Ким Лоренс – A Passionate Night With The Greek (страница 2)

ZACH HAD RECEIVED the message he had been waiting for while he was stuck in traffic. Sometimes a first-hand knowledge of the back streets of Athens, combined with a flexible attitude to rules, came in useful.

Zach possessed both.

For some of his formative years he had lived by his wits on those streets, finding it infinitely preferable to living with the grandmother who had resented having her daughter’s bastard foisted on her, and the drunken uncle who had perfected bullying into an art form.

It took him just under half an hour and a few probable speeding fines to reach the hospital. He remained oblivious to the covetous stares that followed his long-legged progress from his car and through the building. It took him three more minutes to reach the intensive care unit where Alekis Azaria had spent three days in a medically induced coma after being successfully resuscitated following his last cardiac arrest.

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 hooded 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.