A Greek Escape by Elizabeth Power Page A

encroaching on the narrow path, thriving in the rough terrain.
    He had had an exacting morning, sorting out a problem that had arisen back in his London office—a case of divided opinion between a couple of members of his board, which his second-in-command had apologised for bringing to his attention.
    They said it was tough at the top, he reminded himselfwith a grimace. And they could say it again, because no matter how much he needed to escape the rigours of the office for a while, he still needed to keep his finger on the pulsing heart of his business.
    Shopping malls, leisure complexes and housing developments didn’t build themselves, and after the flak he had taken from the press over the neglect of local residents with last year’s bitter fiasco he needed to ensure that no loopholes were left for mercenary lawyers and unprincipled members of his team to make unscrupulous deals over.
    Being labelled ‘ruthless’, ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘a profiteer’ by the media wasn’t something he wanted repeated any more than he wanted further episodes like the one with his publicity-hungry bed-partner Esmeralda Leigh. He had a reputation to uphold—one that he valued—both in his corporate and his private life, and he would protect and defend it with every shred of his power and his unwavering principles. But he hadn’t got where he was today without treading a path that had made him tough, hard-nosed and uncompromising, and he had no intention of wavering from that path. Of allowing himself or anyone else to imagine for one moment that he was going soft. Not even this infernally beautiful girl…
    Hearing her breath coming shallowly some way behind him, he stopped and waited for her to catch up. She was clutching her bottle of sunscreen lotion, the bulky camera dangled around her neck, and with her white leggings, her tunic top and that huge floppy hat she looked like an overgrown child who had just raided her great-grandmother’s attic. He was happy to notice—for his own sake—that her top had nearly dried.
    ‘Here. Let me carry that.’ He could see her cheeks were flushed and that she was finding it a struggle keeping up with him, and he held out his hand for the camera, which she happily relinquished. Silently he extended his other hand.
    Realising his intention, Kayla hesitated briefly, and saw a mocking smile touch his sensational mouth.
    ‘It’s all right. It doesn’t constitute a tacit agreement to let me into your bed,’ he advised her dryly.
    Of course it didn’t, she thought. But an impulse of something so powerfully electric seemed to pass between them when she took his hand that it certainly felt like it.
    ‘Thanks,’ she uttered tremulously, hoping that he would think it was the uphill climb in the heat over the rough ground that was making her sound so breathless. Not that every cell was leaping in response to her physical awareness of him just as it had when he had kissed her down there on the beach.
    ‘Where did you learn to speak English so proficiently?’ she asked, needing to say something—although she
was
genuinely interested to know.
    ‘When I work, I work mainly in the UK,’ he informed her. ‘And my grandmother was English, so I had a head start while I was still knee-high to a cricket.’
    ‘Grasshopper.’
    ‘What?’ The way he was looking down at her, with such charismatically dark eyes, sent a sensually charged little tingle along Kayla’s spine.
    ‘It’s knee-high to a grasshopper,’ she corrected him, contemplating how well the backdrop of the rugged coast and the meandering hillsides served to strengthen the ruggedness of this man who had been born part of them. But she’d picked up on what he’d just said about
when
he worked. So his employment definitely wasn’t regular, she thought, reminded of the recent slump in the building trade and how difficult it had made things for a lot of its workers. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen to ‘opt out’, as he’d