“No!” Andreas sat upright. “No, they never lied to you. They wanted the best for you; there was no deception on their part. But I had no choice in what had to be done.”
“But none of it makes sense,” Kizzy replied. “All that money for a bankrupt business.”
“It was my mother’s dying wish.”
Kizzy’s brow wrinkled with confusion. “Your mother?”
Andreas sighed deeply. “The terms of her will were crystal clear. I was to buy Timi’s for five million pounds and then sell it to developers on the understanding that it would be demolished and the land used for housing or local community use.”
“They paid you five million pounds for it?”
“Of course not! There was a massive loss but, as was Mama’s plan, Theo and Ana were suddenly very wealthy without realizing that they’d been left a legacy in her will.” He shot her a wry look. “They would have viewed it as charity otherwise and given the whole lot away, but since they believed it to be a legitimate bit of good fortune on the property dealing front, they were delighted to sell to me.”
“You deceived them.”
“I had no choice. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have fulfilled my mother’s last wishes—she wanted to thank them in a practical way, had wanted to for years, but knew their foolish pride too well. Her will insisted the place be demolished so they didn’t get any stupid ideas about returning. She said they needed to spend their last years in the sun but never would if left to their own devices. They were never to know the truth about the transaction. So now they never have to worry about money again.”
“But you have to worry about keeping it all a secret.”
“Do I need to worry, Kizzy?” A sudden weariness washed over him. “It’s only us and her solicitor who know about all this.”
“No need.” She rubbed both hands up and down her arms as if she was cold. “I knew they wouldn’t have abandoned me. I knew it.”
Andreas studied her small, hunched frame and realized that he had restored a little of Kizzy’s faith in the world. The Antonideses were the closest thing she had left to a family and even though they were many miles away, she at least had the comfort of knowing that she was still cared about. But his heart felt colder when he realized how inadequate that was for a woman whose unhappy early life experience had left her confidence in tatters.
“They can’t stop being Good Samaritans. They’ve always been that way—it’s how they met my mother and she could never forget their kindness.”
“What happened?”
“Mum was a very spoiled little rich girl—an heiress to a cosmetics empire with too much money for her own good. She got into a vicious fight over a man and needed a hiding place until all the media attention died down. The Antonideses were related to her parents’ housekeeper. They had a quiet little place in Chalcidice and took her in for a year or two to give her time for the scars on her face to heal. She could never thank them enough for that time—she said it saved her life.”
He shrugged and looked suddenly vacant. “Damn shame she spoiled it all by marrying my father.”
He then shifted his large body quickly to the edge of the bed and grabbed one of the enormous towels that had been hurled from the bed onto the floor in the heat of their passion.
“You must be hungry by now,” he said quickly and wrapped the towel around his hips without turning to look at her. “I’ll leave you to freshen up and see you on the terrace when you’re ready. No rush, take your time.”
Kizzy watched him march out of the room with dismay, a cold wave of confusion crashing over her before the leaden thud of rejection landed in the pit of her stomach.
For a small period of time she had been deluded enough to think there had been a meaningful connection between them. Those few moments of intense emotional revelation had been so heart-rending and difficult to bear, but he had listened and held her as she forced out the words and told him things that no one else alive had ever heard. Talking to him like that, naked and warm in the intimacy of the bed, and then listening to him giving his own secrets back had felt like peeling away layers of tissue paper to uncover something beautiful, a gift, a treasure…
Andreas Lazarides hadn’t been able to get out of her bedroom quickly enough. It was obvious now; the pillow talk was simply his way of being polite before making his escape, no doubt bothered both by her revelations and by her inexperience. He didn’t intend to spend the weekend with an inexperienced virgin from the wrong side of the tracks. This wasn’t what he’d bargained for. She wasn’t what he’d had in mind for his island retreat and now she was a problem.
Sickened and humiliated, Kizzy was hit by a blinding need to fight back, to restore some equilibrium and show she didn’t care.
She didn’t care what Andreas Lazarides thought of her and more importantly she didn’t care about him.
Just who was she kidding?
Acting on a need for self-preservation, she leaped off the bed and violently stripped it of its sullied linens, pulling, twisting, and wrenching them about until she was breathless with the effort. Finally throwing the sheets in the corner, she looked around for a cupboard or drawer; somewhere she would be able to find fresh bedding. If she put everything back in order, in its place, she would feel better. But every piece of furniture was as dark and hollow as Andreas’s heart.
There was no way she was going to crumple into a heap and let Andreas know how much his sudden departure from the bedroom had hurt, or how deeply she had grieved for the comfort of his arms around her or some other gesture of affection as he turned his back and walked away.
Freshen up and take your time.
His last words.
Well, she would do just that. She’d wash every trace of him from her body, keep him waiting, and then stroll coolly back into his orbit like the ice maiden she now had to be. It was abundantly clear that he was keen to keep an emotional distance, and so must she.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t enjoy the physical pleasures his body had awakened within her, assuming of course that he hadn’t found her so wanting that he wouldn’t want to repeat the experience again.
Could that be a possibility?
She’d make damn sure he found her irresistible. She would even seduce him if necessary and get this physical craving for his body out of her system before he had a chance to tire of her. Then she would simply get on with the rest of her life—do all the things she had dreamed of doing now that she had no ties in England, now that she was free.