Jackie Braun - Greek Bachelors - Tempted To A Fling - A Greek Escape / Greek for Beginners / My Sexy Greek Summer

Whatever it was, she thought, he unsettled her as no man had ever unsettled her in her life. Not to this degree anyway, she realised. And there was more to it than just the danger of getting too involved with a man whom, until the day before yesterday, she had never even met. It was the potent attraction this man held for her, purely physical in its nature and stronger than any she had felt before. Which was illogical, she decided, when she had been engaged to Craig and fully intending to spend the rest of her life with him.

But Leon was already taking the necessary steps to get her fixed up with an alternative place to stay.

Listening to that deep voice speaking in Greek to some hotelier on the other end of the line, Kayla realised how much more difficult it would have been for her if she had been left to find accommodation herself. There would have been the language barrier to overcome for a start.

Now, though, as he came off the phone, Kayla saw him shaking his head. ‘I’m afraid they’re fully booked for the next three weeks.’

There were three hotels on the island, he had informed her, one closed for refurbishing, and he was now ringing the second one on his list. But again he was shaking his head as he finished speaking to their last possible hope. ‘They said they would have had a room if you had telephoned yesterday, but they’ve had to close this morning because of flooding in part of the hotel last night.’

She could tell that he was almost as dumbfounded as she was.

‘Well, that’s that, then,’ she said, swinging the bin bag up off the tiled floor. ‘I’ll just have to make the best of it here until Lorna’s parents arrive tomorrow.’ And after that... She gave a mental shrug as she crossed the tiny kitchen. Who knew?

Watching the determined squaring of her shoulders as he tried to relieve her of the bag, Leonidas felt his heart going out to her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said as she opened the door to the garden. ‘You can’t stay here.’ The tree was leaning across the landing at a precarious enough angle to be a safety hazard. Also, because of the galleried landing, the ground floor was open to the elements, as well as to any more debris from the fallen tree.

‘No?’ Kayla said, coming in from dumping the bag outside. ‘And I suppose you can come up with a better idea?’

‘Yes, I can,’ he stated pragmatically. ‘You will stay with me.’

Not can. Will, Kayla noted, which marked him as a man who usually got his own way.

‘With you?’ He was leaning against the sink with his thumbs hooked into his waistband, looking very determined, and a little bubble of humourless laughter escaped her. ‘Now look who’s being ridiculous,’ she accused.

‘If you think I’m leaving you here, with that tree likely to come down on you at any moment,’ he said, with an upward toss of his chin, ‘you can think again.’

‘I’m not your responsibility or your problem, Leon,’ she stressed trenchantly. ‘Anyway, I came here to be alone.’

‘Why, exactly?’ Leonidas was regarding her with hard speculation. ‘What is a girl like you doing on her own in a quiet and remote place like this when you could be enjoying the company of other people your age and living it up somewhere like Crete or Corfu? And don’t tell me that you are simply soaking up the sun while considering your next career move, because you could have gone anywhere to do that.’

‘Perhaps I don’t want to be “living it up”,’ Kayla replied, feeling pressured by his unwavering determination. ‘I came here for peace and quiet. Not to share with anyone else.’

‘So did I,’ he reminded her, in a way that suggested that the best-laid plans didn’t always turn out as one would expect.

‘Exactly! And the last thing you want is a...what did you call me? Oh, yes—a “blood-sucking female with her own self-motivated agenda” dumped on you!’ she quoted fiercely, with both hands planted on her denim-clad hips. ‘Well, believe me, this isn’t on my agenda!’

‘All right. So we didn’t get off to a very good start. I shouldn’t have said those things to you,’ he admitted, coming away from the sink. It seemed to constitute some sort of apology. ‘But the fact remains that as things stand this place is a potential hazard, and—my responsibility or not—if you think I am going to stand by and let you risk your safety just because of a few ripe phrases on my part yesterday, then you still have a long way to go in assessing my character. I carried you out of here last night and I’ll do it again if I have to.’ His features were set with indomitable purpose. ‘So, are you going to be sensible and swallow your pride and accept that there isn’t an alternative?’ he asked grimly.

‘There’s always an alternative,’ Kayla said quickly, refusing to accept otherwise—although the thought of him man-handling her 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.’