A Passionate Night With The Greek

‘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?’

‘I don’t know...’ He arched a satiric brow and pretended to consider the answer. ‘He’s rich?’

Her chin lifted to the defiant angle he was getting very familiar with. It was a long time since Zach had been regarded with such open contempt.

Better than indifference!

The knee-jerk reaction of his inner voice brought a brief frown to his brow before he turned his critical attention to the play of expression across her flawless features. He had never encountered anyone who broadcast every thought in their heads quite so obviously before.

The concept of a professional guard would be alien to her. Though in her defence, this wasn’t professional to her—it was very personal. He was getting the idea that everything with this woman might be.

For someone who compartmentalised every aspect of his life, the emotional blurring was something that appalled him.

‘So you’re of the “everyone has a price” school of thought,’ she sneered.

‘They do.’

His man-of-few-words act was really starting to get under her skin.

‘I don’t. I’m not interested in money and...and...things!’

He arched a satiric brow. ‘That might be a more impressive statement if you hadn’t come here with a begging bowl.’

She fought off the angry flush she could feel rising up her neck. ‘That is not the same.’

He dragged his eyes up from the blue-veined pulse that was beating like a trapped wild bird at the base of her slender throat. This might be the moment he told himself to remember that the untouched, fragile look had never been a draw for him. He had no protective instincts to arouse.

‘If you say so.’

His sceptical drawl was an insult in itself.

‘I am not begging. This isn’t for me.’

He cut her off with a bored, ‘I know, it is for the greater good. So consider that for the moment—consider how much you could help the greater good if you had access to the sort of funds that your grandfather has.’

He allowed himself the indulgence of watching the expressions flicker across her face for several seconds before speaking.

‘You see, everyone does have a price—even you.’

‘There is no even me. And I’m not suggesting I’m a better person than anyone else!’ she fired back.

Zach watched her bite her lip before lifting her chin and found himself regretting his taunt. As exasperating as her attitude was, she had just received news that was the verbal equivalent of a gut punch.

And she had come out fighting.

‘If you say so.’

She blinked hard, not prepared to let it go. ‘I do say so, and,’ she choked out, ‘I really don’t want to know the sort of person who would abandon his daughter.’

‘Maybe she abandoned him?’

The suggestion drew a ferocious glare. On one level he registered how magnificent she looked furious, on another he realised that he was now in uncharted territory—he was playing it by ear. Zach trusted his instincts; his confidence was justified but, in this instance, it had turned out to be massively misplaced.

The unorthodox role assigned to him had been unwelcome, but he had approached it as he would anything. He’d thought that he had factored in all the possibilities...had considered every reaction and how to counter them to bring about the desired outcome with the least effort on his part.