Irresistible Greeks: Dark and Determined: The Kanellis Scandal / The Greek's Acquisition / Along Came Twins…

‘Your father used to say—what?’ he prompted very gently.

But Zoe shook her head. The subtle change he’d made to her words didn’t stop her from feeling deeply that she’d mentioned her father in the present tense. She did it a lot. She still turned to speak to her mother only to find she wasn’t there. She had been going to say that her father had always said material wealth did not matter. Love mattered.

‘I met him a few times,’ Anton said quietly, bringing her face slowly back around so she could look at him. Her eyes looked huge again, and so damned vulnerable. ‘I was quite small and he appeared very much a grown-up to me, though he could have been only eighteen. He took me out on the lawn to play football. No one had ever done that with me before.’

Needing to swallow before she could speak, Zoe prompted, ‘Your own father?’

‘He’d died the year before. I barely remember him. He was always going off somewhere on a business trip and was much too busy being powerful to play football with me. We are here,’ he said, sounding as if he was glad of the excuse to call a halt to that line of conversation.

Zoe turned her head in time to watch the front police-car peeling away. The next second the car they were travelling in was slowing down to make a left turn and they were driving through a pair of big gates. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the two police cars had pulled across the gap into which the gates were in the process of closing behind them. Beyond the police cars the chasing pack had all pulled to a stop in a long line. She could feel their frustration as they climbed out of their vehicles and stared helplessly at their disappearing car. There was even the promised big fence cordoning off the area. Relief skittered down her spine as she turned to look forwards again.

And that feeling of relief died immediately. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded jerkily.

‘Our next mode of transport,’ Anton replied.

‘But—but that’s a plane!’

Taking a look out of the car window at the sleek lines of the Pallis private jet, Anton drawled, ‘So it is.’

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_dfdc00e9-fe3d-54da-8cc6-8fe4f662bda6)

CONFUSED and trying not to let the tiny nub of alarm she could feel inside her start to balloon, Zoe murmured, ‘You said a helicopter.’

‘A slight change of plan,’ Anton countered with the smoothness of balm.

‘So we are flying in—that—to your house?’

He watched as his chauffeur climbed out of the car. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed.

His eyes wore a polished jet look to them that Zoe couldn’t read. Having to moisten her lips, she found that they were trembling. ‘And wh-where is this house?’

Perhaps she should have asked that question a long time ago. In fact she was angry with herself that she hadn’t, because there was something about Anton Pallis now that put her senses on stinging alert. He was still reclining in the corner of the car but she was picking up danger signals that made her reach out with a hand and close it around the handle on Toby’s seat.

And he had not answered her question. A new kind of tension sizzled in the air. The chauffeur appeared outside Anton’s door and went to open it for him, but with a tap from the back of his fingers on the glass he waved him away without removing his attention from her.

‘We are going to Greece, Zoe,’ he told her.

‘Greece?’ She said it as if she had never heard of the place. ‘But—but I don’t want to go to Greece. And—and you said …’

‘I never actually said that my house was here in England,’ he pointed out as if she was supposed say, Oh, that’s all right, then. My mistake!

But Zoe wasn’t going to say that. Zoe wasn’t going to Greece. ‘Not me, Mr Pallis, and not my brother,’ she told him on a sudden spurt of movement, and started releasing Toby’s seat from its safety restraints.

‘So where are you intending to go?’ he questioned curiously.

‘Back home, where I belong.’

‘And how are you going to get there?’

‘I will walk if I have to! All the way down that road we’ve just driven along and straight to the police still hanging around the gate. Or the press,’ she added, tight lipped and shaking in her determination to get out of this car as fast as she could. ‘Why the heck should I not go to the papers and let them decide if this makes you a lying, cheating, kidnapping rat?’

At last he showed some emotion with an impatient hiss from between his even white teeth. ‘I may have lied by omission but I am not a cheat and I am not kidnapping you.’

She fumbled in her efforts to release the car seat. ‘What do you call this then—a holiday?’

‘Yes!’ he snapped, sitting up out of his corner.

‘And who is waiting at the other end of this plane journey, Mr Pallis. Theo Kanellis, by any chance?’

The way she scythed out both names as if they poisoned her to say them set Anton’s teeth on edge. ‘No,’ he denied, then sighed and reached over to clamp a hand on the side of Toby’s seat when she tried to pick it up. ‘Will you just stop doing that and listen to me?’

‘Listen to more of your lies? Do you think I’m an idiot?’ She closed both hands over the baby-seat handle. ‘You told me to trust you and I did!’ she acknowledged bitterly. ‘Now look where it’s got me!’

‘You can trust me,’ Anton insisted. ‘We are not going to Theo! On my honour, Zoe, the promise of a sanctuary in my home was the truth.’

And pigs might fly, thought Zoe scornfully. She was forced to let go of Toby’s seat with one hand so she could feel behind in search of the door catch so that she could escape. ‘I should have known your nice behaviour was fishy,’ she said shakily. ‘You are his loyal representative, after all. No wonder my father steered well clear of you lot, people like you would have eaten a gentle man like him for breakfast and thrown away the bits.’

‘This isn’t about Leander.’

‘Don’t you dare call him that!’ She flared up with spectacular force. ‘He is Mr Ellis to you. Ellis, because he couldn’t stand to use the Kanellis name and now I know why—he knew what you were like!’

‘I am not a Kanellis, Zoe,’ Anton said heavily. ‘And this is not what you think. I accept I did not tell you the full truth about where we are going but—’

He ripped out a curse as she began to shiver, all of her shaking like a slender volcano about to erupt, and she’d gone as white as the proverbial sheet.

‘Zoe, listen to me— Damn,’ he muttered when her door flew open and she began scrambling out of the car.

Anton threw open his door, strode around to her side of the car at speed and reached her side as she turned to bend and collect her brother. Teeth seared together behind his tight lips, he looped an arm around her and hauled her backwards before she could get a firm grip on the baby seat. She wriggled and kicked out at him, he dumped her on the tarmac then spun her around to face him.

‘Just listen,’ he insisted, half-angry, half-pleading. ‘I am sorry I’ve upset you this badly.’

Upset me? Zoe threw her head back and looked at him. He actually blanched when he saw the electric-blue pools of her eyes spinning his wretched betrayal into the hard angles of his face.

‘I hate you,’ she choked. ‘You duped me all the way! We were safe in our little house. You made it impossible for us to stay there. You, and my grandfather playing your power games. And if you don’t let go of me right now, I’m going to start screaming my head off!’

Pulling in a deep breath, she opened her mouth to carry out the threat. Anton’s mouth landed on hers with enough power to plug the threatened scream back down her throat. Even he was shocked that he’d used such a method to stop her. Yet once it was done the idea of drawing back again did not enter his head. Her lips were already parted and trembling with tears; he felt their tongues touch and heat explode between them like some unknown, powerful force. She was still sobbing but she kissed him back with hungry urgency. Where it had all come from, he didn’t think even she understood.

Across the airfield by the closed gates a line of telescopic cameras lifted in unison to record the kiss. His team of people all stood watching their controlled, sophisticated employer ravish Theo Kanellis’s granddaughter, when every one of them knew they’d been embroiled in one hell of a row inside the car only seconds before. And still the passion pulsed between them like a wild, living thing. He held her pressed up against him and the hardening of his body made her choke out a groan in dismay.

Wrenching her lips free from his, she gasped out in quivering rejection, ‘That was just gross!’

Anton felt two strikes of heat score across his high cheeks. ‘But you still joined in,’ he grated back unsteadily—unsteadily because his breathing had gone haywire. He didn’t know himself like this.

‘You—you—’ Zoe ran out of words on a thickened stammer. Her lips felt swollen and hot. Things, senses, were crawling around inside her, aiming stinging strikes at certain intimate parts of her body, from the tightened tips of her crushed breasts to her achingly heavy pelvis where he still held her pressed against the hard evidence of his own response. Even her hair roots were tingling, the long loose strands lying like a splash of gold across one of his shoulders because of the way he had tilted her head.

And the way he was looking down at her, as if he was contemplating kissing her again, shot fear and excitement through Zoe in equal amounts.

‘Let go of me,’ she breathed into the burning passion stamped onto his handsome face.