by Kim Lawrence
‘We all have two grandfathers, even me.’
Another time she might have questioned the significance of the even me but Kat was in shock. The sheer unexpectedness of what he had said had felt like walking...no, running full pelt into a brick wall that had suddenly appeared in the middle of a flower-filled meadow.
‘I don’t even know who my father is, other than a name on a birth certificate.’ It had never crossed her mind to track down the man who had abandoned her pregnant mother. The decision to search for her mother had not been one she had taken lightly, though, as it turned out, she had already been five years too late. ‘Why should I want any contact with his family?’
Zach narrowed his eyes, recalling the one line in the file on the man Alekis’s daughter had married in defiance of her father’s wishes. ‘He might have a family, but I don’t have that information.’
‘I don’t understand...’
‘It is your mother’s family, or rather her father, that I am representing.’
She listened to his cold, dispassionate explanation before sitting there in silence for several moments, allowing her disjointed thoughts to coalesce.
‘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.
Pity she didn’t read the same script, Zach!
In his own defence, it hadn’t seemed unreasonable to assume that the idea of being wealthy beyond any person’s wildest dreams would swiftly negate any anger the heiress might feel towards the absentee grandparent.
He had never found it particularly admirable when people were willing to disadvant
age themselves for a point of principle. He found it even less so now, when those so-called principles were making his own life hard work.
Not that it crossed his mind that in the long run she would reject the fortune. She’d find a way to trick herself eventually into believing she wasn’t betraying her principles. He just had to help her get to that point a little quicker.
‘He was the parent,’ she quivered out. ‘Parents care for their children.’
‘In a perfect world, yes.’ But, as she of all people should well know, the world was not perfect. It took a very stubborn idealist to retain a belief system like hers in light of her personal experiences.
She gritted her teeth. ‘It’s got nothing to do with a perfect world. It’s called unconditional love. Not that I’d expect someone like you to know anything about that.’
‘You’d be right, I don’t,’ he lied, pushing away the image that had materialised without warning in his head. His mother’s thin, tired face, her work-worn hands. The memory was irrevocably linked with pain, which was why he didn’t think about it, ever. ‘Do you?’
The sudden attack threw her on the defensive. ‘I see women willing to lay down their lives for their children every day of my working life.’
‘Does that make up for your own mother abandoning you?’
He ignored the kick to his conscience when she flinched as though he had struck her. The illusion of fragility vanished as her chin lifted and she looked at him with angry eyes.
‘None of this is about my mother.’
‘Are you trying to tell me you’re not angry with her for dumping you? My mother left me because she died...and for a long time I hated her for it.’ They were words he’d never even thought, let alone voiced before, and they came with a massive slug of guilt and anger that her attitude had dredged up memories he had consigned to history. ‘And you expect me to believe that you were never angry that you got dumped on a doorstep somewhere?’ Maybe she genuinely didn’t remember and that was why she was able to continue to lie to herself.
‘It was a car park of a doctor’s surgery. She knew that someone would help me, that I’d be safe.’
Safe... He closed his eyes, trying to banish the poignant image in his head of a dark-haired child standing there waiting for a mother who never came back.
‘Some people should not have children,’ Zach condemned. He had decided long ago that he was one of them. It was too easy for a bad parent to scar their children, so why take the risk?
‘She needed help, she had nowhere to go—’
‘I find your determination to see this woman as some innocent victim slightly perverse. She was the one who walked away from your grandfather. And she was an adult, not a child.’
Unable to argue with the facts the way he presented them, she snapped back. ‘If this so-called grandfather of mine is so anxious to make contact, why isn’t he here? Why send you?’
‘He’s in intensive care.’
It was a slight exaggeration; according to his latest update, Alekis had been downgraded from high dependency to whatever the medical equivalent was. He was the next step up...the walking wounded, maybe?
Her reaction was everything he had expected from someone who seemed to have bleeding heart stamped into her DNA. Like a pricked balloon, her anger deflated with an almost audible hiss.
Her eyes slid from his. ‘Well, I’m sorry about that,’ she mumbled stiffly. ‘But I have no room in my life for someone I despise—’ She broke off as he suddenly leaned back in his leather seat and laughed.
‘That’s it, of course!’
‘What’s it?’
‘It’s just I’ve been wondering who you remind me of.’
The suspicion in her eyes deepened. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Someone who doesn’t understand the word compromise, who can’t forgive anyone who lets them down—in fact, anyone, even family, no, especially family, who doesn’t live up to their idea of what is right...’ He arched a dark brow. ‘Sounding familiar?’
It took her a few seconds to divine his meaning. Her horrified reaction was instantaneous. ‘I am nothing like my grandfather.’
‘Well, that’s an improvement. You admit you have one now. I’ve never put much faith in the whole gene thing. I might have to rethink it—you’ve never met the man and yet in your own way you are as stubborn and self-righteous as Alekis.’
‘How dare you?’
‘Easily.’ He dismissed her outrage with a click of his long fingers. ‘Your grandfather couldn’t forgive your mother so he lost her. You can’t forgive him and you’re willing to reject him when he makes the first move.’
‘A move that was twenty-four years coming!’
‘Granted.’
Kat’s head had sunk forward, her chin almost on her chest, so that her expression was hidden from him as she muttered, ‘I’m nothing like him.’
‘Prove it.’
She lifted her head in response to the soft challenge, making herself look at him, mainly because once their eyes were connected it was difficult to break that connection, she observed angrily.
‘You are a very manipulative man.’
He gave what she considered a heartless laugh, which sadly didn’t make it any the less attractive.
‘I’m impressed. It takes most people much longer to figure that one out.’
‘And by then it’s too late,’ she said bitterly as she realised it already was for her. Like it or not, she had been put in a position where she had to prove that the future of the refuge was more important than...what? She realised that it hadn’t been spelt out yet what her side of any bargain would be.
‘What does he expect from me?’
‘Alekis?’ His broad shoulders lifted in a negligent shrug. ‘You should ask him that.’
She squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them wide. ‘Do I have any other family?’ The sudden possibility that she had an entire family out there, aunts, uncles, cousins, felt strange...and yet exciting.
‘Not that I am aware of,’ he said, feeling quite irrationally guilty when the spark faded from her eyes. Another emotion broke through his defences that Zach couldn’t put a name to, didn’t even try. It took seconds for him to douse it, but the memory of that nameless feeling remained like a discordant echo as he responded to the question with evasion that came easily.
‘But again, I suggest you should ask the man himself. I am not privy to all his secrets.’
She nodded. ‘And if I do...see him...how does that work?’
Before he could congratulate himself on a job well done she gave a fractured little sigh and added, ‘Does he have any idea what sort of life she led? The places, the men...?’
Without warning an image of the little girl she had once been flashed into his head again, along with a compulsion to ask, ‘Do you remember?’
‘She used to tell me stories.’ Without warning her eyes filled with tears; the stories were true. ‘Does he live on an island?’ she asked, remembering the wistful quality in her mother’s voice when she told those stories. ‘He didn’t want us and now I—I don’t have a grandfather. I don’t have anybody.’
He clenched his jaw as the plaintive cry from the heart threatened the professional distance he needed to retain. ‘I know this has been a shock.’
She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘You think?’
Shock? Was that what you called making someone question everything she’d thought she knew about her life?
‘Look, I have no vested interest in this. I am simply the messenger boy. You make your decision and I’ll relay it.’
She took a deep sustaining breath and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I’ll do it.’ Oh, God, what am I doing? ‘So, what happens now? If I agree to see him, I’m assuming he can’t come here...unless that was a lie?’
‘He is ill.’
‘So that is real?’
He actually took some comfort from the fact that she was not quite as naive as she appeared, though even if she turned out to be half as naive it would be cause for serious concern.
‘I wasn’t lying. Alekis is seriously ill.’
‘Is he in pain?’
‘Not that I know of. Do you want him to be?’
Her eyes flew wide in comic-book shock-horror fashion. ‘What sort of person do you think I am?’
‘I think you’re—’
The driven quality in his unfinished words made her shake her head in puzzled confusion.
‘You want to know what happens next?’
Diverted, she nodded.
‘The plan is for me to take you to Tackyntha via Athens, where you will meet your grandfather before his next surgery.’ The doctors had agreed with the utmost reluctance to Alekis’s plan to meet them at the airport, and then only after he had agreed to have a full medical team with him.
She shook her head. ‘Tackyntha?’
‘It is your grandfather’s home, an island.’
‘Where my mother lived.’
‘I presume so.’
‘So, you want me to go to the hospital.’
The obvious solution, but Alekis was determined that when he met his granddaughter he would not be lying in a hospital bed. ‘At the airport.’
‘And what if I say no?’
‘I’d say fair enough, though it’s a shame because your cause sounded pretty deserving.’
‘Do you work for him?’
His lips twitched. ‘He did offer, but, no, I do not work for Alekis.’
‘Does he think you can buy love? Buy me?’ Her words had an angry, forlorn sound.
‘That is not in my field of expertise.’
‘What is your area of expertise?’
‘Well, it’s not babysitting reluctant heiresses.’
She responded to the barely concealed disdain in his observation with an equally snooty glare of her own. ‘I do not require a babysitter, thank you.’
‘Let me rephrase it. You need to learn the rules of the society you’re about to enter.’
