Walking back into the kitchen, she pulled a bottle of water from the fridge. “I’ll be watched by your housekeeper and your new security head. Poor Dmitri, along with his arm candies, will be reduced to babysitting duties. Although, I don’t mind him.”
“No?” The question left his mouth before he knew he had thought it.
“Dmitri?” An almost dazed kind of smile glimmered in her expression. And he cut the irrationally possessive thought her expression evoked before it could form fully. “Of course not. He was always kind, even when Calista...” Sudden tension dawned in her gaze and she looked away from him.
“When Calista what, Leah?”
She cleared her throat and started again but resolutely kept her gaze away from him. “This one time, we snuck into his room and stole a bottle of whiskey. Only he caught us...”
“Whiskey, Leah?”
“We were just goofing around, Stavros. We were seventeen.”
“My father was an alcoholic who stole from his own parents, sold our house just so that he could drink, and drove my mother away. Calista wasn’t supposed to even touch that stuff.”
Shock flared in her gaze, widening those beautiful eyes. Only then did he realize how much he had betrayed. “I had no idea, Stavros.”
“What did he do, Leah?”
“Oh, he told us we could drink the whiskey—” color stole into her cheeks and she wouldn’t meet his eyes “—as long as we were also going to join him for a threesome after.”
“Cristo! Of all the things to say to—”
As if expecting his reaction, Leah sighed. “We dropped the bottle where we stood and we ran, Stavros. Dmitri was used to...he knew how to deal with us.”
Unlike you, her unsaid accusation screamed.
He had a feeling Dmitri definitely understood Leah far better than he did. A mistake he had to rectify...
If Giannis had asked me... He pushed away the scenario provoked by Dmitri’s taunting remark from his head and focused his mind on practicalities.
“Leah...fashion design is extremely hard to break into. On a given day, there are tens, if not hundreds, of designers launching new labels. And I don’t know whether you actually have any talent for this.”
“I know that. All I’m asking is a chance to do it, to access the resources that I do have.”
“And when—” he checked himself as she threw that trademark glare at him “—if you fail in this venture?”
“Then it will be my failure. All mine. Just as the success would be. It will be something I have put my heart and joy into, something that doesn’t scare me.”
“I thought nothing scared you, Leah.”
She offered him a perfunctory smile, and Stavros realized how much he didn’t know about the girl he had thought his bitterest penance.
CHAPTER SIX
A WEEK LATER, Leah walked over the white sandy beach on Stavros’s estate on one of the tiny islands along the Aegean coast. Stavros’s “house” turned out to be a hundred-acre estate close to the sea, a ten-minute helicopter ride from Athens that had thrilled her quite a bit.
Even with Stavros studying her curiously the whole time.
She had lived in Athens for so many years and yet she had known nothing about the little slice of heaven that was the island he called home.
Nestled amidst two tiny hills, the mansion was stunning in its simplicity. No glittering glass bars like Dmitri’s yacht, or a lifeless steel-and-chrome affair, which was lately the trend with billionaire homes.
The manor was made entirely of stone, with cathedral ceilings framed by exposed beams, whitewashed walls, a pool and a wine cellar. It was full of soaring spaces and light, stunning in its simple lines.
Austere, private and yet so breathtaking, the exact reflection of the man who owned it, it was an authentic slice of rural Greece. But even when it was only the wind chimes that punctured the silence, even when it was just the staff keeping her company as it had been at the apartment, Leah felt anything but lonely.
There was something very peaceful about the estate and the people surrounding it.
She smiled now about how worried she had been about being confined in a house with him. About seeing Stavros wherever she turned. Not only did the house boast seven bedrooms and attached baths, but Stavros, when he returned from Katrakis Textiles, she realized, worked in the estate.
Although if he had looked smolderingly arrogant in his suit, he looked painfully handsome in light blue jeans and a white polo shirt.
The sounds of the helicopter blades had jolted her from her bed the first morning. Still in her cotton shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, she had run to the attached balcony, spurred on by what, she still didn’t know.
Dressed in a white dress shirt that draped lovingly over his broad frame and plain khaki trousers that looked way too sexy, he had been about to step in.
Except he had turned and looked at her, the breeze ruffling his hair.
Her heart thudding, her mouth dry, Leah had broken his gaze and gone back in.
Now returning from the beach, she waved at workers heading home to the small village from the vineyard, which she had been surprised to learn was operational. Several guesthouses were dotted across the grounds in addition to a horse farm.
When she had laughingly asked Stavros which one Dmitiri preferred when he visited, she had gotten a black look in response.
It was as she passed a couple, probably in their fifties, that she remembered another little tidbit. Stavros and Calista had been from a little village that surrounded Stavros’s estate. His grandparents, she knew, still lived there. Even though their grandson was a household name in all of Greece.
Feeling nauseous at the thought of how brazenly she had threatened to go to the media and how his face had blazed in contempt, she pulled in a long breath and broke into a run.
From the moment he had showed her around the estate, she had loved running through the trails cleared through lush acreage. In just the past week, she had found a trail that touched the horse farm and rounded through the orchard.
She turned the winding bend around it and came to a skidding halt near the glittering pool that was by the house.
The evening sun kissing the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones, Stavros was sitting at the poolside table.
A tall jug of the customary lemonade that she requested every day and a selection of fruits and assorted cheeses were on the glass-topped table between the two loungers.
His head was thrown back against it, and his eyes were closed. Her breathing still raspy, Leah stilled. Her gaze lingering on the corded column of his throat, the planes of his sculpted face, at the way his long lashes almost kissed those sharp cheekbones...
It was something to see the man in repose like that, to study him without his contemptuous gaze peeling layers off her. And the way her breath hitched and her gut folded, the frenzied clamoring of her heartbeat to the very sight of him, it was telling.
For the past week, she had seen the stamp of the man in the thriving estate.
In the tired but happy workers on the vineyard, in the affluent praise the villagers bestowed on him, in the way some of the women’s eyes had widened when they had realized who she was, the reverence in their tone when they addressed her as Thespinis Sporades...
The responsibility of bearing that name, the reality of being the woman Stavros would respect and know and want...it sent shivers down her spine.
The usual white dress shirt he wore was unbuttoned, showing dark olive skin. His cuffs, folded back, displayed his muscled forearms, to the veins extending from his wrist and down... The sight of those powerful thighs, encased in tight blue jeans, made her remember how hard and corded they had been against her own...made her wonder how they would cradle her if she...
Heat, that had nothing to do with her running, pooled under her skin. The stretchy fabric of her Lycra top rasped against her nipples, the soft hem of her shorts rubbing against her inner thighs...
She was breathing like she had run another few laps, her skin so overheated that dunking into the pool was so inviting. Just as she found her willpower and took a step, she heard her name.
Turning slowly, she saw his fingers laced against his chest, faint color bleeding into those cheekbones.
His eyes were still closed when he said, “Did you have a good week, Leah?”
He sounded hoarse, uneven. Very unlike him. Had he felt the way her gaze devoured him in that motionless state?
How could just looking at him fill her blood with this molten wanting?
“Come, sit here and tell me how it was,” he said softly.
While she still stood there stupidly, hovering between drugged inertia and fluttering panic, his gaze opened slowly. Traveled over her with such a thorough intensity that she could almost believe he had been dying to look at her.
In the seconds-long perusal, Leah knew he had noted everything about her, including her heightened color. Hoped he would put it down to the fact that she had been running.
She ran her palm over her forehead, wondering if she was feverish. Because that’s how she felt. Could a harmless, adolescent crush turn into a full-fledged obsession, she thought sarcastically. “I’m sweaty. I need a shower,” she finally responded, and began to walk away.
“Rosa told me you like to swim after your run. Don’t change your routine on my account. Or am I one of those incredible things that scare you, Leah?”
It was so on target that her denial shot out of her mouth like a missile in a defensive tone. “I’m not afraid of you.”