froze as he brushed her tumbled hair back from her woodenly self-contained face to look down at her. ‘It has to work,’ she parried with an edge of desperation because she didn’t know who she was any more, what she was trying to do, why she had let herself down to such an extent, and then she gazed up into Leo’s stunning eyes and reeled at the beauty of them set in that lean strong face of his.
In that instant, the stark realisation that in the matter of a few short weeks she had become deeply attached to Leo shattered her. She loved him. Of course she found it a challenge to step back and deny what her own mind and body longed to have, that intimate connection which might have been essentially meaningless to a male of Leo’s experience and habits, but which meant a great deal more to her. No longer could she deny or wilfully misunderstand the powerful feelings he inspired in her. Earlier, he had been right, and she had been wrong. She was jealous of his tribe of exes and admirers. She didn’t like seeing him with another woman, didn’t like watching another woman command his attention. How petty was that?
Yet being with Leo made her feel stronger, more confident, more individual in more ways than she had words to describe. That was the positive side to loving him while she mentally shook her head over the foolishness that accompanied those same feelings. She had lost her temper over pushy Dido, had been intolerant and idiotically possessive. So, he was right and she was wrong. If this was how she truly felt, how could she ever contrive to live with the knowledge that Leo was having sex with other women? Suddenly she felt as though she had backed herself into a corner and she didn’t know how to get out of it again.
‘Compromise is not the end of the world,’ Leo murmured huskily, pressing an abstracted kiss against her furrowed brow, uncomfortably aware that that clever brain of hers was turning like a clock and probably not in his favour. ‘Eventually we’ll understand what works best for us. It’s too soon to make major decisions about our direction right now.’
Letty gritted her teeth. She was too proud to appreciate Leo being generous enough to offer her a face-saving excuse. ‘We’ll see,’ she muttered flatly. ‘We should return to our table.’
Leo fished a comb out of his jacket and tidied her hair and suggested she fix her lipstick. She had never felt as ashamed of herself as she did at that moment when she registered that her inexperience in relationships had sent her rushing down the wrong path. It was an effort to return to the crowds downstairs and smile and chat as though nothing whatsoever had happened while her body still hummed and pulsed from Leo’s rawly masculine possession. He had won his point but he wasn’t crowing in triumph and she supposed she should be grateful for small mercies.
When they arrived back on the island it was very late and when Darius greeted Leo in Greek and spoke words that etched a look of astonishment on Leo’s lean strong face, Letty was sprung out of her drowsiness.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Apparently my father arrived here with a suitcase during the evening. Darius seems to think he’s broken up with Katrina, but I find that long-desired event very hard to credit,’ Leo mused with a curled lip.
As they entered the hall, Letty headed towards the stairs.
‘Where are you going?’ Leo questioned.
‘I thought that you and your father would appreciate privacy,’ Letty said uncertainly. ‘I mean, if he’s in the midst of a personal crisis…’
‘My father and I don’t have private or personal conversations,’ Leo parried drily, and he closed a hand round hers to turn her back in the direction of the main reception room. ‘A wife as a third party is very welcome. Panos can get very emotional.’
The distaste with which Leo admitted that truth about his father spoke volumes to Letty. Leo evidently respected men who concealed their feelings more, but Letty considered that attitude archaic.
As they entered the room the older man leapt to his feet and greeted his son in a flood of distraught Greek, which made Letty wish very much that she had made it up the stairs because it didn’t feel right to her to be present at such a meeting when she barely knew Leo’s father. Leo replied to him in Greek and in what sounded like a bracing tone but whatever he said etched an expression of grief-stricken horror on Panos’s face and he fell back down on the sofa and sobbed as though his heart would break.
‘What on earth did you say?’ Letty whispered.
‘That she’s been having affairs for over twenty years,’ Leo murmured in an undertone.
‘Is that how you would normally comfort someone who’s just had their heart broken?’ Letty snapped back in disbelief that Leo had chosen that particular moment to drop even worse news on his father about his estranged wife.
‘No, but it is essential that he understands right now that her betrayal is not an isolated episode which he can forgive or overlook,’ Leo proffered without shame.
‘I disagree,’ said Letty, approaching the older man and ordering some tea and supper for him before sitting down beside him to offer him the compassion that his son appeared to lack.
Yes, even at that point she grasped that Leo and his late sister had suffered as children at his stepmother’s unmaternal hands and that, as adults, they and even Ana’s children had been shoved out of their father’s life at Katrina’s behest. And Katrina had even tried to get Leo into bed. She fully understood that Katrina was a nasty corrupt woman, but she also understood that Panos Romanos genuinely loved her and was entitled to sympathetic support from his son, who was, aside of the children, his only surviving family. And what she saw was that Leo was not prepared to offer that support because he despised his father’s ongoing attachment to Katrina and the evidence of his grief over the loss of her.
Leo was aware that Letty thought he was being cruel but he knew better. He was being cruel to be kind. Now that Katrina’s infidelity was out in the open, it was time to be honest rather than offer empty consolations. Watching his father grip both of Letty’s hands and sob out English words, Leo rolled his eyes and walked out of the room. How could he have a father with so little control over his emotions? He cringed inwardly at the thought of ever allowing a woman to bring him down that low. It was shameful, utterly shameful for a man to be so infatuated with a woman that he thought his life was at an end because she had betrayed him. Leo assured himself that he would never descend to such a level of weakness. He didn’t need any woman and he never would, and seeing his father in such a state only reinforced that warning.
By the time Letty finally contrived to persuade Panos that he needed to go to bed and sleep, it was almost dawn and he had told her the whole story of his two marriages from start to finish. She wished Leo had stayed for those revelations because they might have made him a little less judgemental. If there was one thing she could do for Leo, it would be to persuade him to talk to his father about Leo’s mother and what their marriage had been like because Leo had put his mother on a saint’s pedestal at the age of six and had made a lot of wrong assumptions about his father. Unfortunately, Leo would probably be very resistant to the idea that there were two sides to every story.
When she entered the bedroom she had been using it was disconcerting for her to meet Leo walking out of the bathroom with only a towel linked round his lean hips. ‘Why are you in here?’ she queried wearily, too worn out by her hours of comforting Panos to voice it as anything more than a fleetingly curious question.
‘We are not sleeping apart any more,’ Leo informed her.
