A Greek Escape

chapterFIVE

HIS MOUTH OVER hers was like an Olympic torch blazing into life, setting her insides on fire and sending molten sensations of light searing through her blood.

His kiss was passionate, yet tender. Dominant, yet testing. And the mind-blowing expertise with which he lured her mouth to widen for him was the technique of a man who had studied and understood women—a far cry from a man who had such a laid-back attitude to life. A wanderer. A drifter. Without purpose or design.

He smelled of the earth and of the pines that clad the higher slopes of the hillsides. He was burning with everything wild and unfettered, unrestrained. And yet she felt his restraint—a purposeful holding back—as he held her loosely within the exciting circle of his arms.

That was until the hands that were still clutching her camera and the sunscreen bottle against his wide, cushioning shoulders suddenly slid around his neck. Then, with a groan of defeat, his restraint fell away, leaving only raw passion in its wake as he tossed her hat aside and pulled her hard against him.

Kayla heard a gushing in her ears and wasn’t sure whether it was the heavy pounding of her blood or whether she was being captured and submerged beneath the relentless power of the sea.

She could feel the whole hard length of his body—every last inch of it—and she could feel her own responding to the drugging hunger of his mouth.

His back was firm and muscled, and she wished she wasn’t encumbered by her possessions so that she could slide her eager hands across it. There was no such encumbrance though in the way her body locked with his. His chest was a wall of thunder, crushing her aching breasts, while the potent evidence of his hard virility was making her pulse with need.

When he put her from him, holding her at arm’s length, she uttered a strangled murmur of breathless shock and disappointment.

‘Why did you do that?’ she quavered. Why had he kissed her when he had just claimed he had no intention of trying to get her into bed?

He was breathing as heavily as she was, and a deep flush was staining the olive skin across the strong, hard structure of his cheeks.

‘Because you were wondering what it would be like if I did.’

Still trembling, and perturbed by how easily he could not only read her mind but also by how easily he could bend her to his will, she challenged brittly, ‘So why did you stop?’

‘Because, as I told you before, I have no intention of taking advantage of a woman on the rebound,’ he reminded her, even though his breathing was still laboured and his strong face racked from the passion he was struggling to keep in check.

‘And—as I told you before—I’m not on the rebound,’ Kayla protested adamantly, shamed by her response when he was showing such self-control, and when she seemed to have relinquished all of hers in one experimental kiss!

‘Aren’t you?’ he disputed, although there was a wry smile tugging at one corner of his mouth that softened his challenging remark, before he went on to add, ‘You had a relationship with him, didn’t you?’

‘Well, of course I did,’ Kayla returned. ‘Of sorts.’

‘Of sorts?’ He tilted his head, his brows drawing quizzically together. ‘How am I supposed to interpret that?’

‘Any way you like!’ Kayla tossed back at him, too embarrassed to tell him that Craig’s enthusiasm for her had seemed to go off the boil for several weeks before their break-up, and that she was ashamed of herself now for not suspecting the truth. She had believed him when he had blamed work overload for his not showing enough interest in her. When he’d assured her that things would be different when they were married. When he had got the precious promotion he’d spent all his time working for.

‘Were you living with him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? If I ever set my mind on a woman I want to become my wife, then she will be firmly in my life—and my bed—before I even ask her.’

‘I didn’t want us to move in together. Not until we were married,’ Kayla emphasised. ‘And Craig was in full agreement with that.’

‘Really?’ Mocking scepticism marked that hard masculine face. ‘You could do without each other that much?’

‘Not that it’s any concern of yours,’ Kayla pointed out, hating having her relationship with her ex scrutinised so closely by this man she scarcely knew, ‘but we wanted to start married life properly. In a place that was our own. I didn’t want to just move into his flat. Anyway, there’s more to a relationship than jumping into bed with each other at every given opportunity,’ she stressed, unconsciously wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her lips still felt bruised and swollen and, like her susceptible body, burning from Leon’s wholly primal, earth-shattering kiss.

‘Is there?’ he asked, and she could feel those perspicacious eyes following her involuntary action, mocking her, disconcertingly aware.

‘Yes!’ She was trembling, knowing that the way she had just behaved with him made nonsense of everything she was saying. And the worst thing was he knew it too. ‘The type of man I let myself get involved with doesn’t just give in to basic animal lust.’

He chuckled under his breath. ‘Is that what I was doing? Then you must forgive me if I fail to live up to the constraints of the type of man you are obviously used to. Although I could hazard a guess that your relationship was sadly lacking in what was required to make a lifetime commitment, and that the lack of passion between you could have been why he was getting his satisfaction elsewhere.’

The reminder hurt, stinging her pride and giving rise to that same feeling of inadequacy she had felt after she’d got over the initial blow of Craig’s betrayal—especially coming from someone who oozed the sort of sexual potency that this man did.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, surprising her suddenly. ‘I didn’t mean to rub it in.’

‘Didn’t you?’ she accused, hiding her hurt pride and dignity beneath the burnished gold of her lowered lashes.

‘Well, all right.’ A self-effacing smile touched that mouth that had the power to drug her. ‘I did. But until it stops hurting, Kayla, you aren’t ready for an involvement with any other man. And even if you were, the last thing a sensitive girl like you would want is an involvement with a man like me.’

Why not? Crazily, she heard the mortifying question spring to her lips and was half-afraid that she had actually spoken it. Wasn’t he just the type of man she needed right now to drive the bitter after-taste of Craig and all his shallow-minded smart set out of her mind?

‘Believe it or not, I’m not looking for one,’ she responded, to assure herself as much as Leon. Well, she wasn’t, was she? Wasn’t she better off—as her mother had always claimed to be—on her own?

‘Sensible girl,’ Leonidas drawled and, stooping to pick up her hat, deposited it gently and unceremoniously on her head.

‘Thanks.’ Kayla pulled a wry face. ‘Perhaps you’d like to sketch me like this?’ she challenged broodingly, relieved, nevertheless, that the disconcerting subject of her love-life had finally been swept aside.

What wasn’t so easy to sweep aside, however, was the memory of what had transpired between them a few moments ago.

Why had she responded to him so shamelessly if, as he’d suggested, she was still affected by what Craig had done? Was she so wanton? So desperate for a man? Any man? she wondered. Might she have let this virtual stranger take her here on the shingle without a thought for how it might leave her feeling afterwards?

‘I won’t be sketching you at all,’ he said dismissively. ‘For the simple reason that you are wrong. I’m no artist. But if I were, and if I had to keep looking at you looking like this…’ His gaze slid over her tantalisingly wet top, making her quiver inside from the powerful impulses generated by the naked need in his eyes, ‘then—old boyfriend or no old boyfriend—I definitely would wind up taking you to bed.’

The climb up through the scrub to Philomena’s cottage was hot and hilly, and Leonidas walked ahead of Kayla, protecting her from the dense and thorny vegetation that was encroaching on the narrow path, thriving in the rough terrain.

He had had an exacting morning, sorting out a problem that had arisen back in his London office—a case of divided opinion between a couple of members of his board, which his second-in-command had apologised for bringing to his attention.

They said it was tough at the top, he reminded himself with a grimace. And they could say it again, because no matter how much he needed to escape the rigours of the office for a while, he still needed to keep his finger on the pulsing heart of his business.

Shopping malls, leisure complexes and housing developments didn’t build themselves, and after the flak he had taken from the press over the neglect of local residents with last year’s bitter fiasco he needed to ensure that no loopholes were left for mercenary lawyers and unprincipled members of his team to make unscrupulous deals over.

Being labelled ‘ruthless’, ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘a profiteer’ by the media wasn’t something he wanted repeated any more than he wanted further episodes like the one with his publicity-hungry bed-partner Esmeralda Leigh. He had a reputation to uphold—one that he valued—both in his corporate and his private life, and he would protect and defend it with every shred of his power and his unwavering principles. But he hadn’t got where he was today without treading a path that had made him tough, hard-nosed and uncompromising, and he had no intention of wavering from that path. Of allowing himself or anyone else to imagine for one moment that he was going soft. Not even this infernally beautiful girl…

Hearing her breath coming shallowly some way behind him, he stopped and waited for her to catch up. She was clutching her bottle of sunscreen lotion, the bulky camera dangled around her neck, and with her white leggings, her tunic top and that huge floppy hat she looked like an overgrown child who had just raided her great-grandmother’s attic. He was happy to notice—for his own sake—that her top had nearly dried.

‘Here. Let me carry that.’ He could see her cheeks were flushed and that she was finding it a struggle keeping up with him, and he held out his hand for the camera, which she happily relinquished. Silently he extended his other hand.

Realising his intention, Kayla hesitated briefly, and saw a mocking smile touch his sensational mouth.

‘It’s all right. It doesn’t constitute a tacit agreement to let me into your bed,’ he advised her dryly.

Of course it didn’t, she thought. But an impulse of something so powerfully electric seemed to pass between them when she took his hand that it certainly felt like it.

‘Thanks,’ she uttered tremulously, hoping that he would think it was the uphill climb in the heat over the rough ground that was making her sound so breathless. Not that every cell was leaping in response to her physical awareness of him just as it had when he had kissed her down there on the beach.

‘Where did you learn to speak English so proficiently?’ she asked, needing to say something—although she was genuinely interested to know.

‘When I work, I work mainly in the UK,’ he informed her. ‘And my grandmother was English, so I had a head start while I was still knee-high to a cricket.’

‘Grasshopper.’

‘What?’ The way he was looking down at her, with such charismatically dark eyes, sent a sensually charged little tingle along Kayla’s spine.

‘It’s knee-high to a grasshopper,’ she corrected him, contemplating how well the backdrop of the rugged coast and the meandering hillsides served to strengthen the ruggedness of this man who had been born part of them. But she’d picked up on what he’d just said about when he worked. So his employment definitely wasn’t regular, she thought, reminded of the recent slump in the building trade and how difficult it had made things for a lot of its workers. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen to ‘opt out’, as he’d put it, for a while.

‘How old were you when you left the island?’ She found herself wanting to know much more about him.

‘Fifteen.’

She remembered him saying that he’d left to find a better life. ‘On your own?’ she queried. ‘Did you leave to go to college?’ she asked, when he didn’t answer her question. What else could possibly have taken him away at such a young age?

He laughed at that—a sound without humour. ‘No college. No university. I did have hopes of furthering my education, but my father wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘Why not?’ Kayla asked, amazed.

‘He wanted me to get out into the world, like he had, and “do an honest job” as he called it.’

‘Really?’ Kayla sympathised. ‘And what did he do?’

‘He eked a living out of this land,’ he told her, with an edge to his voice that had her looking at her curiously.

‘And where are they now? Your parents?’ She couldn’t believe they could still be living on the island, otherwise why would he be staying here alone in some absentee owner’s sadly neglected house?

‘My parents are dead,’ he told her as he walked half a stride ahead of her. There was no emotion now beside that surprisingly hard cast to his mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kayla murmured. She had discovered during a conversation in the villa with him the other day that he, like Kayla, was an only child.

‘One learns to get over these things,’ he replied.

From the harshness of his tone, however, she wondered if he had. Or was there some other reason, she pondered, for that inexorable grimness to his features?

‘Still…you have Philomena,’ she said brightly, hoping to lighten the mood. She couldn’t understand why down there on the beach he had behaved like an exciting lover and yet now seemed as uncommunicative as ever.

Was it by chance that he had just happened to come across her down there? Or had he come looking for her especially?

A sharp little thrill ran through her at the possibility that he had.

‘Did she tell you where I was?’

His disconcerting glance at her took in what she knew was her thoroughly dishevelled appearance, and a lazy smile curved his mouth, instantly transforming his features.

‘Are you suggesting I asked her?’

Mortified that he would even think she might have wanted him to, Kayla tried to tug her hand out of his, and sucked in a breath when he refused to let it go.

‘Yes, I did,’ he admitted easily, without any of the embarrassment that was burning Kayla’s cheeks. ‘I came down to Philomena’s to check on you. You’ve had a bad experience. I didn’t like to think of it ruining your holiday.’

He actually cared?

Well, of course he was concerned for her, she thought, mindful of the lengths he had gone to in rescuing her the other night, and then not only helping her to clean up the villa afterwards but also bringing her to Philomena’s as well.

‘It hasn’t. Thanks,’ she offered, grateful to him, and was warmed by a flash of something closely resembling admiration in his eyes.

She wondered if he had a girlfriend or a partner. It certainly seemed he’d had a stormy affair, judging by the way he had referred to her when he had been generalising about her sex the other day.

‘Why were you so unfriendly to me when we met those first couple of times?’ she queried, suddenly needing to know. ‘You still haven’t told me.’

She started as he suddenly stopped dead, pulling her round to face him on the path.

‘Do you never stop asking questions?’ he demanded, his face a curious blend of impatience and amusement.

‘No.’ She gave him a sheepish little look and shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m afraid it’s a fault of mine. Apparently, according to my star sign, I was born on “the Day of Curiosity”,’ she quoted with a little giggle.

‘And do you really believe all that stuff?’

Seeing the scepticism marking the strong and perfectly sculpted features, she laughed and said, ‘No. But they’ve got that part of me right!’

‘You can say that again,’ he remarked dryly. ‘And as a matter of interest exactly when is this illustrious day?’ He made a half-amused sound down his nostrils when she told him. ‘So you’ve just had a birthday?’ he observed. ‘And how old are you, Kayla?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘Old enough to know when a man doesn’t welcome any more probing into his private life.’

And that told her, Kayla thought, feeling suitably chastised. This time when she tried to pull her hand away she was even more disconcerted when he allowed her to do so.

They had reached the top of the path that ran up alongside Philomena’s cottage. There was an area at the back, with a lime tree and a couple of orange trees, where Philomena also grew aubergines and sweet peppers, and where chickens foraged freely in the open scrub.

‘How’s the car going?’ Leon asked, noticing it parked against the side wall of the cottage.

Still feeling put down, but relieved to be speaking on a much less personal level with him, Kayla murmured, ‘Fine.’ And suddenly, with tension causing a little bubble of laughter to burst from her, she proclaimed, ‘Which is more than can be said for yours!’

His truck was parked on the edge of the dirt road just behind the little hatchback, and she could see that one of its tyres was completely flat.

‘Oh, dear!’ She tried not to giggle again as he thrust the camera at her and, swearing quietly under his breath in his own language, went to deal with changing the wheel.

Leaving him to it, Kayla wandered into the garden, where Philomena was pegging out some washing, sending a couple of chickens scrambling, clucking noisily.

‘A flat tyre.’ Kayla made a gesture to indicate what she meant and Philomena nodded, rolling her eyes.

Which meant what? Kayla wondered, curious. Had Philomena hoped that the boy she had brought into the world thirty-odd years ago might be doing better for himself by now? Was that what Leon had meant when he’d said she wasn’t happy with the way he had turned out?

Dismissing it from her mind, she moved to help Philomena, but her hostess waved her aside with a warm but incomprehensible protest, pointing to the reclining seats in the welcoming shade of a sun umbrella. Not wishing to offend, Kayla went inside and donned a bikini with matching red and white wrap, which she tied, sarong-style, just above her breasts, before coming back outside into the now deserted garden.

A short time later Philomena emerged from the house with two glasses of something cool and refreshing—juice for her, Kayla realised gratefully, and something a little stronger for Leon.

‘I’ll take it out to him,’ she volunteered, putting her glass down on a nearby table and leaving a thankful Philomena hurrying back inside, because the telephone had started ringing inside the house.

Her discarded wrap had fallen down behind the chair, and wasn’t very easy to reach, so with a little sliver of excitement Kayla left it where it was and proceeded to take the glass to Leon as she was.

For the last twenty-minutes or so her ears had been tuned to every sound coming from the dirt road—from the slamming down of a boot to the chink of metal being laid down on sun-baked stones. Now, as she rounded the corner of the house, Kayla’s heart kicked into overdrive.

With his shirt removed, and faded blue jeans having replaced his linen trousers, Leon was crouched down, securing a nut on the spare wheel, and for a few moments Kayla could only stand there, watching him unobserved.

His body was beautiful. The bronzed skin sheathed muscles that were flexing as he worked, revealing the tension in his straining biceps and across his wide shoulders, in the tapering structure of his strong and sinewy back.

‘Philomena thought you’d like something to drink,’ Kayla told him, dry-mouthed, noticing before he turned around how his hair waved below the nape of his neck like jet against burnished bronze.

He dropped the spanner he was using and stood up, his movements cool and easy. That knowing curve to his mouth suggested that he was well aware of her reluctance to let him think that it was entirely her idea.

‘That’s very good of her.’ His answer and his lopsided smile assured her that two could play at that game. His eyes, however, were tugging over her scantily clothed body in a way that was making her feel naked.

‘You’ve been a long time. You should have let me help you,’ Kayla remarked, handing him the glass. The accidental touch of his fingers against hers sent a sharp little frisson through her.

‘And do you think I would have achieved much with you looking like that?’

Kayla swallowed, watching him drink, trying not to make it too obvious that she was having difficulty staying unaffected by his state of undress.

In fact she was finding it impossible not to allow her gaze free rein over his superb body—from the contoured strength of his smooth chest, with its taut muscles and flat dark nipples, to the black line of hair that started just above his navel and ran down inside the waistband of the denim that encased his flat stomach and narrow hips.

He was like a beautiful sleek stallion. All leanness and rippling muscle, with the power to dominate and excite, to control and to conquer using the pulsing energies and surging potency of his body.

‘Do you see what I mean?’ he taunted softly.

Yes, she did, and she could feel those energies transmitting their sensual messages along her nerve-endings, tugging shameless responses from every erogenous zone in her body.

Beneath the satiny white cups of her bikini her burgeoning breasts throbbed, sending a piercing arrow of need to the heart of her loins.

He was so raw, so masculine, and so shamelessly virile. She wanted to know what it was like to have a man like him filling her, taking her to the wildest edges of the universe with him while she lay beneath him, sobbing her pleasure, in glorious abandon to his thrilling and governing hands.

Shocked by her thoughts, she tried to shake them away, feigning an interest in his truck to try and restore some sense of propriety in herself, grappling for equilibrium.

‘Did this thing come with the house?’ she queried in a tight, strained voice, slapping the grimy, battered bonnet. ‘Or did you have to buy it?’

‘It’s mine,’ Leonidas answered, taking a breath from quenching his thirst and watching her from under the thickness of his dark lashes.

‘Perhaps it’s time you bought a new one,’ she suggested cheekily, amused, deciding that it wasn’t only the tyre that needed changing. The bodywork looked as if it wouldn’t object to a lick of fresh paint either.

‘Perhaps it’s time you stopped having a laugh at my expense.’

Was that what she was doing? ‘I’m sorry.’ Seeing his eyes darkening, quickly Kayla strove to suppress her mocking banter. After all, he probably couldn’t afford anything better, she thought. Not like Craig, with his company Jaguar and his inflated expense account. This man would have no such perks. ‘I didn’t mean to laugh about it—honest.’

‘Didn’t you?’ He had emptied his glass with one final long draught. Setting it aside, he came to where Kayla stood with her hand resting on the top of the radiator grid, as though in apology to the vehicle itself. ‘I suppose you measure a man’s status by the type of car he drives, huh?’

‘No.’

‘What would you prefer? A Porsche? Or a Mercedes?’ he asked roughly.

‘Well, both would be nice…’ Her voice tailed off when she noticed how forbidding he looked, and she realised that she wasn’t just imagining that hardening in his voice. ‘I wasn’t making fun of you. Not really,’ she tagged on, suddenly afraid that he might think less of her if he thought she had been. ‘I suppose I was just getting my own back.’

‘For what?’

‘For embarrassing me earlier. Making me feel awkward. When you said I was being too inquisitive about your private life.’

He laughed very softly then, his strong implacable features suddenly losing some of their austerity. His eyes, however, were disturbingly reflective as they rested on her face.

‘And I thought you were doing it just to prompt some reaction from me,’ he murmured silkily, with no apology for silencing her earlier.

‘Prompt some reaction from you?’ Kayla’s throat contracted with heightening sexual tension. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘Because I’m probably one of the only men you’ve met who isn’t instantly falling over himself to respond to your temptingly sexy signals.’

‘I’m not giving off any signals!’ Kayla breathed, mortified. ‘And I’m certainly not trying to get your attention.’

‘Aren’t you?’ Those shrewd eyes tugged over her flushed, indignant features, regarding, assessing and stripping her of her deepest and hottest secrets. ‘You wouldn’t have come out here looking like this…’ an all-encompassing glance took in breasts thrust tantalisingly upwards by the shaping of the cups and skimpy briefs barely skimming her abdomen ‘…if you weren’t.’

Shamefully, she wished she had bothered to retrieve her cover-up before flaunting herself in front of him like this. Because that was what she had been doing, she admitted silently. Flaunting herself.

She wanted to say something to redeem herself. Or simply to run away. Anything but stay there and face him like this.

She wished she had run when he suddenly reached up and cupped her cheek, his broad thumb playing across the softness of her pouting lips.

‘If I made love to you, Kayla,’ he said huskily, ‘it would be a fleeting moment’s pleasure. That’s all. No commitment. No strings. And I don’t think you came here to let some man with his own issues to sort out use you like that. A girl like you needs something more than anything I could offer you. Something more meaningful. Not a brief fling to try and forget the man who cheated on you with a few hours of what I can’t deny would be sensational pleasure.’

He was deadly serious, but even his words were exciting her. Or was it his thumb, tracing the curve of her plump lower lip, forcing her to close her eyes against the reckless desire to taste him? To inhale his musky animal scent mingling with the smell of grease and metal and everything that made this man exciting to her?

‘Who said I want you to make love to me?’ she murmured in pointless protest, her eyes inky beneath lashes still half-lowered against his gaze.

‘You’re inviting it with every denial you utter,’ he breathed hoarsely, his voice overlaid with desire. ‘And you’re not so naïve as not to realise that you’re making me as hard as a rock.’

‘You’re wrong!’ she argued breathlessly, and in the only way she knew of saving face she pulled away from him, almost tripping over her own feet in her flip-flops as she virtually ran back to the house.

Upstairs, away from Philomena’s shrewd eyes, she went into the shower-room and peeled off the bikini that seemed to be sticking to her.

Why on earth was she so attracted to him? she berated herself under the cool jets of the shower, trying to lather away the sensual heat from her body and that elusive scent of him that still clung to her skin where he had briefly touched her.

He had admitted himself that he was a man with issues.

Woman issues! Which was why he had shut her up, coming back from the beach today.

Well, what did she care? His business was his business. As far as she was concerned, he was simply a man who had helped her out of a difficult situation. Nothing more. It was just that she couldn’t seem to stop making a fool of herself when she was with him, let alone concentrate on anything but him when she wasn’t!

She tried to think about the past couple of months. Her ex. What had driven her here. Tried to stir up some other emotions to blot out the crazy, reckless feelings she was experiencing for Leon.

But, try though she did, feeling bitter suddenly seemed like a wasted emotion—because Craig and what he had done didn’t seem to matter so much any more.