A Greek Escape Read Free

heavy drops that splashed his face and neck as he worked and reflected on the whole complicated mess his life had become.
    To the outsider his privileged lifestyle was one to be envied, but personally he was tired of sycophants, superficial women and the intrusion of the paparazzi. Like that interfering slip of a girl he’d caught photographing him on the beach this morning, he thought grimly, ready to bet money that she was one of them. For what other reason would she have been there if she wasn’t from some newspaper? He had had enough of reporters to last him a lifetime, and they had been particularly savaging of late.
    He had always shunned publicity. Always managed to keep a low media profile. Anyone outside of Greece might not instantly have recognised him, even though they would most certainly have recognised the Vassalio name. It was his brief involvement with Esmeralda Leigh that had thrust him so starkly into the public eye recently.
    Nor had it helped when a couple of the high-ranking executives he had trusted to run one of his UK subsidiaries, along with an unscrupulous lawyer, had reneged on a verbal promise over a development deal and given the Vassalio Group bad press—which in turn had brought his own ethics into question. After all, as chairman, Leonidas thoughtintrospectively, the buck stopped with him. But he had been too tied up at the time to be aware of what was going on.
    That ordinary people had been lied to and were having their homes bulldozed from under them didn’t sit comfortably on his conscience. Nor did being accused of riding roughshod over people without giving a thought to their needs, breaking up communities so as to profit from multi-million-pound sports arenas and retail/leisure complexes and expand on Vassalio’s ever-increasing assets. The fact that everyone affected had been compensated—and very well—had been consigned only to the back pages of the tabloids.
    He had needed to get away. To forget Leonidas Vassalio, billionaire and successful businessman, for a while and sort out what was important to him. And to do that he had needed to get back to his roots. To enjoy the bliss of virtual anonymity that coming here would offer him. Because only one other person knew he was here. But now it looked as though even that might have been too much to expect, if that nosy little blonde he’d caught snooping around today had lied about why she was here.
    And if she hadn’t, and she really had been photographing birds, why had she been standing there taking a picture of him? Had she just fancied snapping a bit of local colour? One of the peasants going about his daily business? Or could it be that she’d just happened to like the look of him? he thought, with his mouth twisting cynically. In other circumstances he would have admitted unreservedly to himself that he hadn’t exactly been put off by the look of
her
. Especially when he’d noted that she’d been wearing no ring.
    But bedding nubile young women wasn’t on his agenda right now. Heaven only knew the physical attributes he’d been endowed with acted like a magnet on the opposite sex, and he’d never met one yet that he’d wanted to bed who hadn’t been willing, but, no, he determined as he oiled a hinge. Whatever her motives were, and no matter how affected she’d been by that spark of something that had leaped between them andmade her pull back from him as though she’d been scorched when he’d pulled her to her feet, that girl certainly hadn’t had bedroom games in mind.
    She had to be staying in one of those modern villas that had sprung up further down the hillside. That was the direction she had been heading in when he’d caught up with her. He wondered if there was anyone with her, or if she was staying there alone. If she was, he deliberated with his hackles rising, then she had to be here for a reason. And if that reason was to intrude on his peace and solitude…
    Finishing what he was doing, annoyed at