CHAPTER SIX
KATEFOLLOWEDLEANDER up the dark wood winding staircase and onto a magnificent mezzanine that overlooked a reception room with a marble fountain as its centrepiece.
He unlocked a door and opened it for her. ‘My main guestroom. It has its own bathroom. You don’t need instructions to work the shower—it is easy to use.’
‘What, even for a dumb blonde like me?’ she jested again, gripping the first aid kit he’d insisted she bring up with her in case the plaster came off in the shower. She needed to keep things light; anything to stop the tightness in her chest from loosening and for all the emotions she’d packed in it to come spilling out.
He stretched his neck and closed his eyes. ‘I am sorry for saying that. I never meant it.’
‘I know.’
His stare zoomed back on her. ‘Do you?’
She nodded and sighed. ‘I knew you were only saying it to get rid of me.’
He studied her a moment and nodded. ‘Help yourself to whatever you need. I will find a shirt or something for you to wear.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I think it’s the least I can do after the way I’ve treated you.’
Seeing him turn as if about to walk away, she impulsively said, ‘Leander, when the weather clears and it’s safe to fly...please go back to Greece. Leo was so angry and he seems to really hate Helena... I’m scared he’s going to blow everything up.’
His huge shoulders rose slowly, dark eyes locking back to hers. ‘He won’t.’
‘How can you be so certain?’
‘Because he’s my twin.’
‘You seem so sure of what he’ll do but you’ve barely spoken in years.’
‘He’s still my twin. I know him better than anyone. He will hate me and curse me but he will keep up the pretence until I return.’
‘But what if he’s discovered before then?’ she challenged softly. ‘The press will be itching to get that honeymoon shot of the bride and groom. One photo and everyone will know the wrong brother’s on the honeymoon.’
‘We are physically identical. No one will be able to tell the difference.’
‘I knew it wasn’t you the second we walked into the church.’
Her words punched into Leander’s chest and sent blood pounding into his head.
Breathing deeply through his nose, he said, ‘Our parents struggle to tell the difference between us.’
The first eighteen years of Leander’s life had been spent correcting people that they’d addressed the wrong twin. Fourteen years later and any unexpected visit to his family always began with their eyes narrowing to scrutinise which twin was standing before them. His parents always got it right but with his grandparents it went either way. He’d had a girlfriend a few years back, before Leo had cut him off completely, who’d bumped into Leo at a party and spent five minutes talking to him before realising it was the wrong twin, and only then because Leo corrected her. This was a woman Leander had been intimate with. To think that Kate could tell from just one look that it was him...
‘Leander, you’re identical but you’re not the same person,’ she said, oblivious to the effect her observation was having on him. ‘Your brother holds himself in an entirely different way to you—I knew it was the wrong twin without even seeing his face.’
For the second time in less than a minute it felt like Kate had winded him with her words, and he had to loosen his throat to say, ‘Then you will just have to trust me that you are an anomaly on this.’
Leander folded the dark grey shirt and navy sweater over the mezzanine railing opposite the guestroom door, and went straight back into his bedroom to use his own shower.
It took all his mental strength not to let his mind wander to Kate and the fact that she was, at that moment, likely to be naked, and as he pushed the image of her breasts away, it was replaced with the bewitching smile that had lit her face when he’d caught her kiss in his apartment that night. If she hadn’t then turned around and danced over to Helena, she would have seen him almost double over with the strength of the desire that had coursed through him.
That was the moment everything had changed for him.
Even if it hadn’t been Kate, the strength of his feelings would have caused him to back away.
Leander was inherently selfish, something his twin had thrown at him too many times over the years to keep count of. Even now, whenever he pictured Leonidas, it was never as the man he was today but as he’d been at eighteen when Leander had told him he was leaving to pursue his life without him, and the hurt and disbelief that had rung from his eyes before cold anger set in. The ramifications from that day still echoed. A combination of living life on his own terms and never wanting to cause such hurt to someone again meant Leander had long ago decided that single life was the life for him. Short-lived flings without any strings or emotional attachments. No mess. No drama. No broken hearts. Perfect.
Pursuing your fake fiancée’s maid of honour in the build-up to your sham wedding was low, even for him, and so when he’d met Kate there had been no thoughts of a potential fling. He’d been able to enjoy her company as one human to another, and her company had been fantastic. He’d never had long, intense conversations about absolute rubbish before and then in the next breath long, intense conversations about the world. Once desire had reared its ugly head...
Hours after his desire ignited he’d sat in his Athenian apartment’s kitchen listening to the silence only people who’d spent the night over-indulging could make when they finally crashed out, and known he must never be alone with her again.
As Leander had predicted, Kate’s plaster came off in the shower. After scrubbing every inch of her body in the most beautifully scented shower cream and washing her hair in equally beautiful shampoo, she wrapped herself in the huge, fluffy towel from the heated rail and put a fresh plaster on. Her skin still sang from when Leander had put the first one on.
She’d never known it was possible for skin to sing at another human’s touch.
The song her skin was singing now though, was a lament.
Her throat closed at the impossibility of her longing.
In less than a week she would be flying to Borneo.
She felt like a runner who’d spent their whole life racing a marathon and could finally see the finish line. The marathon had been hard fought, not just by herself but her support crew, namely her parents who’d worked all hours to pay for the tuition needed to help her achieve the scholarship and all the other things they’d done to support her. Then there were her brothers, always so bemused at having a ‘swot’ for a sister, alternating between teasing and indulgence as the mood took them but always so proud with each marathon mile she passed. And then there was Helena. All the late nights in their dorm room helping Kate revise for school exams, a constant source of emotional support and understanding throughout her university years... All these wonderful people who loved her and were invested in helping Kate realise her dreams.
To do anything to derail that dream’s realisation when she could almost touch the finish line was madness, and even if she did think the risk of letting something happen with Leander was worth the potential derailing, it didn’t change the fact that very soon he would be flying back to Helena.
Leander was showered and dressed and staring out of the glass wall at the howling wind and lashing rain that kept activating the night sensors when he heard the rustle of movement behind him.
His heart tightened and then expanded like a balloon.
His shirt fitted Kate like an oversized dress. Landing just below her knees, it only enhanced her slenderness. Her dark blonde hair was damp and swung gently over her shoulders. Even with the distance between them he could smell the perfume of her shower and he knew that if he were to close his eyes and inhale deeply he’d be able to breathe in the clean heat of her skin.
He had to work hard to stop his mind fully registering that beneath it, she was likely naked.
For the longest time neither of them spoke.
‘How’s your knee?’
She held her hands out and pulled her shoulders in. ‘I found some butterfly stitches in the kit to use on it. Shame you haven’t got any superglue.’
He grinned. Kate’s humour had made him laugh from the outset and to hear it now eased a little of the tension that had built back in him since they’d parted for their separate showers. ‘Do you need painkillers?’
‘It doesn’t hurt that badly.’ In comparison to the pain in Kate’s heart, her knee didn’t hurt at all. ‘It’s almost fully clotted. Can I smell pancakes?’
‘Your sense of smell is incredible. Everything’s set up in the dining room.’
‘Ooh, am I allowed in there now?’ she asked with a grin.
Appreciating the effort it must be costing her to make it appear that she didn’t have a care in the world, he responded in kind, waving an arm expansively. ‘I have unlocked all the doors. Consider yourself free to go where ever you please.’
Kate gave a mock curtsey. ‘If I’d known all it would take for you to be nice to me was to cut my knee open, I’d have tripped on the pathway sooner.’
The dining room was as incredible as the main living area, with a glass wall that overlooked the rear—or was it the front?—of the mansion. It being pitch black outside meant any view was a secret waiting to be discovered. She would not allow herself to wish that the night and its accompanying storm lasted long enough for her to see it.
‘What time is it?’ she asked, taking the seat Leander pulled out for her.
‘Just turned three.’
‘Is that all?’ she marvelled. She was determined to maintain a cheerful front. There had been enough bitterness between them these last two days to last her a lifetime and now she wanted it cleansed. ‘I was sure it must be close to sunrise.’ She wriggled her chair closer to the table. ‘I’ve definitely lost all sense of time.’ Which reminded her, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a phone charger I can borrow, have you? My battery’s dead.’
‘Of course. I’ll get one brought in for you.’
No sooner had he answered than two members of staff descended with a mound of American pancakes and bacon and a copper briki pot of coffee. If they were put out at having to work at this godforsaken time, they didn’t show it. Still, Kate reminded herself, they did work for Leander, a man who played as hard as he worked. A man who had every intention of always playing hard.
Although Kate had gone nearly two days without food, her stomach felt so tight that she doubted she’d be able to manage more than one pancake, but a single bite was enough to get her tastebuds going.
‘I’m sorry for trying to starve you,’ Leander said, watching with a fist around his heart as she poured maple syrup over a third pancake.
She smiled. ‘You would never have beaten me that way.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘And you know that how?’
‘I spent five years as a hungry student, remember?’
‘Even so, it was cruel of me.’ The more he reflected on his behaviour these past two days, the more self-loathing curdled in his guts. Leander knew he was selfish and arrogant but he’d never known he was capable of cruelty. It was a side to himself that sickened him.
‘I invaded your home uninvited. You were under no obligation to provide me with anything.’ The tiniest sparkle glittered in her eyes. ‘The moussaka was a masterstroke.’
He couldn’t keep the carefree act up any more. ‘No. It was cruel. I wish I could take it back.’
‘You were doing what you thought you had to do and...’ She shook her head. ‘At least now when we say goodbye it will be as the friends we were before.’ Her forehead creased and with it her own carefree projection disappeared. ‘We were friends, weren’t we?’
‘We can never go back to that now, Kate.’
‘I know... But we were friends, weren’t we? I didn’t imagine it, did I?’
The yearning to reach his hand across the table to her was so strong he fisted it and held it to his stomach. ‘No. You didn’t imagine it.’
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose, then picked her fork back up to stab at her pancake.
After she’d eaten a little more, she looked back at him. ‘What you said earlier... I get why you’re confident Leo will pretend to be you until you go back, but how do you know he won’t register the marriage certificate?’
Leander pushed his plate aside and considered his answer. ‘He has always been straight down the line, if you know what I mean. His conscience will not allow a falsely signed document to be registered. He will leave that for me to do.’
Another tiny sparkle glittered. ‘Is that because you don’t have a conscience?’
He gave a half-smile. ‘Because he believes I don’t.’
She ate one more bite of her pancake and pushed her own plate aside. ‘What happened between you? Helena told me it goes back years but I honestly don’t understand how two people formed from the same egg can be estranged as you two are.’
He poured himself another coffee and topped Kate’s up too, remembering her first breakfast on his island when he’d poured her a cup of it. The face she’d pulled at the taste had amused him and made Helena snort with laughter. Greek coffee was, he’d learned in his thirty-two years on this earth, an acquired taste. Four breakfasts later and Kate had drunk it like a native.
‘Before I answer that, answer something for me.’ It was a question that kept repeating itself in his mind because of the sheer impossibility of it. ‘Could you really tell it was Leo waiting at the altar and not me?’
Her eyes widened in disbelief. ‘Could I tell? Honestly, I couldn’t believe no one else noticed. I watched them exchange their vows fully expecting someone to jump up and point out the wrong brother was standing there. It was the most surreal experience of my life but no one else noticed. I’m pretty sure even your parents didn’t clock that it was Leo until the vows were done.’
‘But you saw it?’ Leander pressed.
‘I didn’t even think about it.’ Her slender shoulders rose and she added a simple, ‘It wasn’t you.’
For a moment it felt like he’d fallen into a version of suspended animation where the only sound was the blood pounding in his ears.
Clearing his throat, he said, ‘People have never been able to tell us apart. They think we are the same person.’
The face she pulled at this made him smile properly for the first time in days.
‘We are physically identical but our personalities have always been very different,’ he confirmed drily. ‘Leo was always very serious, very straight down the line, as I said.’ Still staring intently at her, he took a sip of his coffee. ‘You know why I have never wanted to marry or be tied down with a partner?’
Her pretty dark blonde eyebrows drew together.
‘It’s because I spent eighteen years married to my brother and our marriage ended with acrimony. I hurt him very badly.’ For reasons he couldn’t begin to decipher, it felt imperative that he explain himself, something he’d never needed to do before. ‘People treated us as if we were one entity with the same thoughts and opinions. It frustrated both of us, especially in our teenage years. Leo frustrated me. He still does. He is so straight, never willing to take risks. He was always the voice of reason.’
‘He was your conscience?’
‘In a way, yes. He shackled me but his opinion mattered more to me than anyone’s.’ He shook his head with a grimace. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘It sounds it,’ she said softly.
‘We were close growing up.’ It had only been since hearing Leo’s voice that he’d remembered just how close they’d been. All the fun they’d had. How they could hold conversations without even having to speak. ‘We knew for a long time that when we turned eighteen and finished school, we could either join the family business and work our way through the ranks until we gained the experience needed to take over, or we could take a cash sum from our parents and make our own way in the world. Leo stayed and I took the cash.’
‘And that caused the estrangement?’
‘It’s what started it.’
‘Because you chose to go?’
‘Because I’d let him believe I would stay.’
Understanding flared. ‘Ah.’
The muscles of his neck tightening as he related for the first time the day he’d put a knife to all their plans, Leander kneaded at them. ‘I told him I was taking the cash the day we finished our education. A week later I left home to make my own way in the world.’
‘He felt that you’d abandoned him?’ she guessed.
He grimaced, gut curdling with more self-loathing. ‘Yes. I fed us both all the excuses in the world but that is what it came down to. I love my brother, he’s a part of me, but at the time I just wanted to be Leander first rather than one of the Liassidis twins, and recognised in my own right. I wanted to make my own way, to get out there and see the world. I should have been honest from the start but I got caught up in all his plans for our future with Liassidis Shipping and only found the courage to tell him after I’d booked my flight to America.’ He kneaded harder at his neck. ‘Leo was furious.’ He gazed into the jade eyes bruised with lack of sleep and admitted for the first time, ‘And hurt. It would have been better if I had given him the knife to stab into his own back.’ And stab himself too.
Hurting Leonidas had felt like cutting his own artery. Leander would never change the path he’d taken but if he could go back and find the courage to tell Leo sooner so he could prepare himself for the separation, he would do it in a heartbeat.
She winced but didn’t say anything.
‘But we are identical twins. The bond between us can never be fully broken and for many years we both made the effort to get past my betrayal—and it was a betrayal—and then all the crap happened with the business... Do you know about that? When Liassidis Shipping came close to going under?’
‘Helena told me a little about it,’ Kate said, thinking hard through the exhaustion creeping through her veins that zero sleep and a full stomach had set off. She knew Helena’s parents had been business partners of a sort—the details were currently hazy in her mind—with Leander and Leo’s parents, and that after Helena’s father died her mother had done something or other with her share that had put the business in jeopardy. ‘But it was all resolved, wasn’t it?’
‘It was resolved and the business is thriving now,’ he agreed, ‘but Leo has never forgiven me for not going home and helping to resolve it, and until I called him Saturday morning we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in five years.’
Although Kate knew the Liassidis twins were estranged, this was the first time she’d really contemplated what the estrangement meant. Her brothers infuriated her at times—and she no doubt infuriated them—and she’d seen little of them during her university years, but she couldn’t imagine cutting them out of her life altogether.
She smothered a yawn and finished her coffee, hoping another shot of caffeine would help fight the encroaching sleepiness. This was all the time she would ever have left with Leander and she didn’t want a second of it lost in the fog of exhaustion. ‘Don’t you miss him?’
His jaw tightened, a pulse throbbing below his ear. ‘In the years after I left home we only saw each other sporadically. We were already accustomed to our lives being separate.’
Not a direct answer, she noted, her heart twisting for him being unable to admit what to Kate was obvious. Instead of pressing it, she tried another tack. ‘Why didn’t you go home when the business was in trouble?’
‘Because he didn’t want me there.’
‘But you just said he hasn’t forgiven you for not being there,’ she pointed out, confused.
‘He told me that he didn’t want me there and that he would deal with it. I took him at his word—his brain is laser sharp. He can solve a problem before anyone else has identified that there even is a problem. My field is technology, not shipping. I had nothing practical to offer apart from my cash and he made it very clear that he didn’t want that either.’
She smothered another yawn and blinked hard to refresh her gritty eyes. ‘Do you think he was hoping you’d ignore his order to stay away and go home anyway?’
‘Whatever I did, I was damned in his eyes. I think he was waiting for the excuse to justify to himself severing the final ties between us. Up to then, it had been me who’d made all the effort to keep our relationship going but after that he stopped answering my calls or responding to my messages.’
‘Maybe it was support of an emotional kind he wanted from you, the kind that you don’t always know you need until you receive it or miss until you don’t get it,’ she suggested, thinking of all the times she’d been too frazzled with exams to call her parents and let them know she was alive and them turning up at her digs with bags of food that required no greater preparation than sticking in the microwave. They’d understood what she needed in those times better than she had.
Leander gave a guttural laugh. ‘Emotional support? I thought you’d met my brother.’
‘He’s like an ice box but he’s still human,’ she said quietly. She felt wretched for both brothers. She’d always been prepared to dislike Leo after the way Helena had spoken about him but now she felt a huge pang of sympathy for both men, one too stubborn to tell his brother that he needed him, the other too stubborn to see his brother needed him.
A yawn sneaked up on her which she couldn’t suppress and which she only just managed to cover with the back of her hand. She blinked hard again at the gritty tiredness in her eyes. ‘Excuse me.’
The dark eyes that had barely left her face the entire conversation softened. ‘You’re exhausted.’
She tried to inject some lightness back. ‘Well, it’s almost morning and I didn’t get much sleep last night.’
His wince of self-recrimination showed her attempted lightness hadn’t landed. ‘I’m sorry for what I put you through. A thousand times sorry. It was unforgivable of me.’
‘It’s already forgiven.’
He held her stare for the longest time before exhaling. ‘That’s more than I deserve.’
‘Stop it. You did what you had to do. If I’d understood my own feelings sooner then—’ She cut herself off before she could say words that could never be taken back, and gave a frustrated, helpless shrug. ‘Toothpaste.’
He shook his head. ‘If it’s any consolation, I hardly slept either.’ Then he added with a short laugh, ‘Toothpaste.’
Her own short laugh was interrupted by a wide yawn she only just managed to raise her hand to cover.
Leander didn’t know if it was the exhaustion etched on Kate’s face that did it or the valiant way she was trying to fight it, but his heart turned over. ‘You should sleep.’
She shook her head vehemently. ‘I’ll sleep on the plane...’ Another enormous yawn overcame her.
Before he could stop to think, he pushed his chair back and got to his feet. ‘You need sleep, Kate. It might be hours until it’s safe to fly. Get some proper sleep in a proper bed, if not for your sake then for mine—let me absolve some of my guilt.’