A Greek Escape(58)

‘I thought as you’re so attached to that camera of yours,’ he said, pulling up outside the small but well-attended little gallery, ‘you might appreciate seeing what the professionals have to offer. Of course if you’d rather not…’

‘No. No I’d like to,’ Kayla put in quickly when he looked in two minds about whether to park or drive away. Craig had hated anything like this, and even Josh and Lorna couldn’t understand what Craig had used to call her ‘camera fetish’. Just the chance to be among like-minded people for a change was something she didn’t want to pass up.

The exhibition, by private invitation only, was being hosted by an acquaintance of Leonidas’s, and Kayla could tell as soon as they were inside that he and the gentle grey-haired man were true friends. There was none of the deference or playing up to Leonidas that she had seen among some of the people at the functions she’d attended with him, until she’d wondered how he could ever tell who was really sincere.

‘Leonidas tells me that you’re quite the enthusiast,’ the man said to her, smiling. Leonidas—still dressed, as she was, in a dark business suit—was, with the rest of the twenty or so guests, browsing some of the artwork around the gallery. ‘If ever you feel you have something to offer, then you know where to come.’

‘It’s just a hobby!’ Kayla laughed warmly, wondering what Leonidas had been saying to his friend about her. That he had said anything at all gave her a decidedly warm feeling inside.

‘So what do you think?’ Suddenly he was there beside her, sharing her interest in a waterfall scene with some interesting use of light.

‘It’s good,’ she expressed, enervated by his dark executive image. ‘But if it had been mine I’d have toned the light down a little.’ She was finding it hard to concentrate when she could feel the power of his virility emanating from him, and her nostrils were straining for every greedy breath of his cologne. ‘It isn’t subtle enough for me.’

‘And you like subtlety?’

Dry-mouthed, Kayla touched her tongue to her top lip and saw the way his eyes followed the nervous little action. ‘Every time.’ She even managed to smile, but her lips felt stretched and burning.

‘Perhaps this will be more to your taste.’ They had moved on and he was referring to a landscape captured beneath an angry sky.

‘Much too wild,’ she dismissed laughingly, and saw the sexy elevation of a dark eyebrow.

‘Are you saying you prefer something more…tamed?’

There was sensuality in the way he said it, in that momentary hesitation. Or was she imagining it? she wondered, her heart still racing when he immediately invited her opinion on the technicalities of the photograph—its depth of field, how it captured the eye.

He knew a lot about the subject, and she was impressed.

‘I’ve studied a bit,’ he said modestly, when she told him so. ‘Unlike you. You’re a natural,’ he commented, making her glow inside. ‘So, what about this one?’

‘Too much Photoshop,’ she quipped, wrinkling her nose, and he laughed.

For a moment it felt as it had that day he had taken her to that little island and she’d been insisting on racehorses on a piece of land not a mile wide. Indulging in make-believe. Playing games with him. Except that it was different tonight. Tonight the very air around them was pulsating with a dangerous chemistry, and she wasn’t with Leon, the man she’d believed to be open and carefree with scarcely two pennies to his name. She was with Leonidas Vassalio, hardened billionaire, powerful magnate and the man who had hurt her—was still hurting her just by being the type of man he was. The type who would use her concern for her friends to get what he wanted.

‘My Gran used to say that the camera doesn’t lie. But it does,’ she accepted, suddenly feeling low-spirited. ‘Maybe not in her day,’ she went on, ‘but in this day and age the emphasis seems to be on how much you can artificially enhance or embellish, and on what you put in or take out. You can’t really tell what’s real any more and what isn’t. There’s so much that isn’t as it seems.’ Including you, she thought achingly, and had to glance away, pretending to be temporarily distracted by the other guests milling around them so that he wouldn’t see the emotion scoring her face.

‘And that means so much to you?’

‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘I like the camera to capture things as they really are.’ She turned back to him now, her feelings brought under control. ‘Men and women. Places. Things. I like them portrayed “warts and all”, as the saying goes. I’m not a fan of illusion. Being fooled into seeing something that isn’t really there.’