CHAPTER FOUR
LEANDERDRANKHIS Scotch in one huge gulp.
His skin had never felt so tight. The beats of his heart had never drummed so loudly in his ears.
God help him, Kate’s breasts...
He gritted his teeth.
It had no effect.
God, they were every bit as beautiful as he’d refused to allow his mind to imagine. More so. Fuller than her petite frame suggested. Nipples the colour of dusky rose...
A groan rose up his throat.
He’d never experienced such painful arousal before.
He needed a shower.
Setting the temperature as low as he could withstand, Leander stood beneath the cold spray and willed the unwanted arousal to abate. If it was only in his loins he could have handled it, relieved himself and be done with it, but this was everywhere. Every cell in his body. Every cell begging for one little taste but one little taste would never be...
God damn it, why had he allowed himself to soften enough to strip a spare bed for her? Telling himself that it wasn’t the same as inviting her to sleep in the spare bed cut no ice. The only reason he hadn’t invited her to use it was because he couldn’t endure Kate sleeping on the same floor as him. Bad enough knowing she was curled on the sofa he doubted he would ever use again. He would throw it out. Replace it.
And what had possessed him to give her an item of his own clothing? If he’d resisted, she would never have thought to take her clothes off and he would never have seen...
He squeezed his eyes as tightly shut as he could manage to eradicate the image of her breasts from his mind, but all he succeeded in doing was replacing them with the look that had slowly crept over her face in those moments when he’d been unable to tear his gaze away from her.
It was a variant of a look he’d seen so many times that he hardly noticed it any more. But he’d never seen it on Kate’s face before and it made everything a thousand times worse.
Leander beat the sun up. He’d had little sleep, his brain too wired at the presence of the woman haunting his home to fully shut down. Before his eyes opened, the memory of Kate’s naked breasts and the feel of that look that had passed between them hit him with vivid colour and he was wide awake in an instant, painfully aware only the floor beneath his bed separated them.
He needed to hit the surf. Once he’d driven out the angst that had his guts clenching so tightly and his pulses beating so strongly he’d be in a better frame of mind to up his game and force her from his home. If that look should pass between them again...
He descended the stairs quietly, intending to leave through the utility room, but before he could stop himself, he stepped into what had quickly turned into Kate’s domain.
She was turned away from him, curled into the sofa fast asleep.
The churning in his stomach was violent enough to induce nausea.
Turning on his heel, he slipped back out of the room.
Kate’s eyes pinged open. Although crushed blue velvet lay in her immediate vision, it was Leander she saw, his expression in that terrible, terrible moment that had passed between them, the complete stillness that had quickly morphed into disgust.
It was an expression that had made anything more than snatches of sleep impossible. She had the awful sense she would remember it for the rest of her life.
Being an annoyance she could handle, but being hated? That cut deeper than she could have believed. She’d never been hated before, not even by the snobby boarding school girls who’d taken cruel delight in patronising and mocking her, and to experience that hatred from the charming, fun, attentive man who’d made her laugh so hard and whose company she’d revelled in...
It didn’t help that she’d developed this awful awareness of him that didn’t seem in any hurry to shake itself off. During their week on his family’s island, when the two of them and Helena had spent almost all their time together, Kate had acknowledged Leander was a hunk, mainly because she wasn’t blind, but his hunkiness had had no effect on her.
Whatever protective layer had been on her eyes and mind in Greece, being alone with him here had stripped it away. The dream had ignited it and switched her awareness on. One little dream. One little dream that had roused something in her, awakened her to the fact that Leander wasn’t just a hunk of a man but the most rampantly sexy man alive.
Rolling over, she squeezed her eyes shut in an attempt to eradicate the disgust on his face from her retinas, then swung her feet to the floor and rubbed her temples.
She needed to pull her big-girl knickers up and think practically. Her mission was to drag Leander back to Greece before his brother pulled the plug on the whole thing, and in good time for Kate to return to England and make the final preparations needed before she flew off to start the new life she’d worked so hard for. Leander’s wild success in life and the way he’d treated her since her arrival here suggested he had an ever-flowing tap of ruthlessness, but she was stubborn, and her love and loyalty for Helena meant she’d wear him down before he broke her spirit. Admittedly, she needed to find a new approach to wear him down with, but so long as she kept her focus on the mission in hand and ignored all the terrible things happening inside her, she would complete it successfully.
Feeling clearer in mind if not in body, Kate headed to the downstairs bathroom. Her heart jumped to find a toothbrush and toothpaste on the ledge above the sink.
She stared at the two items, absently rubbing her bottom lip as her brain raced at all the possible meanings behind it. Was Leander softening? Feeling guilt? Had he caught a whiff of her breath and decided this was the one amenity he would provide? Had it even come from him? Had a member of his invisible staff put it there out of concern for Kate’s oral hygiene?
No point wondering about it, she decided, and spread the minty paste over the brush.
Once she’d scrubbed her teeth and cleaned the rest of herself as best she could with only hand wash and a hand towel to use, she returned to the living room, lighter in heart than she’d been since waking from the dream.
Padding to the glass wall, she pressed her forehead to it and gazed out. The rustling of the trees and the movement of the ocean suggested a strong breeze and she felt a sudden yearning to stand out in it.
There was the same stillness to the house she’d felt when Leander had taken his walk on the beach, and on impulse she slid the glass wall open and stepped onto the terrace.
For long seconds she stood just past the threshold, alert to any sound, half expecting a member of his staff to come pouncing out to slam the door behind her, but the stillness behind her remained.
The ocean was the opposite to still, and when she moved tentatively to the balustrade to look out over it, Kate spotted a surfer riding what seemed to her untrained eyes as humungous waves.
It was the sigh of her heart that told her who the surfer was, a sigh that came after she’d spent Lord knew how long watching him, transfixed. It was a sigh that leapt up and stuck in her throat when he seemed to both ride and race a wave that continued to grow and had to be tens of metres high until the wave peaked and the surf swallowed him whole.
A puppy-like whimper sounded from her throat. The only movement her frozen body was capable of making was the tightening of her knuckles.
The thumping in her chest when he finally reappeared, feet secure on the board, knees bent, arms stretched out, still surfing that wave as it pounded onto the beach, was powerful enough to weaken Kate’s legs.
Almost dizzy with relief, it took a long moment to register that he’d jumped off the board and was carrying it onto the beach...and that his gaze was fixed in her direction.
Kate didn’t get the chance to act on her new, admittedly undecided, approach to her mission because for the whole of the day she was left entirely alone.
Leander had returned from his morning surf through an entrance that kept him out of her sight. He’d been out of her sight ever since.
But not out of her mind. She didn’t know when but at some point Leander or one of his staff had removed the remote controls for the television, and now her phone’s battery was close to death and she’d left the charger on the plane. With nothing to occupy her mind, it filled itself with Leander.
Hours she spent at the glass wall gazing out over the ocean, watching too the surrounding foliage sway in the strengthening wind. He wasn’t out there in it. He was here, under the same roof as her, avoiding her as if she were a carrier of the plague.
As a tactic to wear her spirits down, it was an effective one. Kate wasn’t used to having only her thoughts for company. She was used to her brain being continuously occupied and used to background noise, whether the noise of her family, her university housemates, or Helena and the general noise of an all-girls school. She’d long ago learnt the art of blocking out sounds so she could concentrate on her studies, but today there was no noise to block and nothing to fill her mind but the man actively shunning her, making her question again and again what she could have done to turn him against her so completely.
Memories of their days together on his island played continually in her mind, the two of them and Helena, carefree days Kate had known even as she’d been living them that she would one day look back on as some of the best days of her life. Leander had made those days special. Leander just being Leander.
Where was that man now? Not the physical body he was wrapped in but the fun, gregarious, surprisingly thoughtful man beneath the skin? Just what had she done to drive him away?
It was only the silence of her own company that meant she recognised his nearing footsteps long after the sun went down and enabled her to force her features into a version of nonchalance. If he could see beneath her skin he’d see the nonchalance was nothing but a front. At the first sight of him, crystal glass filled with what looked like Scotch or whisky in hand, her pulses surged.
The casual attire she’d always seen him in had been replaced with a suave dark grey suit that her inexpert eye knew had been tailored especially for his huge frame. The large collar of the crisp white shirt was opened at the throat, the contrast in colour highlighting the deep bronze of his skin. The black stubble on his face had been trimmed, his hair styled.
The scent of freshly showered Leander topped with carefully applied cologne filled the space surrounding them. It was a scent that threw her back what felt a lifetime ago but was in reality not even a week, to when she’d climbed into the helicopter transporting them to Athens and she’d inhaled this exact same scent, and chirpily said, ‘Ooh, you smell nice.’
He’d grinned. ‘Better than the orangutan you’re going to marry.’
Kate’s heart throbbed to remember that little exchange and remember the light, teasing nature of the friendship that had sprung up between them.
The easy smile that had never been far from the surface...no hint of it now. No hint of it for her since Athens. What had she done?
Lips compressed into a thin line, hard dark eyes fixed on her, he raised his hand and took a drink of his liquor. The movement exposed the fine black hairs on his wrist. For some inexplicable reason, seeing those hairs only tightened the throbs of her heart.
For all the hardness of his features, his gravelly voice was as smooth as silk when he said, ‘I’m going out.’
Although she’d registered that Leander was dressed for a night out, it hadn’t been a conscious thought, and she had no idea why it felt like a fist had wrapped itself around her throbbing heart. She cleared her throat and uttered her first word that whole day. ‘Where?’
‘That is none of your business.’
‘But you can’t.’ She tried to think coherently through her wildly scattering thoughts. Was he leaving his bolt hole because of her? Did he hate her that much? ‘You’ll be seen.’
Leander shrugged and drank some more of what was his third glass of Scotch that early evening. ‘No one knows me here. In Marina Sands, I’m just another rich guy who likes to surf.’
And even if people did know him here in this little pocket of California, it was a risk he would be willing to take because he could not stand another damned minute trying to kid himself that slender, pixie-faced Kate Hawkins with the dancing jade eyes wasn’t ensconced in his living room, pacing the walls he’d confined her to, hungry...
Her hunger was her own fault. She wasn’t a guest. She was lucky he was providing her with water. She could leave at any time of her choosing.
And so could he.
There was no risk in what he was doing. He’d chosen Marina Sands for its surfing and the ocean view. If anyone from his world should happen to be in a bar in a town so insignificant its name was barely known to anyone outside the immediate vicinity, they would assume he was Leo. That would be the natural assumption because anyone who’d even touched his social circle knew Leander Liassidis was on his honeymoon. The foulness of his mood meant he could pass himself off as Leo without any effort at all.
Driven out of his own home by a woman half his size.
Or should that be driven out of his own home because the woman half his size was driving him out of his mind? He must have been out of his mind to instruct his staff to arrange toothpaste for her. He shouldn’t care if she got cavities. Any good done by his morning surf, cut short by the gusty winds, had gone to hell when he’d looked up and found her staring at him from the balcony.
With the weather as foul as his mood, he’d resorted to spending the day in his gym, working on every piece of equipment to distract himself from the infuriating woman who just didn’t know when to quit. He couldn’t even throw himself into work as a distraction because he was supposed to be on his damned honeymoon.
Damn Kate Hawkins and her dancing jade eyes for not having the grace to get the hell out of the sanctuary he’d escaped to.
Those jade eyes weren’t dancing now. She was ten feet away from him but even that distance wasn’t far enough to hide the emotion flashing from them.
The only person who’d ever looked at him with anything even close to that kind of emotion was his twin.
He turned his gaze from her.
‘But...what if you are recognised?’
‘This isn’t a debate,’ he said icily, finishing his Scotch. Forget going to a bar. He would call his flight crew and disappear again. He should have done that the moment he realised Kate was prepared to hunker down for as long as it took to drag him back to Helena. ‘I am informing you of my plans as a matter of courtesy and so I can remind you that, should your few brain cells finally recognise you’re in a no-win situation here, all you have to do is—’
A tiny body flew at him, a small hand gripping his wrist before he could finish repeating his mantra about the intercom.
She’d moved so quickly he’d barely had time to register her legs moving.
‘Why are you being so cruel to me? What did I do to make you hate me so much?’ she demanded angrily.
Caught off guard by the speed with which she’d flown at him, completely unprepared for her beautiful pixie face to be so close that he could see the swirling hues of her eyes currently firing hurt and anger at him, it was as much as Leander could manage to grit out, ‘Let go.’
Her features were taut, her breathing ragged. ‘Not until you tell me what I did.’
Fixing his sight on an abstract painting, he said through a jaw clenched so tight it felt in danger of snapping, ‘Let go of my wrist, Kate. I will not tell you again.’
Her grip only tightened. ‘You could easily move my hand if you wanted to but you won’t touch me, will you? You won’t even look at me. I’ve got a ton of photos on my phone of you smiling and laughing with me, and now you can’t even bring yourself to look at me. For the love of God, tell me, what did I do?’
‘You did nothing,’ he dragged out. The blood pumping through him felt like fire. The torturous heat of her grip was spreading like wildfire through his blazer and shirt, burrowing beneath his skin and into his veins.
‘If you’re going to tell a barefaced lie at least have the courtesy to look me in the eye while you tell it,’ she cried, and it was the underlying pain in her voice that snapped his stare back on her. ‘We were friends, Leander. Those days we spent together were some of the best of my life. You went out of your way to make me feel welcome and accepted in your family’s home, and you included me in everything. You looked out for me too—you insisted on escorting me to the ladies’ room in that nightclub in Athens so I didn’t get harassed by drunken men for heaven’s sake, so don’t tell me I didn’t do anything when...’
Kate’s emotional onslaught came to an abrupt end when Leander twisted his wrist from her grasp and captured her face in his hands.
Suddenly pressed against the sideboard, her demonic tormentor’s face loomed over her, all coldness gone, his dark eyes staring intently into hers as if he were preparing to bite her head off in one snap.
‘You did nothing,’ he repeated harshly...but the harshness was counteracted by the molten intensity of his stare as his face drew nearer and his voice lowered to a husky, ‘except be you.’
Kate’s chest filled. Trapped in his molten stare, her pulses thrashed wildly, her senses springing to life as Leander’s heat and scent engulfed her.
He pressed closer to her. Her breasts brushed against his chest. The floor beneath her feet shifted into sand.
She was sinking...
Their faces were so close she could feel his breath on her mouth...
Something guttural came from his throat and he abruptly dropped his hold on her cheeks.
In the blink of an eye the heat of his body vanished and in the blink of an eye that it took for her confused body to feel the loss of it, he strode to the sliding wall.
It took a few moments for the hot blood whooshing in Kate’s head to clear enough for her brain to reengage with her body.
Running after him, she darted out onto the balcony. Leander’s silhouette had already reached the section of the balustrade that opened onto the pathway.
‘What do you mean, except be you?’ she shouted over the now howling wind.
The silhouette went through the gate. It slammed shut behind him.
‘Leander!’ She was all fingers and thumbs with the latch of the glass gate, and in frustration she kicked it with her bare foot.
He was halfway down the path by the time she opened it, yelling out his name but finding it lost in the noise of the strengthening storm. But he heard her, she knew it with the same certainty that she’d known he was in residence when she’d first walked this path.
Whether it was the smarting pain in her toe from kicking the gate or the awful, awful emotions raging through her or her inability to wrench her stare from Leander’s rapidly retreating figure that stopped her watching where she was walking...running...but as she chased after him, shouting out his name, she missed a shallow step. Losing her footing, she went sprawling.