But he had, Kayla thought. And she had been rudely awakened and forced to admit—to herself at least—that her mother was right. They were the worst of the lot! It was a realisation doubly enforced when she had had to suffer the demeaning overtures of one or two other male members of management who had tried to capitalise on her broken engagement.
After leaving the company where she’d worked with Craig, trying to put the pain and humiliation of what he had done behind her, she might have been able to pick up the pieces of her life if she had been allowed to. But her mother’s condescending and self-satisfied attitude—particularly when she’d heard that Craig really was getting married—had made everything far, far worse.
Consequently when Lorna had offered her the chance of escaping to her isolated Grecian retreat for a couple of weeks Kayla had jumped at the chance. It had seemed like the answer to a prayer. A place to start rebuilding her sense of self-worth.
But now, as she took her supper from the bleeping microwave and prodded the rather unpalatable-looking lasagne with a fork, it wasn’t thoughts of Craig Lymington that troubled her and upset her determined attempts to restore her equilibrium. It was the face of that churlish stranger she’d been unfortunate enough to cross this morning, and her shocking awareness of him when he’d pulled her to her feet and she’d felt the impact of his disturbing proximity.
Leonidas Vassalio was fixing a loose shutter on one of the ground-floor windows, his features as hard as the stones that made up the ancient farmhouse and as darkly intense as the gathering clouds that were closing in over the mountains, warning of an impending storm.
The house would fall down if he didn’t take some urgent steps to get it repaired, he realised, glancing up at the sad state of its terracotta roof and the peeling green paint around its doors and windows. The muscles in his powerful arms flexed as he twisted a screw in place.
It was hard to imagine that this place had once been his home. This modest, isolated farmhouse, reached only by a zig-zagging dirt road. Yet this island, with its rocky coast, its azure waters and barren mountains, was as familiar to him as his own being, and a far cry from the world he inhabited now.
The rain had started to fall. Cold, heavy drops that splashed his face and neck as he worked and reflected on the whole complicated mess his life had become.
To the outsider his privileged lifestyle was one to be envied, but personally he was tired of sycophants, superficial women and the intrusion of the paparazzi. Like that interfering slip of a girl he’d caught photographing him on the beach this morning, he thought grimly, ready to bet money that she was one of them. For what other reason would she have been there if she wasn’t from some newspaper? He had had enough of reporters to last him a lifetime, and they had been particularly savaging of late.
He had always shunned publicity. Always managed to keep a low media profile. Anyone outside of Greece might not instantly have recognised him, even though they would most certainly have recognised the Vassalio name. It was his brief involvement with Esmeralda Leigh that had thrust him so starkly into the public eye recently.
Nor had it helped when a couple of the high-ranking executives he had trusted to run one of his UK subsidiaries, along with an unscrupulous lawyer, had reneged on a verbal promise over a development deal and given the Vassalio Group bad press—which in turn had brought his own ethics into question. After all, as chairman, Leonidas thought introspectively, the buck stopped with him. But he had been too tied up at the time to be aware of what was going on.
That ordinary people had been lied to and were having their homes bulldozed from under them didn’t sit comfortably on his conscience. Nor did being accused of riding roughshod over people without giving a thought to their needs, breaking up communities so as to profit from multi-million-pound sports arenas and retail/leisure complexes and expand on Vassalio’s ever-increasing assets. The fact that everyone affected had been compensated—and very well—had been consigned only to the back pages of the tabloids.
He had needed to get away. To forget Leonidas Vassalio, billionaire and successful businessman, for a while and sort out what was important to him. And to do that he had needed to get back to his roots. To enjoy the bliss of virtual anonymity that coming here would offer him. Because only one other person knew he was here. But now it looked as though even that might have been too much to expect, if that nosy little blonde he’d caught snooping around today had lied about why she was here.
And if she hadn’t, and she really had been photographing birds, why had she been standing there taking a picture of him? Had she just fancied snapping a bit of local colour? One of the peasants going about his daily business? Or could it be that she’d just happened to like the look of him? he thought, with his mouth twisting cynically. In other circumstances he would have admitted unreservedly to himself that he hadn’t exactly been put off by the look of her. Especially when he’d noted that she’d been wearing no ring.
But bedding nubile young women wasn’t on his agenda right now. Heaven only knew the physical attributes he’d been endowed with acted like a magnet on the opposite sex, and he’d never met one yet that he’d wanted to bed who hadn’t been willing, but, no, he determined as he oiled a hinge. Whatever her motives were, and no matter how affected she’d been by that spark of something that had leaped between them and made her pull back from him as though she’d been scorched when he’d pulled her to her feet, that girl certainly hadn’t had bedroom games in mind.
She had to be staying in one of those modern villas that had sprung up further down the hillside. That was the direction she had been heading in when he’d caught up with her. He wondered if there was anyone with her, or if she was staying there alone. If she was, he deliberated with his hackles rising, then she had to be here for a reason. And if that reason was to intrude on his peace and solitude…
Finishing what he was doing, annoyed at how much thought he was giving to her, he rushed inside, out of the rain.
She was going to find out the hard way that she couldn’t mess with him!
CHAPTER TWO
THE THREE-MILE drive to the main village to get provisions had seemed like an easy enough mission, particularly when last night’s storm had caused a power cut and made her fridge stop working.
Unless the thing had broken before then, Kayla thought exasperated, having come downstairs this morning to a cabinet of decidedly warm and smelly food.
But the polished voice of the car’s satellite navigation system had let her down badly when it had guided her along this track. And now, having parked the car in order to consult the map and try and work out where she was, the little hatchback that her friends kept here for whenever they visited the island refused to start.
She tried again, her teeth clenched with tension.
‘Come on,’ she appealed desperately to the engine. ‘Please.’
It was no good, she realised, slumping back on her seat. It had well and truly packed up.
Lorna had given her the name of someone she could call in an emergency who spoke relatively good English, Kayla remembered, fishing in the glove compartment for the man’s number. But when she took her cell phone out of her bag she discovered that she didn’t have a signal.
Despairingly tossing the phone onto the passenger seat, she looked around at a Grecian panorama of sea and mountains and, closer to hand, pine woods and stony slopes leading down to this track.
Beyond the open windows of the car the chirruping of crickets in the scrub and the lonely tugging of the wind only seemed to emphasise her isolation. She didn’t have a clue where she was.
Glancing back over her shoulder, she recognised way below the group of rocks that ran seaward from the beach where she had seen that surly local yesterday, and that smaller island in the distance, clear as a bell today beneath the canopy of a rain-washed vividly azure sky.
With the sun beating relentlessly down upon her, with an unusable