A Greek Escape(62)
Wearing a silver-grey suit, white shirt and silver tie, Leonidas was perched on one of the high stools, browsing through a newspaper, when Kayla came into the huge, sterile-looking kitchen an hour or so later. Behind him the sky was overcast beyond the panoramic window, and even a myriad lights in the halogen-studded ceiling couldn’t detract from the dreariness of what should have been a bright summer day.
‘Good morning.’ He scarcely glanced up from whatever he was reading in the Financial Times, although just that briefest glance from him set her insides aflame as she thought about how intimately and passionately he had pleasured her last night.
After a moment he cast the newspaper aside on the kitchen counter beside him. ‘Kayla, we have to talk,’ he stated without any preamble, angling his long, lean body to face her on the stool.
‘About what?’ she queried, with sudden queasiness in her stomach. What was he going to say that lent such a serious tone to his voice?
‘I’ve been a moron,’ he told her. ‘If that’s the correct expression. You were right. I have been trying to keep you in my life for the sake of my own pride—my ego, if you like—because I didn’t like my ethics being brought into question in anyone’s mind. Particularly the mind of a girl who was very sweet and trusting and whom I treated very unfairly when I was with her in Greece and I needed to put that right.’
‘What are you saying?’ Kayla queried in a small, broken voice.
‘That I’ve been very selfish and inconsiderate and that you don’t need to pander to my fragile ego any longer. Your friends’ contract is assured, if that’s what you’ve been worrying about, so you’re free to cast me off…if that’s what you wish,’ he added with some hesitancy, and as though he was picking his words very carefully. ‘Whenever you like.’
If it was what she wished?
Pain speared through her so acutely it felt like a knife slicing through the life-force of her very being. She’d never been let down and effectively rejected in such a considerately phrased manner before. But he’d got what he wanted, she thought wretchedly, trying to concentrate on her breathing. It was her total capitulation that he had needed to redeem his pride, and now she had given him that he needed nothing more.
He was just like all the others—right out of the same mould. The type of man she’d vowed never to be attracted to again. Except that this man was different. This man wasn’t even capable of feeling. Not love, she accepted, anguished. He’d practically admitted that to her himself last night. Loving was a weakness—something only fools entertained—and Leonidas Vassalio was anything but weak, and certainly no fool.
‘Well…’ Her smile felt stretched as she tried to put on a brave face, and she wondered if she was visibly shaking as much as she was trembling inside. It occurred to her then why he’d wanted her kept out of the way of the press while he’d been away last weekend. Because he didn’t want anyone thinking she was a permanent fixture in his life. ‘I’d better go and start packing,’ she said as tonelessly as she was able, and wondered at the unfathomable emotion that turned his eyes almost inky black.
‘I have to fly to Athens,’ he informed her, consulting his watch, his tone similarly flat.
It was a trip, she’d discovered, which he took on a regular basis, often going back and forth between London and his Greek office. ‘If you’re keen to go today, I obviously won’t try and stop you, but I shan’t be able to take you myself. I can, however, arrange for a car to be put at your disposal whenever you wish to leave.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Kayla murmured, wanting to get out of there—and quickly—before the tears that were burning the backs of her eyes overflowed and gave her away.
He nodded as though he understood, and somehow she managed to drag herself from the room with her pride intact, safe in the knowledge that he would never know the truth. A truth she only admitted to herself now, as she stumbled over the stairs up which he had carried her so purposefully last night. That she was deeply and hopelessly in love with Leonidas Vassalio.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MOVING LEADENLY THROUGH the silent cottage, Leonidas was checking each familiar room. He had promised Philomena’s daughter he would do that for her, and that he would take anything he wanted. Anything that meant something to him, she had said.
Coming back through the kitchen, he let his glance touch painfully on a cherished oil-lamp, some sprigs of dried herbs, the stack of unused logs beside the huge stove, and his nostrils dilated from a host of evocative scents—rosemary, sage and pinewood, trapped there by shutters which remained reverently closed against the intrusion of the outside world.