she thought. Clever and probably very manipulative, she decided, but was too tired to worry about that tonight.
After she had declined his offer of any refreshment, and the room he showed her into was rustic but practical, with the same weary air about its furnishings. Like downstairs, the walls looked as though they hadn’t been whitewashed in a long time. A big wooden bed took pride of place, and from the few masculine possessions scattered around the room she gathered that he had been using it up until now.
‘I’m afraid it isn’t five-star, but it’s warm and dry and the sheets are clean.’ They looked it too. Crisp and white, if a little rumpled, and there was a definite indentation in the plump and inviting-looking pillow. ‘Well, I was only in them for half an hour,’ he enlightened her, with his mouth tugging down at one side.
So he had been to bed and got up again—which could only have meant that he must have driven down in the storm especially.
‘Think nothing of it,’ he advised dismissively as their eyes clashed.
Kayla wanted to say something, to thank him at the very least for deserting his bed in the middle of the night to come and see if she was all right. But his manner and all that had gone before kept her mute.
‘What will you do?’ she enquired, glancing down at the bed he’d given up for her. Suddenly worried that she might have given him the wrong idea, quickly she tagged on, ‘That wasn’t meant to sound like...’
‘It didn’t,’ he said, although the way his gaze moved disconcertingly over her body did nothing to put her at ease. ‘Don’t worry about me.’ He’d started moving away. ‘There’s a perfectly adequate sofa in the living room.’
Adequate, but not comfortable. Not for his manly size. She had noticed it on the way through and thought now that it wouldn’t in any way compensate for losing the roomy-looking bed he’d imagined he would be occupying.
‘I really feel awful about this.’
‘Don’t,’ he replied. ‘I’m sure you’re used to better. As I said, it isn’t five-star.’ His tone, however, was more cynical than apologetic, and a little dart of rebellion ran through her as their eyes met and locked.
She didn’t tell him that she had had a taste of luxurious living and it wasn’t something she was keen to get back to. Not when it had meant accompanying Craig to company dinners and luxury conference weekends where she had watched her ex paying homage, she realised now, to people he merely wanted to impress—people he knew could further his corporate ambitions—without really liking them at all.
‘I’m more than grateful for—’ A sudden vivid flash, accompanied by a deafening crack, had her cutting her sentence short with a startled cry.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. His voice came softly from somewhere close behind her as the thunder seemed to reverberate off the very walls. ‘This house might look as though it’s seen better days, but I can assure you, Kayla, the roof is sound. No tree is going to fall in on us, I promise you.’
Her visible fear had brought him over to her. She only realised it as she felt his hands on her shoulders through the thin fabric of her shirt, warm and strong and surprisingly reassuring in view of his previous attitude towards her.
‘I’m all right.’ She took a step back and his hands fell away from her. She wondered what was most unsettling. The storm—or the touch of this stranger whose bedroom she was unbelievably standing in.
‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘But get out of those damp clothes. And get a good night’s rest,’ he advocated, before leaving her to it.
He was right about her clothes being damp, she realised with a little shiver after he had gone. Just the short journey from the villa to the truck and then from the truck to this house had been enough to soak her shirt and jeans. She was grateful to peel them off.
There were a few moments in the king-sized bed when she wondered what she was doing there, unable to keep her thoughts from the man who must have been lying there not more than an hour before. Had he been lying here naked? She felt a sensual little tingle, and her nostrils grasped the trace of a masculine shower gel beneath the scent of fresh linen. But it was only for a few moments, because when she opened her eyes again the tearing winds and driving rain had ceased and a fine blade of sunlight was piercing the dimly shaded room through a slit in the shutters.
Scrambling out of bed, Kayla went over and flung them back, feeling the heat of the sun on her scantily clothed body as it streamed in through windows that were already open to the glittering blue of the sky.
The bedroom overlooked the front yard, the dirt track and the rolling hillside that descended so sharply, with the mountain road, to the blue and silver of the shimmering sea.
She could see the truck parked there on the flagstones, where Leon had left it in the early hours.
A surge of heat coursed through her as she thought about how he had come to her rescue last night, and how helpless she had felt in those hostile yet powerful arms as they had carried her to that truck when she had been too shocked and too bewildered to move.
‘So you’re awake.’ A familiar deep voice overlaid with mockery called out to her as if from nowhere.
Startled, Kayla realised that he had been doing something to his truck. She hadn’t noticed until he had pulled himself up from under it.
Uncertainly she lifted a hand, mesmerised for a moment by the shattering impact of his hard, untrammelled masculinity.
With his hair wild as a gypsy’s, and in a black vest top and cut off jeans, he looked like a man totally uninhibited by convention. Self-sufficient and self-ruling. A man who would probably shun the constraints that Craig and his company cronies adhered to.
But this man was looking at her with such unveiled interest that her stomach took a steep dive as she realised why.
She 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
