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Hard enough to accept she had wanted him physically, but accepting that she had fallen in love with Zach had been one of the hardest things in her life. She prided herself on being truthful but this was one truth she had been avoiding because she had known it would hurt—she just hadn’t known how much!
‘You could make an excuse...’
Kat’s chin went up. ‘Why should I?’ She wasn’t the one who had done anything wrong.
* * *
Zach, drawing eyes and more than a few camera clicks in his dress suit, stepped back into the shadows, and the limo that drew up disgorged the members of a new girl-band group.
The paparazzi went crazy and Zach’s patience grew thin. His offer to travel over to Tackyntha to escort Kat had been politely refused by someone who was not Kat or even Selene.
He was being given the runaround. The only surprise was that nothing of what had happened between he and Kat seemed to have filtered through to Alekis as yet.
The past two weeks had been a sort of hell Zach had never experienced before. Normally in times of stress he was able to bury himself in work until it passed, but not on this occasion. He couldn’t concentrate, a unique experience for him, so work was impossible.
His volatile mood had swung from anger and frustration—he hadn’t asked for any of this—and then on to black despair. It was crazy but he was missing her, not just the physical stuff, although that had been incredible, but stupid things like the sound of her voice...her laugh, the way she wrinkled up her nose.
The woman was haunting him.
Logic told him that a man couldn’t fall in love so quickly, but the same logic told him that love, the romantic variety, didn’t exist outside romance novels.
He’d believed that before Katina had walked into his life.
And now? Now he didn’t know what the hell he felt, and her words kept coming back to him. ‘You won’t have any sort of a future until you come to terms with your past.’
He was the one with the problem.
It still made him angry, but Zach had started to wonder if she could be right.
He had rejected the idea that he was a coward hiding behind his past and unable to face the future, but the more he thought about it... Tonight would give him a chance to connect again. Maybe there was some sort of middle ground?
He dashed a hand across his head. Middle ground? What the hell was he thinking?
He was thinking of kissing her—just sinking into her warmth—as he had been from the second she had walked away from him. He had struggled not to run after her. He had begun to wonder what would have happened if he had—maybe their passionate affair would already have burnt itself out?
Or she might have killed him.
A half-smile on his lips, he stepped forward again. This time the limos had arrived in a block of three.
The door to the first opened and a platinum blonde got out, wearing a glittery silver dress that was so figure-hugging it appeared painted on. She rocked a little on her heels as she paused to pose for cameras even though no one seemed that excited about her and her escort’s arrival.
‘Well, I hear that Alekis’s little heiress will be here tonight. I wonder if she’s as much of a slut as the mother was.’
‘Was she?’ the man asked.
‘God, yes, and a druggie... I hear that the girl is just like her. Alekis found her in some sort of refuge and I hear that before that she was actually living on the streets.’
The woman with the uniquely unattractive voice had begun talking as she emerged from the car. Standing at the top of a long flight of stone steps, Zach nonetheless heard every word of this conversation.
He stepped in front of the doormen.
The woman looked him up and down, her painted lips widening into a smile. ‘Oh, hello, how nice to see you again, Zach. Darling, it’s Zach.’
Zach, who had not to his knowledge ever seen either of them before, waited until she had finished listing to her long-suffering partner all the times they had met him previously.
‘I heard you speaking—actually I think several people heard you speaking—about Miss Katina Parvati,’ Zach observed, pitching his own voice to carry. It was a message he did not mind sharing. ‘I did not like what I heard. Obviously anyone with an ounce of sense will recognise spiteful lies and malice when they hear it. But I feel it only fair to warn you that should I hear those lies repeated anywhere online or in person I will have no compunction but to put the case in the hands of my very litigious legal team. And after they have finished with you I am sure that Alekis Azaria might enjoy watching his own team picking at your bones. His granddaughter is a person so superior to the likes of you that I find it offensive that you breathe the same air!’
‘Zach!’
