A Greek Escape

chapterELEVEN

MOVING 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?’

‘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.

‘Leonidas Vassalio, of course I’ll marry you,’ she whispered smilingly, before she kissed him and felt the surge of power that trembled through his body as he caught her to him. ‘Leon…’

That’s better, his eyes said approvingly when he lifted his head, and the gleam in their dark depths promised everything that was joyous and exciting. ‘And now…’ suddenly he was sweeping her up into his arms ‘…I believe we have some unfinished business upstairs.’

Much later, after he’d gone to make some coffee, Kayla was surprised when he returned almost immediately.

‘Your cell phone is bleeping,’ he told her, handing over her bag, and she was alarmed to see the display on her phone showing half a dozen missed calls—all from Josh.

‘Lorna’s in hospital,’ she told Leonidas when she’d finished speaking to her friend’s husband. ‘She was rushed in for a Caesarean section this afternoon but everything’s OK.’ She was laughing and crying as she added, ‘Both mother and daughter are doing well!’

‘Thank heaven for that!’ he expressed, with his hand against his robed chest, looking as thrilled and almost as relieved as Kayla felt. ‘This means we have to get a move on if we want to catch up with Josh and Lorna—particularly if you’re going to fill my island with dogs and horses and babies, Mrs Vassalio. It’s in the Bahamas, by the way. And at this exact moment I can’t do too much to fulfil your dreams with the first two things on your wish-list, but I can certainly do something right now about fulfilling the last!’

Later, lying in his arms, Kayla stirred and stretched contentedly.

He’s a good man, Philomena had tried to tell her, and Kayla knew that now. She also knew that as men came—company or otherwise—they didn’t come any better.