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

‘I’m more than grateful for—’ A sudden vivid flash, accompanied by a deafening crack, had her cutting her sentence short with a startled cry.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. His voice came softly from somewhere close behind her as the thunder seemed to reverberate off the very walls. ‘This house might look as though it’s seen better days, but I can assure you, Kayla, the roof is sound. No tree is going to fall in on us, I promise you.’

Her visible fear had brought him over to her. She only realised it as she felt his hands on her shoulders through the thin fabric of her shirt, warm and strong and surprisingly reassuring in view of his previous attitude towards her.

‘I’m all right.’ She took a step back and his hands fell away from her. She wondered what was most unsettling. The storm—or the touch of this stranger whose bedroom she was unbelievably standing in.

‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘But get out of those damp clothes. And get a good night’s rest,’ he advocated, before leaving her to it.

He was right about her clothes being damp, she realised with a little shiver after he had gone. Just the short journey from the villa to the truck and then from the truck to this house had been enough to soak her shirt and jeans. She was grateful to peel them off.

There were a few moments in the king-sized bed when she wondered what she was doing there, unable to keep her thoughts from the man who must have been lying there not more than an hour before. Had he been lying here naked? She felt a sensual little tingle, and her nostrils grasped the trace of a masculine shower gel beneath the scent of fresh linen. But it was only for a few moments, because when she opened her eyes again the tearing winds and driving rain had ceased and a fine blade of sunlight was piercing the dimly shaded room through a slit in the shutters.

Scrambling out of bed, Kayla went over and flung them back, feeling the heat of the sun on her scantily clothed body as it streamed in through windows that were already open to the glittering blue of the sky.

The bedroom overlooked the front yard, the dirt track and the rolling hillside that descended so sharply, with the mountain road, to the blue and silver of the shimmering sea.

She could see the truck parked there on the flagstones, where Leon had left it in the early hours.

A surge of heat coursed through her as she thought about how he had come to her rescue last night, and how helpless she had felt in those hostile yet powerful arms as they had carried her to that truck when she had been too shocked and too bewildered to move.

‘So you’re awake.’ A familiar deep voice overlaid with mockery called out to her as if from nowhere.

Startled, Kayla realised that he had been doing something to his truck. She hadn’t noticed until he had pulled himself up from under it.

Uncertainly she lifted a hand, mesmerised for a moment by the shattering impact of his hard, untrammelled masculinity.

With his hair wild as a gypsy’s, and in a black vest top and cut off jeans, he looked like a man totally uninhibited by convention. Self-sufficient and self-ruling. A man who would probably shun the constraints that Craig and his company cronies adhered to.

But this man was looking at her with such unveiled interest that her stomach took a steep dive as she realised why.

She was wearing nothing but her coffee and cream lace-edged baby doll pyjamas and, utterly self-conscious, she swiftly withdrew from the window, certain she wasn’t imagining the deep laugh that emanated from the yard as she hastily pulled the shutters together again.

The bathroom was, as she’d discovered last night, clean and adequately equipped. Some time this morning a toothbrush, still in its packaging, had been placed upon two folded and surprisingly good-quality burgundy towels on a wooden cabinet beside the washstand. Impressed, silently Kayla thanked him for that.

Fortunately her hairbrush had been in her bag when she had made her hasty exit from the villa last night, along with a spare tube of the soft brown mascara she had remembered to buy before leaving London.

Never one to wear much make-up, she had nonetheless always felt undressed without her mascara. A combination of pale hair and pale eyelashes made her look washed-out, she had always thought, and Craig had agreed.

A sharp, unexpected little stab of something under her ribcage had her catching her breath as she thought about Craig, but surprisingly it didn’t hurt as she reminded herself that what Craig Lymington thought wasn’t important any more.

Leon was in the large sitting room off the hall, locking something away in a drawer, when Kayla came down feeling fresh and none the worse for her experiences of the previous night.

He was superb, she thought reluctantly from the doorway, noticing how at close quarters the black vest top emphasised his muscular torso, how perfectly smooth and contoured were his arms, their hair-darkened skin like bronze satin sheathing steel. She was pleased she’d put mascara on, and that when she’d brushed her hair forward and then tossed it back, as she always did, it had looked particularly full and shiny this morning.

He looked up and his gaze moved over her. He was clearly remembering what she had looked like at the window earlier.

‘I’ve been trying to ring Lorna but I can’t get a signal,’ she said quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed the way she’d been ogling him. ‘Is it all right if I use your landline?’

‘You could—if it was connected,’ he returned. He took his own cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to her as she came into the room. It felt smooth and warmed by his body heat, reminding her far too easily of how she had felt being held against his hard warmth the previous night.

‘As soon as it’s a respectable enough time,’ she began, while trying to deal with how ridiculously she was allowing him to affect her, ‘and after you’ve dropped me off at the villa, do you think you could point me in the direction of the nearest hotel?’

‘One thing at a time,’ he advised her. ‘The first thing is not to plan anything on an empty stomach.’

‘Is that your philosophy on life?’ She struggled to speak lightly, which was difficult when there was so much tension in her voice.

‘One of them,’ he answered, with his mouth tugging down at one corner.

She wondered what the others were, but decided against asking. For all the hospitality this man had shown her, he didn’t welcome too much intrusion into his personal life, and Kayla certainly felt as though she had intruded enough.

Surprisingly, she got through to Lorna’s office on the first try. Gently, Kayla broke the news to her about the storm and the tree coming down, wanting to spare her friend as much distress as she could. Lorna and Josh had been trying for a baby for quite some time, and Lorna had had two miscarriages in the past two years. Now she was well into the second trimester of another pregnancy, and Kayla regretted having to cause her any more stress as she concluded, ‘I haven’t had a chance to look at it in daylight, but we’re going down after breakfast to assess the damage.’

‘We?’ Lorna echoed inquisitively, so that Kayla was forced to gather her wits together in order to avoid any awkward questions.

‘Someone from a neighbouring property. They took me in for the night,’ she explained, taking care not to even suggest that ‘they’ was really ‘he’. She wasn’t ready to be bracketed with another man in her life just yet.

‘Then tell them that I can’t thank them enough for taking care of my friend.’ True to character, Lorna seemed more concerned about Kayla than about the tree crashing down on her precious villa. ‘I’m so glad there was someone else there! What would you have done otherwise?’