Greek Bachelors: Tempted To A Fling

Unlike you, Kayla thought, and for a moment found herself envying his flexible lifestyle. His free spirit and total autonomy. The complete lack of binding responsibility.

‘Have you always been so self-sufficient?’ she asked, watching him cutting melon, which he put on the table beside a plate of fresh pineapple slices. She wondered if he had already eaten or just wasn’t bothering.

‘I like to think so,’ he responded, without looking at her. ‘I’ve always believed—’ and found out the hard way, Leonidas thought, his features hardening ‘—that if you want something done properly there’s no surer way but to do it yourself.’

‘Another of your philosophies?’ Kayla enquired, her hand coming to rest on the back of one the pine chairs and her head tilted as she waited for an answer, which never came.

No man was an island, so the saying went. But Kayla had the distinct impression that this man was—emotionally, at any rate. He seemed more detached and aloof from the rat race and the big wide world than anyone she had ever met. Uncommunicative. Guarding his privacy like a precious jewel.

‘Who did you think I was when you accused me of playing some game with you yesterday?’

‘It isn’t important,’ he intoned, moving back to the stove.

‘It seemed to be very important at the time,’ Kayla commented, still put out by the names he had called her. ‘The things you said to me weren’t very nice.’

‘Yes, well...we can all make mistakes,’ Leonidas admitted, adding freshly chopped herbs to the sizzling frying pan and beginning to accept that he might have made a gross error of judgement in treating her so unjustly. ‘I came here to relax. I didn’t expect some uninvited young woman with a camera to be taking secretive photographs of me. When you realised I’d seen you on the rocks and you ran from me I decided that you must definitely be up to no good.’

So he had charged at her like an angry bull, Kayla thought, wondering what he’d thought she was hiding that had incensed him so much.

‘Yesterday,’ he went on, ‘when I invited you to lunch, it was to try to find out why.’

‘You accused me of spying on you,’ she reminded him, folding her arms in a suddenly defensive pose as she bit back the urge to remind him that she hadn’t been trying to photograph him on that beach. ‘What did you imagine? That I was some sort of secret agent or something?’ she suggested with an ironic little laugh. ‘Or a private investigator, hired by a jealous wife—?’ She broke off as a more plausible possibility struck her. ‘A wife who’s taken you to the cleaners and who’s still hoping to uncover the hidden millions you haven’t told her about that you’ve got stashed away somewhere? Gosh! Is that it?’ she exclaimed, when she saw the way his dark lashes came down over his unfathomable eyes, wondering if she’d hit the nail on the head. ‘Not about the millions. I mean...’

‘About the wife?’

She nodded. Why else would he have referred to her as a blood-sucking female yesterday? He must be licking his wounds after a very nasty divorce.

‘Nice try,’ he said dryly, the muscles in his wonderfully masculine back moving as he worked. ‘I’m sorry to have to shoot down such a colourful and imaginative story, but I’m not married. And since when did a man simply wanting to protect his privacy mean there’s an avaricious and avenging wife in tow?’

‘It doesn’t,’ Kayla answered, wondering why the discovery of his marital status should leave her feeling far more pleased than it should have. ‘It just seemed a little bit of an overreaction, that’s all,’ she murmured, feeling her temperature rising from the way he was looking at her—as though he knew what baffling and unsettling thoughts were going through her head.

‘So how did you know about this house?’ she asked, since it was apparent now that it wasn’t just a deserted building he’d happened to stumble across.

‘I was born on this island,’ he said, in a cool, clipped voice. ‘I have the use of this place when I want it.’

‘Who owns it?’ she enquired, looking around.

‘Someone who is too busy to take much interest in it,’ he answered flatly, suddenly sounding bored.

‘What a pity,’ Kayla expressed, looking around her at the sad peeling walls. ‘It could be nice if it was renovated. Someone must have treasured it once.’

Once, Leonidas thought, when its warm, welcoming walls had rung with his mother’s beautiful singing. When he hadn’t been able to sleep for excitement because his grandfather was taking him fishing the following day...

‘Obviously the current owner doesn’t share your sentimentality about it,’ he remarked, and found it a struggle to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

‘You said you were born on this island?’ Kayla reminded him, feeling as though she was being intrusive again, yet unable to stop herself. Even less could she envisage him as a helpless, squalling infant. ‘It’s idyllic. What made you leave?’

His features looked set in stone as he tossed two slices of bubbling halloumi cheese onto slices of fresh bread, topping them with rich red sun-dried tomatoes before he answered, ‘I believed there was a better life out there.’

‘And was there?’

Again he didn’t answer.

But what sort of satisfaction was there in never settling anywhere? Kayla wondered now. In just drifting around from place to place?

‘Eat your breakfast,’ he ordered, putting the meal on the table in front of her. ‘And then we’ll go down and inspect the storm damage.’

CHAPTER FOUR

THE STRUCTURE OF the villa had sustained less damage than Kayla had feared. However, after Leon had helped her to clear up the debris and mess caused by the falling tree, it was still a far cry from what it had been when she had arrived.

‘I’ll have to look for somewhere else,’ she accepted defeatedly, trying to sound braver and less anxious than she was feeling as she dropped the last packet of ruined food into a refuse bag.

‘My very next step,’ Leonidas assured her, taking his phone out of his pocket.

He had changed into a pale blue shirt and jeans before leaving the farmhouse earlier and, looking up from the bag she was tying, Kayla noticed how his rolled-up sleeves emphasised the dark olive of his skin and the virility of his strong arms.

‘I think you’ve done quite enough already,’ she reminded him. Not only had he rescued her from a terrifying situation last night, he had given her food and shelter, driven her back here, and then refused to leave when it came to the clean-up operation. ‘I’m indebted enough to you as it is!’

‘If that’s all that’s worrying you—forget it,’ he drawled. ‘I’m not likely to be extracting payment any time soon.’

‘That’s not funny,’ she scolded, still unhappy about being in his debt. Or was it that mocking glint in his eyes that affected her more than his hostility?

Whatever it was, she thought, he unsettled her as no man had ever unsettled her in her life. Not to this degree anyway, she realised. And there was more to it than just the danger of getting too involved with a man whom, until the day before yesterday, she had never even met. It was the potent attraction this man held for her, purely physical in its nature and stronger than any she had felt before. Which was illogical, she decided, when she had been engaged to Craig and fully intending to spend the rest of her life with him.

But Leon was already taking the necessary steps to get her fixed up with an alternative place to stay.

Listening to that deep voice speaking in Greek to some hotelier on the other end of the line, Kayla realised how much more difficult it would have been for her if she had been left to find accommodation herself. There would have been the language barrier to overcome for a start.

Now, though, as he came off the phone, Kayla saw him shaking his head. ‘I’m afraid they’re fully booked for the next three weeks.’

There were three hotels on the island, he had informed her, one closed for refurbishing, and he was now ringing the second one on his list. But again he was shaking his head as he finished speaking to their last possible hope. ‘They said they would have had a room if you had telephoned yesterday, but they’ve had to close this morning because of flooding in part of the hotel last night.’

She could tell that he was almost as dumbfounded as she was.

‘Well, that’s that, then,’ she said, swinging the bin bag up off the tiled floor. ‘I’ll just have to make the best of it here until Lorna’s parents arrive tomorrow.’ And after that... She gave a mental shrug as she crossed the tiny kitchen. Who knew?

Watching the determined squaring of her shoulders as he tried to relieve her of the bag, Leonidas felt his heart going out to her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said as she opened the door to the garden. ‘You can’t stay here.’ The tree was leaning across the landing at a precarious enough angle to be a safety hazard. Also, because of the galleried landing, the ground floor was open to the elements, as well as to any more debris from the fallen tree.

‘No?’ Kayla said, coming in from dumping the bag outside. ‘And I suppose you can come up with a better idea?’

‘Yes, I can,’ he stated pragmatically. ‘You will stay with me.’

Not can. Will, Kayla noted, which marked him as a man who usually got his own way.

‘With you?’ He was leaning against the sink with his thumbs hooked into his waistband, looking very determined, and a little bubble of humourless laughter escaped her. ‘Now look who’s being ridiculous,’ she accused.

‘If you think I’m leaving you here, with that tree likely to come down on you at any moment,’ he said, with an upward toss of his chin, ‘you can think again.’

‘I’m not your responsibility or your problem, Leon,’ she stressed trenchantly. ‘Anyway, I came here to be alone.’

‘Why, exactly?’ Leonidas was regarding her with hard speculation. ‘What is a girl like you doing on her own in a quiet and remote place like this when you could be enjoying the company of other people your age and living it up somewhere like Crete or Corfu? And don’t tell me that you are simply soaking up the sun while considering your next career move, because you could have gone anywhere to do that.’

‘Perhaps I don’t want to be “living it up”,’ Kayla replied, feeling pressured by his unwavering determination. ‘I came here for peace and quiet. Not to share with anyone else.’

‘So did I,’ he reminded her, in a way that suggested that the best-laid plans didn’t always turn out as one would expect.

‘Exactly! And the last thing you want is a...what did you call me? Oh, yes—a “blood-sucking female with her own self-motivated agenda” dumped on you!’ she quoted fiercely, with both hands planted on her denim-clad hips. ‘Well, believe me, this isn’t on my agenda!’

‘All right. So we didn’t get off to a very good start. I shouldn’t have said those things to you,’ he admitted, coming away from the sink. It seemed to constitute some sort of apology. ‘But the fact remains that as things stand this place is a potential hazard, and—my responsibility or not—if you think I am going to stand by and let you risk your safety just because of a few ripe phrases on my part yesterday, then you still have a long way to go in assessing my character. I carried you out of here last night and I’ll do it again if I have to.’ His features were set with indomitable purpose. ‘So, are you going to be sensible and swallow your pride and accept that there isn’t an alternative?’ he asked grimly.

‘There’s always an alternative,’ Kayla said quickly, refusing to accept otherwise—although the thought of him man-handling her out of there when she wasn’t being distracted by falling trees and a possible landslide was far too disturbing even to contemplate.

‘Like running away?’

Those jet-black eyes seemed to be penetrating her soul, probing down into her heart and digging over her darkest and most painful secrets.

What right did he have to accuse her of running away? Even if she was, it was none of his business! Yet suddenly everything she had suffered over the past weeks, and everything that had gone wrong since she had been here, finally proved too much.

‘Who says I’m running away?’ she flung at him grievously. ‘And if you think that just because I chose to come on holiday by myself, then I could just as easily wonder the same thing about you! And those weren’t just a few ripe phrases you used. You were taking out all your woman problems—whatever they are—on me! Do you want to know why I’m here on my own? Then put this in your pipe and smoke it! Saturday was supposed to be my wedding day—only the groom decided he’d rather marry somebody else instead! He just kept the same date and the same time at the same church with the same photographer for convenience.’ She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

‘Because he wanted to marry her in a hurry, although he did have the decency to let me know she was pregnant before I broke off our engagement three months ago. And if that wasn’t enough we all worked at the same company, which is why I had to leave. I live in a small community, so the whole neighbourhood knew about it as well, and I just couldn’t stay there and face the humiliation. So if running away because I’m not thick-skinned enough to stand there and throw confetti over my ex-fiancé and his pregnant secretary is wrong, then I’m sorry!’ She uttered a facetious little laugh. ‘I’ll just have to toughen up in future.’

‘Forgive me.’

Leonidas’s face was dark with contrition. And shock too, Kayla decided, almost triumphantly.

‘The man’s a...’ He called him something in his own language which she knew wasn’t very complimentary. ‘I spoke without knowing the facts.’

‘Yes, you did.’ Now she had got it all off her chest she was beginning to feel a little calmer. ‘Anyway, it’s all history. Water under the bridge. I’m over him now.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes, I am,’ she asserted, her mouth firming resolutely. ‘He kept to everything we’d planned for us—for our day...’ Strangely, that was what had hurt the most in the end. ‘Even down to the guest list,’ she uttered with another brittle little laugh. ‘Well, most of it anyway,’ she said. ‘It’s funny how when you’re a couple you seem to have a lot of friends. Then when you break up you realise that they weren’t really your friends at all. Most of them were Craig’s. Acquaintances, really. He didn’t have any real friends. They were all company people. People he’d met through his job. Sales reps. Customers. His management team and their wives. The office hierarchy that he liked us to socialise with.’

‘You don’t sound very enamoured,’ Leonidas remarked.

Kayla glanced up to where he was standing with his hands thrust into his pockets, listening with single-minded concentration to all she was saying. ‘I’m just angry with myself for not knowing better.’

‘How could you?’ Those masculine brows came together in a frown. ‘How could anyone prepare for something like that happening?’

‘Oh, I had a good tutor, believe me. Dad did the very same thing to Mum—ran off with his secretary. So it wasn’t as though I wasn’t forewarned. I just wouldn’t listen. I thought it could never happen to me. But now I know never to get mixed up with that type of man again.’

‘And what type is that?’

‘The type with a nicely pressed suit and a spare clean shirt in the office closet. The type who’s always late home because his workload’s so heavy. The type who thinks every reasonably attractive female colleague is only there to boost his ego.’

Leonidas’s dark lashes came down over his eyes, but all he said was, ‘I thought that kind of male chauvinism went out with the nineteen-seventies.’

‘Oh don’t you believe it!’ Kayla returned censoriously. She was mopping water from the fridge with all the venom she felt towards Craig Lymington and his kind. ‘There’s something that happens to a man when he gets behind a desk, gets himself a secretary and has his name on the door. Something he thinks sets him outside the boundaries of accepted moral behaviour. But I’m not going to bore you with that. It’s my problem and I should have known better. I didn’t want to know and I paid for it. End of story.’

Leonidas doubted somehow that it was the end of the story, and reminded himself never to tell her what he really did for a living.

‘You’ve had a tough time,’ he accepted, deciding that this damsel in distress who had been so badly treated by her fiancé would probably feel nothing but contempt for him if she knew more about him.

She would instantly bracket him with the type of man she despised. And if for one moment he did let on who he was, he had learned enough about her already to know that she would want nothing to do with him. She would refuse his help—no matter how desperately she needed it—which would do nothing to get her out of the predicament she was in now.

‘However,’ he continued, ‘the most pressing problem you have right now is where you’re going to sleep tonight. As I’ve already said, I wouldn’t dream of allowing you to talk yourself into thinking it’s all right to stay here...’ No matter how far outside the boundaries of morality she might think he was if she knew about his desk and his secretary and the spare shirts he kept in his Athens and London offices. ‘Which means you either sleep out in the open or you come back with me. Unless, of course, you’re thinking of returning home?’

Almost imperceptibly Kayla flinched. With the villa unusable and nowhere else to stay, it did seem the most feasible thing to do. But if she did, what would she be going back to? Her mother’s smugness over having been right about Craig? The neighbourhood’s silent sympathies? The whispered comments behind her back? What would everyone say if they realised that not only had her proposed wedding turned out to be non-existent but also that the holiday she had been determined to take on her own had turned into a disaster as well?

‘If it’s your modesty you are worrying about, and you’re thinking I might try and—what is the phrase you English use?—“take advantage” of you,’ Leon said, remembering, ‘then I must assure you that I wouldn’t contemplate trying to seduce a girl who is on the rebound.’

‘I’m not on the rebound,’ Kayla denied hotly. But then, realising that he might take that to mean she wanted him to take advantage of her, she added quickly, ‘I mean...’ And then ran out of words because she didn’t know how to phrase what she was trying to convey.

‘I know what you mean,’ he said, making it easy for her, although there was a sensual mockery on that devastating mouth of his that had her wondering just how pleasurable his taking advantage of her might be, if she were so inclined to let him.

‘So what’s it to be, Kayla?’

Her name dripped from his lips like ambrosia from the lips of Eros, although she doubted that even the Greek god of love could have harboured the degree of sensuality this man possessed.

She didn’t want to go home, that was for sure. Yet neither did she want to be indebted to a total stranger—even if he did look like the answer to every woman’s darkest fantasy! That didn’t alter the fact that he was a stranger, and no woman in her right mind would agree to stay with a man she didn’t even know. So where did that leave her? she asked herself. On the ground outside?

Very quietly, Leonidas said, ‘Pack a bag and come with me.’

‘You know I can’t stay with you.’

‘I’m not going to try and talk you into it. Pack a bag,’ he instructed again, without offering her any idea of what his plans were. ‘I’ll finish mopping up here.’

* * *

Leon had asked her to follow him in the car. The little hatchback coughed a few times when Kayla tried to start it, which brought him over from the cab of his truck to investigate.

The engine fired into life just as he was approaching the bonnet.

Looking up at him through the car’s open window with a self-satisfied glint in her eyes, Kayla asked, ‘Do you believe me now?’

That masculine mouth pulled to one side, although he made no verbal response. Perhaps he was a man who didn’t like being reminded of his mistakes too often, Kayla thought, unable to help feeling smug.

‘It needs a good run,’ he said, speaking with some authority. ‘It’s probably been standing idle for too long, which isn’t good for any car.’

Following his truck down the zig-zag of a mountain road, Kayla was tempted to stop and take in the breathtaking views of the sea and the sun-drenched hillsides. But she kept close behind Leon’s truck, envying his knowledge of every sharp bend, admiring the confidence and safety with which he negotiated them.

After guiding her down past a cluster of whitewashed cottages, he pulled up outside another, with blue shutters and, like the rest, pots of gaily coloured flowers on its veranda.

‘Since you refuse to stay with me, I will have to leave you in the capable hands of Philomena,’ Leon told her, having come around the truck to where Kayla was just getting out of the car.

‘Philomena?’

‘A friend of mine,’ he stated, moving past her. ‘There is one small snag, however,’ he went on to inform her as he swung her small single suitcase out of the boot.

‘Oh?’ Kayla looked up at him enquiringly as he slammed the lid closed.

‘She doesn’t speak any English,’ he said.

‘So why would she want me staying with her?’ Kayla practically had to run after him. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to allow that rather large drawback—to Kayla’s mind, at any rate—to interfere with his plans.

‘Her family have all grown up and moved away,’ he tossed back over his shoulder. ‘Trust me. She will be very glad of the company of someone else—especially another woman.’

‘But have you asked her?’ Kayla wasn’t sure that anyone—no matter how lonely they might be—would welcome a guest turning up unexpectedly on their doorstep.

‘Leave the worrying to me,’ he advised, and uneasily Kayla did.

He had said Philomena was a friend, but as he brought Kayla through to the homely sitting room of the little fisherman’s cottage without even needing to knock, she calculated that the woman in dark clothes who greeted them with twinkling brown eyes and a strong, character-lined face was old enough to be his grandmother.

Her affection for Leon was clear from the start, but suddenly as they were speaking the woman burst into what to Kayla’s ears sounded like a fierce outpouring of objection. The woman was waving her hands in typically European fashion and sending more than a few less than approving glances Kayla’s way.

‘She isn’t happy about my staying here and why should she be?’ Kayla challenged, taking in the abundance of framed family photographs and brightly painted pottery and feeling as much mortified as she felt sympathetic towards the elderly woman.

‘She’s happy, Kayla,’ Leonidas told her, breaking off from a run of incomprehensible Greek. He started speaking very quickly in his own language again, which brought forth another bout of scolding and arm-waving from a clearly none-too-pleased Philomena.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kayla apologised through the commotion, hoping the woman would understand as she picked up her suitcase and starting weaving through the rustic furniture towards the door.

‘No, no! No, no!’ A lightly restraining hand came over Kayla’s arm. ‘You stay. Stay Philomena, eh?’ The look she sent Leonidas shot daggers in his direction. Her voice, though, as she turned back to Kayla, was softer and more encouraging, her returning smile no less than sympathetic as a work-worn, sun-dappled hand gently palmed Kayla’s cheek. ‘You come. Stay.’

A good deal of gesticulation with a far warmer flow of baffling Greek seemed to express the woman’s pleasure in having Kayla as her guest.

‘You see,’ Leonidas remarked, looking pleased with himself as Philomena drew her gently away from the door. ‘I said she would want you to stay.’

The appreciative look Kayla gave her hostess turned challenging as she faced the man who had brought her there. ‘Then what were you arguing about?’ she quizzed.