A Greek Escape - By Elizabeth Power Page 0,18

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