A Greek Escape Read Online Free PDF

here with that infernal camera—even if she
had
seemed genuinely distressed when she’d leaped into that hot, angry tirade about her phone, her fridge and her supposedly broken-down car. But if his suspicions about her were right—and he had little reason to doubt that they were—then from the questions she was asking and her response to the answers he was giving he had to admit that she was one hell of a good actress.
    ‘I prefer to call it opting out,’ he stated laconically.
    ‘So…do you work?’ Kayla enquired.
    ‘When I need to.’ Which was twenty-four-seven a lot of the time, he thought grimly. If she was here intent on making a killing out of the Vassalio name, then she would know that already.
    And if she wasn’t…
    If she wasn’t, he thought, irritated, refusing to give any credence to that possibility, then she shouldn’t have inflicted herself upon him in the way she had.
    ‘And what do you do? For a living, I mean?’
    She was still treading cautiously, still playing the innocent.If she’d been trying for an Oscar, Leonidas thought, she would have won it hands-down.
    ‘I’m in construction.’
As you probably well know
, he tagged on silently.
    ‘A builder!’ Kayla interpreted, realising her assessment of him was right. He
was
a man who worked with his hands.
    ‘Loosely speaking.’ Deliberately Leonidas lobbed her own phrase back at her. Playing along with her whatever her game was, he thought with increasing annoyance. And suddenly he was fed-up with pussyfooting around.
    Slinging his plate onto the table, he stood up, thrusting his hands into his pockets, intimidation in his stance and every hard inch of him as he said grimly and with lethal softness, ‘OK, Kayla. This has gone far enough.’
    ‘What has?’
    He had to hand it to her. She looked and sounded perplexed. He might even have said shocked.
    ‘The charade is over, sweet girl.’
    ‘What charade?’ Kayla didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. ‘I don’t understand…’
    ‘Don’t you?’ He laughed rather harshly. ‘Do you think I don’t know what your little game is? Don’t know why you’re he re?’
    ‘No.’ She had leaped to her feet and stood facing him now with her hands on her hips, her eyes wide and contesting.‘You’ve obviously got me mixed up with somebody else! I don’t know who you think I am, but whoever it is I’m not the person you were expecting.’
    ‘I was hardly
expecting
anyone—least of all another blood-sucking female with her own self-motivated agenda! Unless you’re going to tell me you’ve come all this way by yourself to slap a petition on me as well!’
    ‘No, I haven’t!’ Kayla riposted, wondering what the hell he was talking about. ‘And whatever your problem is—whoeverit is you’ve come here to escape from—I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take it out on
me!
’
    She was gone before he could utter another word.

CHAPTER THREE
    I T WAS THE crash that woke her.
    Or had it been the rain and thunder? Kayla wondered, scrambling, terrified, out of bed. She had been tossing and turning in a kind of half-sleep for what seemed like hours, although it might only have been minutes since the storm began.
    Now, as she pulled open her bedroom door, the full force of the gale made her cry out when it almost blew her back into the room. In the darkness she could see an ominous shape lying diagonally across the landing and a gash in the sloping roof, which was now open to the wind and the driving rain.
    Kayla gasped as lightning ripped across the sky, so close that the almost instantaneous crash of thunder that followed seemed to rock the foundations of the house.
    Fumbling to turn on the light switch, she groaned when nothing happened.
    ‘Oh, great!’
    Finding the chair where she had folded the jeans and shirt she had travelled in two days ago, with trembling hands she hastily pulled them on over her flimsy pyjamas, and then groped around for her bag and the small torch