But, no, he could not do that—as Ruby had known he couldn’t, which was why she had interrupted him.
‘OK. Put him through.’ Anton strode around his desk and lowered himself back down into his chair, picked up the phone and waited for Ruby to connect the call.
He knew what was coming. Hell, he knew what was coming.
‘Kalispera, Theo,’ he greeted smoothly.
‘I want the boy, Anton.’ Theo Kanellis’s famously hard and irascible voice sounded in his ear. ‘Get me my grandson!’
‘I didn’t know you were a Kanellis,’ Susie said, eyeing with an expression of awe the famous business logo belonging to Kanellis Intracom which headed the letter Zoe had just discarded on the kitchen table with a contemptuous flick of her hand.
‘Dad dropped the “Kan” when he came to England to live.’ Because he was scared of being hunted down and dragged back to Greece by his bully of a father and forced into doing his duty, she tagged on bitterly, though she gave a different reason to Susie. ‘He thought Ellis was an easier name to use here in the UK.’
Susie’s eyes were still round as saucers. ‘But you’ve always known you are a Kanellis?’
Zoe nodded. ‘It’s on my birth certificate.’
And now it was on Toby’s birth certificate, she added silently, her eyes glossing over when she recalled where else she had been forced to use the Kanellis name recently.
‘I hate it,’ she choked, fighting back the ever-threatening burn of tears when she saw an image of herself sitting there looking at that name on two death certificates the same day that Toby’s birth had been registered.
‘Never mind about the name.’ Reaching across the table, Susie squeezed one of her hands. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’
Why not? It was currently splashed all over every type of media there was out there, because some junior reporter for the local rag had happened to notice the Kanellis name while he’d been writing up the story about her parents’ accident. He had been curious enough to follow it up with a clever bit of sleuthing. Zoe wondered if the same reporter would soon be working for one of the major tabloids; he certainly deserved the promotion for uncovering such a huge scoop.
‘It feels weird,’ Susie said, sitting back in her chair to look around the homely kitchen which doubled as a sitting-room cum everything-room.
‘What feels weird?’ asked Zoe, blinking tears from her eyes.
‘That you are the granddaughter of a genuine, filthy-rich, Greek tycoon, yet you live right next door to me in an ordinary little house smack-bang in the middle of Islington.’
‘Well, don’t start imagining this is a real-life fairy tale.’ Getting up from the table, Zoe carried their coffee mugs to the sink. ‘Cinderella I’m not, and I don’t want to be. Theo Kanellis—’ she refused to refer to him or even think of him as ‘Grandfather—is nobody to me.’
‘That’s not what this letter says, Zoe,’ Susie pointed out. ‘It says that Theo Kanellis wants to get to know you.’
‘Not me—Toby.’
Turning around, she folded her arms across the ache constantly in control of her body, unaware that she was highlighting just how much weight she had lost over the last few, awful weeks. Her hair, usually a bright and shining golden colour, hung dull and heavy from a scraped-back pony tail which emphasised the strain in charge of her face. Dark shadows circled her blue eyes and her once naturally-smiling mouth had developed a permanent down turn that only lifted when she held her brother Toby.
‘The horrible man disowned his own son! He never once attempted to acknowledge my mother while she was alive—or me, for that matter. And the only reason he’s showing some interest in us now is because he’s been shamed into it by all the negative press coverage he’s getting. And because he probably fancies moulding Toby into a better clone of himself than he made of my father.’ She sucked in a deep breath that turned out to be a suppressed sob. ‘He’s a cold and heartless, miserable old despot and he is not getting his hands on Toby!’
‘Wow.’ Susie breathed after a second of stunned silence. ‘That’s one heavy chip you carry on your shoulders there.’
You bet that it’s heavy, Zoe thought bitterly. With a bit of loving support from his thankless father, her father might not have spent the last twenty-three years tinkering with, coaxing and lovingly polishing the ancient sports-car he’d brought with him to England when he’d run away from a marriage made with the devil. It was only now, when she woke up sobbing in the night visualising the whole horrid accident, that it occurred to her that her father had needed to hang onto the stupid old car because it was his only link to home. With a more caring father of his own maybe—just maybe—her father would have been driving her mother to the hospital in something newer and more substantial. Then maybe—just maybe—the car would have protected them from the full force of the impact that had killed them both.
And she would still be in Manchester right now, studying for her post-grad and Toby, sleeping upstairs in the little room his parents had so excitedly prepared for him, would not have been robbed of the most loving parents a little boy could have.
Wow, she thought, echoing Susie as she drew the burning flood to a stop.
‘It says here that you’re to expect a visit from his representative this morning at eleven-thirty.’ Susie had returned to the letter again.
Theo Kanellis was sending a representative to deal with her because he couldn’t be bothered to come and do the job for himself.
‘That means he should be here any minute.’
Just another person in the long line of people Zoe had had walking in and out of her life over the last three horrible weeks: doctors, midwives, care workers, a hundred different departments from social services wanting to check if she was a fit carer for her baby brother, or if she qualified for any handouts. Each one of them had arrived sporting tediously long tick-box questionnaires that had intruded on her privacy but which she’d had to answer if she wanted to hang on to Toby. Yes, she had left her university studies to look after her brother. Yes, of course she was prepared to take employment if child-care facilities came with the job. No, she did not have a boyfriend she might be thinking of moving in with her. No, she was not promiscuous or irresponsible. Of course she wouldn’t leave Toby alone in the house while she went off to enjoy a girly night out. The inquisitions had gone on and on, each one of them filled with such horribly intrusive questions her skin still prickled with pique.
And then there had been the funeral people, she remembered, quiet, calm and very professional as they had walked her gently through the decisions regarding the worst arrangements a grieving daughter could ever have to make. Those arrangements had taken place three days ago and her grandfather had sent no representative to watch his only son and daughter-in-law being lowered into the ground. Had that absence been due to an awareness of the media hype, or due to sheer indifference?
Zoe didn’t know and right at this precise moment she did not care. He had not turned up. He’d stayed hidden away in his ivory tower while the press had crawled all over the funeral like feeding locusts.
Which brought her nicely to the final list of people she’d been forced to deal with these last three awful weeks—the cockroaches out there who’d crawled out of the woodwork the same day the sensational story had broken. The ones that had come banging on her door to offer her big money for exclusive rights to her story, and the ones that still camped outside her home just waiting for her to step out of the door so they could pounce. Were they out there because they cared about her and Toby’s tragic loss? No. They were there because Theo Kanellis was a recluse who hid himself away on his private island somewhere in the middle of the Aegean, and protected his privacy so well that this story was like a juicy, ripe peach they couldn’t resist