A Greek Escape(53)

‘You look beautiful.’ For a moment it was all Leonidas could say. ‘And you’re not my puppet,’ he countered when he had found his voice again. ‘You’re an independent-minded if not stubborn young woman whom I’m delighted to be accompanying tonight. If I’d wanted a puppet I wouldn’t have had to travel too far to find myself a dozen of those.’

No, because every woman he knew would probably leap at the chance to do his bidding, Kayla thought. Whereas she was a woman who had walked away from him—said no to him when it had mattered—and that surely had to prove too much of a challenge for a man like Leonidas.

‘Then you should have found yourself a dozen, shouldn’t you?’ she said, smiling brightly for the benefit of a manservant who was passing as they started down the magnificent staircase.

‘Perhaps I should have,’ he agreed, sounding mildly amused.

From the magnificent staircase to his magnificent car, to dinner in the ballroom of an equally magnificent hotel, Kayla was entranced but at the same time overwhelmed by the world he moved in. It was poles apart from that of the man he had purported to be—a man who had ‘opted out’, driven a wreck of a truck and bedded down in the run-down environs of a Greek farmhouse.

Here she saw a man at the very pinnacle of his prosperity. A man who lived and travelled in style and circulated with some of the most influential names in society. A man eloquent enough to hold an audience of over three hundred captive as he delivered an after-dinner talk on human complacency towards the state of the planet, leaving his peers congratulating him after a standing ovation that left him remarkably unfazed.

‘You were brilliant,’ Kayla remarked, unable to resist saying it as the tables were being cleared and couples were beginning to wander onto the dance floor to enjoy the middle-of-the-road music provided by a professional live band. She hadn’t had a chance to speak to him since before he’d given the talk, and he’d been surrounded by many guests wanting to speak to him ever since.

‘I was just stating fact and emphasising the responsibility that we as professional bodies should engage for the sake of our children and our children’s children. We’re only custodians of this earth. We don’t own it,’ he said. ‘But am I to assume that I’ve hit on one topic that you’re not going to flay me over tonight?’

With a change of tone he had wiped away her attempt to strike an equal balance with him if only for a few hours. Retaliation was futile, she decided. And anyway a smiling brunette, very glamorous and sophisticated, came up to him at that moment to thank him effusively, ogling him with such a blatant come-on in her sultry green eyes that there was no room for doubt as to exactly what she wanted from him.

‘He’s so eloquent!’ she enthused to Kayla, daring to touch red-tipped fingers to his dark sleeve. ‘He made my flesh go all goosebumpy just listening to him!’

‘Really?’ Kayla responded, trying to look impressed. ‘Well, if that makes you goosebumpy then you should take a look at his sketches!’ She felt the bunch of muscle in his powerful arm as she slipped hers through it in a gesture of pure possession. ‘Of course he’s very modest about them, but I’m sure he’d show them to you if you asked him nicely.’

Smiling uncertainly, the woman uttered something that Kayla didn’t catch and, realising she was intruding, moved hastily away.

‘I know you’ve got your grievances,’ Leonidas rasped, as soon as his admirer was out of earshot, ‘but do you have to air them in public? And what was that display of play-acting all about?’ he queried, locking her arm against the sensuous fabric of his jacket as she would have pulled it away.

‘I thought I was supposed to act as though I was enjoying being with you?’ she murmured, with a bright smile for anyone who might be watching them.

He made a disapproving sound down his nostrils. ‘You’re behaving like every woman I went to Greece to get away from.’

Which was why he had been so careful not to tell you who he was, her inner little voice piped up to remind her. But she didn’t want reminding, and silenced the voice with the flash of another smile and a clipped, ‘How do you want me to behave?’

‘As Kayla Young. Guileless. Easy to like. And infernally inquisitive.’

‘A fool,’ she tagged on, all falseness gone. She was only aware then that he was leading her onto the dance floor. ‘Guileless. Easy to like. And an infernally inquisitive, easy-to-fool fool!’