A Greek Escape (16 page)

‘That’s not true!’

‘Isn’t it?’ he shot back. ‘We’re a type. Isn’t that what you said?’

He was standing above her, hands on hips, his legs planted firmly apart. It was such a dominant pose that her gaze faltered beneath his. With heart-quickening dismay she realised she had let it fall to somewhere below his tight lean waist—which was worse.

‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’ she said, hurting, feeling her body’s response to his hard virility even as he stood there actively judging her. ‘You lied to me about everything! Every single thing! And when I didn’t like it you used my friends to blackmail me into living with you until…’

‘Until what?’ he pressed, relentless.

‘Until you’d got what you wanted.’

‘And what was that?’ His eyes were shielded by the thick ebony of his lashes and his question was an almost ragged demand.

‘You know very well.’

‘No, I don’t. I’m afraid you’re going to have to spell it out for me.’

‘Until you’d got me to go to bed with you.’ There were flags of pink across her cheekbones, lending some colour to
her pale skin beneath the summer-bleached gold of her loose hair. ‘Wasn’t that the whole idea of having me move in with you?’ she said wretchedly. ‘To salvage your pride and your ego? Wasn’t it enough that you made a complete fool out of me without robbing me of my dignity and my self-respect as well?’

‘Is that what I did?’ His eyes as they met hers held some dark, unfathomable emotion. ‘I really didn’t realise that in making love with me you were sacrificing all that.’

The raw note in his voice had her searching his face with painful intensity, but his features were shuttered and unreadable.

Her fingers were icy around the glass, but she couldn’t seem to feel them. She couldn’t feel anything except her aching love for him and the raw agony of seeing him again when he didn’t share her feelings, when he had admitted to being incapable of love—virtually ridiculing it—that night he had carried her to his bed.

‘I just wasn’t happy being another notch on your bedpost,’ she murmured, looking down at the striped fabric covering the sofa and wondering what had happened in his life to make him so hard-bitten as she plucked absently at a loose strand of the faded weave.

‘Neither was I. That was why I let you go.’

‘That was very magnanimous of you.’ Her throat was clogged with emotion. Pray heaven that he didn’t guess just how much he had hurt her!

‘Just as well I did—in the circumstances,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to keep my hands off you if you had stayed.’

The ‘circumstances’ meaning the loss of her dignity and self-respect, Kayla realised painfully, wanting to tell him that making love with him had been the most intense and pleasurable experience of her life.

‘Well, you can tell Lorna that she doesn’t need to worry…’
Suddenly he was talking about business, dismissing what had happened between them as easily and as ruthlessly as he had dismissed her from his life. ‘That contract should have been with Kendon Interiors over two weeks ago. I’ll get on to Havens right away and your friends will have it within the next forty-eight hours.’

So he hadn’t been withholding it, Kayla thought. She had satisfied his requirements and he was upholding his part of the bargain. She just wished it hadn’t cost her so much to make it possible. But it had. And it hurt—like hell.

‘What’s wrong?’

Through the crushing emotion that seemed to be weighing her down she caught his hard yet strangely husky enquiry. His eyes were narrowed, probing, digging down into her soul again, and Kayla sucked in a panicky breath as he moved closer. He’d claimed her body as his own, and she would bear the brand of his consummate lovemaking for the rest of her life, but she wasn’t going to let him know that he had branded her heart as well!

‘I’d better go.’ She leaped up, spilling some of the juice she had scarcely touched over her clothes and over the flags. ‘Oh, no…’

‘I’ll get you a towel.’ The glass was retrieved from her shaking hand.

‘I can do it myself,’ she told him, her voice cracking.

‘Kayla!’

There was a thread of urgency in his voice but she took no heed of it as she stumbled along to the kitchen. The pain of loving him was like a knife piercing her heart.

It would be so easy to break down. To let him see how much she cared. But if she did that then she would only be inviting more humiliation—and ultimately more pain. He would use her again, solely in the name of pleasure. And she would let him, she thought wildly, knowing she had to clean herself up
as quickly as she could and get as far away from this place—from him—as was humanly possible.

She’d been a fool to come, she realised, grabbing several sheets of kitchen paper from the roll that hung next to the sink and starting to dab it hastily over her wet tunic. She should have telephoned him. E-mailed. Anything but risk coming here and putting herself through this. But she’d wanted to see him. Speak to him. What kind of a first-rate fool did that make her? She was a glutton for punishment if she’d imagined that coming here—even if it was purely to offer him her sympathies over Philomena—would leave her unaffected and unscathed. And if she’d been hoping, even subconsciously, that seeing him again might change the status quo between them, then she’d forgotten—or was choosing to ignore—every lesson she’d thought she had learned. For all his good points—and there were a lot of them—he was still a ruthless businessman. A self-confessed, hard-headed realist, who believed that love and sentimentality were for fools.

Well, she’d leave him to his laptop and his papers and his…

Plans?

The word died from her consciousness as she swung painfully round to face them, having tossed the damp, scrunched-up kitchen roll into the bin. The easel was angled towards the front window, which was why she hadn’t seen it when she’d peered through the back shutters earlier. But the pinboard was a canvas, and what she’d thought were plans was…

A full-length painting of
her!

He had captured her as she must have looked that day coming out of the sea, wearing only her white smock-top and bikini briefs. Her hair was blowing loose and she was looking down at something in the water, her golden lashes accentuated with a sensuality she had never attributed to them before. What she was wearing was sheer, yet her body was indistinct through the folds of virginal gossamer. It was a work of bold strokes.
Movement. But above all else of the soul. Only a man could have painted her with such intrinsic sensuality, she thought. A man who loved his subject. Who knew her inside and out…

She put her hand up as though to touch it and as quickly retracted it, her fingers curling into a tight ball which she pressed to her mouth as tears started to fall.

They had changed to racking sobs in the time it took Leonidas to cross from the doorway and reach her.

‘Kayla…’ The depth of her emotion tore at him and she put up no resistance as he pulled her into his arms.

She was crying for Philomena. He wasn’t blind enough not to know that. She was remembering where she had come from that day and who she had been staying with…

‘Oh, my darling beautiful girl, don’t cry.’

He’d intended to say it in Greek, and only realised when she lifted her head and looked at him with soul-searching intensity that he had said it in English—and that it was too late.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she breathed in a shocked little whisper.

‘About the painting?’ His voice trembled with emotion as he used his thumb to wipe away her tears. ‘Or about being in love with you?’

There. It was out now, he thought, and he would have to bear the consequences of baring his soul.

‘What?’ Kayla couldn’t believe that she was hearing properly. ‘About the painting…’ She shook her head as though to clear it—uttered a little laugh through her tears. ‘Both!’ Was he really saying this? Hectically, her eyes searched his face.

‘Why do you think I wanted you with me?’ he uttered deeply, on a shuddering note, hardly daring to believe that she wasn’t ridiculing him.

‘To salvage your pride.’ Pain lined her forehead as she remembered that last morning. ‘You said so yourself.’

‘Well, there was a bit of that, I’ll admit.’ He pulled a self-deprecating
face. ‘But mainly it was because I wanted to get you to trust me again. There was no other way I could think of that would break through the barriers you’d erected against me—and not just because I hadn’t been straight with you in the beginning, but because you believed I was the type of man who had hurt you so badly before—the type you so clearly despised. I was hoping you would look beyond the outer shell and see that I was different from those other men you’d known. Yet I only compounded my mistakes by browbeating you into staying with me. I would never have gone back on my word over that contract. But when I realised that you really believed I was manipulative enough to be using your friends to get to you—was actually capable of destroying everything they had if you didn’t do exactly what I wanted—I guess it was more than a crushing blow to my pride. I decided I didn’t have anything to lose. I needed to earn your respect. That’s why I wanted to take things slowly for a while and not complicate matters by taking you to bed, though it was torture having to exercise enough restraint not to do so. When we did make love and you cried I knew it was because your heart didn’t want it, even though physically you couldn’t resist this thing we have between us any more than I could.’

‘That isn’t true,’ Kayla denied emphatically, knowing she had to tell him now. ‘I was crying because I love you—because the whole experience for me had been so…so amazingly incredible. And because I knew—thought—you didn’t feel anything for me and that sooner or later you’d want me to go. And you did,’ she reminded him, with all the agony of the past few weeks rising up to torment her again. ‘Why? If you feel the same way I do?’

‘Because I didn’t fully realise it—or want to acknowledge it—until after you’d gone,’ he admitted, his chest lifting heavily, ‘and I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I knew I already had.’

‘And all the time you’ve been doing this…’ She pulled back from him slightly to gaze awestruck at the painting. ‘Wow! Do I really look like that?’

‘You’d better believe it,’ he said, with a sexy sidelong grin.

‘It’s brilliant. You’re a genius,’ she praised, and he laughed. ‘No, I’m serious,’ she breathed, meaning it. She couldn’t understand why, with so much talent, he hadn’t made art his career.

He made a self-deprecating sound down his nostrils when she asked him. ‘There were reasons,’ he divulged almost brokenly.

‘What reasons?’ she pressed gently, realising that it was stirring up some deeply buried pain for him to talk about it.

‘My father had other ideas for me,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t countenance having a son who painted for a living. He thought it less than manly. We argued about it—and never stopped arguing about it.’ And now he had started pouring out his most agonising secret he couldn’t stop. ‘We were arguing about it in the car the night my mother died. If I hadn’t been determined to oppose his will he wouldn’t have kept turning round to shout at me and we would never have had the accident that killed her. I wouldn’t let up when I knew I should have, and it was my mother who ultimately paid the price. After that even the thought of painting was abominable to me. How could it be anything else?’ he suggested, his strong features ravaged by the pain he had carried all these years. ‘Knowing that she’d died because of it. Because of
me!
’

‘You didn’t kill her!’ Kayla exhaled, understanding now what devils had been driving him all his life to make him so hard-headed and single-mindedly determined—understanding a lot of things now. ‘You were—what? Fourteen? Fifteen? Barely more than a child! Your father was the driver. He was also an adult. It was up to him to exercise restraint until he’d stopped the car.’

‘My father didn’t see it like that,’ he relayed. Yet for the first time he found himself taking some solace from the tender arms that went around him, from the gentle yet determined reasoning in her words.

Art was feeling and feelings were weakness. His father had indoctrinated that into him. But the feelings he had for this beautiful woman—which were being unbelievably reciprocated—made him feel stronger than he had ever felt in his life.

‘This house…it’s yours, isn’t it?’ Kayla murmured, with her head against his shoulder. ‘This is where you lived when you were a boy.’

Locked in his arms, she felt the briefest movement of his strong body as he nodded. ‘It was the first time I’d been able to bring myself back here since my father died last year. The first time I’d been back—apart from visits to Philomena—in over fifteen years.’

His voice cracked as he mentioned the grandmother figure who had filled the void when he had been left motherless and without the nucleus of a loving family. Understanding, Kayla held him closer. Hadn’t she lost a grandmother too?

‘I love you,’ she whispered. It was the only thing it felt right to say just then.

He smiled down at her and her heart missed a beat when she recognised the sultry, satisfied response of the man she had fallen in love with. ‘I love you too—very much,
psihi mou
. We may not have got off to a very good start, but knowing you has made me see that there are more important things in life than everything I’ve been pursuing. Oh, money and position are wonderful to have, but they’re nothing without the most precious things in life—like a caring partner and a family. Without love,’ he murmured against her lips, acknowledging it indisputably now. ‘Do you think you would find it too much of a punishment to marry a company man with a briefcase and a secretary—who, incidentally, is fifty-three years
old and worth her weight in gold? A man who—also incidentally—
does
own an island and builds eyesores for a living? Though not literally. He leaves the spade and shovel work to his minions nowadays.’

He was joking about the minions. She could hear it in his voice. But she couldn’t believe he was actually asking her to be his wife.

‘Of course if you don’t want to…’ He was looking so uncertain, so vulnerable, that she reached up and brought his head down to hers.