CHAPTER TWELVE
LEANDERFOUNDA channel showing the press conference—a whole host of European channels had decided to cut their planned broadcasts short to televise it live—and tried not to look at the sofa Kate had spent her first two nights under his roof sleeping on.
While the Greek presenter gave an enthusiastic and highly speculative account of the ‘Liassidis Twin Swap’, Leander looked again at the message that had pinged in a short while ago.
The press know everything. Helena is going to hold a press conference and confirm the truth. Not sure when but very soon. Your husband services are no longer required. She says it’s best you don’t go back yet.
He thought back to that night in Athens. He’d insisted Kate store his number on her phone when they’d set off to the nightclub, just in case she became separated from the rest of them.
He cradled his head. He was still reeling from everything that had happened since the early hours. Leo’s call had sent him spinning.
Theós, he’d never expected that. Leo calling. An unexpected outpouring Leander had been unprepared for.
He still couldn’t get his head around it.
Strangely, there had been nothing satisfying in hearing his proud brother admit that he’d been wrong to behave the way he had. Nothing at all. Not when he had Kate’s accusations about his part in their ongoing estrangement still ringing in his ears.
‘Leo,’ he’d said when his usually uncommunicative brother had paused for breath. ‘Believe me, I appreciate what you’re saying but right now isn’t a good time for me. I’m sorry for dragging you into this mess and please, tell Helena that I’m sorry for letting her down.’
The silence that had followed this had been stark, reminding him that Leo had never enjoyed the easy friendship Leander had always shared with Helena. Not since Helena hit adolescence, in any case. Before then, Helena had followed them both around like a little puppy. That had been in the days when the Liassidis twins had been closer than borlotti beans from the same pod.
The only person he’d ever experienced a closeness like that with was Kate, who at that point would have been high in the air, flying away from him.
The blood whooshing in his head had increased to a roar, and he’d had to breathe deeply to cut through the silence and say, ‘I need to go. When I come home, we’ll talk properly. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ Leo had agreed slowly. ‘I would like that.’
He’d swallowed a sharp pang. ‘So would I.’
Now, minutes—or was it hours?—since that conversation and the magnitude of it had finally penetrated.
Leo had called him. Leo had reached out for the first time in five years. More than that, he’d reached across the divide created fourteen years ago, truly reached out. As a brother. As a twin. As the other half of his coin.
What had happened to his brother to make him so reflective and actually reach out and say all he’d said? Something had happened. It must have done.
So lost was he in trying to remember everything his twin had said to him that he almost missed the start of the press conference. One look at Helena’s drawn face filling the screen and suddenly it became clear to him what had happened to his brother and explained the stark silence that had followed Leander’s first mention of Helena’s name.
Helena had happened to him.
Just like Kate had happened to Leander.
Helena’s statement was short but heartfelt, taking full responsibility for the Liassidis twins’ deception. When she’d finished and the audience was invited to ask questions, Leander could watch no more and turned the television off.
He rubbed the back of his neck and expelled a long breath.
It wasn’t fair for Helena to take all the blame. Whatever had subsequently happened between Leo and Helena, Leo had been an unwilling party in the whole affair. Leander was the one who’d enthusiastically agreed to the deception. The blame for the whole sorry situation lay with him too.
Leander carried his surfboard across the sand and was knee-deep in the ocean before setting it down and lying on it. The pull was strong and he paddled out with spray drenching him and his board rising and falling sharply with the motion. The latent violence tugging beneath him in that early morning surf didn’t faze him. He welcomed it. He needed to feel something.
He’d been numb since he’d released a written statement shortly after watching Helena’s press conference. He’d kept the statement itself short.
Helena is an honourable woman who was doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. I make no excuse for my own part in the deception. Leonidas is my twin and his actions were those of a brother protecting a brother. I request that people respect his and Helena’s privacy, and also the privacy of Kate Hawkins who is blameless in all of this.
He knew from his parents, who’d been unable to conceal their bewilderment at the situation, that the media frenzy hadn’t abated in Greece, but his security staff had been able to assure him that Kate had arrived in Borneo without any paparazzi following her.
His Californian home was still surrounded by them. He was too numb to care.
Trying to block his thoughts off, he chased a wave that surfed him back onto the beach and then paddled back out again. The wind was picking up. The size of the waves was increasing. Adrenaline was bound to start pumping soon.
How was she getting on? His discreet calls had revealed only that she’d made it to the remote orangutan orphanage safely and without being followed. He had no way of knowing how she was settling in. If she was pleased with her accommodation. How she was finding the food. How she was finding her colleagues. How she was finding her orange orphans. How she was finding the weather.
He shook water off his face and the image of Kate’s face from his retinas. He was here to surf, not to think about the woman whose heart he’d broken.
He seemed to have made it a habit to break the hearts of the people who loved him the most. And Kate did love him. Loved him enough to give up her dreams for him.
His parents loved him too. He’d broken their hearts, not by refusing to join the family business but by moving continents. His mother had understood his reasons but that didn’t mitigate the hurt he’d caused by leaving so suddenly and then expecting her to psychically know he was safe and well rather than checking in more than once a week to keep her worries for him to a minimum.
A larger wave was swelling, and he chased it. Judging when the time was right, he manoeuvred his feet onto the board and stood up, spreading his body weight to keep himself balanced.
As he rode the wave, he experienced a tiny shot of adrenaline but when the ride was over, his heart was barely pumping harder than it did at rest.
He let the swell carry him back out.
Leo loved him too and, until three days ago, Leo was the one he’d hurt the most. The price of Leander’s freedom had been his brother’s heart. And his own heart too.
For fourteen years he’d been the Leander he’d wanted to be. Fourteen years of living his life for his own pleasure, on his own terms, not having to consider anyone else’s opinions or needs. They’d been good years in which he’d accumulated unimaginable wealth. And all to prove a point, not to Leo but to himself. To prove to himself that he didn’t need Leo.
Just as Kate had intuited.
But all to prove to himself too that he didn’t need Leo and that he didn’t miss him when the truth was he’d missed him every minute of every day. When the truth was that he did need him.
Spotting a wave forming further out but just within his reach and paddling furiously towards it, he realised the numbness had gone. Realised it because he was suddenly acutely aware that the absence, which Leo’s olive branch should have healed, had deepened into a pulsating open wound and, with it, Kate’s devastated face when he’d told her to forget about him flashed before him.
The adrenaline he’d been seeking pumped hard, but it was the wrong adrenaline and at the moment he realised he’d mistimed his chase of the forming wave and instead of being on its open shoulder was in the impact zone, he saw another picture of Kate, in his Athens apartment, holding a cocktail and waving a joyful arm in the air as she sang along loudly and badly and gloriously to the music playing.
His last thought when the lip of the giant wave tipped over and slammed into him was that it had been the moment he’d fallen in love with her.
Dark eyes opened and locked onto Kate’s face. She stroked the dear little head. ‘You okay, little one?’ she murmured.
Fingers so much like her own reached up for her.
‘Just a minute longer,’ she told her new charge, who’d been given the name of Mari. Mari was a two-year-old orphan who’d arrived at the orphanage the day before, three weeks after Kate’s arrival. Her history was a blank canvas, the assumption being that she’d been traded as a pet and then abandoned. That was the theory seeing as she’d been found in a box on a busy street in Kota Kinabalu, a coastal city surrounded by rainforest. Mari’s guardian angel had reached out to Kate’s charity, who’d swung straight into action. Within days she’d arrived at the sanctuary that would nurture her and teach her all the skills needed to be let out in the rainforest proper when she became full grown. At some point the poor mite had been bitten, likely by a stray dog, and infection had set in. Kate and her team had sedated her so she could clean the infection and given her a carefully measured dose of antibiotic. Just like with human children, orangutan infants had marvellous powers of recovery and she was confident that Mari would soon be playing in the nursery with all the other infants.
Once Mari’s appointed carer had carried her to the special recovery room where she would be watched continuously to ensure she didn’t rip off her bandage, Kate removed her mask, helped clear up, scrubbed her hands, then set off to do her final check of the day on her other inpatients, who currently ranged in age from six months to six years. Once she was satisfied that all was well, she headed outside to where the juniors were being led back from the rainforest canopy and a day of being taught how to climb trees, forage for ants and the like, and herded into their own special clearing filled with climbing and swinging equipment. Smiling broadly at Aishah, one of the carers, who currently had one of her charges clinging to her leg rather than walk himself, Kate waved flies and mosquitoes off her face and walked over to the accommodation block.
It was only once the sights and sounds—and smells, they were unavoidable—of the orphanage had faded that her own smile faded and her mood sank.
Being around the cheeky, irrepressible orangutans always lifted her spirits. Since Kate’s quarantine had ended and she’d been allowed to start work properly, she’d worked her long shifts with a smile and gratitude. In her short time there, she’d been embraced as one of the team. If melancholy grabbed her, one look at the infants playing was enough to erase it.
Every step away from the sanctuary was like a slowly deflating puncture until she reached her tiny studio apartment and her mood would be completely flat.
Other than dining in the staff canteen—the staff apartments contained only a fridge and a microwave—she had no plans for the evening. No video calls with her family. No video call with Helena.
It still made her chest go cold to remember getting off the plane in the humid Borneo heat to a call from Helena where her friend had tentatively told her about Leander’s near-death experience while surfing. She’d quickly reassured her that he was recovering well with nothing more serious than a bad concussion from where his board had hit his head. It had been his good fortune that local surfers he was friendly with had seen him in the ocean and had been paddling out to join him. They’d seen immediately that he was in trouble and rescued him.
The minute that call had ended, Kate had brought up all the food she’d eaten on the plane and then physically shook for three hours.
In all their video calls since, Kate had refused outright to discuss Leander. She couldn’t even bear to hear his name. Her family were forbidden from mentioning him too, or talking about Greece or California.
That evening, she had nothing to distract her from thinking about him.
She didn’t want to think about him. She wasn’t a masochist.
And she didn’t want to look at the photos she’d taken of him during that wonderful week in Greece, before he’d gone cold on her. Despite knowing how unhealthy it was, the first thing she did once she’d trudged up the wooden steps and stepped into her apartment was curl up on the decades-old sofa and bring the pictures up.
It was a pattern she’d followed every working day since her arrival.
It didn’t matter how much her head told her to follow Leander’s advice and forget about him, her heart refused to let go. That was just a sad fact. As another sad fact of her life had been that to get the grades she’d needed meant working harder than everyone else, she knew the only way for her heart to let go and reach acceptance that she would never see him again was to work hard at it.
After scrolling blindly backwards and forwards through pictures of his gorgeous face for a good twenty minutes, she took a deep breath and straightened herself.
It was time.
She would never forget him if she had these photos as a constant reminder.
She brought the first picture up, a selfie of Kate, Helena and Leander leaning against the car he’d collected her from the airport in. Delete.
The next photo was another selfie. The three of them around the Liassidis family swimming pool. Delete.
The next was just Leander. He was walking towards Kate carrying a pitcher of sangria that she’d cheekily requested. The camera had captured the magnificence of his body and that devastating smile. Delete.
One by one, all the images of the man who’d turned his back on her love were erased. By the time she’d finished, the screen of her phone was soaked with tears and her heart was shredded.
It was a long time before she was able to bring herself to head to the canteen for her first meal of the day. Because that was something else she needed to work at. Eating. Her work clothes were already loose. She didn’t have enough body fat on her to lose any more weight. She would force her appetite to come out of hibernation.
And she would let go of Leander.
Leander had travelled all over the world. He’d climbed mountains, skied mountains and trekked the Gobi Desert. Those were just the things he remembered off the top of his head. Even with the things that didn’t immediately spring to mind, he had never been in an environment like this. Never felt the humidity actually soak into his skin. When they reached a huge clearing at the edge of the rainforest and he got out of the truck that had collected him from the airport, the noises assaulted his ears.
A tiny, formidable-looking woman with salt-and-pepper hair steamed over to him.
‘Mr Liassidis?’ she said in perfect English that contained only the trace of an accent and not the slightest trace of warmth.
‘Call me Leander,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘You must be Yuna.’ The woman who ran the orphanage.
She ignored his hand. ‘That’s me. Your documents.’
Prepared, he handed everything over. He would have been here weeks sooner if the concussion from his mistimed surf and then bureaucracy, not from the Malaysian government but the charity itself, hadn’t held him up. This orphanage was too precious for them to risk allowing shortcuts of any kind. Only a sizeable donation had got the trustees onside. Yuna had been vocal in her resentment of his special treatment. If Leander wanted to see a member of her staff, then he should make private arrangements to meet at the house in a local town the staff used on their weekends off. As she’d then refused to tell him when Kate’s weekend off was, he’d gone through every expected hoop to get this far.
Unhappily satisfied all was in order, she started walking. ‘Remember, you must not enter any building our charges are in.’
Even though the sun was falling, there were plenty of workers around, all going about their business, and he followed Yuna past buildings of varying sizes that all buzzed with life and activity. If he wasn’t feeling so sick with nerves, he’d find it fascinating.
The orphanage’s buildings behind them, they followed a narrow path until they reached what looked like a low, wide temple.
‘Wait here,’ Yuna commanded. ‘I shall see if she wants to see you.’
Leander clamped his lips together and gave a short nod. That had been one of Yuna’s many conditions. If Kate refused to see him, he would be escorted straight back to the truck.
Yuna disappeared around the side of the building and returned tight-faced.
His heart plunged. ‘She won’t see me?’
She shook her head. ‘No, she wasn’t in.’
The relief almost knocked him off his feet.
‘She must be eating. Come.’ And she set off again.