A Greek Escape (15 page)

‘Leon…’

He wasn’t sure, from her soft murmur, whether that was
what she’d said, but if it was it wasn’t meant for the man who had made love to her last night. Not Leonidas Vassalio, corporate chairman and billionaire. Not after the way she had cried after they had made love.

She didn’t trust him or even like him, and she despised herself for wanting him. Why else would she have shed tears of such bitter regret when she’d been overtaken—as he had—by their mutual passion last night?

It was his fault for thinking in the beginning that he could have a casual fling with a girl like her and that keeping the truth from her wouldn’t matter. Nor had he been right in thinking he could bend her to his will in making her come here to try and get her to want him as she had in Greece. She was never likely to. She was hurting, and he had never intended that.

What was that old adage? he pondered distractedly, moving away from the bed. If you loved something, you had to let it go. If it came back to you, it was yours. If it didn’t, it never would be.

But what he felt for this beautiful, bewitching girl wasn’t
love
, he thought, steeling himself against any emotion. Not as she deserved it. And she certainly wasn’t his. So wasn’t it time to let her go?

Wearing a silver-grey suit, white shirt and silver tie, Leonidas was perched on one of the high stools, browsing through a newspaper, when Kayla came into the huge, sterile-looking kitchen an hour or so later. Behind him the sky was overcast beyond the panoramic window, and even a myriad lights in the halogen-studded ceiling couldn’t detract from the dreariness of what should have been a bright summer day.

‘Good morning.’ He scarcely glanced up from whatever he was reading in the
Financial Times
, although just that briefest glance from him set her insides aflame as she thought
about how intimately and passionately he had pleasured her last night.

After a moment he cast the newspaper aside on the kitchen counter beside him. ‘Kayla, we have to talk,’ he stated without any preamble, angling his long, lean body to face her on the stool.

‘About what?’ she queried, with sudden queasiness in her stomach. What was he going to say that lent such a serious tone to his voice?

‘I’ve been a moron,’ he told her. ‘If that’s the correct expression. You were right. I have been trying to keep you in my life for the sake of my own pride—my ego, if you like—because I didn’t like my ethics being brought into question in anyone’s mind. Particularly the mind of a girl who was very sweet and trusting and whom I treated very unfairly when I was with her in Greece and I needed to put that right.’

‘What are you saying?’ Kayla queried in a small, broken voice.

‘That I’ve been very selfish and inconsiderate and that you don’t need to pander to my fragile ego any longer. Your friends’ contract is assured, if that’s what you’ve been worrying about, so you’re free to cast me off…if that’s what you wish,’ he added with some hesitancy, and as though he was picking his words very carefully. ‘Whenever you like.’

If it was what she wished?

Pain speared through her so acutely it felt like a knife slicing through the life-force of her very being. She’d never been let down and effectively rejected in such a considerately phrased manner before. But he’d got what he wanted, she thought wretchedly, trying to concentrate on her breathing. It was her total capitulation that he had needed to redeem his pride, and now she had given him that he needed nothing more.

He was just like all the others—right out of the same mould. The type of man she’d vowed never to be attracted to again.
Except that this man was different. This man wasn’t even capable of feeling. Not love, she accepted, anguished. He’d practically admitted that to her himself last night. Loving was a weakness—something only fools entertained—and Leonidas Vassalio was anything but weak, and certainly no fool.

‘Well…’ Her smile felt stretched as she tried to put on a brave face, and she wondered if she was visibly shaking as much as she was trembling inside. It occurred to her then why he’d wanted her kept out of the way of the press while he’d been away last weekend. Because he didn’t want anyone thinking she was a permanent fixture in his life. ‘I’d better go and start packing,’ she said as tonelessly as she was able, and wondered at the unfathomable emotion that turned his eyes almost inky black.

‘I have to fly to Athens,’ he informed her, consulting his watch, his tone similarly flat.

It was a trip, she’d discovered, which he took on a regular basis, often going back and forth between London and his Greek office. ‘If you’re keen to go today, I obviously won’t try and stop you, but I shan’t be able to take you myself. I can, however, arrange for a car to be put at your disposal whenever you wish to leave.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Kayla murmured, wanting to get out of there—and quickly—before the tears that were burning the backs of her eyes overflowed and gave her away.

He nodded as though he understood, and somehow she managed to drag herself from the room with her pride intact, safe in the knowledge that he would never know the truth. A truth she only admitted to herself now, as she stumbled over the stairs up which he had carried her so purposefully last night. That she was deeply and hopelessly in love with Leonidas Vassalio.

M
OVING LEADENLY THROUGH
the silent cottage, Leonidas was checking each familiar room. He had promised Philomena’s daughter he would do that for her, and that he would take anything he wanted. Anything that meant something to him, she had said.

Coming back through the kitchen, he let his glance touch painfully on a cherished oil-lamp, some sprigs of dried herbs, the stack of unused logs beside the huge stove, and his nostrils dilated from a host of evocative scents—rosemary, sage and pinewood, trapped there by shutters which remained reverently closed against the intrusion of the outside world.

There was nothing for him here. He had everything he wanted in the memory of Philomena’s presence, her warmth and her voice, often scolding but always wise, and he wished fervently that she was there now, with her affectionate scolding and her wisdom.

He could hear her still, when he had run down here on countless occasions to escape his father’s bellowing and his character-moulding brutality.

Be true to yourself, Leon
.

But he hadn’t been, had he? Not in his hopes and aspirations. In everything he hadn’t been able to feel. Not since he’d been a child, or maybe a young adolescent, but certainly not as a man.

Since his mother had died and his father had blamed him for it he had built a hard, impervious shell around himself. A shell that no one, not even he himself, could crack. Only once had he ever—

He slammed the brakes on his errant thinking.

No, he hadn’t been true to himself, he realised grimly. But that, like everything about this house, was now part of the past.

Grabbing one final look around filled him with such an ache of grief in his chest that he had to take a minute to steel himself before stepping outside into the bright sunlight and closing the door for the last time.

‘I was just going to ring you,’ Kayla said brightly as Lorna came through on her cell phone. ‘The men have done a great job! The builder’s been paid—in fact he’s only just left—and the villa looks as good as new!’

She was standing looking up at the rafters above the galleried landing, and at the freshly rendered walls, which now bore no sign of the damage they had sustained earlier in the year. She tried not to think about how Leonidas—or Leon, she amended painfully—had rescued her that night, risking his own life in coming down here and carrying her out to the truck. She wasn’t going to think about that. Or anything else about him, she decided achingly, just as she had promised herself she wouldn’t when she had stepped off the ferry the previous day.

Josh hadn’t been able to leave the business, and as his in-laws were away on an anniversary cruise Lorna had been fully intending to come here and do the inspection herself. But that had been before her doctor had strongly advised that she was in no condition to travel, so Kayla had immediately allayed her friend’s anxieties by offering to come instead.

What she hadn’t anticipated was how unbearably being here would affect her. She had known it would be painful,
but just how excruciating she hadn’t been prepared for. All she wanted to do now was lock up the villa, drive down and see Philomena, and then get the hell off this island before the last ferry left that day.

Now, to try and take her mind off the memories that were killing her, in a voice thickened by emotion she asked, ‘Is there any news yet on that contract?’

The business that Havens Exclusive were giving them had all been agreed in principle, but the company seemed to be dragging its heels, and the paperwork that would secure it still hadn’t come through. Josh and Lorna were on a knife-edge, waiting for the contract to arrive, and Kayla was secretly worried that it never would.

‘That’s why I’m ringing.’

The anxious note in Lorna’s voice told Kayla that it still hadn’t arrived.

‘I rang Havens yesterday, and they seemed to think it was sent to us two weeks ago. Then today someone else said they didn’t think it had been. I tried to ring Leonidas, to see if he knew anything about it, but his office said he was in Greece this week. I know you’re not seeing him any more, but as you’re already in the country, and as you said things between you only sort of…fizzled out…’

It had been the only way Kayla could describe her break-up with Leonidas to her friend without falling apart emotionally. ‘I was wondering…is there anything you can do to get hold of him from your end? To see if you can find out what’s happening?’

Lorna sounded in such a state that, although her nerves were already stretched to breaking point at the thought of calling him, Kayla agreed to help.

She knew he made regular trips between the UK and Greece, and with her heart thumping a few minutes later she got through to his Athens office.

‘I’m afraid Mr Vassalio isn’t here this week,’ a thickly accented female voice informed her in nonetheless perfect English. ‘You should be able to contact him on his mobile.’

‘Thanks,’ Kayla said, feeling deflated after it had taken so much courage to call in the first place.

It seemed too personal, ringing his cell phone number. Far, far too intimate… After a few moments, though, for Lorna’s sake, she forced herself to do it.

‘You have reached the voicemail of Leonidas Vassalio…’

Just hearing his deep tones sent fire tingling through her veins, but with her heart beating like crazy Kayla cut them off in mid-sentence. There was no way she could leave a message without her voice shaking uncontrollably. And then he’d know, wouldn’t he?

She’d try him again later, she decided, breathing deeply to steady her pulse-rate. In the meantime she would do what she’d planned to do before Lorna had rung and pop down to see Philomena.

The shutters were closed when Kayla pulled up alongside the cottage, which wasn’t that surprising as the late summer sun still burned fiercely here at this time of day, she thought. Even so, the flowers outside in their pots looked neglected and wilting, and there was an ominous air of emptiness about the place.

The door leading from the yard where she had sunbathed in the May sunshine looked securely closed, which was unusual, she realised, and there was no bread baking in the old clay oven, or any spotlessly clean washing hanging on the line.

As she came around the house, looking up at the shuttered windows, a man loading a cart called to her from a little way down the lane. He tilted his head, his weathered face sympathetic, and the expressive little gesture of his hands assured Kayla of what she dreaded most.

Oh, no!

As she wandered numbly around the side one solitary chicken ran clucking across the yard, and the sound only seemed to emphasise its screaming loneliness.

Her heart heavy with grief, Kayla got into the car, fighting back the emotion she could barely contain. But she knew she had to, because if she let it out for just a moment then she’d be swamped by it, she thought. By memories that were so much a part of this place. And Leonidas…

Her cell phone was sticking out of the bag she’d tossed onto the passenger seat, jolting her into remembering that she was supposed to try and contact him again.

Did he know? About Philomena? And then she realised that of course he would know. He would be heartbroken, she thought. In which case how could she ring him and ask him about something so trivial as a contract? She couldn’t. Anyway, his office had told her that he hadn’t come to Athens. And yet his London office had stated categorically that he had…

Of course!

Her gaze lifted swiftly to the hillside and the invisible ribbon of road that wound up above Lorna’s villa. He would have been told about Philomena and he would have come here to be with her family. Because she was
his
family. Or the only person worth calling ‘family’ that Leonidas Vassalio had. In which case he would be here! Not in Athens! Here! At the farmhouse! Where else would he stay?

She didn’t know if the little hatchback would stand up to the punishing drive as she tore out of the lane and took the zig-zagging road up to the familiar dirt track. She only knew she had to see him. She prayed to heaven that he would be there, and that he wouldn’t send her away.

The farmhouse looked the same as she swung into the paved yard. Pale stone walls. Green peeling shutters. Its rickety terracotta roof seeming to grow out of the hillside rising
sharply above it. The truck was still there too, looking as dusty and as sorry for itself as it ever had.

No one answered when she knocked at the flaking door.

Coming around the back, she noticed how baked everything looked from the hot, Ionian summer, remembering with a sharp shaft of pain how she had sat there on the terrace under that vine-covered canopy, enjoying the fish Leonidas had cooked for her the first time she had come here.

Again, there was no response to her knock, and after several attempts to make him hear she tried the doors. They were locked, just as Philomena’s had been.

Everything was the same, but nothing was, she thought achingly, peering through one of the half-open shutters. Supposing he had gone? Supposing he hadn’t been here at all? She couldn’t bear it if he wasn’t. She didn’t think she’d ever find the courage to face him again.

She could see papers lying all over the kitchen table, just as there had been on that dreadful morning when she’d seduced him so shamelessly before discovering who he really was. And there was his pinboard with his plans on, propped up against the easel.

So he was immersing himself in work. Was that how he was dealing with his grief? Carrying on regardless with that formidable strength of character? That indomitable will that was such an integral part of the man she had so desperately fallen in love with?

A sound like a twig snapping behind her had her whirling round, her pulses missing a beat and then leaping into overdrive when she saw him striding up through the overgrown garden.

‘What are you doing here?’ He spoke in such a low whisper that she couldn’t tell whether he welcomed seeing her, but his eyes were penetrating and his features were scored with shock.

‘I came to check the villa. For the builder. I mean for Lorna.’
She was waffling, but she couldn’t help it. Just the sight of him, in a loose-fitting, long-sleeved white shirt tucked into black denim jeans seemed to be turning her insides to mush.

He looked like the old Leon, with his chest half-bared and that thickening shadow around his mouth and chin. But his hair—only slightly longer than when she had seen him last—was still immaculately groomed, and with that air of power that Kayla could never detach from him now he was still very much Leonidas—the billionaire. He looked leaner, though, she decided, and his eyes were heavy, and she remembered in that moment that he was in mourning.

‘I—I heard about Philomena.’ She made a helpless little gesture. ‘Just now. I went down there. I’m so…so sorry—’ Tears threatened and she broke off, unable to keep the emotion out of her voice.

He merely dipped his head in acknowledgment. Perhaps he didn’t trust himself to speak, Kayla thought.

‘I thought you were gone. I wasn’t sure if you’d even been here, and I wanted to see you. To tell you.’ She was prattling on again, but she didn’t know what else to say to him. He wasn’t making it particularly easy for her.

As he crossed the flagstones, taking his key out of his trouser pocket, she was struck, as she always was, by the grace and litheness with which he moved, and by his sheer, uncompromising masculinity.

‘Is that why you came?’ He glanced over his shoulder as he stooped to unlock the door.

‘Yes,’ she answered, because it
was
the only reason. She would never have had the courage to seek him out over anything less.

‘And who told you I was here?’ He pushed open the door, gestured for her to go inside.

‘No one. I just put two and two together,’ she said, moving
past him with every cell responding to the aching familiarity of him beneath her flimsy feminine tunic and leggings.

‘And came up with four?’ He sounded impressed as he followed her in. ‘What made you so sure I was in the country?’

‘I’d been trying to ring you,’ she admitted, and then felt like biting off her tongue. But the atmosphere of the ancient farmhouse, with its familiar rusticity and evocative scents, was so overwhelming that she hadn’t stopped to think.

‘Oh?’ His tone demanded more as he guided her into the sitting room. It looked the same, with its jaded walls and tapestries and its faded striped throws over the easy chairs. ‘What about?’ He gestured for her to sit down.

‘Lorna’s been getting worried,’ she said, subsiding onto the sofa. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, seeing the grooves already etched around his eyes and mouth deepening. ‘I didn’t want to mention it. Not right now.’

‘The world has to keep turning,’ he said, sounding resigned. ‘Do you want some coffee?’

‘Something cold,’ she appealed, thinking that nothing seemed so cold and detached from her as he did right then. She wondered if she should have come; wondered painfully if he was annoyed with her because she had.

He returned minutes later with two tall frosted glasses of an iced citrus drink.

‘So Lorna’s worried?’ he reminded her as she sipped the liquid gratefully. It was sharp and very refreshing. ‘What about?’

‘They haven’t received the contract that Havens were supposed to be supplying.’

‘Supposed to be?’ His eyes were darkly penetrative as he set his own glass down on a side table.

‘I was just worried that…’

‘Yes?’

Why was he looking at her like that? Kayla wondered. As though he wanted to plunder her very soul?

‘…that you might have changed your mind. About giving them that order.’

There. She had said it. So why didn’t she feel any relief? And why was he looking at her with his mouth turning down in distaste, as though she was something that had just crawled out from one of the cracks in the walls outside?

‘So you still think I’d do that? You are still so shot through with doubt and suspicion over what your father and your fiancé did to you that you think every man who carries a briefcase and has a secretary can’t be anything but an unscrupulous bastard?’