CHAPTER FIVE
LEANDERIGNOREDALL Kate’s shouts. His mind was made up. He was leaving. He would make some calls from his car and get the hell out of California. Drive somewhere where a storm wasn’t raging.
There was a storm enough raging in his guts, self-recriminations flying through his head.
Theós, he’d been on the verge of losing his head completely and kissing her. The ache of desire had infected the whole of him, an internal battle waging to turn around and go straight back to her, sweep her in his arms, carry her to his bed and devour her whole.
His driver opened the door for him and kept a secure hold of it to stop the wind from ripping it off its hinges.
About to climb in, Leander made the fatal error of turning his head.
Kate was quick on her feet. She should already have reached the natural curve the path made and be in sight.
When Kate ran out of English curses, she muttered all the Greek ones Leander had taught her when she hadn’t been the anti-Christ to him, and fought the very real need to burst into tears.
This had to count as the worst day of her life, on a par with the day she’d learned that she’d failed the final unit of assessment of her first module at university, bringing her overall mark down and so failing the entire module. Her second-worst fear had come true. Failing the module had terrified her, proved she couldn’t take her foot off the gas even for a second. She’d ended her fledging relationship with Euan on the spot and thrown herself even harder into her studies. After resitting the assessment, she’d spent weeks living with cold fear while awaiting the results. A second failure would mean her ultimate worst fear coming true—being kicked out of university and her dreams being destroyed. All the sacrifices she’d made and her family had made would have been for nothing.
This day was as different from failure day as the sun was to the moon but she felt every bit as wretched. She was starving hungry, and physically and emotionally exhausted. It was like Leander had taken possession of her, and not only of her mind. If he’d kissed her, she wouldn’t have stopped him. The difference between them would have been that if he’d kissed her, it would have been because she was female and had a pulse. If he’d kissed her she’d have responded because she’d have been helpless to resist.
There was no denying it any more. The thrills that had ravaged her entire being to have his hands cradling her cheeks and his breath on her face... She’d fallen for Leander. She’d fallen for the man she’d travelled thousands of miles to deliver back to her best friend so he could play the role of her best friend’s husband, a man who’d been the light of her existence for five glorious days but had turned on a dime against her, and now she was sat on this stupid pavement in the dark, trees creaking around her in the wind, and with a gashed knee. She didn’t know what was the most urgent: stemming her tears or stemming the blood.
The outside sensor lights came back on at the same moment a tall figure emerged on the path and a splash of rain landed on her nose.
Her throat choking, stemming the tears won, and she frantically swallowed the rest back. She would not let him see her cry.
It was only when Leander crouched on his haunches beside her and the humiliation of sitting on a path with a bleeding knee like a small child hit her and smashed into all the other emotions lacing her blood.
‘Go away,’ she choked, slapping her palm over the wound.
‘You’re hurt. What’s happened?’
‘I tripped.’ How dare he fake concern? How very dare he?
‘Let me see.’
‘Why? So you can stick your finger in it?’ Scrambling to her feet, she hobbled towards the car, raindrops mingling with the blood trickling down her leg. She didn’t know what hurt the most, her knee, her toe, her pride or her heart.
She’d fallen for Leander and he despised everything about her. That was what he’d meant. She hadn’t done anything to make him hate her except exist.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home. You win.’ She couldn’t do this any more. Not now. Leander would go back to Helena when he was good and ready and not a minute sooner. The only thing Kate would achieve by staying was starvation and, she painfully suspected, hurt of a kind that would leave her with a much bigger wound than a gashed knee. ‘You can tell your driver to take me to the airfield.’
She could hear the gritting of his teeth as he called after her through the now pouring rain, ‘You need to dress the wound. Come back up and I’ll—’
Her anger and pain finally boiled over. Spinning around, she yelled, ‘You’ll what? Clean it with salt? I’d much rather take my chances with an infection than let you and your hatred anywhere near me, so why don’t you just—’
He moved so quickly and stealthily that she didn’t notice him close the gap between them until she’d been scooped into his arms.
‘You are not flying anywhere in this weather or going anywhere with that wound,’ he snarled, already striding back up the path before she found the voice to protest.
‘I’m perfectly capable of walking,’ she snarled back, kicking her heel hard into his rock-like abdomen.
He gave no reaction whatsoever, opening the gate without loosening his grip on her and then adjusting his arms to secure her more tightly to him as he marched her through the quickly accumulating rainwater deepening on the balcony. The rain now falling like a sheet, the collars of Leander’s shirt and jacket were drenched against her sopping cheek.
She wriggled frantically, lashing out with her legs which, with Leander’s arm now under her knees and his hand holding her thighs firmly to his chest, meant ineffectually kicking her ankles. ‘Put me down.’
‘You haven’t got anything on your feet!’ he told her furiously. ‘There is debris all over the place from the winds. Do you want to cause more damage to yourself?’
‘Like you care!’ she spat.
‘Of course I bloody care!’ he roared, coming to an abrupt stop and tilting his furious face down so his eyes bore into hers. ‘You can have no idea...’ He shook his head and sucked his words away, muttering something that sounded like one of his Greek curses.
He stared into her eyes another long moment and then something tortured contorted his features and, with another curse, his mouth came crashing down on hers in a kiss so hungry and possessive that she froze in shock. At least, her brain froze. The rest of her...
It was like a switch had been turned on. Before she could comprehend what she was doing, she was kissing him back with equal ferocity, melting into the dark heat of his mouth, her hand holding tightly to his neck as their tongues entwined and the fusion deepened. Dimly, she was aware of the rain still falling in a torrent over them, droplets pooling into the tiny pockets their mouths made as they moved together, her fingers now tugging at the sopping hair at the back of his neck, his fingers pressing tightly into her flesh, every passing second bringing them closer to being one entity until only the need for air forced their faces apart.
Blinking rainwater out of her eyes, she stared at him and shook her head in a futile attempt to clear the fog in her mind. It wasn’t just the need to draw breath that made it hard to speak but the thrashing of her heart. ‘Why did you do that?’ she half accused. ‘You hate me.’
Leander already knew he was defeated. He’d known it when the scratching of his heart at Kate’s failure to round the curve of the path had led him to go and find her. He’d known it when he’d lifted her into his arms. And he’d known it when he’d looked down at her furious face and felt like he would die if he didn’t feed the craving for her.
Pressing his forehead to hers, he expelled a long sigh. ‘The only thing I hate about you, agápi mou, is the way you make me feel.’
Even with the storm raging around them, the silence that followed this admission was so total a feather swooshing to the ground would have been audible.
Jade eyes widened in dazed incomprehension.
A bolt of lightning crackled and lit the sky.
They both looked up and then back at each other. The dazed incomprehension was still vivid.
Wordlessly, he carried her inside and sat her on the sofa she’d made herself at home on. She didn’t resist. She didn’t say or do anything but keep her confused eyes fixed on his face.
‘I’ll get the first aid kit,’ he told her as he straightened and ran his fingers through his hair to pull some of the water out.
She blinked as if not understanding. She looked like a drowned rat. A very beautiful drowned rat.
He dropped his gaze to her knee. The wound was still bleeding. All the rain had mingled with it and turned her calf and bare foot red.
Snatching a handful of tissues from the box on the coffee table, he pressed them to her knee. ‘Hold that,’ he ordered gently. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
She obeyed without uttering a word.
In the large utility off the back of the kitchen, Leander pulled apart the medicine cabinet his staff kept topped up, grabbed the first aid kit, then snatched a couple of fresh towels from the laundry section and headed back to the woman he firmly believed had been put on this earth to make him lose his mind.
Theós, the taste of her mouth on his tongue and the heat and weight of her body in his arms and against his chest were still vivid.
Strangely, he felt calmer now. His heart still throbbed painfully and desire still racked his body but there was relief in not having to hide away from it any more. It was out in the open.
The last time he’d tried to bury his feelings and hide them from the person they most affected had ended in acrimony. When he’d finally admitted the truth fourteen years ago, Leonidas had taken it personally. He’d never forgiven him. But the truth had freed Leander even if the consequence had been to rip a piece of his soul off.
Nothing could come of the freedom that came with Kate knowing the truth. He’d known from the moment desire for her had almost doubled him over that it was a desire that was impossible. Days from marrying their mutual close friend, it had been easier to bear when he’d thought it a one-way desire.
His instincts that her feelings for him had shifted had been proved right. She did want him.
He should have left California when he first felt that shift.
Too late now.
What they felt for each other couldn’t go anywhere.
His guts twisted to know he’d never cared if his desire could go anywhere before. Indiscriminate in his affairs, one night of pleasure, one week or one month, it had all been the same to him.
But those women had not been Kate.
Kate held the tissues now soaked in blood to her knee and swallowed hard when Leander reappeared. She was still reeling from the passionate kiss they’d shared and all the feelings that had erupted in her from it, still reeling from what he’d said to her, hardly daring to believe what he’d meant by it, terrified to even contemplate the implications.
He’d taken his jacket off. Her heart clenched to see smears of her blood on his soaked shirt. Something lower and deeper within her clenched to notice how his shirt had become translucent.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve bled over your rug,’ she whispered. She had a vague awareness the rug would have cost far more than she’d received for the battered car she’d sold the day before she’d flown out to Greece.
‘It will clean,’ he said, handing her a towel. ‘For your hair,’ he explained before pulling a footrest next to the side of her injured leg and sitting on it. ‘Let me take care of your injury.’ He gave a fleeting smile. ‘No salt, I promise.’
Her heart expanded and caught in her throat. ‘Leander...’
‘Let me tend to your wound and then we can talk. Okay?’
Trying her hardest to keep herself together, Kate gazed into Leander’s steady dark eyes and gave a short nod. Desperately needing to lighten the mood, she said. ‘If it gets infected I’ll have to sue you. I might sue anyway, seeing as it was your stupid step I lost my footing on.’
Deadpan, he answered, ‘I’ll give you my lawyer’s details, now put your leg on my lap.’
Holding her breath, Kate lifted her leg and laid her calf on his thigh.
‘Dry your hair,’ he chided as he rummaged through the first aid kit.
She managed a half-smile and patted the towel to her hair. How, she wondered dazedly, was it possible for desire to spring from nothing to everything in the blink of an eye? When Leander shifted the footstool closer to her so more of her thigh lay on his lap, she concentrated harder on holding her breath and prayed he couldn’t hear the thundering of her heart.
Oh, what did it matter? He already knew. Her ardent response to his kiss had given her feelings away.
What his own feelings were, she hardly dared to imagine.
Detaching from his mind that it was Kate’s leg draped over his thighs and that the texture of her skin was even softer than he’d dreamed, Leander dropped the bloodied tissues stemming the wound on the rug and studied the gash on the base of her knee. It was already clotting, drying blood streaked all down the calf and ankle.
He dabbed at the wound with antiseptic and cleaned the skin around it, working as gently as he could. ‘I think this needs butterfly stitches or you’ll end up with a nasty scar.’
She gave a half-hearted shrug. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m bound to end my career covered in them.’
Removing the backing off a large skin coloured plaster, he distracted himself further from the torture of touching Kate’s skin by asking, ‘Have you ever been bitten by a patient?’
‘Not yet but it’s bound to happen one day.’
‘Let’s hope it’s not by one of those other wild creatures you mentioned.’
Although Kate was shortly to join a charity that cared for orphaned orangutans, the veterinary staff there also treated injured native wild animals as needed. She’d enthusiastically told him all about her upcoming move to South East Asia and what the job would entail at Helena’s prompting on her second night, when they’d been eating at a taverna on a neighbouring island. He’d been struck not only by her single-minded focus—Kate had spent her whole life working to reach this point—but by the light in her eyes and the animation in her voice. Theós, she’d been fascinating. He could have listened to her talk all night. He could have watched her talk all night.
He should have known he was in trouble then.
He wouldn’t have known how much damned trouble though.
The memory of Dimitri palming Kate’s stomach and leaning his torso into her back to dance with her with that drunken leer on his face smashed back into him. One of his closest friends. A friendship Leander would have killed if he’d acted on the violence of his thoughts.
Coming hot on the heels of being doubled over with desire just from watching her dance, that was the moment he’d known just how much trouble he was in.
‘I’m sure you’ll be hoping one of them bites my entire head off,’ she jested weakly.
It took everything he had to fight the swell of emotions rushing up his throat and spread the plaster over the wound.
She flinched when he pressed his palm down to secure it, only a reflex flinch, barely perceptible, but it broke something in him.
In an instant everything he’d been trying to tune out while tending to her injury, that this was Kate’s leg draped over him, that this was her skin he was touching and it was the smoothest, warmest, silkiest flesh in existence, that the taste on his tongue was the taste of her tongue...it all slammed into his senses, and in that instant his senses refilled with her. With Kate.
Heart suddenly pounding furiously, breaths suddenly shallow, Leander lifted his gaze to the beautiful, delicate pixie face with its delicate features and delicate little sticky-out ears. Everything about Kate was delicate, a physicality that couldn’t have contrasted more strongly with the vivacious substance contained within it.
Kate only had to walk into a room to light it up.
She only had to fix those incredible jade eyes on him to light him up.
Those eyes had lit him up from the very first moment they’d locked onto his, and they were locked on him now.
God help him but he’d hurt her. He’d knocked the light out of her eyes. He’d done that. Deliberately. And now he felt it, the full magnitude of it, as deeply as if he’d inflicted the wounds on himself, but even more than that, he felt the essence of Kate Hawkins feeding into the very fabric of his being.
Kate’s heart was thumping so hard she could hardly draw breath. The pain in her knee was entirely forgotten.
The look in Leander’s eyes...
It sucked all the air from her lungs.
She’d never seen anything like it before.
The emotion filling them was the antithesis of loathing.
Seeing that emotion...feeling it...
Everything fell into place, and suddenly she found herself clutching tightly to the towel and frantically shaking her head. ‘We can’t,’ she choked. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why the hell do you think I’ve been trying so hard to make you leave?’ he asked hoarsely.
Their gazes held for the longest time before a sharp pain sliced through her chest and she felt her entire being crumple.
This...
Oh, God, this was worse than believing he hated her. This...
With a heavy, sinking stomach, she realised that a part of her had sensed Leander’s feelings. Sensed them and ignored them with the same zeal that she’d ignored her own feelings. Refused to even acknowledge their existence.
She’d thought the dreams had been about her feelings but they’d been much more than that.
This had been there between them from the start and she hadn’t even known it, and now it was too late to wind the clock back to ignorance.
It hit her again. Leander didn’t hate her. He had feelings for her.
Fresh hot tears welling, Kate blinked them away. ‘Helena is like a sister to me.’
Hating to see the contortion of her face, Leander rubbed the back of his neck. ‘She’s like a sister to me too. There is nothing else between us.’
‘I know, but you’re married to her.’
‘I’m not.’
Her upset and frustration visibly grew. ‘Your brother made his vows and signed the certificate as you.’
‘I didn’t make those vows and Leo will never allow the certificate to be registered.’ This aspect, he was certain, was the most important point to get through to her. He’d seen the two women together, seen their closeness, knew that if Kate believed he was currently married to Helena even on a mere technical level then guilt at their fleeting kiss would eat her up.
‘How can you know that?’
‘Because I know him. He will leave it for me to register.’
She blinked rapidly and then breathed deeply through her nose and slid her leg off his thigh. Throat moving, she straightened, and when she next looked at him, it was beseechingly. ‘Leander, you have to get the marriage registered, for Helena’s sake. You know that.’ Her throat moved again. ‘And we need to pretend that nothing happened. Just forget about it.’
‘That’s impossible.’ Leander could no more pretend that he’d not had a taste of Kate’s sweet lips than he could pretend the earth didn’t revolve around the sun.
Her eyes pleaded with him.
‘Toothpaste cannot be squeezed back into its tube.’
She spluttered a tearful laugh. ‘That is a terrible analogy.’
‘But a truthful one.’
After the longest time she looked away from him and rubbed her eye with the palm of her hand. Her melodious voice laced with misery, she said, ‘I should go.’
‘I know. But in this weather...?’ Leander shook his head. It felt like a boulder had lodged itself in his chest. His efforts to force Kate from his home had finally worked but it was all too late. He’d treated her despicably for nothing, and he would have to live with it on his conscience for the rest of his life, just as he still lived with his betrayal of his brother. ‘Are you hungry?’
Her blonde eyebrows rose in surprise at the question and then quirked as if she couldn’t believe he’d been stupid enough to ask it.
‘We can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube but we can agree not to talk about it,’ he said gently. ‘I will get my chef to make us something to eat—’
Her eyebrows shot back up again. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’
‘I have staff on call at all times. I think we could both benefit from a shower and dry clothes, and then we can eat and talk about everything except...this...until the weather clears enough for you to fly home. What do you say?’
The pulse at the base of his jaw throbbed strongly as he waited for Kate’s answer.
The longing crushed Kate’s heart against her ribs, and as she soaked in the face of the man who’d woken up a side of herself she’d barely been aware lived inside her, it hit her again that Leander had feelings for her. Strong feelings.
His toothpaste analogy had been terrible, but it had also been true. They couldn’t pretend what had been revealed between them hadn’t been revealed, but if they didn’t speak about it then it could be squashed away and for a short while they could reset things and maybe even part ways with the spirit of friendship that had first bound them.
She took a deep breath. ‘I must really stink if you’re offering me the use of your shower.’
A glimmer of amusement passed between them and then Kate found herself laughing while simultaneously wiping a tear away.