A Greek Escape(59)

He tilted his head, the movement so slight that she wasn’t sure whether she had imagined it or not. His eyes were dark pools of inscrutable emotion and she wondered what he was thinking. That he had done just that with her when he hadn’t told her who he was?

‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

He spoke very little to her on the relatively short journey back, while the car ate up the miles in the gathering dusk.

There had been a sporadic press presence at the main gates of the house over the past few days, and Leonidas wasn’t taking any chances when they arrived home.

‘We’ll take the east entrance,’ he told Kayla as he turned the car down a quiet lane that stretched for a couple of miles and which, from the manicured trees above the high wall that soon came into view, obviously skirted his property.

Another pair of electronically opened gates brought them past a small lodge and into his home through a smaller and more secluded side entrance.

‘Why isn’t this part of the house used?’ Kayla whispered as they came out of rooms covered in dustsheets which Leonidas had had to unlock to allow them into the main body of the house. She felt like a child creeping around when she should have been in bed. Or a guilty mistress sneaking away from the ecstasies of her lover’s bed…

‘I had this part converted for my father, but he never came here,’ he said, his voice taking on a curiously jagged edge.

‘Why not?’ Kayla asked, thinking how thick and black his hair was as he stopped to lock the door behind him. It made her want to rake her fingers through it, twist the strong tufts around them as she lay beneath him, crying out from the terrifying pleasure he was withholding from her.

‘I believe I told you before. We were never able to get on. I wanted us to try and establish some sort of rapport as he was getting older.’ They were moving along a softly lit carpeted passage now. ‘To try and forge some sort of bond with him.’

He was so close behind her that if she stopped he would collide with her, Kayla thought hectically, craving the feel of his warmth through her prim little jacket and tight pencil skirt.

‘And did you?’

‘No. There was too much between us—far too much to even imagine we could repair it. He didn’t want to share in my good fortune or the things I could give him. He didn’t want anything from me,’ he concluded, with something in his voice that she might have mistaken for pain if she hadn’t known better.

‘Why not? Wasn’t he proud of you?’ she queried, feeling for him in spite of herself as they came through an archway into the main hall alongside the sweeping staircase. She couldn’t believe that any parent with a son like Leonidas—driven, enterprising, so overwhelmingly successful—could possibly be anything else.

‘Oh, I think he was satisfied that I’d turned out to be the man he had been determined to mould me into,’ he accepted harshly.

Kayla glanced back over her shoulder and saw the rigidity of his features, the hard cynicism touching his mouth. ‘And what type is that?’

‘The type who understands that sentiment and idealism are for fools and that common sense and practicality are the only two reliable bedfellows.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ she murmured, with wounded incredulity in her eyes as she stopped, as he had, at the foot of the stairs.

‘What does it matter what I believe?’ he said.

He meant to her. And yet it did matter, she realised—far too much—and she had to sink her nails into her clenched palms to keep herself from blurting it out.

He was hard and ruthless. She’d realised that even before she’d left Greece. Although she hadn’t known how hard and how calculating he could be until she’d seen him in full corporate action, which was how he had managed to climb to the very top of the executive ladder while still only thirty-one. Yet there was an altruistic side to his nature too, reined in beneath that cold and ruthless streak, which could have had her eating out of his hand if she had been weak enough to let it. But she wasn’t, she thought turbulently as she found herself battling against a surge of responses to that dark and raw sensuality that transcended everything else about him.

‘Thank you for taking me to the exhibition,’ she said, in a husky voice that didn’t sound like hers. ‘It was thoughtful of you. I think I’ll go straight up. Goodnight.’

If she had thought he would let her go then she had been fooling herself, she realised too late, when his firm, determined fingers closed around her wrist.