A Greek Escape (13 page)

No, because every woman he knew would probably leap at the chance to do his bidding, Kayla thought. Whereas
she
was a woman who had walked away from him—said no to him when it had mattered—and that surely had to prove too much of a challenge for a man like Leonidas.

‘Then you should have found yourself a dozen, shouldn’t you?’ she said, smiling brightly for the benefit of a manservant who was passing as they started down the magnificent staircase.

‘Perhaps I should have,’ he agreed, sounding mildly amused.

From the magnificent staircase to his magnificent car, to dinner in the ballroom of an equally magnificent hotel, Kayla was entranced but at the same time overwhelmed by the world he moved in. It was poles apart from that of the man he had purported to be—a man who had ‘opted out’, driven a wreck of a truck and bedded down in the run-down environs of a Greek farmhouse.

Here she saw a man at the very pinnacle of his prosperity. A man who lived and travelled in style and circulated with some of the most influential names in society. A man eloquent enough to hold an audience of over three hundred captive as he delivered an after-dinner talk on human complacency towards the state of the planet, leaving his peers congratulating him after a standing ovation that left him remarkably unfazed.

‘You were brilliant,’ Kayla remarked, unable to resist saying it as the tables were being cleared and couples were beginning
to wander onto the dance floor to enjoy the middle-of-the-road music provided by a professional live band. She hadn’t had a chance to speak to him since before he’d given the talk, and he’d been surrounded by many guests wanting to speak to him ever since.

‘I was just stating fact and emphasising the responsibility that we as professional bodies should engage for the sake of our children and our children’s children. We’re only custodians of this earth. We don’t own it,’ he said. ‘But am I to assume that I’ve hit on one topic that you’re not going to flay me over tonight?’

With a change of tone he had wiped away her attempt to strike an equal balance with him if only for a few hours. Retaliation was futile, she decided. And anyway a smiling brunette, very glamorous and sophisticated, came up to him at that moment to thank him effusively, ogling him with such a blatant come-on in her sultry green eyes that there was no room for doubt as to exactly what she wanted from him.

‘He’s so eloquent!’ she enthused to Kayla, daring to touch red-tipped fingers to his dark sleeve. ‘He made my flesh go all goosebumpy just listening to him!’

‘Really?’ Kayla responded, trying to look impressed. ‘Well, if that makes you goosebumpy then you should take a look at his sketches!’ She felt the bunch of muscle in his powerful arm as she slipped hers through it in a gesture of pure possession. ‘Of course he’s very modest about them, but I’m sure he’d show them to you if you asked him nicely.’

Smiling uncertainly, the woman uttered something that Kayla didn’t catch and, realising she was intruding, moved hastily away.

‘I know you’ve got your grievances,’ Leonidas rasped, as soon as his admirer was out of earshot, ‘but do you have to air them in public? And what was
that
display of play-acting
all about?’ he queried, locking her arm against the sensuous fabric of his jacket as she would have pulled it away.

‘I thought I was supposed to act as though I was enjoying being with you?’ she murmured, with a bright smile for anyone who might be watching them.

He made a disapproving sound down his nostrils. ‘You’re behaving like every woman I went to Greece to get away from.’

Which was why he had been so careful not to tell you who he was, her inner little voice piped up to remind her. But she didn’t want reminding, and silenced the voice with the flash of another smile and a clipped, ‘How do you
want
me to behave?’

‘As Kayla Young. Guileless. Easy to like. And infernally inquisitive.’

‘A fool,’ she tagged on, all falseness gone. She was only aware then that he was leading her onto the dance floor. ‘Guileless. Easy to like. And an infernally inquisitive, easy-to-fool fool!’

‘How can I forget it?’ he murmured, slipping those strong arms around her. ‘You aren’t prepared to let me.’

‘Any more than I’m prepared to let you forget that I’m here under protest.’

‘No, you aren’t,’ he purred silkily, drawing her close, sending Kayla’s senses reeling in shaming response. ‘I don’t think “protest” can in any way account for the way we’re both feeling now.’

This close to him she could feel every steel-hard muscle of his body—in the whipcord strength of his back and shoulders, in his hard hips and powerful thighs, and in the stirring evidence of his arousal. It made her want to press herself against him, and it took every shred of will-power she possessed not to do it.

‘You aren’t feeling anything. Just a bruised ego and severely
dented pride because you can’t bear a woman ever saying no to you.’

He laughed very softly, and with his cheek against hers whispered in her ear, ‘Not a woman whom I know wants me as much as I want her—no.’

Even his breath was a turn-on against her treacherously pulsing flesh, without the stimulus of his stunning appearance and the way he’d had everyone there tonight eating out of his hand. It made her wish that they didn’t have the baggage of the past hanging over them and that she was somewhere else, alone with him, not moving like this under an exquisite chandelier, with three hundred other people in the room.

‘In fact, do you want to know what I think you are thinking now?’

The lights spun gold from Kayla’s hair as she lifted her head in challenge. ‘No,’ she dismissed with a saccharine-sweet smile. ‘But no doubt you’re going to tell me anyway.’

‘Well, let’s see if I’m right,’ he suggested. He was looking down at her and emulating her smile in a way that to anyone watching would have marked them undoubtedly as lovers—hungry for each other, wanting only the privacy of their bedroom. ‘I think that right now you would prefer to be back at the house and for me to be slowly undressing you with some soft music playing. And I think you’d like me to remain clothed while I carry you naked up to my bed. There’s nothing like the sensuality of cloth to add zest to lovemaking, is there, Kayla? Particularly when the man wearing it doesn’t give a fig for how you might abuse it, just so long as he can gratify your desires and make you sob with pleasure.’

It was so close to what she had been thinking that Kayla could scarcely breathe. She could feel her cheeks burning from the shaming imagery. ‘You’re just indulging in your own uninhibited fantasies.’ she croaked, her throat as arid as a Grecian
hillside, and she felt those dark masculine eyes appraising the results of what his mind-blowing words had produced.

‘Am I?’ he challenged softly, with a knowing smile.

She wasn’t even aware that the music had stopped until his arms fell away from her, and then she could see one of the older male guests to whom she’d been introduced earlier beckoning him from the bar.

‘I’ll be a few minutes,’ Leonidas apologised, and left her to flee to the mercifully deserted sanctuary of the powder room.

A flushed-faced, bright-eyed creature stared back at her from the mirror above the luxuriously equipped basins. She felt as though she had just been aroused to fever-pitch only to be left abandoned and wanting. Wanting
him
, she acknowledged painfully, wondering how she still could.

How could she stay under his roof when every time he touched her it was like dropping a firework into a powder keg? When her common sense went up in smoke just at a look from him, even without the X-rated things he’d been saying to her just now?

And yet he hadn’t attempted to touch her intimately since he’d brought her to his house—had merely treated her with a detached respect that had kept her awake over the past two nights wondering why he hadn’t. Had he finally accepted that he had treated her unfairly and was now doing his best to make it up to her? Or was his plan to wear her down with the sort of earth-shattering sensuality he’d used just now until she was begging for him to make love to her?

She hadn’t met a company man yet whose motives weren’t entirely self-centred, so why should Leonidas Vassalio be any different? She rebuked herself for her moment of weakness in even daring to hope that he might be. Wasn’t he using the plight of two people she cared about purely to satisfy his own selfish demands? And he’d already lived up to the type of man he really was in the way he had lied to her in Greece.

Even so, it was with a sick and building excitement that a little later she sat in the shadowy intimacy of his car, acutely aware of him sitting there beside her, changing gear with an immaculately cuffed wrist as he took a bend, driving them home, his jacket discarded in the back…

Only the hall light was burning on a dimmer switch as they came through the electronically operated gates and he admitted them into his magnificent house. Having watched the way he’d used his security card to open the impressively carved door, Kayla couldn’t help comparing this man, with his millions and his discreet surveillance staff and his stringently guarded home, with the one who had slept with his doors unlocked—open to the world—alone on a lonely Greek hillside.

‘Thanks. I think I’ll go straight up,’ she murmured, breathless with anticipation. She wasn’t sure how she was managing to drag herself away from him as she started towards the wide sweeping stairs.

‘Kayla…’

His soft command stopped her in her tracks, her heart beating a frenzied tattoo. If he touched her…

Dear heaven! She
wanted
him to touch her! To take the decision away from her, carry her up these stairs and drive her wild in the sumptuous luxury of his bed!

She turned round, her legs threatening to buckle under her. ‘What?’

‘You dropped your wrap,’ he said, in a voice that was screamingly intimate.

Even the purposefulness of his tread on the pale marble was a sensuality that made her tense and yearning body throb.

Very softly he moved over and placed the blue and silver sequinned stole which she hadn’t even realised had slipped off lightly over her bare shoulders. Then, with heart-stopping gentleness, he turned her round to face him.

He had retrieved his jacket since stepping out of the car,
and the dark cloth now spanning his shoulders was a sensuality she wanted to touch.

It was a replay of all he had tormented her with earlier, and she caught her breath, held in thrall by the scent and warmth and power of him as he stooped and pressed his lips against her forehead.

‘You look tired,’ he remarked, gazing down with some dark, unfathomable emotion at the naked hunger in her eyes. ‘Get some rest,’ he advised softly, leaving her excruciatingly lost and aching for him. ‘We’ve got another busy day tomorrow.’

‘W
HY DIDN
’
T YOU
tell me you were seeing him?’ Lorna gasped, amazed, after Leonidas had telephoned Kayla in the office on Monday morning. ‘And don’t tell me you aren’t, because that phone call certainly wasn’t about trading figures! You’re going out with him, aren’t you?’

Imperceptibly, Kayla tensed. She hadn’t told anyone that she was staying with Leonidas. All she had told her mother was that she was spending a couple of weeks with Lorna, and as Leonidas lived within a reasonable driving distance of Kendon Interiors, which meant that she could still come into the office, she had decided not to involve her friend in the lie.

‘Don’t spread it about,’ she implored, reluctant to reveal her secret or to face the awkward questions that people would ask if she did.

What could she tell them, anyway? That she was only with Leonidas because he had made it impossible for her to refuse? That he was as good as blackmailing her to get her to comply with his wishes, and that she didn’t intend staying in his house a second longer than after that contract was signed?

‘If the paparazzi get wind of it they could turn his life into a circus,’ she tagged on as casually as she was able to, although she was aware, from things Leonidas had already mentioned in passing, that they really could do just that.

‘I won’t. Well, only to Josh, of course,’ Lorna stated unnecessarily.
‘But how did you manage it? No, scrub that,’ she put in hastily. ‘You’re smart and you’re beautiful—he wouldn’t have been worth his salt if he hadn’t noticed you the moment you walked into the conference room last week. Wow! Won’t that be one in the eye for Craig!’ she continued, clearly flabbergasted. ‘Honestly, Kayla! Do you
know
how rich he is?’

Rich and manipulative and using his power to get exactly what he wants
, Kayla thought desolately. Because what he wanted was her, back in his bed. She was certain of that, despite the fact that he was making no advances to her in that respect, and regardless of how much he had hurt her—was still hurting her with his calculated plan to use her friends’ precarious position as a lever to get her to fall in with him.

It was for that reason that she still couldn’t bring herself to tell Lorna about meeting him in Greece. Lorna, who always thought the best of people, would instantly imagine that he had cast his company’s business their way because Kayla had recommended them. She might even think he was doing it as a favour to her, Kayla, and she couldn’t bear her friend to be deceived by him as she had, when nothing could be further from the truth.

‘His money doesn’t interest me,’ Kayla tried to say nonchalantly, which produced a knowing little laugh from her friend.

‘Well, no. I can see that there’s far more that would interest you before you even got to his wallet! Gosh! If I wasn’t married—and pregnant…’

‘Which you are,’ Kayla emphasised, managing a smile, knowing that her friend was only jesting. Lorna adored Josh, and her one desire in life was to give birth to their healthy baby. Dropping an almost envying glance to her dearest friend’s burgeoning middle, Kayla decided right there and then that whatever it took to help Lorna fulfil that desire she would do, regardless of the cost to her own emotions.

During that week Leonidas went away on some unexpected business, returning a couple of days later to steal Kayla away early from the office and take her to a charity auction, where canapés were handed round on silver dishes and champagne flowed like water from a spring.

It was an event where the proceeds from the various items on offer went to a tsunami relief fund, and it soon became clear to Kayla that it was because of Leonidas’s attendance and his company’s support of the event that so many people had got involved.

‘Did you enjoy that?’ he asked her afterwards, when they were in the car, pulling away. ‘As far as you were able to, of course, bearing in mind that your enjoyment level was probably stuck on zero in view of who you were with.’

Like her, he had refused the champagne after the first half-glass, and she was beginning to discover that his driving standards—as with most of what he did—were impeccable.

‘Very amusing,’ she remarked dryly, turning to look out of the window, secretly admiring the gardens surrounding the grand English country manor his company had hired to host the event. ‘What was the object of the exercise in bringing me here today? To show me how charitable you can be?’ She’d been surprised when he had paid over the odds for a small and not particularly well done watercolour of one of the local landmarks. ‘There are those who might say you can afford to be.’

‘You would be one of them, I take it?’ When she didn’t answer, already wishing she hadn’t been so quick to snipe at him like that, he went on, ‘It isn’t about affording it, Kayla. It’s about having enough clout to make others aware of the importance of events like this and bringing everyone together to contribute.’

Which he had done—and very successfully, she accepted, secretly impressed. Although she couldn’t bring herself to
admit it aloud, privately she couldn’t deny that she had enjoyed herself—very much.

He took her to a West End show one evening—one she had wanted to see and for which she had been unable to get tickets. Afterwards, coming out of the exclusive restaurant where he had taken her for a late dinner, they were leapt on by photographers who almost succeeded in trampling her to death before Leonidas got her into the waiting limousine he’d had one of his aides bring to whisk them away.

‘How do you cope with all this?’ Kayla challenged, and he could tell from the all-encompassing gesture of her small chin that she meant the security and the car and the public demands his billionaire status made upon him, and not just the frightening intrusion of the paparazzi.

‘One learns to live with it,’ he said in a matter-of-fact voice, and then, more solicitously, asked, ‘Are you all right?’

She nodded, but he could see that she wasn’t. That anxious line between her eyes assured him that she was anything but happy being there with him. Also, being jostled by those photographers had caused the fine white silk of her dress to tear, and her beautiful hair, which she had styled so elegantly before they had left the house, was coming out of its combs. She looked as if she had been out in a gale—or with a far too impassioned lover.

The thought made him hard, but he steeled himself against it. She wasn’t ready to accept him back into her bed just yet.

Consequently, when they reached the house he left her to go to bed alone and went straight to his study, where he spent hours catching up on some pressing paperwork in an endeavour not to give in to the almost overwhelming urge to mount the stairs two at time, rip back her bedcovers and watch her hollow protests dissolve beneath the surging demands of their entwined bodies.

The photographs were emblazoned across the tabloids the
next day, with Kayla caught looking surprised and dishevelled and Leonidas urging her determinedly into the car.

‘Have you seen them?’ she wailed, ringing him on his mobile, having already spent half an hour on the phone, dodging awkward questions from her mother. She wasn’t sure where he was, but her call had been diverted to his secretary first, who had obviously been asked to field his calls.

‘Yes, I did, and I’m sorry,’ he expressed, sounding annoyed over the publicity.

She was beginning to appreciate why he’d gone off to that island to escape it all for a while. Why he had been so angry when he had caught her supposedly taking photographs of him that first day.

‘Say nothing,’ he recommended, when she told him that someone from the press had found out where she worked and had been ringing the office to try and get her to talk to them. ‘Throw them a crumb and they’ll knead it into a whole loaf. If you say nothing it will blow over within a week.’ He apologised again before ringing off.

A couple of hours later a large bunch of red roses was delivered to the office as added consolation from Leonidas, much to the excitement of everyone at Kendon Interiors—particularly the female contingent, who had already seen the article and were still drooling over the hard and exciting image of the high-powered tycoon.

As arranged, he picked Kayla up himself from the office that evening, using his car’s superior power to roar out of the business park before one lurking newspaperman and a couple of young girls from the office who had rushed out to get a glimpse of him knew what had happened.

‘Thank you.’ Kayla looked gratefully across at him as he brought the powerful car into the early rush-hour traffic. ‘For getting me out of there so fast—and for the roses.’ Remembering her telephone call to him earlier, however, and the manner
in which she had finally got to speak to him, she asked, before she could stop herself, ‘Did you get your secretary to send them for you?’

Wasn’t that what company men did? she reflected bitterly, remembering other roses. Before turning their focus on their adoring secretaries themselves?

‘I’m not your father, Kayla,’ he answered grimly, without taking his eyes off the rear window of the car in front of them, uncannily reading her mind. ‘Nor am I your ex-fiancé. When I send flowers I never do it without choosing exactly what I want myself.’

Which put her in her place, good and proper! She didn’t doubt that in this instance at least he was telling her the truth.

He was due to fly to the Channel Islands for a conference that weekend. Expressing concern, however, at Kayla being left to the mercies of the press for a couple of days, he instructed her not to stray beyond the boundaries of his home, and made sure she complied by instructing one strong-armed member of his security staff to keep his eye on her.

‘What are you imagining I’ll do if I go out?’ she quipped as he was leaving for the helicopter that was standing, its blades whirring, on the landing pad in front of the house. ‘Find some man to impregnate me so I can tell everybody it’s yours?’

She regretted it almost as soon as she’d said it.

‘You aren’t a prisoner, Kayla,’ he said, all emotion veiled by the dark fringes of his lashes. ‘I’m only thinking of your privacy and your safety.’

And he was gone, leaving her with only the briefest touch of his lips branding her cheek.

As it was a good weekend she swam in the pool and sunbathed on the terrace, catching up with some reading and watching a couple of adventure movies in the mansion’s impressive professionally equipped cinema room.

Nothing, though, could compare to her traitorous excitement
at hearing Leonidas’s helicopter returning on Sunday evening after she had gone to bed—deliberately early so that she wouldn’t have to see him. Wouldn’t have to battle with this underlying sexual tension that was building in her daily with a terrifying intensity, and which was becoming almost impossible to keep from him whenever he touched her—however casually. And she
had
to keep it from him, she thought, harrowed and racked with frustration. Because wasn’t this part of his ploy? To wear her down with wanting him? Just to redeem his indomitable masculine pride? And if she did ever succumb again to her own foolish and weak-willed desire for him, what then?

No, she had to be strong, she determined. Had to resist him at all costs. Just until that contract was signed.

When Leonidas picked her up from the office the following evening it was to take her for an early dinner in a favoured bistro he knew and then, much to her surprise, on to a photography exhibition.

‘I thought as you’re so attached to that camera of yours,’ he said, pulling up outside the small but well-attended little gallery, ‘you might appreciate seeing what the professionals have to offer. Of course if you’d rather not…’

‘No. No I’d like to,’ Kayla put in quickly when he looked in two minds about whether to park or drive away. Craig had hated anything like this, and even Josh and Lorna couldn’t understand what Craig had used to call her ‘camera fetish’. Just the chance to be among like-minded people for a change was something she didn’t want to pass up.

The exhibition, by private invitation only, was being hosted by an acquaintance of Leonidas’s, and Kayla could tell as soon as they were inside that he and the gentle grey-haired man were true friends. There was none of the deference or playing up to Leonidas that she had seen among some of the people at
the functions she’d attended with him, until she’d wondered how he could ever tell who was really sincere.

‘Leonidas tells me that you’re quite the enthusiast,’ the man said to her, smiling. Leonidas—still dressed, as she was, in a dark business suit—was, with the rest of the twenty or so guests, browsing some of the artwork around the gallery. ‘If ever you feel you have something to offer, then you know where to come.’

‘It’s just a hobby!’ Kayla laughed warmly, wondering what Leonidas had been saying to his friend about her. That he had said anything at all gave her a decidedly warm feeling inside.

‘So what do you think?’ Suddenly he was there beside her, sharing her interest in a waterfall scene with some interesting use of light.

‘It’s good,’ she expressed, enervated by his dark executive image. ‘But if it had been mine I’d have toned the light down a little.’ She was finding it hard to concentrate when she could feel the power of his virility emanating from him, and her nostrils were straining for every greedy breath of his cologne. ‘It isn’t subtle enough for me.’

‘And you like subtlety?’

Dry-mouthed, Kayla touched her tongue to her top lip and saw the way his eyes followed the nervous little action. ‘Every time.’ She even managed to smile, but her lips felt stretched and burning.

‘Perhaps this will be more to your taste.’ They had moved on and he was referring to a landscape captured beneath an angry sky.

‘Much too wild,’ she dismissed laughingly, and saw the sexy elevation of a dark eyebrow.

‘Are you saying you prefer something more…tamed?’

There was sensuality in the way he said it, in that momentary hesitation. Or was she imagining it? she wondered, her heart still racing when he immediately invited her opinion on
the technicalities of the photograph—its depth of field, how it captured the eye.