A Greek Escape (14 page)

He knew a lot about the subject, and she was impressed.

‘I’ve studied a bit,’ he said modestly, when she told him so. ‘Unlike you. You’re a natural,’ he commented, making her glow inside. ‘So, what about this one?’

‘Too much Photoshop,’ she quipped, wrinkling her nose, and he laughed.

For a moment it felt as it had that day he had taken her to that little island and she’d been insisting on racehorses on a piece of land not a mile wide. Indulging in make-believe. Playing games with him. Except that it was different tonight. Tonight the very air around them was pulsating with a dangerous chemistry, and she wasn’t with Leon, the man she’d believed to be open and carefree with scarcely two pennies to his name. She was with Leonidas Vassalio, hardened billionaire, powerful magnate and the man who had hurt her—was still hurting her just by being the type of man he was. The type who would use her concern for her friends to get what he wanted.

‘My Gran used to say that the camera doesn’t lie. But it does,’ she accepted, suddenly feeling low-spirited. ‘Maybe not in her day,’ she went on, ‘but in this day and age the emphasis seems to be on how much you can artificially enhance or embellish, and on what you put in or take out. You can’t really tell what’s real any more and what isn’t. There’s so much that isn’t as it seems.’
Including you
, she thought achingly, and had to glance away, pretending to be temporarily distracted by the other guests milling around them so that he wouldn’t see the emotion scoring her face.

‘And that means so much to you?’

‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘I like the camera to capture things as they really are.’ She turned back to him now, her feelings brought under control. ‘Men and women. Places. Things. I like them portrayed “warts and all”, as the saying goes. I’m
not a fan of illusion. Being fooled into seeing something that isn’t really there.’

He tilted his head, the movement so slight that she wasn’t sure whether she had imagined it or not. His eyes were dark pools of inscrutable emotion and she wondered what he was thinking. That he had done just that with her when he hadn’t told her who he was?

‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

He spoke very little to her on the relatively short journey back, while the car ate up the miles in the gathering dusk.

There had been a sporadic press presence at the main gates of the house over the past few days, and Leonidas wasn’t taking any chances when they arrived home.

‘We’ll take the east entrance,’ he told Kayla as he turned the car down a quiet lane that stretched for a couple of miles and which, from the manicured trees above the high wall that soon came into view, obviously skirted his property.

Another pair of electronically opened gates brought them past a small lodge and into his home through a smaller and more secluded side entrance.

‘Why isn’t this part of the house used?’ Kayla whispered as they came out of rooms covered in dustsheets which Leonidas had had to unlock to allow them into the main body of the house. She felt like a child creeping around when she should have been in bed. Or a guilty mistress sneaking away from the ecstasies of her lover’s bed…

‘I had this part converted for my father, but he never came here,’ he said, his voice taking on a curiously jagged edge.

‘Why not?’ Kayla asked, thinking how thick and black his hair was as he stopped to lock the door behind him. It made her want to rake her fingers through it, twist the strong tufts around them as she lay beneath him, crying out from the terrifying pleasure he was withholding from her.

‘I believe I told you before. We were never able to get on. I
wanted us to try and establish some sort of rapport as he was getting older.’ They were moving along a softly lit carpeted passage now. ‘To try and forge some sort of bond with him.’

He was so close behind her that if she stopped he would collide with her, Kayla thought hectically, craving the feel of his warmth through her prim little jacket and tight pencil skirt.

‘And did you?’

‘No. There was too much between us—far too much to even imagine we could repair it. He didn’t want to share in my good fortune or the things I could give him. He didn’t want anything from me,’ he concluded, with something in his voice that she might have mistaken for pain if she hadn’t known better.

‘Why not? Wasn’t he proud of you?’ she queried, feeling for him in spite of herself as they came through an archway into the main hall alongside the sweeping staircase. She couldn’t believe that any parent with a son like Leonidas—driven, enterprising, so overwhelmingly successful—could possibly be anything else.

‘Oh, I think he was satisfied that I’d turned out to be the man he had been determined to mould me into,’ he accepted harshly.

Kayla glanced back over her shoulder and saw the rigidity of his features, the hard cynicism touching his mouth. ‘And what type is that?’

‘The type who understands that sentiment and idealism are for fools and that common sense and practicality are the only two reliable bedfellows.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ she murmured, with wounded incredulity in her eyes as she stopped, as he had, at the foot of the stairs.

‘What does it matter what I believe?’ he said.

He meant to her. And yet it did matter, she realised—far too much—and she had to sink her nails into her clenched palms to keep herself from blurting it out.

He was hard and ruthless. She’d realised that even before she’d left Greece. Although she hadn’t known how hard and how calculating he could be until she’d seen him in full corporate action, which was how he had managed to climb to the very top of the executive ladder while still only thirty-one. Yet there was an altruistic side to his nature too, reined in beneath that cold and ruthless streak, which could have had her eating out of his hand if she had been weak enough to let it. But she wasn’t, she thought turbulently as she found herself battling against a surge of responses to that dark and raw sensuality that transcended everything else about him.

‘Thank you for taking me to the exhibition,’ she said, in a husky voice that didn’t sound like hers. ‘It was thoughtful of you. I think I’ll go straight up. Goodnight.’

If she had thought he would let her go then she had been fooling herself, she realised too late, when his firm, determined fingers closed around her wrist.

‘You might not like the man you think I am—or what I stand for—but it excites you, Kayla.’

How right he was! She felt panicked as he drew her towards him and brought the fingers of his other hand to play along the pulsing sensitivity of her throat.

‘
This
excites you.’

‘No, don’t—please…’ It was a hopeless little sound. The sound of one who knew her cause was lost.

‘Why? Are you afraid that if for one minute you let your guard down you might just have to acknowledge how much you want me?’

‘I don’t want you.’ Rebellion warred with the dark desire in her eyes. Futile rebellion, she realised when she saw him smile.

‘No?’

He was barely touching her, yet every feminine cell was screaming out to the steel-hard strength and warmth and power he exuded. She could feel her breasts straining against her blouse, could feel the moist heat of her desire against the flimsy film of her string.

‘You want me and it’s driving you mad. It’s driving us both mad,’ he admitted, and his scent and his nearness and that iron control were electrifying as he tilted her chin with a forefinger—all that was touching her now. ‘You want me,’ he said huskily, his dark eyes raking over her upturned mouth. ‘Say it.’

It was a soft command, breathed against her lips, and it was that excruciating denial of the kiss she was craving, which finally broke her resolve.

‘I want you! I want you! I want—!’

His mouth over hers silenced her wild admission in the same moment that she twined her arms around his neck to pull him down to her.

He caught her to him, those strong arms tightening around her.

Kayla wriggled against him, seeking even closer contact with his body, her own a mass of desperate wanting as their mouths fused, broke contact, devoured in a hunger of frenzied need.

He was tugging off her jacket, letting it lie where it fell, ripping buttons in his urgency to get her out of her clothes. But when her hands slid under his jacket and it fell away from those broad shoulders he suddenly swept her up off her feet and mounted the stairs with her as effortlessly as if she were a rag doll.

Of course. The staff.

The thought penetrated her consciousness, but only for a second, because all that mattered was that she was with this man, destined for his bed, and she was going to know the full meaning of his loving her.

In the physical sense…

She shook that thought away, because all she wanted was to have him inside her—anyhow, anywhere and any way it came.

He set her down on her feet before they had even reached his room, pressing her against the wall of the carpeted landing, as hungry for her mouth as she was for the pleasuring mastery of his hands on her body.

He surfaced only to tug off her gaping blouse, pulling her against his hard hips so that he could deal with the back zipper of her skirt.

It slipped to the floor and she was standing there in nothing but a white lacy bra and string and black high-heeled sandals, revelling in his groan of satisfaction as he caught her to him again.

His tongue burned an urgent trail along the shallow valley between her breasts and, clutching his shoulders, she arched against him as his mouth moved ravishingly over a lacy cup.

The fine silk of his shirt was a sensual turn-on under her urgently groping hands, the fabric of his immaculately pressed trousers heightening her pleasure as he suddenly cupped her buttocks and lifted her up and her legs went around him, her fingers tangling wildly in his thick black hair.

It was the culmination of everything he had promised and everything she had dared to imagine, she realised as they finally made it to his room and he dropped her down onto the yielding sensuality of his big bed.

They had been lovers in the spring, but it hadn’t been like this, she thought as he came down to her, still fully clothed, and removed the last scraps of her underwear with swift and amazing dexterity. Perhaps he had been right when he’d
suggested that his power and influence excited her. Perhaps she was no different from all those other women she’d seen visually devouring him, she thought. Because she had no control over the desires he aroused in her.

Naked, she writhed beneath him, wanting him naked too, wanting the hands that were reclaiming her body never to stop—because she had been made for them. For this…

When he moved away to hastily shed his clothes, she watched with her hair spread like wild silk over the darker sheen of his pillow, her arms arched above her head in wanton abandon to the thrilling anticipation of what was to come.

‘I called you an angel once,’ he said hoarsely, looking down at her from where he was standing, unashamed and magnificent in his glorious nakedness. ‘But I was wrong. You’re a she-devil.’ It was said with a curious tremor in his voice.

‘And you…’ she whispered, her body pulsing as he finished sheathing himself—not taking any chances this time—and came back to join her ‘…are the devil incarnate.’

‘Yes,’ he murmured, his voice humorously soft against her lips.

But she didn’t care, because she was on fire for him, burning up in a conflagration of need and wanting and desire.

Skilfully and with controlled deliberation he slid down her body, anointing her skin with kisses, although his body was taut with his own need and his breathing was as ragged as hers.

Their hunger was too demanding for much foreplay. As he moved above her, positioning himself to take her, Kayla welcomed his hard invasion, her legs opening for him like silken wings for the sun.

His sliding into her was an ecstasy she couldn’t have
imagined and she lifted her hips to accommodate him, a small cry spilling from her lips.

His penetration was deep, with each successive thrust taking him deeper, until he was filling her, stretching her, turning her into a being of mindless, unparalleled sensation where nothing else mattered but the union of their two bodies.

She was riding with him, being taken to a place where only the two of them existed—a rapturous world of feeling and sharpening senses that grew into a mountain of exquisitely unbearable pleasure, urging her upwards to its summit. And suddenly as she reached the top the mountain started to explode, and she cried out from the pleasure that was bursting all around her. She was falling, tumbling in a freefall of interminable sensation, clinging to the man she never wanted to let out of her arms, part of him, belonging to him, as he tumbled with her through the sensational universe.

When she came back to earth she was sobbing uncontrollably, all her pent-up feelings for him released by the shattering throbs of her orgasm.

Some time afterwards, when her sobs had subsided, Leonidas asked, ‘Are you all right?’

She was lying in the crook of his arm and the warm velvet of his chest was damp from her tears.

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Kayla murmured, and rolled away from him, unable to tell him why she had wept. If she did, then he would know, and she didn’t want to admit it to herself. So she stayed where she was, on her side, with her legs drawn up, not wanting to face the truth or the reality of what had just happened.

Leonidas woke shortly before dawn.

Kayla was still lying with her back to him, as far over on her side of the bed as it was possible to get. With a crease between his eyes, Leonidas slipped quietly out of bed, so as not to disturb her, and went to take a shower.

When he returned, wearing a dark robe, she was still sleeping, but now lying on her back. What little make-up she’d been wearing last night was smudged—either from his over-zealous treatment of her or from crying, he remembered
uneasily—and her hair was alluringly tousled from making love.

Unable to help himself, he stooped to press his lips lightly to her forehead. She stirred slightly, her brow furrowing as though her dreams were troubled.