Greek Bachelors: Tempted To A Fling

‘Philomena has no one to scold nowadays, so she likes to scold me.’ His mouth as he directed a look towards their hostess was pulling wryly. ‘Philomena bore seven children, but her one claim to fame, as she likes to call it, is that she delivered me. I’m eternally grateful to her for introducing me to this universe,’ he expressed with smiling affection at Philomena, ‘but she does tend to imagine that that gives her licence to upbraid me at every given opportunity.’

‘For what?’ Kayla was puzzled, still not convinced.

One of those impressive shoulders lifted as he contemplated this. ‘For leaving the island. For coming back. For not coming back.’

Kayla noted the curious inflexion in his voice as he made that last statement. Her smile wavered. ‘And what about just now?’

‘Just now?’

Leonidas looked at the woman who had pulled him screaming into the world. She had been there—never far away—throughout his childhood. A comfort from his father’s strict and sometimes brutal regime of discipline, his rock when his mother had died.

‘I don’t think she’s happy with the way I’ve turned out,’ he commented dryly to Kayla, and thought that if it were true he wouldn’t blame Philomena. There were times lately, he was surprised to find himself thinking, when he had been far, far from happy with himself.

‘Oh?’ Kayla clearly wanted to know more, but he had nothing more to offer her.

Gratefully he expressed his thanks to Philomena, adding something else, which brought Kayla’s cornflower-blue eyes curiously to his as he started moving away.

‘I’ve told her to take care of you,’ he translated, with a blazing smile that made Kayla’s stomach muscles curl in on themselves. And that was that. He had gone before she could utter another word.

* * *

Kayla settled in to her new accommodation with remarkable ease, and as she had suspected, despite the language barrier, she found Philomena Sarantos to be a warm and generous hostess.

She wondered what Leon had meant about Philomena being unhappy with the way he had turned out. Had he meant because of his lifestyle? Not having a steady job? Because he seemed content to drift from place to place?

Two days passed and she saw nothing of him. But then, what had she expected? Kayla meditated. Hadn’t he made it clear from the beginning that he didn’t welcome intrusion into his life? And, although he had invited her to stay with him at the farmhouse the morning after that tree had come down, she wondered if it hadn’t been merely a hollow gesture on his part. He’d known she would refuse, so he’d been perfectly safe in offering her his roof over her head.

What did it matter? she decided now. She’d had enough to occupy her time without bothering herself about Leon over the past couple of days.

The previous day she had driven up to the villa after Lorna’s parents had texted her with the estimated time they would be arriving. They had brought some local men with them who were arranging for the removal of the tree, and someone else who, having inspected the building, pronounced the place off-limits for the time being.

After arranging with the men for the necessary works to be carried out, her friend’s parents had been extremely concerned as to where Kayla would stay. But having satisfied them—just as she had done with Lorna, over the phone the previous day—that she had found suitable alternative accommodation, she had seen the couple off to spend a few days on Corfu and—in their own words—‘make the whole trip worthwhile’.

Now, with the sun having just risen and another glorious day yawning before her, Kayla traversed the dusty path that led from Philomena’s cottage and gasped with delight when it brought her down onto the sun-washed shingle of a secluded cove.

* * *

Striding down through the scrub, Leonidas came to where the beach opened out before him and stopped dead in his tracks.

Kayla was wading, shin-deep, in the translucent blue water, moving shorewards. She was looking down into the water and hadn’t spotted him yet.

He would have considered the fine white cotton dress she was wearing with its sheer long sleeves and modest yoke demure in any other circumstances, because it made her look almost angelic with her loose blonde hair moving in the breeze. But she had evidently—perhaps unintentionally—allowed the sea to lap too high to preserve her modesty, for now the garment clung wetly to her body, so that the gold of her skin and her small naked breasts were clearly visible beneath.

As she waded forward the sun struck gold from her hair, illuminating the lustrous gold of lashes that lay against her cheeks as her interest never wavered from the water.

Transfixed by her beauty, he noticed the grace of her movements, the way her progress changed the light, making her breasts appear indistinct one moment and then tantalisingly defined the next. A virginal siren, tantalising enough to set his masculine hormones ablaze as his gaze swept the length of her tunic, which only reached the tops of her slender thighs.

She looked up—and when she saw him she put her hand to her mouth in shock. Then her bare feet were running lightly over the shingle towards the white floppy hat he had only just noticed lying discarded nearby.

‘I didn’t see you,’ she called out, snatching up the hat that had been covering her ever-present camera and the rest of her things lying there on the shingle.

‘Evidently not.’ He couldn’t contain the slow smile that played across his mouth as he noted the purposeful way she covered her wet top with the hat, her own smile feigning nonchalance, as though she didn’t care.

‘Have you been standing there long?’

Not nearly long enough, Leonidas thought, struggling to keep control of his unleashed hormones and the effect she was having on him. He was glad he hadn’t simply worn bathing shorts, as he’d been tempted to do, and instead had donned linen trousers with a loose, casual shirt.

She had probably had enough of men lusting after her for their own primeval satisfaction—including that fiancé of hers—without having to endure the same kind of treatment from him.

‘You shouldn’t go bathing like that without a chaperone,’ he chided softly, the dark lenses of his sunglasses revealing nothing of his thoughts.

‘I didn’t mean to.’ Beneath the pale swathe of her hair a modestly clad shoulder lifted almost imperceptibly. ‘The sea was beckoning me while I was paddling and I just got carried away.’

‘It has a way of doing that, and before you know it—’ He made a gesture with his hand like a fish taking a dive. ‘It’s nature drawing us back to itself.’

He saw her golden head tilt and was struck by the vivid clarity of those cornflower-blue eyes as she surveyed him. ‘What a beautiful thing to say.’

Leonidas laughed. ‘Was it?’ He found himself swallowing and his throat felt dry. He had been accused of expressing himself in many ways in his time, he recalled, but beautifully had never been one of them.

She had turned round to gather her things and was starting to pull on white cropped leggings.

‘How are you getting on with Philomena?’ he asked.

Thrusting her feet into flip-flops, Kayla retrieved the hat she had momentarily discarded and turned back to face him, keeping its wide brim strategically in place across her breasts.

‘She’s great.’ Her face lit up with genuine warmth. ‘She reminds me of my gran.’

‘That’s good.’ He knew he was looking self-satisfied as he flipped open the notebook he’d taken out of the back pocket of his trousers. ‘And what does your grandmother think of your being here alone?’ He was in danger of sounding distracted, but it was vital he got something down. Something he’d forget if he didn’t consign it to paper this very instant. ‘Isn’t she afraid you’ll fall prey to some licentious stranger?’

‘No.’ Picking up her camera and sunglasses, which she slid onto her head, Kayla pushed a swathe of golden silk back off her shoulder with the aid of the sunscreen bottle she was holding. ‘She died. A few months ago.’

The sadness in her voice required nothing less than Leonidas’s full attention. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yes. So am I,’ Kayla responded, reaffirming his suspicion that she had cared a great deal for her elderly relative.

‘You were close?’ He didn’t even need to ask.

She nodded. ‘Mum and I never really were. And after Dad left he was never the loving father type whenever I got to see him, so we just drifted apart over the years. But Gran—Mum’s mum—she filled the void in every way she could.’

She was looking over her shoulder out to sea but Leonidas knew that she wasn’t seeing the white-crested waves and the indigo blue water. She was hiding emotion—nothing more—because she was embarrassed by it.

‘So you lost your fiancé on top of losing a grandmother?’ he commented, with a depth of feeling he wasn’t used to. ‘That’s rough.’

She shrugged. ‘At least I had Lorna,’ she told him with a ruminative smile. ‘On both counts she was there for me. She helped me through.’

‘Tell me about her,’ he said somewhat distractedly Kayla thought as she started walking casually a step or two ahead of him, because he was busy scribbling in a notebook.

But she told him anyway, about the friend she had known from her first day at school who had come to mean as much as a sister to her. About the interior design work that Lorna and her husband were involved in, and how brilliant they were at what they did, but how, with the state of the market and then losing their biggest customer, things had become extremely difficult for them recently. She even went on to tell him how she might find herself looking for another job if things didn’t improve.

He wasn’t really listening, she decided, relieved, feeling that she had gabbled on too much.

‘What are you writing?’ She stopped on the shingle, turning to him with her chin almost resting on the hat she was still clutching to her beneath her folded arms.

‘Just jotting down a few things I don’t want to forget.’ He had snapped the notebook closed and was stuffing it into his back pocket.

‘You were sketching.’ Suddenly it dawned. ‘You were sketching me.’

‘Leave it, Kayla.’ His words were laced with a warning not to pursue it.

‘You were sketching me. Oh, no!’ Kayla hid her face in the wide brim of her hat. How could he? With the ends of her hair all lank and dripping, and she wasn’t even wearing any mascara, let alone a bra! ‘I look like a drowned and lashless rat!’

‘You look like an angel,’ Leonidas told her, voicing his earlier thoughts.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Kayla protested, bringing her head up, clinging to her crushed hat as her only defence against those shaded yet all-seeing eyes.

‘I never joke about beauty. Particularly the beauty of a woman,’ he said, in a voice that seemed to trickle with pure honey.

And you would have known scores of those! Known just what to say to make them feel like you’re making me feel now, Kayla thought hectically. Weak-kneed and breathless and wanting so much to believe that all he was saying was true!

She pulled a face, and in spite of everything managed to say with a tremulous little laugh, ‘Does that line usually work?’

The firm masculine mouth compressed, and she couldn’t seem to drag her gaze from it as he prompted, ‘Does it work in what way?’ Now that mouth took on a mocking curve. ‘In getting you into my bed?’

Kayla felt heated colour steal into her cheeks. Which was ridiculous, she thought. She was hardly a novice to male attention. She’d been planning a wedding, for heaven’s sake! Yet there was something about this man that was more exciting and more dangerous to her than any other man she had ever met.

‘Isn’t it customary?’ she returned somewhat breathlessly in answer to his reference to getting her into bed.

‘Possibly,’ he acceded, ‘but not in this case. And not with someone who has been made to feel so unsure of herself that she blushes at the mere mention of a man and woman finding pleasure in each other. Or a man taking any interest in her. There’s really no need to hide from me, Kayla.’

Perhaps there wasn’t. But when he took the hat she was clutching to her like a shield and his hand accidentally brushed the sensitised flesh above her modest neckline she realised that it was herself that she was afraid of. Of feelings that were too reckless and wild to think about. Purely physical feelings that had surfaced the moment she had first seen him standing on that other beach a few days ago.

Now, with her wet top doing nothing to protect her from his gaze, she could feel her blood starting to surge and the peaks of her breasts tightening in response to his hot regard, so that all she could think about was that hard masculine body locked in torrid sensual pleasure on some bed. And not just any bed. On hers!

‘Are you saying that your interest is purely aesthetic?’ she queried, her voice croaking from her shaming thoughts and the knowledge of how her rapidly rising breasts were betraying her to him.

‘No.’ He had removed his sunglasses and was hooking them onto the waistband of his trousers. Now she could see his eyes clearly.

They were dark and heavy-lidded beneath the thick swathe of his lashes, and glittering with such intensity of purpose that her every nerve went into red alert as he closed the screaming distance between them.

CHAPTER FIVE

HIS MOUTH OVER hers was like an Olympic torch blazing into life, setting her insides on fire and sending molten sensations of light searing through her blood.

His kiss was passionate, yet tender. Dominant, yet testing. And the mind-blowing expertise with which he lured her mouth to widen for him was the technique of a man who had studied and understood women—a far cry from a man who had such a laid-back attitude to life. A wanderer. A drifter. Without purpose or design.

He smelled of the earth and of the pines that clad the higher slopes of the hillsides. He was burning with everything wild and unfettered, unrestrained. And yet she felt his restraint—a purposeful holding back—as he held her loosely within the exciting circle of his arms.

That was until the hands that were still clutching her camera and the sunscreen bottle against his wide, cushioning shoulders suddenly slid around his neck. Then, with a groan of defeat, his restraint fell away, leaving only raw passion in its wake as he tossed her hat aside and pulled her hard against him.

Kayla heard a gushing in her ears and wasn’t sure whether it was the heavy pounding of her blood or whether she was being captured and submerged beneath the relentless power of the sea.

She could feel the whole hard length of his body—every last inch of it—and she could feel her own responding to the drugging hunger of his mouth.

His back was firm and muscled, and she wished she wasn’t encumbered by her possessions so that she could slide her eager hands across it. There was no such encumbrance though in the way her body locked with his. His chest was a wall of thunder, crushing her aching breasts, while the potent evidence of his hard virility was making her pulse with need.

When he put her from him, holding her at arm’s length, she uttered a strangled murmur of breathless shock and disappointment.

‘Why did you do that?’ she quavered. Why had he kissed her when he had just claimed he had no intention of trying to get her into bed?

He was breathing as heavily as she was, and a deep flush was staining the olive skin across the strong, hard structure of his cheeks.

‘Because you were wondering what it would be like if I did.’

Still trembling, and perturbed by how easily he could not only read her mind but also by how easily he could bend her to his will, she challenged brittly, ‘So why did you stop?’

‘Because, as I told you before, I have no intention of taking advantage of a woman on the rebound,’ he reminded her, even though his breathing was still laboured and his strong face racked from the passion he was struggling to keep in check.

‘And—as I told you before—I’m not on the rebound,’ Kayla protested adamantly, shamed by her response when he was showing such self-control, and when she seemed to have relinquished all of hers in one experimental kiss!

‘Aren’t you?’ he disputed, although there was a wry smile tugging at one corner of his mouth that softened his challenging remark, before he went on to add, ‘You had a relationship with him, didn’t you?’

‘Well, of course I did,’ Kayla returned. ‘Of sorts.’

‘Of sorts?’ He tilted his head, his brows drawing quizzically together. ‘How am I supposed to interpret that?’

‘Any way you like!’ Kayla tossed back at him, too embarrassed to tell him that Craig’s enthusiasm for her had seemed to go off the boil for several weeks before their break-up, and that she was ashamed of herself now for not suspecting the truth. She had believed him when he had blamed work overload for his not showing enough interest in her. When he’d assured her that things would be different when they were married. When he had got the precious promotion he’d spent all his time working for.

‘Were you living with him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? If I ever set my mind on a woman I want to become my wife, then she will be firmly in my life—and my bed—before I even ask her.’

‘I didn’t want us to move in together. Not until we were married,’ Kayla emphasised. ‘And Craig was in full agreement with that.’

‘Really?’ Mocking scepticism marked that hard masculine face. ‘You could do without each other that much?’

‘Not that it’s any concern of yours,’ Kayla pointed out, hating having her relationship with her ex scrutinised so closely by this man she scarcely knew, ‘but we wanted to start married life properly. In a place that was our own. I didn’t want to just move into his flat. Anyway, there’s more to a relationship than jumping into bed with each other at every given opportunity,’ she stressed, unconsciously wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her lips still felt bruised and swollen and, like her susceptible body, burning from Leon’s wholly primal, earth-shattering kiss.

‘Is there?’ he asked, and she could feel those perspicacious eyes following her involuntary action, mocking her, disconcertingly aware.

‘Yes!’ She was trembling, knowing that the way she had just behaved with him made nonsense of everything she was saying. And the worst thing was he knew it too. ‘The type of man I let myself get involved with doesn’t just give in to basic animal lust.’

He chuckled under his breath. ‘Is that what I was doing? Then you must forgive me if I fail to live up to the constraints of the type of man you are obviously used to. Although I could hazard a guess that your relationship was sadly lacking in what was required to make a lifetime commitment, and that the lack of passion between you could have been why he was getting his satisfaction elsewhere.’

The reminder hurt, stinging her pride and giving rise to that same feeling of inadequacy she had felt after she’d got over the initial blow of Craig’s betrayal—especially coming from someone who oozed the sort of sexual potency that this man did.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, surprising her suddenly. ‘I didn’t mean to rub it in.’

‘Didn’t you?’ she accused, hiding her hurt pride and dignity beneath the burnished gold of her lowered lashes.

‘Well, all right.’ A self-effacing smile touched that mouth that had the power to drug her. ‘I did. But until it stops hurting, Kayla, you aren’t ready for an involvement with any other man. And even if you were, the last thing a sensitive girl like you would want is an involvement with a man like me.’

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.