A Greek Escape(33)

‘They couldn’t run away,’ Leonidas reminded her. ‘Not unless they were proficient swimmers.’

‘Haven’t you ever heard of the doggy paddle?’ She giggled, enjoying playing this little game with him. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were glowing from an exhilaration that had nothing to do with their climb. ‘So you were going to build a house with a swimming pool? And have horses? Racehorses, of course.’

He shot her a sceptical glance. ‘Now you’re wandering into the realms of fantasy,’ he chided, amused.

‘Well, if you can own the island and have a house with lots of dogs, I can have racehorses,’ Kayla insisted light-heartedly.

‘They’d fall off the edge before they’d covered a mile,’ he commented dryly. ‘I was talking about what seemed totally realistic to a twelve-year-old boy.’

Tugging her windswept hair out of her eyes, Kayla pulled a face. ‘But then you grew up?’

‘Yes,’ he said heavily. ‘I grew up.’ And all he had wanted to do was run as far away from these islands and everything he had called home as he could possibly get.

‘What happened?’ Kayla asked, frowning. She couldn’t help but notice the tension clenching his mouth and the hard line of his jaw.

‘My mother died when I was fourteen, then my grandfather shortly afterwards. My father and I didn’t see eye to eye,’ he enlightened her.

‘Why not?’

‘Why do we not get on with some people and yet gel so perfectly with others? Especially those who are supposed to be closest to us?’ He shrugged, his strong features softening a little. ‘Differing opinions? A clash of personalities? Maybe even because we are too much alike. Why aren’t you close to your mother?’ he outlined as an example.

Watching a lizard dart along the jagged edge of the wall and disappear over the side, Kayla considered his question. ‘I suppose all those things,’ she admitted, rather ruefully. And then, keen to shrug off the serious turn the conversation had taken, she said, ‘So, are you going to sketch me a picture of this house?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ She had seen him scribbling in his notepad again, when he had been waiting for her in the truck outside Philomena’s, and wondered what he could possibly have been doing if he hadn’t been sketching. He’d also been speaking to somebody on his cell phone at the same time, Kayla remembered, but had cut the call short, leaning across to open the passenger door for her when he had seen her coming. She’d wondered if he’d been speaking to a woman and, if he had, whether it was the woman at the heart of his ‘issues’.

‘It isn’t what I do,’ Leonidas said.

‘No son of mine is going to disgrace the Vassalio name by painting for a living!’

Leonidas could still hear his father’s bellowing as he ridiculed his talent, his love of perspective and light and colour, beating it out of him—sometimes literally—as he destroyed the results of his teenage son’s labours and with them all the creativity in his soul. Art was a feeling and feelings were weakness, his father had drummed into him. And no Vassalio male had ever been weak.

So he had channelled his driving energies into creating new worlds out of blocks of clay and concrete, in innovative designs that had leaped off the paper and formed the basis of his own developments. Developments that had made him rich beyond his wildest dreams. And with the money it had all come tumbling into his lap. Influence. Respect. Women. So many women that he could have had his pick of any of them. Yet he hadn’t found one who was more disposed to him personally than she was to the state of his bank balance. Not beyond the pleasures of the bedroom at any rate, he thought with a self-deprecating mental grimace. In that it seemed he was never able to fail.

‘So what about you, Kayla? Didn’t you have any aspirations?’

‘I suppose I did but not like yours,’ she said, twirling the stalk of a pink flower in her fingers. ‘I think I was always practical and realistic. Besides, I was brought up with the understanding that if you don’t expect you can’t be disappointed.’

‘And because of that you never allowed yourself to dream?’

He was sitting on one of the larger stones, one leg bent, the other stretched out in front of him, and Kayla tried to avoid noticing how the cloth of his trousers pulled tautly over one muscular thigh.

‘Of course I did,’ she uttered, wondering why she suddenly felt as if she needed to defend herself. ‘But I’ve never been one for mooning over things I can’t have. Especially things which are totally out of my reach.’