The Fallen Greek Bride\At the Greek Boss's Bidding (19 page)

“Miss Aravantinos isn’t coming back.” Elizabeth felt her temper rise. Of course he’d request the one nurse he’d broken into bits. The poor girl, barely out of nursing school, had been putty in Kristian Koumantaros’s hands. Literally. For a man with life-threatening injuries he’d been incredibly adept at seduction.

His dark head tipped sideways. “Was that her last name?”

“You behaved in a most unscrupulous manner. You’re thirty—what?” She quickly flipped through his chart, found his age. “Nearly thirty-six. And she was barely twenty-three. She quit, you know. Left our Athens office. She felt terribly demoralized.”

“I never asked Calista to fall in love with me.”

“Love?”
she choked. “Love didn’t have anything to do with it. You seduced her. Out of boredom. And spite.”

“You’ve got me all wrong, Nurse Cratchett—” He paused, a corner of his mouth smirking. “You
are
English, are you not?”

“I speak English, yes,” she answered curtly.

“Well, Cratchett, you have me wrong. You see, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

Blood surged to Elizabeth’s cheeks. “That’s quite enough.”

“I’ve never forced myself on a woman.” His voice dropped, the pitch growing deeper, rougher. “If anything, our dear delightful Calista forced herself on me.”

“Mr. Koumantaros.” Acutely uncomfortable, she gripped her pen tightly, growing warm, warmer. She hated his mocking smile and resented his tone. She could see why Calista had thrown the towel in. How was a young girl to cope with him?

“She romanticized me,” he continued, in the same infuriatingly smug vein. “She wanted to know what an invalid was capable of, I suppose. And she discovered that although I can’t walk, I can still—”

“Mr. Koumantaros!”
Elizabeth jumped to her feet, suddenly oppressed by the warm, dark room. It was late afternoon, and the day had been cloudless, blissfully sunny. She couldn’t fathom why the windows and shutters were all closed, keeping the fresh mountain air out. “I do not wish to hear the details.”

“But you need them.” Kristian pushed his wheelchair toward her, blue cotton sleeves rolled back on his forearms, corded tendons tight beneath his skin. He’d once had a very deep tan, but the tan had long ago faded. His olive skin was pale, testament to his long months indoors. “You’re misinformed if you think I took advantage of Calista. Calista got what Calista wanted.”

She averted her head and ground her teeth together. “She was a wonderful, promising young nurse.”

“I don’t know about wonderful, but I’ll give you naïve. And since she quit, I think you’ve deliberately assigned me nurses from hell.”

“We do not employ nurses from hell. All of our nurses are professional, efficient, compassionate—”

“And stink to high heaven.”

“Excuse me?”
Elizabeth drew back, affronted. “That’s a crude accusation.”

“Crude, but true. And I didn’t want them in my home, and I refused to have them touching me.”

So that was it. He didn’t want a real nurse. He wanted something from late-night T.V.—big hair, big breasts, and a short, tight skirt.

Elizabeth took a deep breath, fighting to hang on to her professional composure. She was beginning to see how he wore his nurses down, brow-beating and tormenting until they begged for a reprieve.
Anyone but Mr. Koumantaros. Any job but that!

Well, she wasn’t about to let Mr. Koumantaros break her. He couldn’t get a rise out of her because she wouldn’t let him. “Did Calista smell bad?”

“No, Calista smelled like heaven.”

For a moment she could have sworn Kristian was smiling, and the fact that he could smile over ruining a young nurse’s career infuriated her.

He rolled another foot closer. “But then after Calista fled you sent only old, fat, frumpy nurses to torture me, punishing me for what was really Calista’s fault. And don’t tell me they weren’t old and fat and frumpy, because I might be blind but I’m not stupid.”

Elizabeth’s blood pressure shot up again. “I assigned mature nurses, but they were well-trained and certainly prepared for the rigors of the job.”

“One smelled like a tobacco shop. One of fish. I’m quite certain another could have been a battleship—”

“You’re being insulting.”

“I’m being honest. You replaced Calista with prison guards.”

Elizabeth’s anger spiked, and then her lips twitched. Kristian Koumantaros was actually right.

After poor Calista’s disgrace, Elizabeth had intentionally assigned Mr. Koumantaros only the older, less responsive nurses, realizing that he required special care. Very special care.

She smiled faintly, amused despite herself. He might not be walking, and he might not have his vision, but his brain worked just fine.

Still smiling, she studied him dispassionately, aware of his injuries, his months of painful rehabilitation, his prognosis. He was lucky to have escaped such a serious accident with his life. The trauma to his head had been so extensive he’d been expected to suffer severe brain damage. Happily, his mental faculties were intact. His motor skills could be repaired, but his eyesight was questionable. Sometimes the brain healed itself. Sometimes it didn’t. Only time and continued therapy would tell.

“Well, that’s all in the past now,” she said, forcing a note of cheer into her voice. “The battleaxe nurses are gone. I am here—”

“And you are probably worse than all of them.”

“Indeed, I am. They whisper behind my back that I’m every patient’s worst nightmare.”

“So I can call you Nurse Cratchett, then?”

“If you’d like. Or you can call me by my name, which is Nurse Hatchet. But they’re so similar, I’ll answer either way.”

He sat in silence, his jaw set, his expression increasingly wary. Elizabeth felt the edges of her mouth lift, curl. He couldn’t browbeat or intimidate her. She knew what Greek tycoons were. She’d once been married to one.

“It’s time to move on,” she added briskly. “And the first place we start is with your meals. I know it’s late, Mr. Koumantaros, but have you eaten lunch yet?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Elizabeth closed her portfolio and slipped the pen into the leather case. “You need to eat. Your body needs the nutrition. I’ll see about a light meal.” She moved toward the door, unwilling to waste time arguing.

Kristian shoved his wheelchair forward, inadvertently slamming into the edge of the couch. His frustration was written in every line of his face. “I don’t want food—”

“Of course not. Why eat when you’re addicted to pain pills?” She flashed a tight, strained smile he couldn’t see. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see to your meal.”

The vaulted stone kitchen was in the tower, or
pyrgos,
and there the butler, cook and senior housekeeper had gathered beneath one of the medieval arches. They were in such deep conversation that they didn’t hear Elizabeth enter.

Once they realized she was there, all three fell silent and turned to face her with varying degrees of hostility.

Elizabeth wasn’t surprised. For one, unlike the other nurses, she wasn’t Greek. Two, despite being foreign, she spoke Greek fluently. And three, she wasn’t showing proper deference to their employer, a very wealthy, powerful Greek man.

“Hello,” Elizabeth said, attempting to ignore the icy welcome. “I thought I’d see if I could help with Mr. Koumantaros’s lunch.”

Everyone continued to gape at her until Pano, the butler, cleared his throat. “Mr. Koumantaros doesn’t eat lunch.”

“Does he take a late breakfast, then?” Elizabeth asked.

“No, just coffee.”

“Then when does he eat his first meal?”

“Not until evening.”

“I see.” Elizabeth’s brow furrowed as she studied the three staffers, wondering how long they’d been employed by Kristian Koumantaros and how they coped with his black moods and display of temper. “Does he eat well then?”

“Sometimes,” the short, stocky cook answered, wiping her hands across the starched white fabric of her apron. “And sometimes he just pecks. He used to have an excellent appetite—fish,
moussaka, dolmades,
cheese, meat, vegetables—but that was before the accident.”

Elizabeth nodded, glad to see at least one of them had been with him a while. That was good. Loyalty was always a plus, but misplaced loyalty could also be a hindrance to Kristian recovering. “We’ll have to improve his appetite,” she said. “Starting with a light meal right now. Perhaps a
horiatiki salata,
” she said, suggesting what most Europeans and Americans thought of as a Greek salad—feta cheese and onion, tomato and cucumber, drizzled with olive oil and a few drops of homemade wine vinegar.

“There must be someplace outside—a sunny terrace—where he can enjoy his meal. Mr. Koumantaros needs the sun and fresh air—”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Pano interrupted, “but the sun bothers Mr. Koumantaros’s eyes.”

“It’s because Mr. Koumantaros has spent too much time sitting in the dark. The light will do him good. Sunlight stimulates the pituitary gland, helps alleviate depression and promotes healing. But, seeing as he’s been inside so much, we can transition today by having lunch in the shade. I assume part of the terrace is covered?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the cook answered. “But Mr. Koumantaros won’t go.”

“Oh, he will.” Elizabeth swallowed, summoning all her determination. She knew Kristian would eventually go. But it’d be a struggle.

* * *

Sitting in the library, Kristian heard the English nurse’s footsteps disappear as she went in search of the kitchen, and after a number of long minutes heard her footsteps return.

So she was coming back. Wonderful.

He tipped his head, looking up at nothing, since everything was and had been dark since the crash, fourteen months and eleven days ago.

The door opened, and he knew from the way the handle turned and the lightness of the step that it was her. “You’re wrong about something else,” he said abruptly as she entered the library. “The accident wasn’t a year ago. It was almost a year and a half ago. It happened late February.”

She’d stopped walking and he felt her there, beyond his sight, beyond his reach, standing, staring,
waiting.
It galled him, this lack of knowing, seeing. He’d achieved what he’d achieved by utilizing his eyes, his mind, his gut. He trusted his eyes and his gut, and now, without those, he didn’t know what was true, or real.

Like Calista, for example.

“That’s even worse,” his new nightmare nurse shot back. “You should be back at work by now. You’ve a corporation to run, people dependent on you. You’re doing no one any good hiding away here in your villa.”

“I can’t run my company if I can’t walk or see—”

“But you
can
walk, and there might be a chance you could see—”

“A less than five percent chance.” He laughed bitterly. “You know, before the last round of surgeries I had a thirty-five percent chance of seeing, but they botched those—”

“They weren’t botched. They were just highly experimental.”

“Yes, and that experimental treatment reduced my chances of seeing again to nil.”

“Not nil.”

“Five percent. There’s not much difference. Especially when they say that even if the operation were a success I’d still never be able to drive, or fly, or sail. That there’s too much trauma for me to do what I used to do.”

“And your answer is to sit here shrouded in bandages and darkness and feel sorry for yourself?” she said tartly, her voice growing closer.

Kristian shifted in his chair, and felt an active and growing dislike for Cratchett. She was standing off to his right, and her smug, superior attitude rubbed him the wrong way. “Your company’s services have been terminated.”

“They haven’t—”

“I may be blind, but you’re apparently deaf. First Class Rehab has received its last—
final
—check. There is no more coming from me. There will be no more payments for services rendered.”

He heard her exhale—a soft, quick breath that was so uniquely feminine that he drew back, momentarily startled.

And in that half-second he felt betrayed.

She was the one not listening. She was the one forcing herself on him. And yet—and yet she was a woman. And he was—or had been—a gentleman, and gentlemen were supposed to have manners. Gentlemen were supposed to be above reproach.

Growling, he leaned back in his chair, gripped the rims on the wheels and glared at where he imagined her to be standing.

He shouldn’t feel bad for speaking bluntly. His brow furrowed even more deeply. It was her fault. She’d come here, barging in with a righteous, high-handed, bossy attitude that turned his stomach.

The accident hadn’t been yesterday. He’d lived like this long enough to know what he was dealing with. He didn’t need her telling him this and that, as though he couldn’t figure it out for himself.

No, she—Nurse Hatchet-Cratchett, his nurse number seven—had the same bloody mentality as the first six. In their eyes the wheelchair rendered him incompetent, unable to think for himself.

“I’m not paying you any longer,” he repeated firmly, determined to get this over and done with. “You’ve had your last payment. You and your company are finished here.”

And then she made that sound again—that little sound which had made him draw back. But this time he recognized the sound for what it was.

A laugh.

She was laughing at him.

Laughing and walking around the side of his chair so he had to crane his head to try to follow her.

He felt her hands settle on the back of his chair. She must have bent down, or perhaps she wasn’t very tall, because her voice came surprisingly close to his ear.

“But
you
aren’t paying me any longer. Our services have been retained and we are authorized to continue providing your care. Only now, instead of you paying for your care, the financial arrangements are being handled by a private source.”

He went cold—cold and heavy. Even his legs, with their only limited sensation.
“What?”

“It’s true,” she continued, beginning to push his chair and moving him forward. “I’m not the only one who thinks it’s high time you recovered.” She continued pushing him despite his attempt to resist. “You’re going to get well,” she added, her voice whispering sweetly in his ear. “Whether you want to or not.”