All hint of humour had left him as they assembled in the narrow hallway half an hour later. Kostas had control of the door; Anton stood against the wall, his demeanour silent and grim as he studied the downturned profile of Zoe Kanellis. What light application of make-up she had applied was useless as a cover up because the strain was back on her face—the ravaged hollows, the barely steady set of her lips. She had pulled on a black jacket and she was trying to fasten the buttons with fingers that shook. On the floor in front of her the baby slept on, oblivious to the silent tension pulsing all around him, Anton saw, looking at the contraption the child slept in which he’d been told doubled as a car safety-seat.
He wanted to touch her in reassurance. It played on his senses like an itch he could not scratch. The pulling-on of the jacket had somehow placed a defensive space around her that he recognised instinctively would earn him another shrinking rejection, like the one he had suffered when he’d first arrived here, if he tried to cross it.
She did not want to do this, which was another reason why he was holding himself back from making any risky moves. She’d had time to think about what she’d agreed to and he held a suspicion that the only thing stopping her from changing her mind was the tempting prospect of the sanctuary he had promised her, with the all-important no strings attached.
Kostas was talking quietly into his mobile; he turned to send Anton a look. With a nod of his head he acknowledged it, aware that his conscience was not happy right now. He was a liar and he knew it. And the only reason why he was determined to let this continue was his belief that what he was doing was for hers and the boy’s own good.
‘My car is parked right outside the door.’ He broke through the tension with his voice carefully level. ‘My people will attempt to maintain a corridor for us to reach it. However, I am afraid we can do nothing about the way the media will react once they see us. It will be noisy and intimidating. The trick is to fix your attention on the open car door and walk straight into it.’
Zoe pressed her pale lips together and nodded that she understood.
‘Try to keep in your mind that once we have left here they will leave, and your neighbours will retrieve their peace and quiet.’
Staring down at Toby sleeping snugly in his car seat, she nodded again.
‘Will you allow me to take care of your brother?’
This time she looked up. Those amazing eyes were burning with so many conflicting things, from uncertainty in what she was doing to straight-out anxiety and fear, that Anton broke his own constraints, reached out and rested his fingers beneath her chin. Her skin felt like the finest silk.
‘Trust me.’ He uttered his biggest lie yet, then watched her lips tremble as they parted. ‘I do,’ she told him.
It was no reassurance. In fact his own expression turned so tough even he felt its harshness as he bent to grasp the handle of the child’s seat. As he straightened up again he looked at Kostas, who said something into his mobile then turned to open the door.
Zoe’s heart was throbbing in her mouth even before the din hit her. The afternoon sunlight spilled over the threshold just before it was blocked out by Kostas’s bulky shape. Anton placed an arm around her shoulders. She didn’t protest when he drew her close into his side. They walked through the door in a huddle of dipped heads and baby seat. She did as she had been told to do and focused on the limousine standing there with a man at the ready to throw open the rear door.
There were flashes, shouts, the vague impression of a swirling crowd-surge. ‘What does it feel like to be Theo Kanellis’s granddaughter, Zoe? Hey, Anton, how does it feel to lose a fortune? Is it true Theo Kanellis wants the boy?’
His handsome face locked in austere lines, lips pinned together, Anton kept them walking. His own body blocked Zoe’s transfer into the car. The baby seat followed, grabbed and hugged to Zoe’s lap as he dipped his long body and followed her inside. One of his men closed the door. Her eyes were wide and stark with alarm. She almost jumped out of her skin when people started banging on the glass beside her, making her swing around wildly to find camera flashes blinding her eyes.
They started moving. Peeling her eyes forward, she saw the shadowy bulk of a uniformed driver separated from them by a partition of glass.
‘Oh my God,’ she choked as the sound of sirens suddenly wound into life. Blue lights started flashing in front and behind them. She twisted one way then the other. ‘We have a police escort?’ she gasped.
‘It was the only way we could have forged a passage out of here,’ her companion explained.
Clutching Toby’s seat to her, she turned her wide eyes onto him. ‘You’re that important?’
‘We are that important,’ he corrected, almost nailing Zoe to her seat with the salient point.
Life as she knew it had just taken a hike, she registered fully for the very first time. It was never going to be the same again. She’d spent three weeks living in fairyland, blithely telling herself that if she just sat it out everyone would eventually go away and leave her and Toby alone.
Twisting in her seat, she glance backwards. ‘The press are going to follow us,’ she whispered, staring beyond the rear police-car to where she could see people making frantic dives towards their own transport.
‘Though not, I hope, once we are in the air.’
That grabbed her attention away from the chasing pack, Anton noted, as she focused those incredible eyes back on him. ‘The air?’ she echoed.
He nodded. ‘A private helicopter awaits us not far away. It will transport us to our destination. Tell me what we need to do to make your brother’s seat secure …’
Distract to divert. The knowledge that he was using boardroom tactics to keep his passenger in line did not impress Anton’s sense of fair play, but then, hell, fair play had flown out of the window the moment he’d decided he was not leaving her home without both of them.
She took on the task with focused diligence, placing the baby seat in the gap between the two of them and sliding the spare seat-belt into place. Anton rested his shoulders into the corner of the car and watched, mildly intrigued by the simplistic efficiency of the engineering, while the small baby slept on unaware.
‘He is remarkably placid,’ he remarked idly.
‘He is three weeks old. At this age they sleep, they eat, they sleep again, so long as they are comfortable.’ Leaning down, she placed a soft kiss on the boy’s button nose.
Her hair spilled over one shoulder as she did so, a shimmering flow of the purest gold he had ever seen. Her hands were nice, he noticed, slender-boned with long, delicately formed fingers and elegant fingernails filed in smooth crescents, unpolished yet shining, not too long, not too short.
‘Who is the man in your life?’ he asked, curious suddenly because his own attraction to her told him that she must attract them in droves.
Easing back into her own seat, Zoe used one of her hands to smooth her hair back from her cheek before she looked at him. ‘Who said there was one?’
‘You were locking the back gate after someone’s swift exit this morning,’ he reminded her. ‘I was just curious as to what kind of guy scarpers fast instead of hanging around to offer you support.’
The idea of a heavily pregnant Susie staying around to defend her against this man brought a smile to Zoe’s lips. She’d had her share of boyfriends, of course—she was reasonable to look at and popular—but in truth there had never been anyone special in her life, at least not anyone she had felt passionate enough about to lose her head over.
Not that she was about to tell Anton Pallis that. ‘I don’t think my personal life is any of your business,’ she murmured.
‘It is if he’s willing to sell the inside