‘Maybe it isn’t,’ he said, feeling a nerve beginning to flicker at his temple. ‘But I don’t think it’s unreasonable of us to want to get hold of you, is it?’
‘Us?’
‘Zeitgeist,’ he bit out, wondering what the hell was the matter with her. Why she was being so damned stubborn. And so remote. Hadn’t they just spent the best part of a week being about as intimate as a man and woman could be? ‘And Lulu,’ he added. ‘You know. The people who provided you with work.’
‘I was told it was a one-off.’ She gripped the handle of the spade. ‘And you were the one who told me that.’
‘With hindsight, I might have spoken a little hastily.’
Her gaze was steady. ‘If only we all had the benefit of hindsight, Loukas.’
He frowned. He didn’t want this impenetrable wall between them. He wanted her onside. ‘The campaign has been a huge success.’
‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘The campaign.’
‘We’ve been inundated with requests for interviews, TV—’
‘So have I,’ she said sharply. ‘My answer machine keeps getting filled up with messages, even though I clear it at the end of every day.’
‘But you didn’t think to answer them?’
‘Actually, I did. And then decided not to.’ She wrapped her jacket more tightly around herself and gave an exaggerated shiver. ‘I’m getting cold just standing here.’
‘Then why don’t you take me inside and offer me some of your legendary English hospitality?’
Jessica hesitated when she heard the sarcasm in his voice, but she could hardly say no. And the trouble was that she didn’t want to say no. She wanted to know what had brought him here—appearing on her horizon like some dark avenging angel. Most of all she wanted him to kiss her, and that was where the danger lay. She had missed him so much that it had hurt and yet now that she had seen him again her heart had started aching even more. This was a lose-lose situation and his presence here wasn’t going to help her in the long term. But you couldn’t really turn a man away when he’d driven all this way to see you, could you?
‘You’d better come in,’ she said.
He followed her into the kitchen and she could sense him looking around as she put the kettle on. What did he think of her dresser, with the eclectic collection of jugs, or the cork board studded with all the postcards which Hannah had sent from her travels? Was he comparing it to his huge but cold suite at the Vinoly and did it all look terribly parochial to his sophisticated eye?
The wind had ruffled his black hair and he was dressed in jeans more faded than hers, along with a battered brown leather jacket. His casual clothes started playing tricks with her memory. Like a flashback, they gave her a glimpse of the man he had once been. The big bear of a bodyguard who used to watch her from the side of a tennis court. But flashbacks were notoriously unreliable—they always painted the past in such flattering shades that you wanted to be back there. And that was impossible. The past was the refuge for losers who couldn’t cope with the present, and she wasn’t going to be one of those losers.
She made tea and took the tray into the small sitting room which overlooked the Atlantic. She thought about lighting a fire but then decided against it, because he wasn’t staying long. He definitely wasn’t staying long.
‘So...’ She put a steaming star-decorated mug on a small table beside one of the chairs, but he didn’t take the hint to sit down—he just strode over to the window and stood there, staring out at the crashing ocean, his silhouetted body dark and powerful and more than a little intimidating.
He turned back, eyes narrowed. ‘Did you move because the house was too big?’
She thought about saying yes. It would be understandable, after all—especially now that it was just her. But Jessica knew that she couldn’t keep hiding behind her cool mask, thinking that to do so would offer her some kind of protection. Because she’d realised that it didn’t. Masks didn’t stop you wishing for things which were never going to come true. And they didn’t stop your heart from hurting when you fell for men who were wrong for you.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I moved because I had to. Because my father had built up massive debts which were only revealed after he was killed in the avalanche.’
His eyes narrowed, but there wasn’t a flicker of emotion on his own face. And suddenly she was glad that he hadn’t come out with the usual platitudes which people always trotted out, platitudes which meant zero and somehow ended up making you feel even worse. Maybe they were more alike than she’d thought. Or maybe now that they had entered the dark worlds of death and debts, he suddenly felt on familiar ground.
He sat down then, lowering his mighty frame into a chair which up until that moment had always looked substantial.
‘What happened?’
She watched as he picked up his tea and sipped it. ‘Like everyone else, he was banking on me winning a Grand Slam, or three. He was very ambitious.’ She shrugged. ‘They say that fathers make the best and the worst coaches.’
‘You didn’t like him very much,’ he said slowly.
His words came out of the blue. Few people would have thought it and even fewer would have dared say it. It would be easier to deny it but her chin stayed high and defiant as she met his eyes with a challenge. ‘Does that shock you?’
He gave a hard smile in response. ‘Very little in life shocks me, koukla mou.’
The soft Greek words slid over her skin, touching her at a time when she was feeling vulnerable, but she tried not to be swayed by them. She cleared her throat. ‘He did his best. He did what he thought was right. It’s just that he never really allowed me to have a normal life.’
‘So why didn’t you stand up to him?’
Recognising that his question was about more than the unbending routine of her tennis years, Jessica picked up a match and struck it to the crumpled-up paper in the grate, seeing the heated flare as it caught the logs and hoping it would warm the sudden chill of her skin. Because sometimes it was easier to be told what to do than to think for yourself. It meant you could blame someone else if it all went wrong. And it was hard to admit that, even to herself.
‘There were lots of reasons why I didn’t stand up to him, but I suppose what you really want to know is why I wasn’t stronger when it came to you. Why I let him drive a wedge between us.’ She sensed that he was holding his breath but she couldn’t look at him. She didn’t dare. Because if she removed her mask completely—mightn’t he be repulsed by the face he saw beneath?
She threw an unnecessary log onto the fire. ‘I thought we were too young to settle down and my career was very important to me.’
‘But that’s not the only reason, is it, Jess?’
There was a pause. ‘No.’ Her voice sounded quiet against the crackle of the fire. She stared into the forest of flames, losing herself in that flickering orange kingdom. ‘I was an unsettled child. My parents split up when I was very young. My dad left my mum for a younger woman who was already pregnant with his child—Hannah—and my mum never really got over that. I lived with her shame and her bitterness, which didn’t leave much room for anything else.’
She picked up her tea and cupped her hands around it. ‘When she died I went to live with my father and that’s when the tennis really kicked off. At last I had something to believe in. Something I could lose myself in. But my stepmother resented the amount of time it took him away from her and I think Hannah was a bit jealous of all the attention I got.’ She gave a slightly nervous laugh. ‘I mean, I’m probably making it sound worse than