!
‘Get out of my face,’ she hissed.
HE DID. It actually stunned her when he did exactly that by straightening up and taking a tense step back.
For an endless space of time afterwards, they just stared at each other. The whole ugly scene they’d just enacted hovered between them in a hyperbolic spin of emotions—not all of them of the hostile variety. And that really worried Zoe. Hadn’t someone once said that a person in a captive situation can suffer a dangerous attraction for their captor? Well, she was feeling like that right now as she stood with her back flattened to the bulkhead and her legs feeling as if they were about to give way. She was sure that she hated him, but she’d also wanted him to kiss her, and that was the reason why she’d slapped his face—to smash through the frightening allure of her own feelings.
His eyes were like jet again, but burning at their centres with something so terribly intense she knew he could feel the confusion too. He’d gone pale beneath his tanned complexion, a white ring of tension circling the tense compression of his mouth. Her finger marks stood out red on his cheek like a brand and she watched with a trembling mix of defiance and fascination as they slowly faded to white.
When he moved she jumped, wrenching her wary eyes back to his, but all he was doing was releasing a low, grating breath. ‘It seems I have succeeded in behaving badly twice in one day,’ he acknowledged. ‘Please accept my apologies—again.’
Zoe couldn’t say anything because her tongue had cleaved to the roof of her mouth. After a shockingly taut few seconds of silence, with a twist of his lips he turned away from her and walked back to the door. It was only after the door closed behind him that Zoe peeled away from the wall and sank weakly down on the bed.
Phew, she thought as she released the pent up breath from her body. She felt like she’d just done ten rounds in a boxing ring—shattered, in other words, limp like a rag. And, what was worse, she was aware that she’d been the one to start that confrontation, goading him on with her ‘gold-digger’ accusations until he’d reacted.
Why had she done that? Did she really believe that he was a calculating, gold-digging monster prepared to sink to any low depth just to get his hands on her grandfather’s power and wealth? Somehow she just did not believe it yet she couldn’t work out why she did not believe it.
But then, she didn’t feel as if she knew anything for a certainty any more. When she’d got up this morning and found the letter from her grandfather lying on the doormat she’d been angry and bitter that he’d dared to write to her at all. When she’d opened her front door to find Anton Pallis standing there, she had been more than ready to take him on. Yet the more they had talked—or sparred, she amended with a quivering grimace—the more she’d begun to like him, instinctively sensing he was someone she could trust.
Did anyone with an ounce of good sense inside them trust a liar? No. So why was she sitting here wanting to believe that everything he had just said was just his angry retaliation to her ‘gold-digger’ charge?
Toby let out a yelp, reminding her that he was there.
Turning to look at him, she smiled when he hiccupped. ‘Someone didn’t wind you properly,’ she told him.
Then she remembered who that someone was: the exotic dark prince who had messed up his Italian-cut suit in his attempts care for her brother while she’d been asleep. She frowned at the pale-blue sleepsuit Toby was wearing, with its studs only half-fastened because the complicated order in which to fasten them had clearly defeated the famously intelligent Anton Pallis.
The dratted man was a disorientating mix of hard and soft, ruthless and sweet. For she did not doubt that he had taken up the task of caring for Toby as an act of penance for the way he’d scared her into a fit of blind, grief-stricken hysterics.
Stretching out across the bed, she rearranged her brother’s clothing into order then lifted him onto her shoulder to coax away the hiccups. ‘So what do we do, Toby?’ she asked him. ‘Give in to Mr Hard And Soft and agree to this trip to Greece to meet dear old grandpa? Or do we take the fight with us into the next generation?’
The baby hiccupped again, which was no help, but at least he rid himself of the problem causing them. She laid him back down on the bed. ‘Since we are almost in Greece, I suppose for now we have to put up and shut up,’ she decided heavily.
Then a sudden thought hit her. Greece … Frowning again, Zoe sat up. To enter Greece they needed passports …
Ten minutes later, freshly washed and tidied, Zoe stepped out of the door into the main cabin. As her blue eyes were about to take in the sheer opulence of her luxurious surroundings she’d been too busy panicking to notice before, she was startled into staring at the half-dozen men who rose in unison to their feet.
Lounging comfortably in his own seat, Anton raised his attention from the laptop he had open on his lap and reviewed this unilateral demonstration of respect from his staff for their passenger. He compared it ruefully to the deep freeze they had been treating him to in silent objection to his driving a grieving young woman to the place into which Zoe had tumbled due to his ruthless method for getting her onto this flight.
Even Kostas wasn’t speaking to him. His head of security did not spare him a glance as he passed by his seat on his way to greet Zoe. Returning his gaze to the computer screen, Anton sat in his splendid isolation and listened to Kostas enquiring of Zoe if she had enjoyed a comfortable rest. Polite to an inch, his tough, bulky security chief then offered to settle the boy in the installed flight-bassinette, while the rest of his staff returned to their seats.
He had glimpsed a new side to Kostas Demitris today, Anton mused ruefully, one which had wobbled years of total loyalty to him. Kostas had cornered him the moment he’d stepped out of the bedroom cabin after leaving Zoe to sleep, and he’d told him to his face that he should feel shame for the way he had behaved.
That he did feel shame was something he chose not the share with Kostas. Nor was he going to share the other forces that had been driving him at the time: sex … desire … a dangerous attraction, unwillingly felt but felt all the same. Theo’s slender young granddaughter with the vivid eyes, flowing golden hair and pale, pinched vulnerability, stoked up his senses in ways which shocked even him.
That she was prepared to take him on in a fight as if she was his equal only fired him up even more. She had Theo’s spunk, though she would be insulted if he told her so. A courageous creature with her life ripped apart, yet valiantly determined to cope. He admired her and lusted after her in equal measures. He’d felt so in tune with her from the moment he’d stepped into her tiny house that he’d failed to question if she would see what he had planned for her and her brother in the same sensible light.
He’d been a man on a mission, focused, driven by the tactical cut and thrust, and so had failed to recognise that she was so fragile the slightest knock to her defences was bound to shatter them. Now he knew he was going to live for a long time with the crucifying sounds of her grief as it poured from her.
His punishment; he deserved it. He even deserved the ‘gold-digger’ tag, when he still had not bothered to offer up a better side of himself.
Her perfume arrived first, that distinct scent of apple shampoo assailing his nostrils, and he looked up. She had changed her clothes, he noticed, the