‘No.’ She had leaped to her feet and stood facing him now with her hands on her hips, her eyes wide and contesting. ‘You’ve obviously got me mixed up with somebody else! I don’t know who you think I am, but whoever it is I’m not the person you were expecting.’
‘I was hardly expecting anyone—least of all another blood-sucking female with her own self-motivated agenda! Unless you’re going to tell me you’ve come all this way by yourself to slap a petition on me as well!’
‘No, I haven’t!’ Kayla riposted, wondering what the hell he was talking about. ‘And whatever your problem is—whoever it is you’ve come here to escape from—I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take it out on me!’
She was gone before he could utter another word.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS THE crash that woke her.
Or had it been the rain and thunder? Kayla wondered, scrambling, terrified, out of bed. She had been tossing and turning in a kind of half-sleep for what seemed like hours, although it might only have been minutes since the storm began.
Now, as she pulled open her bedroom door, the full force of the gale made her cry out when it almost blew her back into the room. In the darkness she could see an ominous shape lying diagonally across the landing and a gash in the sloping roof, which was now open to the wind and the driving rain.
Kayla gasped as lightning ripped across the sky, so close that the almost instantaneous crash of thunder that followed seemed to rock the foundations of the house.
Fumbling to turn on the light switch, she groaned when nothing happened.
‘Oh, great!’
Finding the chair where she had folded the jeans and shirt she had travelled in two days ago, with trembling hands she hastily pulled them on over her flimsy pyjamas, and then groped around for her bag and the small torch she always carried on her keyring.
Debris was everywhere as she moved cautiously under the fallen tree-trunk. Twisted branches, leaves, twigs and pieces of broken masonry and plaster scrunched underfoot as she picked her way carefully downstairs.
It was as if the whole outdoors had broken in, she thought with a startled cry as another flash of lightning streaked across the sky. The crash that followed it seemed to rock the villa, causing her to panic at the torrent of rain that was coming in on the raging wind.
And then she heard another sound, like a loud hammering on the external door to the villa, and mercifully a voice, its deep tone muffled, yet still breaking through to her through the tearing gale and the rain.
‘Kayla! Kayla? Answer me! Are you in there? Kayla! Are you all right?’
The banging persisted until she thought the door was caving in.
Reaching it and tugging it open, she almost cried with relief when she saw the formidable figure of Leon standing there, his fists clenched as though to knock the door down if it wasn’t opened. Rain was running down his face and his strong bronzed throat in rivulets.
It took all her will-power not to sink against him as he caught her arm and shouted something urgently in his own language.
‘Get out of here! Quickly!’ he ordered, reverting to English. ‘There’s been a landslide further up the mountain. This house might not be safe to stay in.’ And as she hesitated, casting an anxious glance at her belongings, ‘We’ll come back for your things in the morning!’ he shouted above the wind and the lashing rain. ‘You’re coming with me!’
Petrified, rooted to the spot by the sound of splitting timber somewhere close by on the riven hillside, Kayla felt herself suddenly being whipped off her feet. She was only pacified by the realisation that she was in a pair of strong, powerful arms, being held against Leon’s sodden warmth as he ran with her to the waiting truck.
He had left the vehicle’s lights on, and after he had set her quickly down on the passenger seat Kayla saw him race around the bonnet with his head bent against the storm, his purposeful physique only just discernible through the rain-washed windscreen.
He opened the driver’s door, his long hair dripping, and as he climbed into the cab beside her and slammed the door against the wind she noticed that his shirt, which was unbuttoned and hanging loose, like his jeans, was soaked through and clinging to his powerful torso.
‘Thank you! Oh, thank you!’ Dropping her head into her hands as the truck started rumbling away, Kayla couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘I didn’t know what was happening!’ she blurted out when she had recovered herself enough to sit up straight and turn towards him. ‘I woke up and thought the world was coming to an end!’
‘It would have been for you,’ Leonidas stated with grim truthfulness, ‘if that tree had fallen on you.’
But it hadn’t, she thought gratefully. Nor was she now exposed to the damage it had caused. Thanks to him, she realised, and wondered how she would have coped if he hadn’t been passing right at that moment.
‘What happened?’ she queried, baffled, as she began to gather her wits about her. ‘Did you just happen to come by?’
‘Something like that,’ he intoned, without taking his attention from the zig-zagging mountain road. The truck’s wiper blades were barely able to cope even at double-speed with the torrential rain.
At half-past one in the morning?
For the first time noticing the clock on the dashboard, Kayla realised exactly what the time was. Had he been out late, seen what had happened as he had driven past? Or had he been in bed? Had he heard the landslide and driven down especially?
Of course not, she thought, dismissing that last possible scenario. No man she knew of would be so gallant as to risk his own safety for a girl he didn’t even know let alone like. And it was patently obvious from her two previous meetings with him that he clearly didn’t like her. Or any of her sex, if it came to that!
‘Why are you doing this if you think I’m someone who’s out to make trouble for you?’ she enquired pointedly, her hair falling, damp and dishevelled, around her shoulders.
‘What would you have preferred me to do?’ Every ounce of his concentration was still riveted on the windscreen. ‘Leave you there to swim? Or worse?’
Kayla shuddered as she interpreted what ‘worse’ might easily have meant.
‘Is it always like this on these islands?’ she queried worriedly, staring out at the truck’s powerful headlights cutting through the sheets of rain.
‘If you come here in the spring it’s a chance you take,’ he returned succinctly.
Which she had, Kayla thought, deciding that he probably thought her stupid on top of everything else.
‘What’s likely to happen to the villa?’ she asked anxiously, watching the gleaming water cascading off the hills and filling every crack and crevice on the rugged road. ‘That tree came right through onto the landing.’
‘We’ll go down and inspect the damage in the morning.’
‘But the furniture and furnishings. And my things,’ she remembered as an afterthought. ‘Everything’s going to get wet.’
‘Only to be expected,’ he answered prosaically, changing gear to take a particularly sharp bend. ‘With a hole in the roof.’
A hysterical little laugh bubbled up inside of her. Nerves, she decided. And shock. Because there was certainly nothing funny about the havoc this storm had wreaked upon the little Grecian retreat her friends had worked so hard for.
‘What am I going to say to Lorna?’ She was worrying about how she was