A Greek Escape(26)

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?’