The Innocent Behind The Scandal - Abby Green Page 0,50
under the hot spray a few seconds later, but it couldn’t melt the block of ice that had formed in his gut. He didn’t have to look at his phone to know that it would be blowing up after he’d rescheduled a whole day of meetings yesterday.
His brother Nikos had been renowned for this kind of behaviour—going AWOL and then turning up in the tabloids, falling out of a club with two women on his arm, in a different city to the one where he’d been due to attend meetings.
Sharif was a little more circumspect, but recently he’d been at the mercy of some unfavourable kiss-and-tells after one of too many discarded lovers had had enough.
Maks did not do this. Maks had had a well-honed instinct to keep out of the limelight after his parents’ toxicity had blighted his and his sister’s lives. He’d always been the solid brother. The one who never failed to turn up to meetings and was discreet in all matters.
He knew he and Zoe would be all over the papers by now, because they’d been seen together at more than one event. And if he wasn’t mistaken he was pretty sure a paparazzo had been following them yesterday. He hadn’t even cared all that much.
And yet it had taken her lifting a camera to her face to wake him up. He hadn’t been able to see her face. He’d only seen that lens. It had made him realise just how far under his skin he’d let her burrow.
All the way.
No. Maks rejected that thought as he stepped out of the shower. He slung a towel around his hips and saw his face in the mirror over the sink.
What was he doing? Letting a woman get under his skin like this? When there was no way it was going to last?
The most important person in the world to Maks was Sasha, his sister. As soon as he’d been old enough he’d taken Sasha out of his father’s house and had become her guardian. His father had died soon after, and anyway he hadn’t even noticed that his daughter was gone from his care. Because she hadn’t even been his.
Their experiences had fostered an unspoken agreement between them never to repeat the mistakes of their parents.
What he felt here, now, with Zoe, was some kind of lust-induced craziness. He knew better than this. He knew not to send mixed messages. And that was exactly what he was doing. Telling her one thing but behaving in the completely opposite way. When he thought of the previous day, wandering around Venice, hand in hand, taking a gondola—which no self-respecting Italian would ever do—he cringed.
Maks and his sister had been the flotsam and jetsam in the wreckage of their parents’ toxic marriage, and while Sasha had no interest in the Marchetti Group, Maks did. He’d made it his priority to ensure that he helped to build a legacy that would prove to be far more stable and durable and lasting than any marriage.
That was what mattered. Not the illusion of something that didn’t exist.
He knew this was an unprecedented situation. He’d never wanted a woman for longer than a couple of dates. So it would be hard to do what he had to. But he would do it because he couldn’t offer Zoe anything more.
Zoe sat on the bed for a long moment after Maks disappeared into the bathroom. She didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that something seismic had just happened.
She shouldn’t have taken those pictures.
But when she’d woken and seen him standing by the gently fluttering drapes she’d wondered if she was dreaming. Not awake at all. He’d looked like a living sculpture of a Greek god. Every line of his body perfectly proportioned and muscled in the light of dawn, bathing him in a kind of golden celestial glow.
Zoe had had only one impulse—to capture his beauty. She’d barely been aware of reaching for her camera and lifting it to her face. Much like the first time she’d taken his photo.
Realising that she was sitting in some kind of a stupor, waiting for him to emerge, she scrambled out of bed and took some clothes with her, washing and changing in the suite’s other bathroom.
When she was drying herself afterwards she was aware of a tension she hadn’t felt in days. She’d become so engrossed in Maks’s world. In his masterful seduction. To the point where she’d almost forgotten that a far grittier world