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
