A Greek Escape(67)
It would be so easy to break down. To let him see how much she cared. But if she did that then she would only be inviting more humiliation—and ultimately more pain. He would use her again, solely in the name of pleasure. And she would let him, she thought wildly, knowing she had to clean herself up as quickly as she could and get as far away from this place—from him—as was humanly possible.
She’d been a fool to come, she realised, grabbing several sheets of kitchen paper from the roll that hung next to the sink and starting to dab it hastily over her wet tunic. She should have telephoned him. E-mailed. Anything but risk coming here and putting herself through this. But she’d wanted to see him. Speak to him. What kind of a first-rate fool did that make her? She was a glutton for punishment if she’d imagined that coming here—even if it was purely to offer him her sympathies over Philomena—would leave her unaffected and unscathed. And if she’d been hoping, even subconsciously, that seeing him again might change the status quo between them, then she’d forgotten—or was choosing to ignore—every lesson she’d thought she had learned. For all his good points—and there were a lot of them—he was still a ruthless businessman. A self-confessed, hard-headed realist, who believed that love and sentimentality were for fools.
Well, she’d leave him to his laptop and his papers and his…
Plans?
The word died from her consciousness as she swung painfully round to face them, having tossed the damp, scrunched-up kitchen roll into the bin. The easel was angled towards the front window, which was why she hadn’t seen it when she’d peered through the back shutters earlier. But the pinboard was a canvas, and what she’d thought were plans was…
A full-length painting of her!
He had captured her as she must have looked that day coming out of the sea, wearing only her white smock-top and bikini briefs. Her hair was blowing loose and she was looking down at something in the water, her golden lashes accentuated with a sensuality she had never attributed to them before. What she was wearing was sheer, yet her body was indistinct through the folds of virginal gossamer. It was a work of bold strokes. Movement. But above all else of the soul. Only a man could have painted her with such intrinsic sensuality, she thought. A man who loved his subject. Who knew her inside and out…
She put her hand up as though to touch it and as quickly retracted it, her fingers curling into a tight ball which she pressed to her mouth as tears started to fall.
They had changed to racking sobs in the time it took Leonidas to cross from the doorway and reach her.
‘Kayla…’ The depth of her emotion tore at him and she put up no resistance as he pulled her into his arms.
She was crying for Philomena. He wasn’t blind enough not to know that. She was remembering where she had come from that day and who she had been staying with…
‘Oh, my darling beautiful girl, don’t cry.’
He’d intended to say it in Greek, and only realised when she lifted her head and looked at him with soul-searching intensity that he had said it in English—and that it was too late.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she breathed in a shocked little whisper.
‘About the painting?’ His voice trembled with emotion as he used his thumb to wipe away her tears. ‘Or about being in love with you?’
There. It was out now, he thought, and he would have to bear the consequences of baring his soul.
‘What?’ Kayla couldn’t believe that she was hearing properly. ‘About the painting…’ She shook her head as though to clear it—uttered a little laugh through her tears. ‘Both!’ Was he really saying this? Hectically, her eyes searched his face.
‘Why do you think I wanted you with me?’ he uttered deeply, on a shuddering note, hardly daring to believe that she wasn’t ridiculing him.
‘To salvage your pride.’ Pain lined her forehead as she remembered that last morning. ‘You said so yourself.’
‘Well, there was a bit of that, I’ll admit.’ He pulled a self-deprecating face. ‘But mainly it was because I wanted to get you to trust me again. There was no other way I could think of that would break through the barriers you’d erected against me—and not just because I hadn’t been straight with you in the beginning, but because you believed I was the type of man who had hurt you so badly before—the type you so clearly despised. I was hoping you would look beyond the outer shell and see that I was different from those other men you’d known. Yet I only compounded my mistakes by browbeating you into staying with me. I would never have gone back on my word over that contract. But when I realised that you really believed I was manipulative enough to be using your friends to get to you—was actually capable of destroying everything they had if you didn’t do exactly what I wanted—I guess it was more than a crushing blow to my pride. I decided I didn’t have anything to lose. I needed to earn your respect. That’s why I wanted to take things slowly for a while and not complicate matters by taking you to bed, though it was torture having to exercise enough restraint not to do so. When we did make love and you cried I knew it was because your heart didn’t want it, even though physically you couldn’t resist this thing we have between us any more than I could.’