‘What are you concerned about, Kayla?’ he asked softly, closing the cool box that had contained their picnic before stowing it away. ‘That I might have spent more than you think I can justifiably afford? Or is it finding yourself in my debt that’s making you uneasy?’
‘A bit of both, I suppose,’ she admitted truthfully. After all, she’d always been used to paying her way when she was with a man, to never taking more out of a relationship than she was prepared to put in. Emotionally as well as financially, she thought with a little stab of self-derision as she remembered how with Craig she had wound up giving everything and receiving nothing, coming out a first-rate fool in the end.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Leonidas advised. ‘I promise you I’m not likely to starve for the rest of my holiday. As for the boat, I hired it to take myself off exploring today. Your coming with me is just a bonus, so there’s no need to feel awkward or indebted in any way. If you want to contribute something, then your enjoyment will suffice,’ he assured her, and refrained from adding that most women he’d known would have taken his generosity as their due.
The island, when they came ashore, was beautiful. Lonely and uninhabited, it was merely a haven for wildlife, with only numerous birds and insects making their voices heard above the warm wind and the wash of the sea in the cove where they had left the boat.
There was no distinct path, and the climb through the surprisingly green vegetation was hot and steep, but the feeling of freedom at the top was worth a thousand climbs.
It was like standing in their own uninhabited world. In every direction the deep blue of the sky met the deeper blue of the sea. Looking back across the distance they had covered, Kayla saw the hulk of mountainous land they had left with its forests and its craggy coastline slumbering in a haze of heat.
There were huge stones amongst the grass—sculpted stones of an ancient ruin, overgrown with scrub and wild flowers, a sad and silent testimony to the beliefs of some long-lost civilisation.
‘You said you came to sort out some issues?’ Kayla reminded him, venturing to broach what she had been dying to ask him since they had left that morning. ‘What sort of issues?’ she pressed, looking seawards at the waves creaming onto a distant beach and wondering if it was the one where she had first seen him over a week ago. ‘Woman issues?’ she enquired, more tentatively now.
He was standing with his foot on one of the stones that had once formed part of the ancient temple, with one hand resting on his knee. The wind was lifting his hair, sweeping it back off features suddenly so uncompromising that he looked like a marauding mythical god, surveying all he intended to conquer.
‘Among other things,’ he said, but he didn’t enlarge on the women in his life or tell her what those ‘other things’ were.
Kayla moved away from him, pulling a brightly flowering weed from a crack in what had formed part of a wall. She was getting used to his uncommunicative ways.
She was surprised, therefore, when he suddenly said, ‘I used to dream of owning this island when I was a boy. I used to sit on that hillside...’ he pointed to a distant spot across the water, indiscernible through the heat haze ‘...and imagine all I was going to do with it. The big house. The swimming pool. The riding stables.’
‘And dogs?’ Kayla inserted, her eyes gleaming, following him into a make-believe world of her own.
‘Yes, lots of dogs.’
So he liked animals, she realised, deriving warm pleasure from the knowledge. Contrarily, though, she wrinkled her nose. ‘Too costly to feed.’ Laughingly she pretended to discount that idea. ‘And too much heartache if they get sick or run away.’
‘They couldn’t run away,’ Leonidas reminded her. ‘Not unless they were proficient swimmers.’
‘Haven’t you ever heard of the doggy paddle?’ She giggled, enjoying playing this little game with him. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were glowing from an exhilaration that had nothing to do with their climb. ‘So you were going to build a house with a swimming pool? And have horses? Racehorses, of course.’
He shot her a sceptical glance. ‘Now you’re wandering into the realms of fantasy,’ he chided, amused.
‘Well, if you can own the island and have a house with lots of dogs, I can have racehorses,’ Kayla insisted light-heartedly.
‘They’d fall off the edge before they’d covered a mile,’ he commented dryly. ‘I was talking about what seemed totally realistic to a twelve-year-old boy.’
Tugging her windswept hair out of her eyes, Kayla pulled a face. ‘But then you grew up?’
‘Yes,’ he said heavily. ‘I grew up.’ And all he had wanted to do was run as far away from these islands and everything he had called home as he could possibly get.
‘What happened?’ Kayla asked, frowning. She couldn’t help but notice the tension clenching his mouth and the hard line of his jaw.
‘My mother died when I was fourteen, then my grandfather shortly afterwards. My father and I didn’t see eye to eye,’ he enlightened her.
‘Why not?’
‘Why do we not get on with some people and yet gel so perfectly with others? Especially those who are supposed to be closest to us?’ He shrugged, his strong features softening a little. ‘Differing opinions? A clash of personalities? Maybe even because we are too much alike. Why aren’t you close to your mother?’ he outlined as an example.
Watching a lizard dart along the jagged edge of the wall and disappear over the side, Kayla considered his question. ‘I suppose all those things,’ she admitted, rather ruefully. And then, keen to shrug off the serious turn the conversation had taken, she said, ‘So, are you going to sketch me a picture of this house?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ She had seen him scribbling in his notepad again, when he had been waiting for her in the truck outside Philomena’s, and wondered what he could possibly have been doing if he hadn’t been sketching. He’d also been speaking to somebody on his cell phone at the same time, Kayla remembered, but had cut the call short, leaning across to open the passenger door for her when he had seen her coming. She’d wondered if he’d been speaking to a woman and, if he had, whether it was the woman at the heart of his ‘issues’.
‘It isn’t what I do,’ Leonidas said.
‘No son of mine is going to disgrace the Vassalio name by painting for a living!’
Leonidas could still hear his father’s bellowing as he ridiculed his talent, his love of perspective and light and colour, beating it out of him—sometimes literally—as he destroyed the results of his teenage son’s labours and with them all the creativity in his soul. Art was a feeling and feelings were weakness, his father had drummed into him. And no Vassalio male had ever been weak.
So he had channelled his driving energies into creating new worlds out of blocks of clay and concrete, in innovative designs that had leaped off the paper and formed the basis of his own developments. Developments that had made him rich beyond his wildest dreams. And with the money it had all come tumbling into his lap. Influence. Respect. Women. So many women that he could have had his pick of any of them. Yet he hadn’t found one who was more disposed to him personally than she was to the state of his bank balance. Not beyond the pleasures of the bedroom at any rate, he thought with a self-deprecating mental grimace. In that it seemed he was never able to fail.
‘So what about you, Kayla? Didn’t you have any aspirations?’
‘I suppose I did but not like yours,’ she said, twirling the stalk of a pink flower in her fingers. ‘I think I was always practical and realistic. Besides, I was brought up with the understanding that if you don’t expect