A Greek Escape - By Elizabeth Power Page 0,64

to concentrate on her breathing. It was her total capitulation that he had needed to redeem his pride, and now she had given him that he needed nothing more.

He was just like all the others—right out of the same mould. The type of man she’d vowed never to be attracted to again. Except that this man was different. This man wasn’t even capable of feeling. Not love, she accepted, anguished. He’d practically admitted that to her himself last night. Loving was a weakness—something only fools entertained—and Leonidas Vassalio was anything but weak, and certainly no fool.

‘Well…’ Her smile felt stretched as she tried to put on a brave face, and she wondered if she was visibly shaking as much as she was trembling inside. It occurred to her then why he’d wanted her kept out of the way of the press while he’d been away last weekend. Because he didn’t want anyone thinking she was a permanent fixture in his life. ‘I’d better go and start packing,’ she said as tonelessly as she was able, and wondered at the unfathomable emotion that turned his eyes almost inky black.

‘I have to fly to Athens,’ he informed her, consulting his watch, his tone similarly flat.

It was a trip, she’d discovered, which he took on a regular basis, often going back and forth between London and his Greek office. ‘If you’re keen to go today, I obviously won’t try and stop you, but I shan’t be able to take you myself. I can, however, arrange for a car to be put at your disposal whenever you wish to leave.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Kayla murmured, wanting to get out of there—and quickly—before the tears that were burning the backs of her eyes overflowed and gave her away.

He nodded as though he understood, and somehow she managed to drag herself from the room with her pride intact, safe in the knowledge that he would never know the truth. A truth she only admitted to herself now, as she stumbled over the stairs up which he had carried her so purposefully last night. That she was deeply and hopelessly in love with Leonidas Vassalio.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MOVING LEADENLY THROUGH the silent cottage, Leonidas was checking each familiar room. He had promised Philomena’s daughter he would do that for her, and that he would take anything he wanted. Anything that meant something to him, she had said.

Coming back through the kitchen, he let his glance touch painfully on a cherished oil-lamp, some sprigs of dried herbs, the stack of unused logs beside the huge stove, and his nostrils dilated from a host of evocative scents—rosemary, sage and pinewood, trapped there by shutters which remained reverently closed against the intrusion of the outside world.

There was nothing for him here. He had everything he wanted in the memory of Philomena’s presence, her warmth and her voice, often scolding but always wise, and he wished fervently that she was there now, with her affectionate scolding and her wisdom.

He could hear her still, when he had run down here on countless occasions to escape his father’s bellowing and his character-moulding brutality.

Be true to yourself, Leon.

But he hadn’t been, had he? Not in his hopes and aspirations. In everything he hadn’t been able to feel. Not since he’d been a child, or maybe a young adolescent, but certainly not as a man.

Since his mother had died and his father had blamed him for it he had built a hard, impervious shell around himself. A shell that no one, not even he himself, could crack. Only once had he ever—

He slammed the brakes on his errant thinking.

No, he hadn’t been true to himself, he realised grimly. But that, like everything about this house, was now part of the past.

Grabbing one final look around filled him with such an ache of grief in his chest that he had to take a minute to steel himself before stepping outside into the bright sunlight and closing the door for the last time.

‘I was just going to ring you,’ Kayla said brightly as Lorna came through on her cell phone. ‘The men have done a great job! The builder’s been paid—in fact he’s only just left—and the villa looks as good as new!’

She was standing looking up at the rafters above the galleried landing, and at the freshly rendered walls, which now bore no sign of the damage they had sustained earlier in the year. She tried not to think about how Leonidas—or Leon, she amended painfully—had rescued her