Why not? Crazily, she heard the mortifying question spring to her lips and was half-afraid that she had actually spoken it. Wasn’t he just the type of man she needed right now to drive the bitter after-taste of Craig and all his shallow-minded smart set out of her mind?
‘Believe it or not, I’m not looking for one,’ she responded, to assure herself as much as Leon. Well, she wasn’t, was she? Wasn’t she better off—as her mother had always claimed to be—on her own?
‘Sensible girl,’ Leonidas drawled and, stooping to pick up her hat, deposited it gently and unceremoniously on her head.
‘Thanks.’ Kayla pulled a wry face. ‘Perhaps you’d like to sketch me like this?’ she challenged broodingly, relieved, nevertheless, that the disconcerting subject of her love-life had finally been swept aside.
What wasn’t so easy to sweep aside, however, was the memory of what had transpired between them a few moments ago.
Why had she responded to him so shamelessly if, as he’d suggested, she was still affected by what Craig had done? Was she so wanton? So desperate for a man? Any man? she wondered. Might she have let this virtual stranger take her here on the shingle without a thought for how it might leave her feeling afterwards?
‘I won’t be sketching you at all,’ he said dismissively. ‘For the simple reason that you are wrong. I’m no artist. But if I were, and if I had to keep looking at you looking like this...’ His gaze slid over her tantalisingly wet top, making her quiver inside from the powerful impulses generated by the naked need in his eyes, ‘then—old boyfriend or no old boyfriend—I definitely would wind up taking you to bed.’
* * *
The climb up through the scrub to Philomena’s cottage was hot and hilly, and Leonidas walked ahead of Kayla, protecting her from the dense and thorny vegetation that was encroaching on the narrow path, thriving in the rough terrain.
He had had an exacting morning, sorting out a problem that had arisen back in his London office—a case of divided opinion between a couple of members of his board, which his second-in-command had apologised for bringing to his attention.
They said it was tough at the top, he reminded himself with a grimace. And they could say it again, because no matter how much he needed to escape the rigours of the office for a while, he still needed to keep his finger on the pulsing heart of his business.
Shopping malls, leisure complexes and housing developments didn’t build themselves, and after the flak he had taken from the press over the neglect of local residents with last year’s bitter fiasco he needed to ensure that no loopholes were left for mercenary lawyers and unprincipled members of his team to make unscrupulous deals over.
Being labelled ‘ruthless’, ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘a profiteer’ by the media wasn’t something he wanted repeated any more than he wanted further episodes like the one with his publicity-hungry bed-partner Esmeralda Leigh. He had a reputation to uphold—one that he valued—both in his corporate and his private life, and he would protect and defend it with every shred of his power and his unwavering principles. But he hadn’t got where he was today without treading a path that had made him tough, hard-nosed and uncompromising, and he had no intention of wavering from that path. Of allowing himself or anyone else to imagine for one moment that he was going soft. Not even this infernally beautiful girl...
Hearing her breath coming shallowly some way behind him, he stopped and waited for her to catch up. She was clutching her bottle of sunscreen lotion, the bulky camera dangled around her neck, and with her white leggings, her tunic top and that huge floppy hat she looked like an overgrown child who had just raided her great-grandmother’s attic. He was happy to notice—for his own sake—that her top had nearly dried.
‘Here. Let me carry that.’ He could see her cheeks were flushed and that she was finding it a struggle keeping up with him, and he held out his hand for the camera, which she happily relinquished. Silently he extended his other hand.
Realising his intention, Kayla hesitated briefly, and saw a mocking smile touch his sensational mouth.
‘It’s all right. It doesn’t constitute a tacit agreement to let me into your bed,’ he advised her dryly.
Of course it didn’t, she thought. But an impulse of something so powerfully electric seemed to pass between them when she took his hand that it certainly felt like it.
‘Thanks,’ she uttered tremulously, hoping that he would think it was the uphill climb in the heat over the rough ground that was making her sound so breathless. Not that every cell was leaping in response to her physical awareness of him just as it had when he had kissed her down there on the beach.
‘Where did you learn to speak English so proficiently?’ she asked, needing to say something—although she was genuinely interested to know.
‘When I work, I work mainly in the UK,’ he informed her. ‘And my grandmother was English, so I had a head start while I was still knee-high to a cricket.’
‘Grasshopper.’
‘What?’ The way he was looking down at her, with such charismatically dark eyes, sent a sensually charged little tingle along Kayla’s spine.
‘It’s knee-high to a grasshopper,’ she corrected him, contemplating how well the backdrop of the rugged coast and the meandering hillsides served to strengthen the ruggedness of this man who had been born part of them. But she’d picked up on what he’d just said about when he worked. So his employment definitely wasn’t regular, she thought, reminded of the recent slump in the building trade and how difficult it had made things for a lot of its workers. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen to ‘opt out’, as he’d put it, for a while.
‘How old were you when you left the island?’ She found herself wanting to know much more about him.
‘Fifteen.’
She remembered him saying that he’d left to find a better life. ‘On your own?’ she queried. ‘Did you leave to go to college?’ she asked, when he didn’t answer her question. What else could possibly have taken him away at such a young age?
He laughed at that—a sound without humour. ‘No college. No university. I did have hopes of furthering my education, but my father wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘Why not?’ Kayla asked, amazed.
‘He wanted me to get out into the world, like he had, and “do an honest job” as he called it.’
‘Really?’ Kayla sympathised. ‘And what did he do?’
‘He eked a living out of this land,’ he told her, with an edge to his voice that had her looking at her curiously.
‘And where are they now? Your parents?’ She couldn’t believe they could still be living on the island, otherwise why would he be staying here alone in some absentee owner’s sadly neglected house?
‘My parents are dead,’ he told her as he walked half a stride ahead of her. There was no emotion now beside that surprisingly hard cast to his mouth.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kayla murmured. She had discovered during a conversation in the villa with him the other day that he, like Kayla, was an only child.
‘One learns to get over these things,’ he replied.
From the harshness of his tone, however, she wondered if he had. Or was there some other reason, she pondered, for that inexorable grimness to his features?
‘Still...you have Philomena,’ she said brightly, hoping to lighten the mood. She couldn’t understand why down there on the beach he had behaved like an exciting lover and yet now seemed as uncommunicative as ever.
Was