AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Oh, I really wish you would pretend that it is.’
He responded to her attempt at humour with a hard look. ‘But you will learn to judge. Learn your own style. Until you do, that’s what I’m here for.’
She fixed him with a narrow-eyed glare. ‘So you mean you’ll put the words in my mouth and tell me what to wear.’ She folded her arms across her chest and directed a belligerent stare up at his face. ‘I’m not a puppet.’
‘No. From where I’m sitting you are...’ He completed the sentence in a flood of angry-sounding Greek before finally dragging a hand through his dark hair as he sat there, lips compressed, dark eyes burning.
‘I don’t understand Greek.’
‘I said,’ he gritted out, ‘I am trying to protect you, but if you would prefer I throw you to the wolves...?’
As their eyes connected, glittering black on gold, a strange little shiver traced a slow, sinuous path up her tension-stiffened spine.
‘What is this? Set a thief to catch a thief, or in this case a wolf to catch a wolf?’ It was true, there was definitely something of the lean, feral predator about him, which she could see might appeal to some women.
‘For your information, I have not spent my life in a protective bubble and I’ve been coping without a guardian angel—which, for the record, is definitely major miscasting—all my life. I resent being treated like a child.’
Were you ever a child? he wondered as his glance moved in an unscheduled slow sweep over her slim, tense figure, oozing hostility, before coming to rest on the outline of her lips. The dull throb in his temples got louder as he saw faceless wolves drawn to the delicious invitation of their plump pinkness.
The barrier of his clenched teeth did nothing to shield him from a fresh onslaught of painful desire. Alekis had put him in a ‘rock and hard place’ position. He couldn’t lay a finger on her without betraying the trust the older man had, for some reason, placed in him and he couldn’t walk away, either.
‘So, we are going to the island.’
‘It doesn’t take long by helicopter.’
Kat felt reluctant to admit she’d never flown in one. ‘And do your family live there too? Is that how you know Alekis?’
A look she couldn’t quite put a name to flickered in his eyes. It was gone so quickly that she might have imagined it.
‘No, my family do not live there.’
‘But you have family...?’ she asked, remembering how he had spoken about his mother’s death. ‘They were there for you after your mother died?’
‘You think because our mothers are dead that gives us something in common? It does not.’
She flushed. If he’d tried to embarrass her, he’d succeeded. Did he think she didn’t know they came from two different worlds? That she needed him to point out they had nothing in common, that he had been raised in a world of wealth and privilege that she knew she would never fit into.
Being orphaned was always an awful thing for any child, but in Zach’s world there were cushions...nannies, good schools. None could replace maternal love, but it helped if you had the support structure of a family, especially one that meant you didn’t stand out because your clothes were not the latest fashion, or you had no holiday to talk about at the start of a new school term.
‘You really do worry about family, don’t you? Well, relax—yes, I did have family.’ His lips curled in a cynical smile of remembrance. ‘An uncle who is now happily dead and a grandmother who is a great deal pleasanter now that she doesn’t remember my name, or, for that matter, her own.’
Shock reverberated through his body, none of it showing on his still shuttered face as he realised he had just revealed more to her than he had to another living person. Not even Alekis knew the details about his life before they had met, and here he was spilling his guts to this woman, with her ridiculous sentimentality, virtually inviting her to walk around in his head!
Was this a new symptom of sexual deprivation?
She looked at his bleakly beautiful face and felt her heart squeeze with sympathy. His comment had been sparing in detail, but you didn’t need to have worked with children caught in the firing line of family conflict to recognise that Zach’s childhood had not been what she’d imagined.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, wondering uneasily how many of her other assumptions about him were wrong.
‘There is no need to be sorry,’ he sliced back coldly. ‘It is the past.’
Did he really believe it was that easy? she wondered, remembering all the times when she was growing up that she had wished that her past were a painless blank. That she didn’t have the snatches of memories that made her sad, while filling her with a nameless longing.
Glancing at his shuttered face, she recognised that she had pushed him as far as she could on the subject. She changed tack. ‘So, what is your connection to Alekis?’
‘I wonder about that sometimes myself.’
Before she could voice her frustration at this deliberately unhelpful response, he added, ‘Your grandfather helped me when no one else would.’
