Awakened by the Scarred Italian

by Abby Green

  Zach, as the closest thing the older man had to either friend or family, had been there the previous day when they’d brought him out of the coma. Despite the warnings that he had chosen not to hear, he had fully anticipated that Alekis would simply open his eyes.

  The consultant had explained this sometimes happened but admitted there was a possibility that Alekis might never wake up.

  Given the fact that the Greek shipping tycoon’s presence here was on a strict need-to-know basis, it was no surprise that the same consultant who had issued this gloomy prognosis was waiting for him now, at the entrance to the intensive care unit.

  The medic, used to being a figure of respect and authority, found himself straightening up and taking a deep steadying breath when the younger, tall, athletically built figure approached.

  Zach didn’t respond to the older man’s greeting; instead, head tilted at a questioning angle, he arched a thick dark brow and waited, jaw clenched, to hear what was coming.

  ‘He has woken and is breathing independently.’

  Impatient with the drip-feed delivery Zach could sense coming, he cut across the other man, impatience edging his deep voice.

  ‘Look, just give it to me straight.’

  Straight had never been a problem for Zach. His ability to compartmentalise meant personal issues did not affect his professional ability.

  ‘There seems to be no problem with Mr Azaria’s cognitive abilities.’

  A flicker of relief flashed in Zach’s dark eyes. Intellectual impairment would have been Alekis’s worst nightmare; for that matter it would have been his own.

  ‘Always supposing that he was fairly...demanding previously?’ the doctor tacked on drily.

  Zach gave a rare smile that softened the austere lines of his chiselled, handsome features, causing a passing pretty nurse to walk into a door.

  ‘He is accustomed to being in charge. I can see him...?’

  The cardiologist nodded. ‘He is stable, but you do understand this is early days?’ he cautioned.

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘This way.’

  Alekis had been moved from a cubicle in the intensive care unit to a private suite of rooms. Zach found him propped up on a pile of pillows. The events of the last week had gouged deep lines in the leathered skin of his face and hollowed out his cheeks, but his voice still sounded pretty robust!

  Zach stood in the doorway for a moment, listening, a smile playing gently across his firm lips.

  ‘Have you never heard of human rights? I’ll have your job. I want my damned phone!’

  The nurse, recovering her professional poise that had slipped when she’d seen Zach appear, lifted a hand to her flushed cheek and twitched a pillow, but looked calm in the face of the peevish demand and stream of belligerent threats.

  ‘Oh, it’s way above my pay grade to make a decision like that, Mr Azaria.’

  ‘Then get me someone who can make a decision—’ Alekis broke off as he registered Zach’s presence. ‘Good, give me your phone, and a brandy wouldn’t come amiss.’

  ‘I must have mislaid it.’ Zach’s response earned him a look of approval from the flush-faced nurse.

  Alekis snorted. ‘It’s a conspiracy!’ he grumbled. ‘So, what are you waiting for? Take a seat, then. Don’t stand there towering over me.’

  Zach did as he was bade, lowering his immaculately clad, long and lean, six-foot-five athletic frame into one of the room’s easy chairs. Stretching his legs out in front of him, he crossed one ankle over the other.

  ‘You look—’

  ‘I look like a dying man,’ came the impatient response. ‘But not yet—I have things to do and so do you. I assume you do actually have your phone?’

  Zach’s relief at the business-as-usual attitude was cancelled out by his concern at the shaking of the blue-veined hand extended to him.

  He hid his concern beneath a layer of irony as he scrolled down the screen to find the best of the requested snapshots he’d taken several days earlier for Alekis.

  ‘So how long before the news that I’m in here surfaces and the sharks start circling?’

  Zach selected the best of the head shots he had taken and glanced up. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Damage limitation is the order of the day, then.’

  Zach nodded and extended the phone. ‘I suppose if you’re going to have another heart attack, you’re in the right place. I’m assuming that you will tell me at some point why you sent me to a graveyard in London to stalk some woman.’

  ‘Not stalk, take a photo...’

  Zach’s half-smile held irony as he responded to the correction. ‘All the difference in the world. I’m curious—did it ever occur to you I’d say no?’

  Zach had been due to address a prestigious international conference in London as guest speaker to an audience consisting of the cream of the financial world when Alekis had rung him with his bizarre demand, thinly disguised as a request.

  Should he ever start believing his own press he could always rely on Alekis to keep his ego in check, Zach mused with wry affection as the short conversation of several days before flickered through his head.

  ‘You want me to go where and do what?’

  ‘You heard me. Just give the address of the church to your driver—the cemetery is opposite—then take a photo of the woman who arrives at four-thirty.’

  ‘Try not to let it give you a heart attack this time,’ Zach advised now, placing his phone into the older man’s waiting hand.

  ‘Waiting for you to deliver this picture didn’t give me a heart attack. Seventy-five years of over-indulgence did, according to the doctors who tell me I should have been six feet under years ago. They also said that if I want to last even another week I should deprive myself of everything that gives life meaning.’

  ‘I’m sure they were much more tactful.’

  ‘I have no use for tact.’

  Greedy floated into Zach’s head as he watched the older man stare at the phone.

  ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

  Zach deemed a response unnecessary. There was no question mark over the haunting beauty of the woman captured by his phone. What he had questioned was not Alekis’s interest, but his own fascination, bordering on obsession, with the face he couldn’t stop thinking about. Until, that was, he had realised it wasn’t the face, it was the puzzle of her identity, the mystery of the affair, that had tweaked his imagination, not those golden eyes.

  ‘I’m always willing to lend a hand to a friend in need. I assume that you have lost all your fortune and no longer have access to your own personal team of private investigators in order to have needed me? How did you know she’d be there at four-thirty?’

  ‘I have had her followed for the past two weeks.’ He looked bemused that Zach would ask such an obvious question. ‘And hardly a team was required... Actually I had reasons for not wanting to use in-house expertise. I was employing someone who proved to be an idiot...’

  ‘The same person you had following her?’

  ‘And he can whistle for his money. He was utterly inept, took any number of photographs, mostly of her back or lamp posts. And as for covert? She noticed him and threatened to report him for stalking... Took his photo, then hit him with her shopping bag. Did she see you?’

  ‘No, I’m thinking of taking up espionage as my second career. I had no idea I was signing up for such a dangerous task. So, who is this scary lady?’

  ‘My granddaughter.’

  A quiver of surprise widened Zach’s dark eyes as his ebony lashes lifted off the angle of his cheekbones. He really hadn’t seen that one coming!

  ‘Her mother was beautiful too...’ The older man seemed oblivious to Zach’s reaction as he considered the photograph, his fingers shaking as he held it up. ‘I think she has a look of Mia, around the mouth.’ His hoo
ded gaze lifted. ‘You knew I had a daughter?’

  Zach tipped his head in acknowledgement. He had of course heard the stories of the wild-child daughter. There was talk of drugs and men, but no one knew if Alekis had seen her since she’d married against his wishes, and so the story went that she’d been disinherited. This was the first time Zach had heard mention of a granddaughter, or, for that matter, heard Alekis speak of his family at all; though a portrait of his long-dead wife hung in the hallway of his palatial home on the island he owned.

  ‘She married some loser, Parvati, threw herself away on him—to spite me, I think,’ the older man brooded darkly. ‘I was right. He was a useless waster, but would she listen? No, he left her when she got pregnant. All she had to do was ask and I’d have...’ He shook his head, looking tired in the aftermath of emotional outburst. ‘No matter, she always was as stubborn and...’ His voice trailed away until he sat there, eyes half closed.

  Zach began to wonder if he had fallen asleep. ‘Sounds like the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.’

  To Zach’s relief, the older man opened his eyes and directed a scowl up at Zach, which slowly faded. The smile that replaced it held a hint of pride. ‘Mia was a fiery one. Like her mother to look at but...’ His voice trailed away again.

  If the likeness in the painting he had seen was accurate, Alekis’s wife had been beautiful, though not in the same style as the granddaughter with the glowing amber eyes. Zach could see no similarity between the two. The portrait was of a beautiful woman with a beautiful face but not a face to haunt a man. Unlike the face of the woman with the golden eyes. She was Alekis’s granddaughter—he was still struggling to get his head around that.

  Alekis’s lack of family had been something they’d had in common, part of their unlikely bond that had grown through the years. Now it turned out that there was family and he was assuming Alekis wanted to be reunited. If the older man had asked his advice, Zach would have told him it was a bad idea. But Alekis wouldn’t ask or listen any more than Zach would have if someone had told him beforehand that reconnecting with his own past would leave him with memories that would offer no answers and no comfort.

  ‘I suppose I could have made the first move. I was just waiting but she never...’ He wiped a hand across his eyes and when it fell away Zach pretended not to see the moisture on the old man’s cheeks.

  The truth was, he was finding it uncomfortable to see the man he had always considered self-contained and unsentimental and way past being a victim of his emotions show such vulnerability. But then maybe that was what a reminder of his own mortality did to a man?

  ‘I suppose everyone has regrets.’

  ‘Do you?’

  Zach raised his brows at the question and considered it. ‘We all make mistakes,’ he said, thinking of his grandmother staring out of the window with blank eyes on his last visit to the home. ‘But never the same one twice.’ Twice made you a fool or in love—in his eyes the latter made you the former.

  He could not imagine ever allowing his heart, or at least his hormones, to rule his head. Not that he was a monk; sex was healthy and necessary but he never mixed it with sentiment, which had given him a reputation for being heartless, but he could live with that. Living with the same woman for the rest of his life? Less so!

  ‘I regret...but it’s too late for that.’ Alekis’s voice firmed. ‘I want to make amends. I intend to leave her everything. Sorry if you thought you were getting it.’

  ‘I don’t need your money.’

  ‘You and your damned pride! If you’d let me help you’d have got to the top a lot quicker, or at least with a lot less effort.’

  ‘Where would be the fun in that? And you did help. You gave me an education and your advice.’ Zach spoke lightly but he knew how much he owed to Alekis, and so did the shipping magnate.

  ‘A gift beyond price, wouldn’t you say?’

  Zach’s lips quivered into an appreciative smile. ‘You really are feeling more yourself, but the moral blackmail is unnecessary, Alekis.’ He spoke without heat. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Bring her to me.’

  The face with the golden eyes floated into his head and Zach felt some nameless emotion flare inside him at the idea of seeing that face again.

  The older man was staring again at the image on the screen.

  ‘Will you?’

  Zach’s thickly defined sable brows lifted. ‘Bring, as in...?’ He shook his head, adding in an attempt to lighten the rather intense atmosphere that couldn’t be doing Alekis’s heart any good, ‘I’m assuming we are not talking kidnap here.’

  ‘It shouldn’t come to that.’

  ‘That wasn’t actually an offer.’

  The older man didn’t appear to hear him.

  ‘Does she have a name?’ Zach asked, pretending not to see the moisture the older man wiped from the corners of his eyes.

  ‘Katina.’ Alekis’s lips tightened. ‘Greek only in name, she was born in England. Her history is...’

  Zach was amazed to see a look close to shame wash over the older man’s face.

  ‘She has been alone for a long time. She thinks she still is. I intend to make it up to her, but I’m concerned that the shock will...’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll cope,’ Zach soothed, repressing the cynical retort on the tip of his tongue. Discovering you were set to become wealthy beyond anyone’s wildest dreams was the sort of shock most people recovered from quite quickly.

  ‘It will be a culture shock. She’s about to become an heiress and the target of vicious tongues and gold-diggers. She’ll need to be protected...’

  ‘From what you say she seems pretty well able to protect herself,’ Zach inserted drily.

  ‘Oh, she’s clearly got spirit, but it takes more than spirit. She needs to be taught how things operate,’ her grandfather continued. ‘And I’m stuck in here, which is why I’m—’

  Zach, who had listened with growing unease at the direction of this, cut in quickly. ‘I’d love to help but that sounds pretty much like a full-time job to me.’

  His mentor gave a deep sigh that made Zach’s teeth clench; the smile that accompanied it was a nice blend of understanding and sadness. ‘And you have every right to refuse.’ Another sigh. ‘You owe me nothing. Please don’t run away with the idea I’m calling in a debt. I will discharge myself and—’

  Zach lowered his shoulders. He knew when he was beaten.

  ‘You know, sometimes I forget it was me that saved your life.’

  The first lesson you learnt on the streets was to look after number one, the second was walk, or preferably run, away from trouble. Zach’s problem was bullies. He hated them, and seeing those knife-wielding thugs surrounding the foolish old guy who was refusing to hand over his wallet had produced a red-mist moment that had led him to run towards danger and not away from it.

  Zach believed nothing positive could be achieved by reflecting on the past, but if he had, his objective view would have been that there hadn’t been anything remotely brave about his actions. Though stupid had flashed through his head at the first cut that had slipped between his ribs.

  He might have saved the older man’s life, but Alekis had given him a life and until this point asked for very little in return.

  He watched, an expression of wry resignation twisting his lips, as the man’s air of weary defeat melted away in a beat of his damaged heart.

  The elderly Greek’s smile oozed smug satisfaction. ‘If you’re sure?’

  ‘Don’t push it,’ Zach growled out, torn between exasperation that he had been so expertly manipulated and amusement.

  ‘It is important to control the flow of information when the news does leak. I know I can rely on you for that. The media will be all over her like a rash. We must be ready; she must be ready. Go away!’

  The loud addition was di
rected to an unwary nurse who, to give her her due, stood her ground.

  ‘I’ll leave him to you. Good luck,’ Zach added as he rose to his feet. ‘You can email me the necessary,’ he added before the exhausted-looking patient could react to his intention. ‘Just give me her details and I’ll do the rest, and in the meantime you get some rest.’

  * * *

  Kat danced around her small office and punched the air in triumph, before controlling the fizz of excitement still bubbling in her veins enough to retrieve the letter that she had tossed in the air after she had read it.

  She read it again now, anxious that she hadn’t misinterpreted it. That really would be awful. The tension that had slipped into her shoulders fell away as she came to the end.

  It really did say what she’d thought, but what puckered her smooth brow into a slight frown was what it didn’t say. There was a time she was expected to be there, at the address of the law firm, but no clue as to who was looking forward to meeting her.

  She shrugged. Presumably a representative of one of the individuals or businesses known for their philanthropy to whom she had pitched her appeal—or wasted her time with, as some of her less optimistic-minded colleagues and volunteers had put it. Fighting against the negativity, she’d pointed out that she wasn’t expecting any one person or organisation to step into the breach, but if she could persuade a handful to make some sort of donation it could mean a stay of execution for the refuge once the local authority funding was pulled the coming month.

  Who knew? This could be the first of many.

  There was a short tap on the door before Sue, with her nose stud, stuck her orange-streaked head around the door. ‘Oh, God!’ She sighed when she saw Kat’s face. ‘I know that look.’

  ‘What look?’

  The older woman stepped inside the room and, after closing the door, said, ‘Your “campaign for a good cause” face.’

  Kat blinked. ‘Do I have a...?’

  ‘Oh, you sure do, and I love—we all love—that you’re a fighter, but there comes a time...’ She sighed again, her skinny shoulders lifting before they fell. ‘You’ve got to be a realist, love,’ she told Kat earnestly. ‘This place...’ Her expansive gesture took in the small office with its cardboard-box system of filing—there always seemed to be something better to spend the limited resources on than office furniture. ‘It’s a lost cause. I’ve got an interview Monday. Just giving you the heads-up that I’ll need the morning off.’