was wearing nothing but her coffee and cream lace-edged baby doll pyjamas and, utterly self-conscious, she swiftly withdrew from the window, certain she wasn’t imagining the deep laugh that emanated from the yard as she hastily pulled the shutters together again.
The bathroom was, as she’d discovered last night, clean and adequately equipped. Some time this morning a toothbrush, still in its packaging, had been placed upon two folded and surprisingly good-quality burgundy towels on a wooden cabinet beside the washstand. Impressed, silently Kayla thanked him for that.
Fortunately her hairbrush had been in her bag when she had made her hasty exit from the villa last night, along with a spare tube of the soft brown mascara she had remembered to buy before leaving London.
Never one to wear much make-up, she had nonetheless always felt undressed without her mascara. A combination of pale hair and pale eyelashes made her look washed-out, she had always thought, and Craig had agreed.
A sharp, unexpected little stab of something under her ribcage had her catching her breath as she thought about Craig, but surprisingly it didn’t hurt as she reminded herself that what Craig Lymington thought wasn’t important any more.
Leon was in the large sitting room off the hall, locking something away in a drawer, when Kayla came down feeling fresh and none the worse for her experiences of the previous night.
He was superb, she thought reluctantly from the doorway, noticing how at close quarters the black vest top emphasised his muscular torso, how perfectly smooth and contoured were his arms, their hair-darkened skin like bronze satin sheathing steel. She was pleased she’d put mascara on, and that when she’d brushed her hair forward and then tossed it back, as she always did, it had looked particularly full and shiny this morning.
He looked up and his gaze moved over her. He was clearly remembering what she had looked like at the window earlier.
‘I’ve been trying to ring Lorna but I can’t get a signal,’ she said quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed the way she’d been ogling him. ‘Is it all right if I use your landline?’
‘You could—if it was connected,’ he returned. He took his own cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to her as she came into the room. It felt smooth and warmed by his body heat, reminding her far too easily of how she had felt being held against his hard warmth the previous night.
‘As soon as it’s a respectable enough time,’ she began, while trying to deal with how ridiculously she was allowing him to affect her, ‘and after you’ve dropped me off at the villa, do you think you could point me in the direction of the nearest hotel?’
‘One thing at a time,’ he advised her. ‘The first thing is not to plan anything on an empty stomach.’
‘Is that your philosophy on life?’ She struggled to speak lightly, which was difficult when there was so much tension in her voice.
‘One of them,’ he answered, with his mouth tugging down at one corner.
She wondered what the others were, but decided against asking. For all the hospitality this man had shown her, he didn’t welcome too much intrusion into his personal life, and Kayla certainly felt as though she had intruded enough.
Surprisingly, she got through to Lorna’s office on the first try. Gently, Kayla broke the news to her about the storm and the tree coming down, wanting to spare her friend as much distress as she could. Lorna and Josh had been trying for a baby for quite some time, and Lorna had had two miscarriages in the past two years. Now she was well into the second trimester of another pregnancy, and Kayla regretted having to cause her any more stress as she concluded, ‘I haven’t had a chance to look at it in daylight, but we’re going down after breakfast to assess the damage.’
‘We?’ Lorna echoed inquisitively, so that Kayla was forced to gather her wits together in order to avoid any awkward questions.
‘Someone from a neighbouring property. They took me in for the night,’ she explained, taking care not to even suggest that ‘they’ was really ‘he’. She wasn’t ready to be bracketed with another man in her life just yet.
‘Then tell them that I can’t thank them enough for taking care of my friend.’ True to character, Lorna seemed more concerned about Kayla than about the tree crashing down on her precious villa. ‘I’m so glad there was someone else there! What would you have done otherwise?’
My thoughts exactly, Kayla mused, unable to keep her eyes from straying to Leon’s superbly broad back as he moved lithely out of the room while her friend made plans for what she intended to do.
‘Lorna’s parents are going to come over and sort out what needs doing,’ Kayla reported to him a few minutes later, having found him in the huge and very outdated farmhouse kitchen at the end of the hall. It contained a dresser and a huge wood-burning stove over which Leon was busily wielding a frying pan. A large pine table stood in the centre of the room, already laid for one. Two large-paned windows faced the front of the house, offering stupendous views of the distant sea, while two more on the other side of the room looked out onto the terraced gardens. ‘Lorna and Josh have their own business and don’t have much free time,’ she explained, handing him back his phone, which he casually slipped into the back pocket of his jeans.
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
