A Greek Escape

chapterTHREE

IT WAS THE crash that woke her.

Or had it been the rain and thunder? Kayla wondered, scrambling, terrified, out of bed. She had been tossing and turning in a kind of half-sleep for what seemed like hours, although it might only have been minutes since the storm began.

Now, as she pulled open her bedroom door, the full force of the gale made her cry out when it almost blew her back into the room. In the darkness she could see an ominous shape lying diagonally across the landing and a gash in the sloping roof, which was now open to the wind and the driving rain.

Kayla gasped as lightning ripped across the sky, so close that the almost instantaneous crash of thunder that followed seemed to rock the foundations of the house.

Fumbling to turn on the light switch, she groaned when nothing happened.

‘Oh, great!’

Finding the chair where she had folded the jeans and shirt she had travelled in two days ago, with trembling hands she hastily pulled them on over her flimsy pyjamas, and then groped around for her bag and the small torch she always carried on her keyring.

Debris was everywhere as she moved cautiously under the fallen tree-trunk. Twisted branches, leaves, twigs and pieces of broken masonry and plaster scrunched underfoot as she picked her way carefully downstairs.

It was as if the whole outdoors had broken in, she thought with a startled cry as another flash of lightning streaked across the sky. The crash that followed it seemed to rock the villa, causing her to panic at the torrent of rain that was coming in on the raging wind.

And then she heard another sound, like a loud hammering on the external door to the villa, and mercifully a voice, its deep tone muffled, yet still breaking through to her through the tearing gale and the rain.

‘Kayla! Kayla? Answer me! Are you in there? Kayla! Are you all right?’

The banging persisted until she thought the door was caving in.

Reaching it and tugging it open, she almost cried with relief when she saw the formidable figure of Leon standing there, his fists clenched as though to knock the door down if it wasn’t opened. Rain was running down his face and his strong bronzed throat in rivulets.

It took all her will-power not to sink against him as he caught her arm and shouted something urgently in his own language.

‘Get out of here! Quickly!’ he ordered, reverting to English. ‘There’s been a landslide further up the mountain. This house might not be safe to stay in.’ And as she hesitated, casting an anxious glance at her belongings, ‘We’ll come back for your things in the morning!’ he shouted above the wind and the lashing rain. ‘You’re coming with me!’

Petrified, rooted to the spot by the sound of splitting timber somewhere close by on the riven hillside, Kayla felt herself suddenly being whipped off her feet. She was only pacified by the realisation that she was in a pair of strong, powerful arms, being held against Leon’s sodden warmth as he ran with her to the waiting truck.

He had left the vehicle’s lights on, and after he had set her quickly down on the passenger seat Kayla saw him race around the bonnet with his head bent against the storm, his purposeful physique only just discernible through the rain-washed windscreen.

He opened the driver’s door, his long hair dripping, and as he climbed into the cab beside her and slammed the door against the wind she noticed that his shirt, which was unbuttoned and hanging loose, like his jeans, was soaked through and clinging to his powerful torso.

‘Thank you! Oh, thank you!’ Dropping her head into her hands as the truck started rumbling away, Kayla couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘I didn’t know what was happening!’ she blurted out when she had recovered herself enough to sit up straight and turn towards him. ‘I woke up and thought the world was coming to an end!’

‘It would have been for you,’ Leonidas stated with grim truthfulness, ‘if that tree had fallen on you.’

But it hadn’t, she thought gratefully. Nor was she now exposed to the damage it had caused. Thanks to him, she realised, and wondered how she would have coped if he hadn’t been passing right at that moment.

‘What happened?’ she queried, baffled, as she began to gather her wits about her. ‘Did you just happen to come by?’

‘Something like that,’ he intoned, without taking his attention from the zig-zagging mountain road. The truck’s wiper blades were barely able to cope even at double-speed with the torrential rain.

At half-past one in the morning?

For the first time noticing the clock on the dashboard, Kayla realised exactly what the time was. Had he been out late, seen what had happened as he had driven past? Or had he been in bed? Had he heard the landslide and driven down especially?

Of course not, she thought, dismissing that last possible scenario. No man she knew of would be so gallant as to risk his own safety for a girl he didn’t even know let alone like. And it was patently obvious from her two previous meetings with him that he clearly didn’t like her. Or any of her sex, if it came to that!

‘Why are you doing this if you think I’m someone who’s out to make trouble for you?’ she enquired pointedly, her hair falling, damp and dishevelled, around her shoulders.

‘What would you have preferred me to do?’ Every ounce of his concentration was still riveted on the windscreen. ‘Leave you there to swim? Or worse?’

Kayla shuddered as she interpreted what ‘worse’ might easily have meant.

‘Is it always like this on these islands?’ she queried worriedly, staring out at the truck’s powerful headlights cutting through the sheets of rain.

‘If you come here in the spring it’s a chance you take,’ he returned succinctly.

Which she had, Kayla thought, deciding that he probably thought her stupid on top of everything else.

‘What’s likely to happen to the villa?’ she asked anxiously, watching the gleaming water cascading off the hills and filling every crack and crevice on the rugged road. ‘That tree came right through onto the landing.’

‘We’ll go down and inspect the damage in the morning.’

‘But the furniture and furnishings. And my things,’ she remembered as an afterthought. ‘Everything’s going to get wet.’

‘Only to be expected,’ he answered prosaically, changing gear to take a particularly sharp bend. ‘With a hole in the roof.’

A hysterical little laugh bubbled up inside of her. Nerves, she decided. And shock. Because there was certainly nothing funny about the havoc this storm had wreaked upon the little Grecian retreat her friends had worked so hard for.

‘What am I going to say to Lorna?’ She was worrying about how she was going to break the news to her, thinking aloud. ‘She and Josh have got enough problems as it is.’ And then it dawned on her. ‘Oh, heavens!’ she breathed, still shaking inside from her ordeal. ‘Where on earth am I going to stay? Tonight? Tomorrow? At all?’

‘Well, tonight you’re going to stay with me,’ he told her in a tone that was settled, decisive. ‘And tomorrow, when you’ve telephoned your friend to let her know what has happened, we’ll think of something else.’

We, he’d said, as though they were in this thing together. Which they weren’t, Kayla thought. Yet strangely she gleaned some comfort from it—along with a contradictory feeling of being indebted to him, too.

‘Like what?’ She didn’t know where to begin, or even if the island had any other suitable or affordable accommodation. Lorna had offered to let her stay in the villa rent-free, and although Kayla had insisted on paying her, it was still only a nominal amount. The alternative was that she could fly home…

‘There are three hotels on this side of the island. One of them—the largest—is closed for refurbishment,’ Leon was telling her, ‘but I’m sure as it’s out of season one of the other two will be able to accommodate you.’

‘I can’t stay with you tonight,’ she informed him. ‘It’s such an imposition, for one thing.’ She didn’t even know him! And from what she had seen of him over the past couple of days neither did she want to. ‘You said yourself you wanted to be left alone.’

‘Which you’ve failed to acknowledge since the day you arrived,’ he told her dryly. ‘So why break with tradition?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Now she felt even worse. ‘You don’t have to do this. I’m only making a nuisance of myself…’

‘What would you prefer me to do?’ he asked. ‘Put you out into the storm?’ He laughed when he saw the anxiety creasing her forehead. ‘Relax,’ he advised. ‘You’re coming back with me. So, no more arguments to the contrary—and definitely no more apologies. Understood?’

Uneasily, Kayla nodded.

‘I didn’t hear you,’ he stated over the rumble of the engine and the jaunty rhythm of the wiper blades trying to keep pace with the interminable rain.

‘Understood!’ she shouted back, and kept her gaze on the windscreen and her hands in her lap until he brought them safely off the road and onto the paved area of the old farmhouse.

The part of the house he led her into was remarkably clean and tidy. It was surprisingly well-furnished too, even though most of the furniture looked worn and in need of replacing, and the tapestries on two of the walls, like the once colourfully striped throws over the easy chairs, were faded from the sunlight and with age. But with its whitewashed walls and cool stone floors it had an overall rustic charm that offered more comfort than she had imagined from the outside.

She was too tired and weary from her experiences to take too much interest in how he was living, and said only after a cursory glance around her, ‘I’m really not happy about this.’

She didn’t know anything about him, for a start, even if he had just rescued her from a house that might possibly be unsafe. He was still a stranger, and up until now a decidedly hostile one.

‘I’m afraid you’ve no choice,’ he told her, opening a cupboard and pulling out towels and spare bedlinen, ‘because I’ve no intention of trying to find you a hotel tonight. No hotelier would welcome you turning up at this hour—even if it were safe enough to do so. And if you really don’t profess to know me—’ He broke off, his speculative gaze raking over her as if, by some miracle, he was at last beginning to believe her. ‘I’m not a criminal,’ he stated. ‘Unless, of course, the police want to charge me with some driving offence I don’t yet know about.’

Kayla smiled, relaxing a little, as he had intended her to.

Clever, she thought. Clever and probably very manipulative, she decided, but was too tired to worry about that tonight.

After she had declined his offer of any refreshment, and the room he showed her into was rustic but practical, with the same weary air about its furnishings. Like downstairs, the walls looked as though they hadn’t been whitewashed in a long time. A big wooden bed took pride of place, and from the few masculine possessions scattered around the room she gathered that he had been using it up until now.

‘I’m afraid it isn’t five-star, but it’s warm and dry and the sheets are clean.’ They looked it too. Crisp and white, if a little rumpled, and there was a definite indentation in the plump and inviting-looking pillow. ‘Well, I was only in them for half an hour,’ he enlightened her, with his mouth tugging down at one side.

So he had been to bed and got up again—which could only have meant that he must have driven down in the storm especially.

‘Think nothing of it,’ he advised dismissively as their eyes clashed.

Kayla wanted to say something, to thank him at the very least for deserting his bed in the middle of the night to come and see if she was all right. But his manner and all that had gone before kept her mute.

‘What will you do?’ she enquired, glancing down at the bed he’d given up for her. Suddenly worried that she might have given him the wrong idea, quickly she tagged on, ‘That wasn’t meant to sound like…’

‘It didn’t,’ he said, although the way his gaze moved disconcertingly over her body did nothing to put her at ease. ‘Don’t worry about me.’ He’d started moving away. ‘There’s a perfectly adequate sofa in the living room.’

Adequate, but not comfortable. Not for his manly size. She had noticed it on the way through and thought now that it wouldn’t in any way compensate for losing the roomy-looking bed he’d imagined he would be occupying.

‘I really feel awful about this.’

‘Don’t,’ he replied. ‘I’m sure you’re used to better. As I said, it isn’t five-star.’ His tone, however, was more cynical than apologetic, and a little dart of rebellion ran through her as their eyes met and locked.

She didn’t tell him that she had had a taste of luxurious living and it wasn’t something she was keen to get back to. Not when it had meant accompanying Craig to company dinners and luxury conference weekends where she had watched her ex paying homage, she realised now, to people he merely wanted to impress—people he knew could further his corporate ambitions—without really liking them at all.

‘I’m more than grateful for—’ A sudden vivid flash, accompanied by a deafening crack, had her cutting her sentence short with a startled cry.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. His voice came softly from somewhere close behind her as the thunder seemed to reverberate off the very walls. ‘This house might look as though it’s seen better days, but I can assure you, Kayla, the roof is sound. No tree is going to fall in on us, I promise you.’

Her visible fear had brought him over to her. She only realised it as she felt his hands on her shoulders through the thin fabric of her shirt, warm and strong and surprisingly reassuring in view of his previous attitude towards her.

‘I’m all right.’ She took a step back and his hands fell away from her. She wondered what was most unsettling. The storm—or the touch of this stranger whose bedroom she was unbelievably standing in.

‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘But get out of those damp clothes. And get a good night’s rest,’ he advocated, before leaving her to it.

He was right about her clothes being damp, she realised with a little shiver after he had gone. Just the short journey from the villa to the truck and then from the truck to this house had been enough to soak her shirt and jeans. She was grateful to peel them off.

There were a few moments in the king-sized bed when she wondered what she was doing there, unable to keep her thoughts from the man who must have been lying there not more than an hour before. Had he been lying here naked? She felt a sensual little tingle, and her nostrils grasped the trace of a masculine shower gel beneath the scent of fresh linen. But it was only for a few moments, because when she opened her eyes again the tearing winds and driving rain had ceased and a fine blade of sunlight was piercing the dimly shaded room through a slit in the shutters.

Scrambling out of bed, Kayla went over and flung them back, feeling the heat of the sun on her scantily clothed body as it streamed in through windows that were already open to the glittering blue of the sky.

The bedroom overlooked the front yard, the dirt track and the rolling hillside that descended so sharply, with the mountain road, to the blue and silver of the shimmering sea.

She could see the truck parked there on the flagstones, where Leon had left it in the early hours.

A surge of heat coursed through her as she thought about how he had come to her rescue last night, and how helpless she had felt in those hostile yet powerful arms as they had carried her to that truck when she had been too shocked and too bewildered to move.

‘So you’re awake.’ A familiar deep voice overlaid with mockery called out to her as if from nowhere.

Startled, Kayla realised that he had been doing something to his truck. She hadn’t noticed until he had pulled himself up from under it.

Uncertainly she lifted a hand, mesmerised for a moment by the shattering impact of his hard, untrammelled masculinity.

With his hair wild as a gypsy’s, and in a black vest top and cut off jeans, he looked like a man totally uninhibited by convention. Self-sufficient and self-ruling. A man who would probably shun the constraints that Craig and his company cronies adhered to.

But this man was looking at her with such unveiled interest that her stomach took a steep dive as she realised why.

She was wearing nothing but her coffee and cream lace-edged baby doll pyjamas and, utterly self-conscious, she swiftly withdrew from the window, certain she wasn’t imagining the deep laugh that emanated from the yard as she hastily pulled the shutters together again.

The bathroom was, as she’d discovered last night, clean and adequately equipped. Some time this morning a toothbrush, still in its packaging, had been placed upon two folded and surprisingly good-quality burgundy towels on a wooden cabinet beside the washstand. Impressed, silently Kayla thanked him for that.

Fortunately her hairbrush had been in her bag when she had made her hasty exit from the villa last night, along with a spare tube of the soft brown mascara she had remembered to buy before leaving London.

Never one to wear much make-up, she had nonetheless always felt undressed without her mascara. A combination of pale hair and pale eyelashes made her look washed-out, she had always thought, and Craig had agreed.

A sharp, unexpected little stab of something under her ribcage had her catching her breath as she thought about Craig, but surprisingly it didn’t hurt as she reminded herself that what Craig Lymington thought wasn’t important any more.

Leon was in the large sitting room off the hall, locking something away in a drawer, when Kayla came down feeling fresh and none the worse for her experiences of the previous night.

He was superb, she thought reluctantly from the doorway, noticing how at close quarters the black vest top emphasised his muscular torso, how perfectly smooth and contoured were his arms, their hair-darkened skin like bronze satin sheathing steel. She was pleased she’d put mascara on, and that when she’d brushed her hair forward and then tossed it back, as she always did, it had looked particularly full and shiny this morning.

He looked up and his gaze moved over her. He was clearly remembering what she had looked like at the window earlier.

‘I’ve been trying to ring Lorna but I can’t get a signal,’ she said quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed the way she’d been ogling him. ‘Is it all right if I use your landline?’

‘You could—if it was connected,’ he returned. He took his own cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to her as she came into the room. It felt smooth and warmed by his body heat, reminding her far too easily of how she had felt being held against his hard warmth the previous night.

‘As soon as it’s a respectable enough time,’ she began, while trying to deal with how ridiculously she was allowing him to affect her, ‘and after you’ve dropped me off at the villa, do you think you could point me in the direction of the nearest hotel?’

‘One thing at a time,’ he advised her. ‘The first thing is not to plan anything on an empty stomach.’

‘Is that your philosophy on life?’ She struggled to speak lightly, which was difficult when there was so much tension in her voice.

‘One of them,’ he answered, with his mouth tugging down at one corner.

She wondered what the others were, but decided against asking. For all the hospitality this man had shown her, he didn’t welcome too much intrusion into his personal life, and Kayla certainly felt as though she had intruded enough.

Surprisingly, she got through to Lorna’s office on the first try. Gently, Kayla broke the news to her about the storm and the tree coming down, wanting to spare her friend as much distress as she could. Lorna and Josh had been trying for a baby for quite some time, and Lorna had had two miscarriages in the past two years. Now she was well into the second trimester of another pregnancy, and Kayla regretted having to cause her any more stress as she concluded, ‘I haven’t had a chance to look at it in daylight, but we’re going down after breakfast to assess the damage.’

‘We?’ Lorna echoed inquisitively, so that Kayla was forced to gather her wits together in order to avoid any awkward questions.

‘Someone from a neighbouring property. They took me in for the night,’ she explained, taking care not to even suggest that ‘they’ was really ‘he’. She wasn’t ready to be bracketed with another man in her life just yet.

‘Then tell them that I can’t thank them enough for taking care of my friend.’ True to character, Lorna seemed more concerned about Kayla than about the tree crashing down on her precious villa. ‘I’m so glad there was someone else there! What would you have done otherwise?’

My thoughts exactly, Kayla mused, unable to keep her eyes from straying to Leon’s superbly broad back as he moved lithely out of the room while her friend made plans for what she intended to do.

‘Lorna’s parents are going to come over and sort out what needs doing,’ Kayla reported to him a few minutes later, having found him in the huge and very outdated farmhouse kitchen at the end of the hall. It contained a dresser and a huge wood-burning stove over which Leon was busily wielding a frying pan. A large pine table stood in the centre of the room, already laid for one. Two large-paned windows faced the front of the house, offering stupendous views of the distant sea, while two more on the other side of the room looked out onto the terraced gardens. ‘Lorna and Josh have their own business and don’t have much free time,’ she explained, handing him back his phone, which he casually slipped into the back pocket of his jeans.

Unlike you, Kayla thought, and for a moment found herself envying his flexible lifestyle. His free spirit and total autonomy. The complete lack of binding responsibility.

‘Have you always been so self-sufficient?’ she asked, watching him cutting melon, which he put on the table beside a plate of fresh pineapple slices. She wondered if he had already eaten or just wasn’t bothering.

‘I like to think so,’ he responded, without looking at her. ‘I’ve always believed—’ and found out the hard way, Leonidas thought, his features hardening ‘—that if you want something done properly there’s no surer way but to do it yourself.’

‘Another of your philosophies?’ Kayla enquired, her hand coming to rest on the back of one the pine chairs and her head tilted as she waited for an answer, which never came.

No man was an island, so the saying went. But Kayla had the distinct impression that this man was—emotionally, at any rate. He seemed more detached and aloof from the rat race and the big wide world than anyone she had ever met. Uncommunicative. Guarding his privacy like a precious jewel.

‘Who did you think I was when you accused me of playing some game with you yesterday?’

‘It isn’t important,’ he intoned, moving back to the stove.

‘It seemed to be very important at the time,’ Kayla commented, still put out by the names he had called her. ‘The things you said to me weren’t very nice.’

‘Yes, well…we can all make mistakes,’ Leonidas admitted, adding freshly chopped herbs to the sizzling frying pan and beginning to accept that he might have made a gross error of judgement in treating her so unjustly. ‘I came here to relax. I didn’t expect some uninvited young woman with a camera to be taking secretive photographs of me. When you realised I’d seen you on the rocks and you ran from me I decided that you must definitely be up to no good.’

So he had charged at her like an angry bull, Kayla thought, wondering what he’d thought she was hiding that had incensed him so much.

‘Yesterday,’ he went on, ‘when I invited you to lunch, it was to try to find out why.’

‘You accused me of spying on you,’ she reminded him, folding her arms in a suddenly defensive pose as she bit back the urge to remind him that she hadn’t been trying to photograph him on that beach. ‘What did you imagine? That I was some sort of secret agent or something?’ she suggested with an ironic little laugh. ‘Or a private investigator, hired by a jealous wife—?’ She broke off as a more plausible possibility struck her. ‘A wife who’s taken you to the cleaners and who’s still hoping to uncover the hidden millions you haven’t told her about that you’ve got stashed away somewhere? Gosh! Is that it?’ she exclaimed, when she saw the way his dark lashes came down over his unfathomable eyes, wondering if she’d hit the nail on the head. ‘Not about the millions. I mean…’

‘About the wife?’

She nodded. Why else would he have referred to her as a blood-sucking female yesterday? He must be licking his wounds after a very nasty divorce.

‘Nice try,’ he said dryly, the muscles in his wonderfully masculine back moving as he worked. ‘I’m sorry to have to shoot down such a colourful and imaginative story, but I’m not married. And since when did a man simply wanting to protect his privacy mean there’s an avaricious and avenging wife in tow?’

‘It doesn’t,’ Kayla answered, wondering why the discovery of his marital status should leave her feeling far more pleased than it should have. ‘It just seemed a little bit of an overreaction, that’s all,’ she murmured, feeling her temperature rising from the way he was looking at her—as though he knew what baffling and unsettling thoughts were going through her head.

‘So how did you know about this house?’ she asked, since it was apparent now that it wasn’t just a deserted building he’d happened to stumble across.

‘I was born on this island,’ he said, in a cool, clipped voice. ‘I have the use of this place when I want it.’

‘Who owns it?’ she enquired, looking around.

‘Someone who is too busy to take much interest in it,’ he answered flatly, suddenly sounding bored.

‘What a pity,’ Kayla expressed, looking around her at the sad peeling walls. ‘It could be nice if it was renovated. Someone must have treasured it once.’

Once, Leonidas thought, when its warm, welcoming walls had rung with his mother’s beautiful singing. When he hadn’t been able to sleep for excitement because his grandfather was taking him fishing the following day…

‘Obviously the current owner doesn’t share your sentimentality about it,’ he remarked, and found it a struggle to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

‘You said you were born on this island?’ Kayla reminded him, feeling as though she was being intrusive again, yet unable to stop herself. Even less could she envisage him as a helpless, squalling infant. ‘It’s idyllic. What made you leave?’

His features looked set in stone as he tossed two slices of bubbling halloumi cheese onto slices of fresh bread, topping them with rich red sun-dried tomatoes before he answered, ‘I believed there was a better life out there.’

‘And was there?’

Again he didn’t answer.

But what sort of satisfaction was there in never settling anywhere? Kayla wondered now. In just drifting around from place to place?

‘Eat your breakfast,’ he ordered, putting the meal on the table in front of her. ‘And then we’ll go down and inspect the storm damage.’