A Greek Escape

chapterFOUR

THE STRUCTURE OF the villa had sustained less damage than Kayla had feared. However, after Leon had helped her to clear up the debris and mess caused by the falling tree, it was still a far cry from what it had been when she had arrived.

‘I’ll have to look for somewhere else,’ she accepted defeatedly, trying to sound braver and less anxious than she was feeling as she dropped the last packet of ruined food into a refuse bag.

‘My very next step,’ Leonidas assured her, taking his phone out of his pocket.

He had changed into a pale blue shirt and jeans before leaving the farmhouse earlier and, looking up from the bag she was tying, Kayla noticed how his rolled-up sleeves emphasised the dark olive of his skin and the virility of his strong arms.

‘I think you’ve done quite enough already,’ she reminded him. Not only had he rescued her from a terrifying situation last night, he had given her food and shelter, driven her back here, and then refused to leave when it came to the clean-up operation. ‘I’m indebted enough to you as it is!’

‘If that’s all that’s worrying you—forget it,’ he drawled. ‘I’m not likely to be extracting payment any time soon.’

‘That’s not funny,’ she scolded, still unhappy about being in his debt. Or was it that mocking glint in his eyes that affected her more than his hostility?

Whatever it was, she thought, he unsettled her as no man had ever unsettled her in her life. Not to this degree anyway, she realised. And there was more to it than just the danger of getting too involved with a man whom, until the day before yesterday, she had never even met. It was the potent attraction this man held for her, purely physical in its nature and stronger than any she had felt before. Which was illogical, she decided, when she had been engaged to Craig and fully intending to spend the rest of her life with him.

But Leon was already taking the necessary steps to get her fixed up with an alternative place to stay.

Listening to that deep voice speaking in Greek to some hotelier on the other end of the line, Kayla realised how much more difficult it would have been for her if she had been left to find accommodation herself. There would have been the language barrier to overcome for a start.

Now, though, as he came off the phone, Kayla saw him shaking his head. ‘I’m afraid they’re fully booked for the next three weeks.’

There were three hotels on the island, he had informed her, one closed for refurbishing, and he was now ringing the second one on his list. But again he was shaking his head as he finished speaking to their last possible hope. ‘They said they would have had a room if you had telephoned yesterday, but they’ve had to close this morning because of flooding in part of the hotel last night.’

She could tell that he was almost as dumbfounded as she was.

‘Well, that’s that, then,’ she said, swinging the bin bag up off the tiled floor. ‘I’ll just have to make the best of it here until Lorna’s parents arrive tomorrow.’ And after that… She gave a mental shrug as she crossed the tiny kitchen. Who knew?

Watching the determined squaring of her shoulders as he tried to relieve her of the bag, Leonidas felt his heart going out to her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said as she opened the door to the garden. ‘You can’t stay here.’ The tree was leaning across the landing at a precarious enough angle to be a safety hazard. Also, because of the galleried landing, the ground floor was open to the elements, as well as to any more debris from the fallen tree.

‘No?’ Kayla said, coming in from dumping the bag outside. ‘And I suppose you can come up with a better idea?’

‘Yes, I can,’ he stated pragmatically. ‘You will stay with me.’

Not can. Will, Kayla noted, which marked him as a man who usually got his own way.

‘With you?’ He was leaning against the sink with his thumbs hooked into his waistband, looking very determined, and a little bubble of humourless laughter escaped her. ‘Now look who’s being ridiculous,’ she accused.

‘If you think I’m leaving you here, with that tree likely to come down on you at any moment,’ he said, with an upward toss of his chin, ‘you can think again.’

‘I’m not your responsibility or your problem, Leon,’ she stressed trenchantly. ‘Anyway, I came here to be alone.’

‘Why, exactly?’ Leonidas was regarding her with hard speculation. ‘What is a girl like you doing on her own in a quiet and remote place like this when you could be enjoying the company of other people your age and living it up somewhere like Crete or Corfu? And don’t tell me that you are simply soaking up the sun while considering your next career move, because you could have gone anywhere to do that.’

‘Perhaps I don’t want to be “living it up”,’ Kayla replied, feeling pressured by his unwavering determination. ‘I came here for peace and quiet. Not to share with anyone else.’

‘So did I,’ he reminded her, in a way that suggested that the best-laid plans didn’t always turn out as one would expect.

‘Exactly! And the last thing you want is a…what did you call me? Oh, yes—a “blood-sucking female with her own self-motivated agenda” dumped on you!’ she quoted fiercely, with both hands planted on her denim-clad hips. ‘Well, believe me, this isn’t on my agenda!’

‘All right. So we didn’t get off to a very good start. I shouldn’t have said those things to you,’ he admitted, coming away from the sink. It seemed to constitute some sort of apology. ‘But the fact remains that as things stand this place is a potential hazard, and—my responsibility or not—if you think I am going to stand by and let you risk your safety just because of a few ripe phrases on my part yesterday, then you still have a long way to go in assessing my character. I carried you out of here last night and I’ll do it again if I have to.’ His features were set with indomitable purpose. ‘So, are you going to be sensible and swallow your pride and accept that there isn’t an alternative?’ he asked grimly.

‘There’s always an alternative,’ Kayla said quickly, refusing to accept otherwise—although the thought of him man-handling her out of there when she wasn’t being distracted by falling trees and a possible landslide was far too disturbing even to contemplate.

‘Like running away?’

Those jet-black eyes seemed to be penetrating her soul, probing down into her heart and digging over her darkest and most painful secrets.

What right did he have to accuse her of running away? Even if she was, it was none of his business! Yet suddenly everything she had suffered over the past weeks, and everything that had gone wrong since she had been here, finally proved too much.

‘Who says I’m running away?’ she flung at him grievously. ‘And if you think that just because I chose to come on holiday by myself, then I could just as easily wonder the same thing about you! And those weren’t just a few ripe phrases you used. You were taking out all your woman problems—whatever they are—on me! Do you want to know why I’m here on my own? Then put this in your pipe and smoke it! Saturday was supposed to be my wedding day—only the groom decided he’d rather marry somebody else instead! He just kept the same date and the same time at the same church with the same photographer for convenience.’ She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

‘Because he wanted to marry her in a hurry, although he did have the decency to let me know she was pregnant before I broke off our engagement three months ago. And if that wasn’t enough we all worked at the same company, which is why I had to leave. I live in a small community, so the whole neighbourhood knew about it as well, and I just couldn’t stay there and face the humiliation. So if running away because I’m not thick-skinned enough to stand there and throw confetti over my ex-fiancé and his pregnant secretary is wrong, then I’m sorry!’ She uttered a facetious little laugh. ‘I’ll just have to toughen up in future.’

‘Forgive me.’

Leonidas’s face was dark with contrition. And shock too, Kayla decided, almost triumphantly.

‘The man’s a…’ He called him something in his own language which she knew wasn’t very complimentary. ‘I spoke without knowing the facts.’

‘Yes, you did.’ Now she had got it all off her chest she was beginning to feel a little calmer. ‘Anyway, it’s all history. Water under the bridge. I’m over him now.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes, I am,’ she asserted, her mouth firming resolutely. ‘He kept to everything we’d planned for us—for our day…’ Strangely, that was what had hurt the most in the end. ‘Even down to the guest list,’ she uttered with another brittle little laugh. ‘Well, most of it anyway,’ she said. ‘It’s funny how when you’re a couple you seem to have a lot of friends. Then when you break up you realise that they weren’t really your friends at all. Most of them were Craig’s. Acquaintances, really. He didn’t have any real friends. They were all company people. People he’d met through his job. Sales reps. Customers. His management team and their wives. The office hierarchy that he liked us to socialise with.’

‘You don’t sound very enamoured,’ Leonidas remarked.

Kayla glanced up to where he was standing with his hands thrust into his pockets, listening with single-minded concentration to all she was saying. ‘I’m just angry with myself for not knowing better.’

‘How could you?’ Those masculine brows came together in a frown. ‘How could anyone prepare for something like that happening?’

‘Oh, I had a good tutor, believe me. Dad did the very same thing to Mum—ran off with his secretary. So it wasn’t as though I wasn’t forewarned. I just wouldn’t listen. I thought it could never happen to me. But now I know never to get mixed up with that type of man again.’

‘And what type is that?’

‘The type with a nicely pressed suit and a spare clean shirt in the office closet. The type who’s always late home because his workload’s so heavy. The type who thinks every reasonably attractive female colleague is only there to boost his ego.’

Leonidas’s dark lashes came down over his eyes, but all he said was, ‘I thought that kind of male chauvinism went out with the nineteen-seventies.’

‘Oh don’t you believe it!’ Kayla returned censoriously. She was mopping water from the fridge with all the venom she felt towards Craig Lymington and his kind. ‘There’s something that happens to a man when he gets behind a desk, gets himself a secretary and has his name on the door. Something he thinks sets him outside the boundaries of accepted moral behaviour. But I’m not going to bore you with that. It’s my problem and I should have known better. I didn’t want to know and I paid for it. End of story.’

Leonidas doubted somehow that it was the end of the story, and reminded himself never to tell her what he really did for a living.

‘You’ve had a tough time,’ he accepted, deciding that this damsel in distress who had been so badly treated by her fiancé would probably feel nothing but contempt for him if she knew more about him.

She would instantly bracket him with the type of man she despised. And if for one moment he did let on who he was, he had learned enough about her already to know that she would want nothing to do with him. She would refuse his help—no matter how desperately she needed it—which would do nothing to get her out of the predicament she was in now.

‘However,’ he continued, ‘the most pressing problem you have right now is where you’re going to sleep tonight. As I’ve already said, I wouldn’t dream of allowing you to talk yourself into thinking it’s all right to stay here…’ No matter how far outside the boundaries of morality she might think he was if she knew about his desk and his secretary and the spare shirts he kept in his Athens and London offices. ‘Which means you either sleep out in the open or you come back with me. Unless, of course, you’re thinking of returning home?’

Almost imperceptibly Kayla flinched. With the villa unusable and nowhere else to stay, it did seem the most feasible thing to do. But if she did, what would she be going back to? Her mother’s smugness over having been right about Craig? The neighbourhood’s silent sympathies? The whispered comments behind her back? What would everyone say if they realised that not only had her proposed wedding turned out to be non-existent but also that the holiday she had been determined to take on her own had turned into a disaster as well?

‘If it’s your modesty you are worrying about, and you’re thinking I might try and—what is the phrase you English use?—“take advantage” of you,’ Leon said, remembering, ‘then I must assure you that I wouldn’t contemplate trying to seduce a girl who is on the rebound.’

‘I’m not on the rebound,’ Kayla denied hotly. But then, realising that he might take that to mean she wanted him to take advantage of her, she added quickly, ‘I mean…’ And then ran out of words because she didn’t know how to phrase what she was trying to convey.

‘I know what you mean,’ he said, making it easy for her, although there was a sensual mockery on that devastating mouth of his that had her wondering just how pleasurable his taking advantage of her might be, if she were so inclined to let him.

‘So what’s it to be, Kayla?’

Her name dripped from his lips like ambrosia from the lips of Eros, although she doubted that even the Greek god of love could have harboured the degree of sensuality this man possessed.

She didn’t want to go home, that was for sure. Yet neither did she want to be indebted to a total stranger—even if he did look like the answer to every woman’s darkest fantasy! That didn’t alter the fact that he was a stranger, and no woman in her right mind would agree to stay with a man she didn’t even know. So where did that leave her? she asked herself. On the ground outside?

Very quietly, Leonidas said, ‘Pack a bag and come with me.’

‘You know I can’t stay with you.’

‘I’m not going to try and talk you into it. Pack a bag,’ he instructed again, without offering her any idea of what his plans were. ‘I’ll finish mopping up here.’

Leon had asked her to follow him in the car. The little hatchback coughed a few times when Kayla tried to start it, which brought him over from the cab of his truck to investigate.

The engine fired into life just as he was approaching the bonnet.

Looking up at him through the car’s open window with a self-satisfied glint in her eyes, Kayla asked, ‘Do you believe me now?’

That masculine mouth pulled to one side, although he made no verbal response. Perhaps he was a man who didn’t like being reminded of his mistakes too often, Kayla thought, unable to help feeling smug.

‘It needs a good run,’ he said, speaking with some authority. ‘It’s probably been standing idle for too long, which isn’t good for any car.’

Following his truck down the zig-zag of a mountain road, Kayla was tempted to stop and take in the breathtaking views of the sea and the sun-drenched hillsides. But she kept close behind Leon’s truck, envying his knowledge of every sharp bend, admiring the confidence and safety with which he negotiated them.

After guiding her down past a cluster of whitewashed cottages, he pulled up outside another, with blue shutters and, like the rest, pots of gaily coloured flowers on its veranda.

‘Since you refuse to stay with me, I will have to leave you in the capable hands of Philomena,’ Leon told her, having come around the truck to where Kayla was just getting out of the car.

‘Philomena?’

‘A friend of mine,’ he stated, moving past her. ‘There is one small snag, however,’ he went on to inform her as he swung her small single suitcase out of the boot.

‘Oh?’ Kayla looked up at him enquiringly as he slammed the lid closed.

‘She doesn’t speak any English,’ he said.

‘So why would she want me staying with her?’ Kayla practically had to run after him. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to allow that rather large drawback—to Kayla’s mind, at any rate—to interfere with his plans.

‘Her family have all grown up and moved away,’ he tossed back over his shoulder. ‘Trust me. She will be very glad of the company of someone else—especially another woman.’

‘But have you asked her?’ Kayla wasn’t sure that anyone—no matter how lonely they might be—would welcome a guest turning up unexpectedly on their doorstep.

‘Leave the worrying to me,’ he advised, and uneasily Kayla did.

He had said Philomena was a friend, but as he brought Kayla through to the homely sitting room of the little fisherman’s cottage without even needing to knock, she calculated that the woman in dark clothes who greeted them with twinkling brown eyes and a strong, character-lined face was old enough to be his grandmother.

Her affection for Leon was clear from the start, but suddenly as they were speaking the woman burst into what to Kayla’s ears sounded like a fierce outpouring of objection. The woman was waving her hands in typically European fashion and sending more than a few less than approving glances Kayla’s way.

‘She isn’t happy about my staying here and why should she be?’ Kayla challenged, taking in the abundance of framed family photographs and brightly painted pottery and feeling as much mortified as she felt sympathetic towards the elderly woman.

‘She’s happy, Kayla,’ Leonidas told her, breaking off from a run of incomprehensible Greek. He started speaking very quickly in his own language again, which brought forth another bout of scolding and arm-waving from a clearly none-too-pleased Philomena.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kayla apologised through the commotion, hoping the woman would understand as she picked up her suitcase and starting weaving through the rustic furniture towards the door.

‘No, no! No, no!’ A lightly restraining hand came over Kayla’s arm. ‘You stay. Stay Philomena, eh?’ The look she sent Leonidas shot daggers in his direction. Her voice, though, as she turned back to Kayla, was softer and more encouraging, her returning smile no less than sympathetic as a work-worn, sun-dappled hand gently palmed Kayla’s cheek. ‘You come. Stay.’

A good deal of gesticulation with a far warmer flow of baffling Greek seemed to express the woman’s pleasure in having Kayla as her guest.

‘You see,’ Leonidas remarked, looking pleased with himself as Philomena drew her gently away from the door. ‘I said she would want you to stay.’

The appreciative look Kayla gave her hostess turned challenging as she faced the man who had brought her there. ‘Then what were you arguing about?’ she quizzed.

‘Philomena has no one to scold nowadays, so she likes to scold me.’ His mouth as he directed a look towards their hostess was pulling wryly. ‘Philomena bore seven children, but her one claim to fame, as she likes to call it, is that she delivered me. I’m eternally grateful to her for introducing me to this universe,’ he expressed with smiling affection at Philomena, ‘but she does tend to imagine that that gives her licence to upbraid me at every given opportunity.’

‘For what?’ Kayla was puzzled, still not convinced.

One of those impressive shoulders lifted as he contemplated this. ‘For leaving the island. For coming back. For not coming back.’

Kayla noted the curious inflexion in his voice as he made that last statement. Her smile wavered. ‘And what about just now?’

‘Just now?’

Leonidas looked at the woman who had pulled him screaming into the world. She had been there—never far away—throughout his childhood. A comfort from his father’s strict and sometimes brutal regime of discipline, his rock when his mother had died.

‘I don’t think she’s happy with the way I’ve turned out,’ he commented dryly to Kayla, and thought that if it were true he wouldn’t blame Philomena. There were times lately, he was surprised to find himself thinking, when he had been far, far from happy with himself.

‘Oh?’ Kayla clearly wanted to know more, but he had nothing more to offer her.

Gratefully he expressed his thanks to Philomena, adding something else, which brought Kayla’s cornflower-blue eyes curiously to his as he started moving away.

‘I’ve told her to take care of you,’ he translated, with a blazing smile that made Kayla’s stomach muscles curl in on themselves. And that was that. He had gone before she could utter another word.

Kayla settled in to her new accommodation with remarkable ease, and as she had suspected, despite the language barrier, she found Philomena Sarantos to be a warm and generous hostess.

She wondered what Leon had meant about Philomena being unhappy with the way he had turned out. Had he meant because of his lifestyle? Not having a steady job? Because he seemed content to drift from place to place?

Two days passed and she saw nothing of him. But then, what had she expected? Kayla meditated. Hadn’t he made it clear from the beginning that he didn’t welcome intrusion into his life? And, although he had invited her to stay with him at the farmhouse the morning after that tree had come down, she wondered if it hadn’t been merely a hollow gesture on his part. He’d known she would refuse, so he’d been perfectly safe in offering her his roof over her head.

What did it matter? she decided now. She’d had enough to occupy her time without bothering herself about Leon over the past couple of days.

The previous day she had driven up to the villa after Lorna’s parents had texted her with the estimated time they would be arriving. They had brought some local men with them who were arranging for the removal of the tree, and someone else who, having inspected the building, pronounced the place off-limits for the time being.

After arranging with the men for the necessary works to be carried out, her friend’s parents had been extremely concerned as to where Kayla would stay. But having satisfied them—just as she had done with Lorna, over the phone the previous day—that she had found suitable alternative accommodation, she had seen the couple off to spend a few days on Corfu and—in their own words—‘make the whole trip worthwhile’.

Now, with the sun having just risen and another glorious day yawning before her, Kayla traversed the dusty path that led from Philomena’s cottage and gasped with delight when it brought her down onto the sun-washed shingle of a secluded cove.

Striding down through the scrub, Leonidas came to where the beach opened out before him and stopped dead in his tracks.

Kayla was wading, shin-deep, in the translucent blue water, moving shorewards. She was looking down into the water and hadn’t spotted him yet.

He would have considered the fine white cotton dress she was wearing with its sheer long sleeves and modest yoke demure in any other circumstances, because it made her look almost angelic with her loose blonde hair moving in the breeze. But she had evidently—perhaps unintentionally—allowed the sea to lap too high to preserve her modesty, for now the garment clung wetly to her body, so that the gold of her skin and her small naked breasts were clearly visible beneath.

As she waded forward the sun struck gold from her hair, illuminating the lustrous gold of lashes that lay against her cheeks as her interest never wavered from the water.

Transfixed by her beauty, he noticed the grace of her movements, the way her progress changed the light, making her breasts appear indistinct one moment and then tantalisingly defined the next. A virginal siren, tantalising enough to set his masculine hormones ablaze as his gaze swept the length of her tunic, which only reached the tops of her slender thighs.

She looked up—and when she saw him she put her hand to her mouth in shock. Then her bare feet were running lightly over the shingle towards the white floppy hat he had only just noticed lying discarded nearby.

‘I didn’t see you,’ she called out, snatching up the hat that had been covering her ever-present camera and the rest of her things lying there on the shingle.

‘Evidently not.’ He couldn’t contain the slow smile that played across his mouth as he noted the purposeful way she covered her wet top with the hat, her own smile feigning nonchalance, as though she didn’t care.

‘Have you been standing there long?’

Not nearly long enough, Leonidas thought, struggling to keep control of his unleashed hormones and the effect she was having on him. He was glad he hadn’t simply worn bathing shorts, as he’d been tempted to do, and instead had donned linen trousers with a loose, casual shirt.

She had probably had enough of men lusting after her for their own primeval satisfaction—including that fiancé of hers—without having to endure the same kind of treatment from him.

‘You shouldn’t go bathing like that without a chaperone,’ he chided softly, the dark lenses of his sunglasses revealing nothing of his thoughts.

‘I didn’t mean to.’ Beneath the pale swathe of her hair a modestly clad shoulder lifted almost imperceptibly. ‘The sea was beckoning me while I was paddling and I just got carried away.’

‘It has a way of doing that, and before you know it—’ He made a gesture with his hand like a fish taking a dive. ‘It’s nature drawing us back to itself.’

He saw her golden head tilt and was struck by the vivid clarity of those cornflower-blue eyes as she surveyed him. ‘What a beautiful thing to say.’

Leonidas laughed. ‘Was it?’ He found himself swallowing and his throat felt dry. He had been accused of expressing himself in many ways in his time, he recalled, but beautifully had never been one of them.

She had turned round to gather her things and was starting to pull on white cropped leggings.

‘How are you getting on with Philomena?’ he asked.

Thrusting her feet into flip-flops, Kayla retrieved the hat she had momentarily discarded and turned back to face him, keeping its wide brim strategically in place across her breasts.

‘She’s great.’ Her face lit up with genuine warmth. ‘She reminds me of my gran.’

‘That’s good.’ He knew he was looking self-satisfied as he flipped open the notebook he’d taken out of the back pocket of his trousers. ‘And what does your grandmother think of your being here alone?’ He was in danger of sounding distracted, but it was vital he got something down. Something he’d forget if he didn’t consign it to paper this very instant. ‘Isn’t she afraid you’ll fall prey to some licentious stranger?’

‘No.’ Picking up her camera and sunglasses, which she slid onto her head, Kayla pushed a swathe of golden silk back off her shoulder with the aid of the sunscreen bottle she was holding. ‘She died. A few months ago.’

The sadness in her voice required nothing less than Leonidas’s full attention. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yes. So am I,’ Kayla responded, reaffirming his suspicion that she had cared a great deal for her elderly relative.

‘You were close?’ He didn’t even need to ask.

She nodded. ‘Mum and I never really were. And after Dad left he was never the loving father type whenever I got to see him, so we just drifted apart over the years. But Gran—Mum’s mum—she filled the void in every way she could.’

She was looking over her shoulder out to sea but Leonidas knew that she wasn’t seeing the white-crested waves and the indigo blue water. She was hiding emotion—nothing more—because she was embarrassed by it.

‘So you lost your fiancé on top of losing a grandmother?’ he commented, with a depth of feeling he wasn’t used to. ‘That’s rough.’

She shrugged. ‘At least I had Lorna,’ she told him with a ruminative smile. ‘On both counts she was there for me. She helped me through.’

‘Tell me about her,’ he said somewhat distractedly Kayla thought as she started walking casually a step or two ahead of him, because he was busy scribbling in a notebook.

But she told him anyway, about the friend she had known from her first day at school who had come to mean as much as a sister to her. About the interior design work that Lorna and her husband were involved in, and how brilliant they were at what they did, but how, with the state of the market and then losing their biggest customer, things had become extremely difficult for them recently. She even went on to tell him how she might find herself looking for another job if things didn’t improve.

He wasn’t really listening, she decided, relieved, feeling that she had gabbled on too much.

‘What are you writing?’ She stopped on the shingle, turning to him with her chin almost resting on the hat she was still clutching to her beneath her folded arms.

‘Just jotting down a few things I don’t want to forget.’ He had snapped the notebook closed and was stuffing it into his back pocket.

‘You were sketching.’ Suddenly it dawned. ‘You were sketching me.’

‘Leave it, Kayla.’ His words were laced with a warning not to pursue it.

‘You were sketching me. Oh, no!’ Kayla hid her face in the wide brim of her hat. How could he? With the ends of her hair all lank and dripping, and she wasn’t even wearing any mascara, let alone a bra! ‘I look like a drowned and lashless rat!’

‘You look like an angel,’ Leonidas told her, voicing his earlier thoughts.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Kayla protested, bringing her head up, clinging to her crushed hat as her only defence against those shaded yet all-seeing eyes.

‘I never joke about beauty. Particularly the beauty of a woman,’ he said, in a voice that seemed to trickle with pure honey.

And you would have known scores of those! Known just what to say to make them feel like you’re making me feel now, Kayla thought hectically. Weak-kneed and breathless and wanting so much to believe that all he was saying was true!

She pulled a face, and in spite of everything managed to say with a tremulous little laugh, ‘Does that line usually work?’

The firm masculine mouth compressed, and she couldn’t seem to drag her gaze from it as he prompted, ‘Does it work in what way?’ Now that mouth took on a mocking curve. ‘In getting you into my bed?’

Kayla felt heated colour steal into her cheeks. Which was ridiculous, she thought. She was hardly a novice to male attention. She’d been planning a wedding, for heaven’s sake! Yet there was something about this man that was more exciting and more dangerous to her than any other man she had ever met.

‘Isn’t it customary?’ she returned somewhat breathlessly in answer to his reference to getting her into bed.

‘Possibly,’ he acceded, ‘but not in this case. And not with someone who has been made to feel so unsure of herself that she blushes at the mere mention of a man and woman finding pleasure in each other. Or a man taking any interest in her. There’s really no need to hide from me, Kayla.’

Perhaps there wasn’t. But when he took the hat she was clutching to her like a shield and his hand accidentally brushed the sensitised flesh above her modest neckline she realised that it was herself that she was afraid of. Of feelings that were too reckless and wild to think about. Purely physical feelings that had surfaced the moment she had first seen him standing on that other beach a few days ago.

Now, with her wet top doing nothing to protect her from his gaze, she could feel her blood starting to surge and the peaks of her breasts tightening in response to his hot regard, so that all she could think about was that hard masculine body locked in torrid sensual pleasure on some bed. And not just any bed. On hers!

‘Are you saying that your interest is purely aesthetic?’ she queried, her voice croaking from her shaming thoughts and the knowledge of how her rapidly rising breasts were betraying her to him.

‘No.’ He had removed his sunglasses and was hooking them onto the waistband of his trousers. Now she could see his eyes clearly.

They were dark and heavy-lidded beneath the thick swathe of his lashes, and glittering with such intensity of purpose that her every nerve went into red alert as he closed the screaming distance between them.