A Greek Escape - By Elizabeth Power Page 0,4

what was important to him. And to do that he had needed to get back to his roots. To enjoy the bliss of virtual anonymity that coming here would offer him. Because only one other person knew he was here. But now it looked as though even that might have been too much to expect, if that nosy little blonde he’d caught snooping around today had lied about why she was here.

And if she hadn’t, and she really had been photographing birds, why had she been standing there taking a picture of him? Had she just fancied snapping a bit of local colour? One of the peasants going about his daily business? Or could it be that she’d just happened to like the look of him? he thought, with his mouth twisting cynically. In other circumstances he would have admitted unreservedly to himself that he hadn’t exactly been put off by the look of her. Especially when he’d noted that she’d been wearing no ring.

But bedding nubile young women wasn’t on his agenda right now. Heaven only knew the physical attributes he’d been endowed with acted like a magnet on the opposite sex, and he’d never met one yet that he’d wanted to bed who hadn’t been willing, but, no, he determined as he oiled a hinge. Whatever her motives were, and no matter how affected she’d been by that spark of something that had leaped between them and made her pull back from him as though she’d been scorched when he’d pulled her to her feet, that girl certainly hadn’t had bedroom games in mind.

She had to be staying in one of those modern villas that had sprung up further down the hillside. That was the direction she had been heading in when he’d caught up with her. He wondered if there was anyone with her, or if she was staying there alone. If she was, he deliberated with his hackles rising, then she had to be here for a reason. And if that reason was to intrude on his peace and solitude…

Finishing what he was doing, annoyed at how much thought he was giving to her, he rushed inside, out of the rain.

She was going to find out the hard way that she couldn’t mess with him!

CHAPTER TWO

THE THREE-MILE drive to the main village to get provisions had seemed like an easy enough mission, particularly when last night’s storm had caused a power cut and made her fridge stop working.

Unless the thing had broken before then, Kayla thought exasperated, having come downstairs this morning to a cabinet of decidedly warm and smelly food.

But the polished voice of the car’s satellite navigation system had let her down badly when it had guided her along this track. And now, having parked the car in order to consult the map and try and work out where she was, the little hatchback that her friends kept here for whenever they visited the island refused to start.

She tried again, her teeth clenched with tension.

‘Come on,’ she appealed desperately to the engine. ‘Please.’

It was no good, she realised, slumping back on her seat. It had well and truly packed up.

Lorna had given her the name of someone she could call in an emergency who spoke relatively good English, Kayla remembered, fishing in the glove compartment for the man’s number. But when she took her cell phone out of her bag she discovered that she didn’t have a signal.

Despairingly tossing the phone onto the passenger seat, she looked around at a Grecian panorama of sea and mountains and, closer to hand, pine woods and stony slopes leading down to this track.

Beyond the open windows of the car the chirruping of crickets in the scrub and the lonely tugging of the wind only seemed to emphasise her isolation. She didn’t have a clue where she was.

Glancing back over her shoulder, she recognised way below the group of rocks that ran seaward from the beach where she had seen that surly local yesterday, and that smaller island in the distance, clear as a bell today beneath the canopy of a rain-washed vividly azure sky.

With the sun beating relentlessly down upon her, with an unusable phone and only a broken-down car for company, Kayla glanced wistfully towards what looked like a deserted farmhouse, with a roof that had seen better days peeping above the trees at the end of the track.

Fat chance she had of making a call from there!

Or did she?

Sticking her head out of the window