as if it had been renovated in recent years. ‘I take it you do live here?’
‘For the time being,’ he said uncommunicatively, adding after a moment or two, ‘I thought it would be as good a place as any to...what is the expression...? Bed down for a while.’
‘You mean...you’re just bumming around?’
Leonidas laughed, showing strong white teeth, and through the thick fringes of his lashes he surveyed the young woman sitting opposite him with guarded circumspection, wondering how far she was planning to carry this little charade. Yesterday she had displayed all the characteristics of an opportunity-grabbing undercover reporter, and again this morning, when she had wandered in here with that infernal camera—even if she had seemed genuinely distressed when she’d leaped into that hot, angry tirade about her phone, her fridge and her supposedly broken-down car. But if his suspicions about her were right—and he had little reason to doubt that they were—then from the questions she was asking and her response to the answers he was giving he had to admit that she was one hell of a good actress.
‘I prefer to call it opting out,’ he stated laconically.
‘So...do you work?’ Kayla enquired.
‘When I need to.’ Which was twenty-four-seven a lot of the time, he thought grimly. If she was here intent on making a killing out of the Vassalio name, then she would know that already.
And if she wasn’t...
If she wasn’t, he thought, irritated, refusing to give any credence to that possibility, then she shouldn’t have inflicted herself upon him in the way she had.
‘And what do you do? For a living, I mean?’
She was still treading cautiously, still playing the innocent. If she’d been trying for an Oscar, Leonidas thought, she would have won it hands-down.
‘I’m in construction.’ As you probably well know, he tagged on silently.
‘A builder!’ Kayla interpreted, realising her assessment of him was right. He was a man who worked with his hands.
‘Loosely speaking.’ Deliberately Leonidas lobbed her own phrase back at her. Playing along with her whatever her game was, he thought with increasing annoyance. And suddenly he was fed-up with pussyfooting around.
Slinging his plate onto the table, he stood up, thrusting his hands into his pockets, intimidation in his stance and every hard inch of him as he said grimly and with lethal softness, ‘OK, Kayla. This has gone far enough.’
‘What has?’
He had to hand it to her. She looked and sounded perplexed. He might even have said shocked.
‘The charade is over, sweet girl.’
‘What charade?’ Kayla didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. ‘I don’t understand...’
‘Don’t you?’ He laughed rather harshly. ‘Do you think I don’t know what your little game is? Don’t know why you’re here?’
‘No.’ She had leaped to her feet and stood facing him now with her hands on her hips, her eyes wide and contesting. ‘You’ve obviously got me mixed up with somebody else! I don’t know who you think I am, but whoever it is I’m not the person you were expecting.’
‘I was hardly expecting anyone—least of all another blood-sucking female with her own self-motivated agenda! Unless you’re going to tell me you’ve come all this way by yourself to slap a petition on me as well!’
‘No, I haven’t!’ Kayla riposted, wondering what the hell he was talking about. ‘And whatever your problem is—whoever it is you’ve come here to escape from—I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take it out on me!’
She was gone before he could utter another word.
IT WAS THE crash that woke her.
Or had it been the rain and thunder? Kayla wondered, scrambling, terrified, out of bed. She had been tossing and turning in a kind of half-sleep for what seemed like hours, although it might only have been minutes since the storm began.
Now, as she pulled open her bedroom door, the full force of the gale made her cry out when it almost blew her back into the room. In the darkness she could see an ominous shape lying diagonally across the landing and a gash in the sloping roof, which was now open to the wind and the driving rain.
Kayla gasped as lightning ripped across the sky, so close that the almost instantaneous crash of thunder that followed seemed to rock the foundations of the house.
Fumbling to turn on the light switch, she groaned when nothing happened.
‘Oh, great!’
Finding the chair where she had folded the jeans and shirt she had travelled in two days ago, with trembling hands she hastily pulled them on over her flimsy pyjamas, and then groped around for her bag and the small torch she always carried on her keyring.
Debris was everywhere as she moved cautiously under the fallen tree-trunk. Twisted branches, leaves, twigs and pieces of broken masonry and plaster scrunched underfoot as she picked her way carefully downstairs.
It was as if the whole outdoors had broken in, she thought with a startled cry as another flash of lightning streaked across the sky. The crash that followed it seemed to rock the villa, causing her to panic at the torrent of rain that was coming in on the raging wind.
And then she heard another sound, like a loud hammering on the external door to the villa, and mercifully a voice, its deep tone muffled, yet still breaking through to her through the tearing gale and the rain.
‘Kayla! Kayla? Answer me! Are you in there? Kayla! Are you all right?’
The banging persisted until she thought the door was caving in.
Reaching it and tugging it open, she almost cried with relief when she saw the formidable figure of Leon standing there, his fists clenched as though to knock the door down if it wasn’t opened. Rain was running down his face and his strong bronzed throat in rivulets.
It took all her will-power not to sink against him as he caught her arm and shouted something urgently in his own language.
‘Get out of here! Quickly!’ he ordered, reverting to English. ‘There’s been a landslide further up the mountain. This house might not be safe to stay in.’ And as she hesitated, casting an anxious glance at her belongings, ‘We’ll come back for your things in the morning!’ he shouted above the wind and the lashing rain. ‘You’re coming with me!’
Petrified, rooted to the spot by the sound of splitting timber somewhere close by on the riven hillside, Kayla felt herself suddenly being whipped off her feet. She was only pacified by the realisation that she was in a pair of strong, powerful arms, being held against Leon’s sodden warmth as he ran with her to the waiting truck.
He had left the vehicle’s lights on, and after he had set her quickly down on the passenger seat Kayla saw him race around the bonnet with his head bent against the storm, his purposeful
