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www.millsandboon.co.uk
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Coming Next Month
For two of my favorite heroes: my brothers Dr. Thomas W. Porter and Robert George Porter.
PROLOGUE
THE helicopter slammed against the rocky incline of the mountain thick with drifts of snow.
Glass shattered, metal crunched and red flames shot from the engine, turning what Kristian Koumantaros knew was glacial white into a shimmering dance of fire and ice.
Unable to see, he struggled with his seatbelt. The helicopter tilted, sliding a few feet. Fire burned everywhere as the heat surged, surrounding him. Kristian tugged his seatbelt again. The clip was jammed.
The smoke seared his lungs, blistering each breath.
Life and death, he thought woozily. Life and death came down to this. And life-and-death decisions were often no different than any other decisions. You did what you had to do and the consequences be damned.
Kristian had done what he had to do and the consequences damned him.
As the roar of the fire grew louder, the helicopter shifted again, the snow giving way.
My God. Kristian threw his arms out, and yet there was nothing to grab, and they were sent tumbling down the mountain face. Another avalanche, he thought, deafened by the endless roar—
And then nothing.
CHAPTER ONE
“OHI. No.” The deep rough voice could be none other than Kristian Koumantaros himself. “Not interested. Tell her to go away.”
Standing in the hall outside the library, Elizabeth Hatchet drew a deep breath, strengthening her resolve. This was not going to be easy, but then nothing about Kristian Koumantaros’s case had been easy. Not the accident, not the rehab, not the location of his estate.
It had taken her two days to get here from London—a flight from London to Athens, an endless drive from Athens to Sparta, and finally a bone-jarring cart and donkey trip halfway up the ridiculously inaccessible mountain.
Why anybody, much less a man who couldn’t walk and couldn’t see, would want to live in a former monastery built on a rocky crag on a slope of Taygetos, the highest mountain in the Peloponnese, was beyond her. But now that she was here, she wasn’t going to go away.
“Kyrios.” Another voice sounded from within the library and Elizabeth recognized the voice as the Greek servant who’d met her at the door. “She’s traveled a long way—”
“I’ve had it with the bloody help from First Class Rehab. First Class, my ass.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes and exhaled slowly, counting to ten as she did so.
She’d been told by her Athens staff that it was a long trip to the former monastery.
She’d been warned that reaching rugged Taygetos, with its severe landscape but breathtaking vistas, was nearly as exhausting as caring for Mr. Koumantaros.
Her staff had counseled that traveling up this spectacular mountain with its ancient Byzantine ruins would seem at turns mythical as well as impossible, but Elizabeth, climbing into the donkey cart, had thought she’d been prepared. She’d thought she knew what she was getting into.
Just like she’d thought she knew what she was getting into when she agreed to provide Mr. Koumantaros’s home health care after he was released from the French hospital.
In both cases she had been wrong.
The painfully slow, bumpy ride had left her woozy, with a queasy stomach and a pounding headache.
Attempting to rehabilitate Mr. Koumantaros had made her suffer far worse. Quite bluntly, he’d nearly bankrupted her company.
Elizabeth tensed at the sound of glass breaking, followed by a string of select and exceptionally colorful Greek curses.
“Kyrios, it’s just a glass. It can be replaced.”
“I hate this, Pano. Hate everything about this—”
“I know, kyrios.” Pano’s voice dropped low, and Elizabeth couldn’t hear much of what was said, but apparently it had the effect of calming Mr. Koumantaros.
Elizabeth wasn’t soothed.
Kristian Koumantaros might be fabulously wealthy and able to afford an eccentric and reclusive lifestyle in the Peloponnese, but that didn’t excuse his behavior. And his behavior was nothing short of self-absorbed and self-destructive.
She was here because Kristian Koumantaros couldn’t keep a nurse, and he couldn’t keep a nurse because he couldn’t keep his temper.
The voices in the library were growing louder again. Elizabeth, fluent in Greek, listened as they discussed her.
Mr. Koumantaros didn’t want her here.
Pano, the elderly butler, was attempting to convince that Mr. Koumantaros it wouldn’t be polite to send the nurse away without seeing her.
Mr. Koumantaros said he didn’t care about being polite.
Elizabeth’s mouth curved wryly as the butler urged Mr. Koumantaros to at least offer her some refreshment.
Her wry smile disappeared as she heard Mr. Koumantaros answer that as most nurses from First Class Rehab were large women Ms. Hatchet could probably benefit from passing on an afternoon snack.
“Kyrios,” Pano persisted, “she’s brought a suitcase. Luggage. Ms. Hatchet intends to stay.”
“Stay?” Koumantaros roared.
“Yes, kyrios.” The elderly Greek’s tone couldn’t have been any more apologetic, but his words had the effect of sending Kristian into another litany of curses.
“For God’s sake, Pano, leave the damn glass alone and dispense with her. Throw her a bone. Get her a donkey. I don’t care. Just do it. Now.”
“But she’s traveled from London—”
“I don’t care if she flew from the moon. She had no business coming here. I left a message two weeks ago with the service. That woman knows perfectly well I’ve fired them. I didn’t ask her to come. And it’s not my problem she wasted her time.”
Speaking of which, Elizabeth thought, rubbing at the back of her neck to ease the pinch of pain, she was wasting time standing here. It was time to introduce herself, get the meeting underway.
Shoulders squared, Elizabeth took a deep breath and pushed the tall door open. As she entered the room, her low heels made a faint clicking sound on the hardwood floor.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Koumantaros,” she said. Her narrowed gaze flashed across the shuttered windows, cluttered coffee table, newspapers stacked computer-high on a corner desk. Had to be a month’s newspapers piled there, unread.
“You’re trespassing, and eavesdropping.” Kristian jerked upright in his wheelchair, his deep voice vibrating with fury.
She barely glanced his way, heading instead for the small table filled with prescription bottles. “You were shouting, Mr. Koumantaros. I didn’t need to eavesdrop. And I’d be trespassing if your care weren’t my responsibility, but it is, so you’re going to have to deal with me.”
At the table, Elizabeth picked up one of the medicine bottles to check the label, and then the others. It was an old habit, an automatic habit. The first thing a medical professional needed to know was what, if anything, the patient was taking.
Kristian’s hunched figure in the wheelchair shuddered as he tried to follow the sound of her movements, his eyes shielded by a white gauze bandage wrapped around his head, the white gauze a brilliant contrast to his thick onyx hair. “Your services have already been terminated,” he said tersely.
“You’ve been overruled,” Elizabeth answered, returning the bottles to the table to study him. The bandages swathing his eyes exposed the hard, carved contours of his face. He had chiseled cheekbones, a firm chin and strong jaw shadowed with a rough black beard. From the look of it, he hadn’t shaved since the last nurse had been sent packing.
“By whom?” he demanded, leaning crookedly in his chair.
“Your physicians.”
“My physicians?”
“Yes, indeed. We’re in daily contact with them, Mr. Koumantaros, and these past several months have made them question your mental soundness.”
“You must be joking.”
“Not at all. There is a discussion that perhaps you’d be better cared for in a facility—”
“Get out!” he demanded, pointing at the door. “Get out now.”
Elizabeth didn’t move. Instead she cocked her head, coolly examining him. He looked impossibly unkempt, nothing like the sophisticated powerful tycoon he’d reportedly been, with castles and estates scattered all over the world and a gorgeous mistress tucked enticingly in each.
“They fear for you, Mr. Koumantaros,” she added quietly, “and so do I. You need help.”
“That’s absurd. If my doctors were so concerned, they’d be here. And you…you don’t know me. You can’t drop in here and make assessments based on two minutes of observation.”
“I can, because I’ve managed your case from day one, when you were released from the hospital. No one knows more about you and your day-to-day care than I do. And if you’d always been this despondent we’d see it as a personality issue, but your despair is new—”
“There’s no despair. I’m just tired.”
“Then let’s address that, shall we?” Elizabeth flipped open her leather portfolio and scribbled some notes. One couldn’t be too careful these days. She had to protect the agency, not to mention her staff. She’d learned early to document everything. “It’s tragic you’re still in your present condition—tragic to isolate yourself here on Taygetos when there are people waiting for you in Athens, people wanting you to come home.”
“I live here permanently now.”
She glanced up at him. “You’ve no intention of returning?”
“I spent years renovating this monastery, updating and converting it into a modern home to meet my needs.”
“That was before you were injured. It’s not practical for you to live here now. You can’t fly—”
“Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”
She swallowed, tried again. “It’s not easy for your friends or family to see you. You’re absolutely secluded here—”
“As I wish to be.”
“But how can you fully recover when you’re so alone in what is undoubtedly one of the most remote places in Greece?”
He averted his head, giving her a glimpse of a very strong, very proud profile. “This is my home,” he repeated stubbornly, his tone colder, flintier.
“And what of your company? The businesses? Have you given those up along with your friends and family?”
“If this is your bedside manner—”
“Oh, it is,” she assured him unapologetically. “Mr. Koumantaros, I’m not here to coddle you. Nor to say pretty things and try to make you laugh. I’m here to get you on your feet again.”
“It’s not going to happen.”
“Because you like being helpless, or because you’re afraid of pain?”
For a moment he said nothing, his face growing paler against the white gauze bandaging his head. Finally he found his voice. “How dare you?” he demanded. “How dare you waltz into my home—?”
“It wasn’t exactly a waltz, Mr. Koumantaros. It took me two days to get here and that included planes, taxis, buses and asses.” She smiled thinly. This was the last place she’d wanted to come, and the last person she wanted to nurse. “It’s been nearly a year since your accident,” she continued. “There’s no medical reason for you to be as helpless as you are.”
“Get out.”
“I can’t. Not only have I’ve nowhere to go—as you must know, it’s too dark to take a donkey back down the mountain.”
“No, I don’t know. I’m blind. I’ve no idea what time of day it is.”
Heat surged to her cheeks. Heat and shame and disgust. Not for her, but him. If he expected her to feel sorry for him, he had another thing coming, and if he hoped to intimidate her, he was wrong again. He could shout and break things, but she wasn’t about to cower like a frightened puppy dog. Just because he was a famous Greek with a billion-dollar company didn’t mean he deserved her respect. Respect was earned, not automatically given.
“It’s almost four o’clock, Mr. Koumantaros. Half of the mountain is already steeped in shadows. I couldn’t go home tonight even if I wanted to. Your doctors have authorized me to stay, so I must. It’s either that or you go to a rehab facility in Athens. Your choice.”
“Not much of a choice.”
“No, it’s not.” Elizabeth picked up one of the prescription bottles and popped off the plastic cap to see the number of tablets inside. Three remained from a count of thirty. The prescription had only been refilled a week ago. “Still not sleeping, Mr. Koumantaros?”
“I can’t.”
“Still in a lot of pain, then?” She pressed the notebook to her chest, stared at him over the portfolio’s edge. Probably addicted to his painkillers now. Happened more often than not. One more battle ahead.
Kristian Koumantaros shifted in his wheelchair. The bandages that hid his eyes revealed the sharp twist of his lips. “As if you care.”
She didn’t even blink. His self-pity didn’t trigger sympathy. Self-pity was a typical stage in the healing process—an early stage, one of the first. And the fact that Kristian Koumantaros hadn’t moved beyond it meant he had a long, long way to go.
“I do care,” she answered flatly. Elizabeth didn’t bother to add that she also cared about the future of her company, First Class Rehab, and that providing for Kristian Koumantaros’s medical needs had nearly ruined her four-year-old company. “I do care, but I won’t be like the others—going soft on you, accepting your excuses, allowing you to get away with murder.”
“And what do you know of murder, Miss Holier-Than-Thou?” He wrenched his wheelchair forward, the hard rubber tires crunching glass shards.
“Careful, Mr. Koumantaros! You’ll pop a tire.”
“Good. Pop the goddamn tires. I hate this chair. I hate not seeing. I despise living like this.” He swore violently, but at least he’d stopped rolling forward and was sitting still while the butler hurriedly finished sweeping up the glass with a small broom and dustpan.
As Kristian sat, his enormous shoulders turned inward, his dark head hung low.
Despair.
The word whispered to her, summing up what she saw, what she felt. His black mood wasn’t merely anger. It was bigger than that, darker than that. His black mood was fed by despair.
He was, she thought, feeling the smallest prick of sympathy, a ruin of a great man.
As swiftly as the sympathy came, she pushed it aside, replacing tenderness with resolve. He’d get well. There was no reason he couldn’t.
Elizabeth signaled to Pano that she wanted a word alone with his employer and, nodding, he left them, exiting the library with his dustpan of broken glass.
“Now, then, Mr. Koumantaros,” she said as the library doors closed, “we need to get you back on your rehab program. But we can’t do that if you insist on intimidating your nurses.”
“They were all completely useless, incompetent—”
“All six?” she interrupted, taking a seat on the nearest armchair arm.
He’d gone through the roster of home healthcare specialists in record fashion. In fact, they’d run out of possible candidates. There was no one else to send. And yet Mr. Koumantaros couldn’t be left alone. He required more than a butler. He still needed around-the-clock medical care.
“One nurse wasn’t so bad. Well, in some ways,” he said grudgingly, tapping the metal rim of his wheelchair with his finger tips. “The young one. Calista. And believe me, if she was the best it should show you how bad the others were. But that’s another story—”
“Miss Aravantinos isn’t coming back.” Elizabeth felt her temper rise. Of course he’d request the one nurse he’d broken into bits. The poor girl, barely out of nursing school, had been putty in Kristian Koumantaros’s hands. Literally. For a man with life-threatening injuries he’d been incredibly adept at seduction.
His dark head tipped sideways. “Was that her last name?”
“You behaved in a most unscrupulous manner. You’re thirty—what?” She quickly flipped through his chart, found his age. “Nearly thirty-six. And she was barely twenty-three. She quit, you know. Left our Athens office. She felt terribly demoralized.”
“I never asked Calista to fall in love with me.”
“Love?” she choked. “Love didn’t have anything to do with it. You seduced her. Out of boredom. And spite.”
“You’ve got me all wrong, Nurse Cratchett—” He paused, a corner of his mouth smirking. “You are English, are you not?”
“I speak English, yes,” she answered curtly.
“Well, Cratchett, you have me wrong. You see, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
Blood surged to Elizabeth’s cheeks. “That’s quite enough.”
“I’ve never forced myself on a woman.” His voice dropped, the pitch growing deeper, rougher. “If anything, our dear delightful Calista forced herself on me.”
“Mr. Koumantaros.” Acutely uncomfortable, she gripped her pen tightly, growing warm, warmer. She hated his mocking smile and resented his tone. She could see why Calista had thrown the towel in. How was a young girl to cope with him?
“She romanticized me,” he continued, in the same infuriatingly smug vein. “She wanted to know what an invalid was capable of, I suppose. And she discovered that although I can’t walk, I can still—”
“Mr. Koumantaros!” Elizabeth jumped to her feet, suddenly oppressed by the warm, dark room. It was late afternoon, and the day had been cloudless, blissfully sunny. She couldn’t fathom why the windows and shutters were all closed, keeping the fresh mountain air out. “I do not wish to hear the details.”
“But you need them.” Kristian pushed his wheelchair toward her, blue cotton sleeves rolled back on his forearms, corded tendons tight beneath his skin. He’d once had a very deep tan, but the tan had long ago faded. His olive skin was pale, testament to his long months indoors. “You’re misinformed if you think I took advantage of Calista. Calista got what Calista wanted.”
She averted her head and ground her teeth together. “She was a wonderful, promising young nurse.”
“I don’t know about wonderful, but I’ll give you naïve. And since she quit, I think you’ve deliberately assigned me nurses from hell.”
“We do not employ nurses from hell. All of our nurses are professional, efficient, compassionate—”
“And stink to high heaven.”
“Excuse me?” Elizabeth drew back, affronted. “That’s a crude accusation.”
“Crude, but true. And I didn’t want them in my home, and I refused to have them touching me.”
So that was it. He didn’t want a real nurse. He wanted something from late-night T.V.—big hair, big breasts, and a short, tight skirt.
Elizabeth took a deep breath, fighting to hang on to her professional composure. She was beginning to see how he wore his nurses down, brow-beating and tormenting until they begged for a reprieve. Anyone but Mr. Koumantaros. Any job but that!
Well, she wasn’t about to let Mr. Koumantaros break her. He couldn’t get a rise out of her because she wouldn’t let him. “Did Calista smell bad?”
“No, Calista smelled like heaven.”
For a moment she could have sworn Kristian was smiling, and the fact that he could smile over ruining a young nurse’s career infuriated her.
He rolled another foot closer. “But then after Calista fled you sent only old, fat, frumpy nurses to torture me, punishing me for what was really Calista’s fault. And don’t tell me they weren’t old and fat and frumpy, because I might be blind but I’m not stupid.”
Elizabeth’s blood pressure shot up again. “I assigned mature nurses, but they were well-trained and certainly prepared for the rigors of the job.”
“One smelled like a tobacco shop. One of fish. I’m quite certain another could have been a battleship—”
“You’re being insulting.”
“I’m being honest. You replaced Calista with prison guards.”
Elizabeth’s anger spiked, and then her lips twitched. Kristian Koumantaros was actually right.
After poor Calista’s disgrace, Elizabeth had intentionally assigned Mr. Koumantaros only the older, less responsive nurses, realizing that he required special care. Very special care.
She smiled faintly, amused despite herself. He might not be walking, and he might not have his vision, but his brain worked just fine.
Still smiling, she studied him dispassionately, aware of his injuries, his months of painful rehabilitation, his prognosis. He was lucky to have escaped such a serious accident with his life. The trauma to his head had been so extensive he’d been expected to suffer severe brain damage. Happily, his mental faculties were intact. His motor skills could be repaired, but his eyesight was questionable. Sometimes the brain healed itself. Sometimes it didn’t. Only time and continued therapy would tell.
“Well, that’s all in the past now,” she said, forcing a note of cheer into her voice. “The battleaxe nurses are gone. I am here—”
“And you are probably worse than all of them.”
“Indeed, I am. They whisper behind my back that I’m every patient’s worst nightmare.”
“So I can call you Nurse Cratchett, then?”
“If you’d like. Or you can call me by my name, which is Nurse Hatchet. But they’re so similar, I’ll answer either way.”
He sat in silence, his jaw set, his expression increasingly wary. Elizabeth felt the edges of her mouth lift, curl. He couldn’t browbeat or intimidate her. She knew what Greek tycoons were. She’d once been married to one.
“It’s time to move on,” she added briskly. “And the first place we start is with your meals. I know it’s late, Mr. Koumantaros, but have you eaten lunch yet?”
“I’m not hungry.”
Elizabeth closed her portfolio and slipped the pen into the leather case. “You need to eat. Your body needs the nutrition. I’ll see about a light meal.” She moved toward the door, unwilling to waste time arguing.
Kristian shoved his wheelchair forward, inadvertently slamming into the edge of the couch. His frustration was written in every line of his face. “I don’t want food—”
“Of course not. Why eat when you’re addicted to pain pills?” She flashed a tight, strained smile he couldn’t see. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see to your meal.”
The vaulted stone kitchen was in the tower, or pyrgos, and there the butler, cook and senior housekeeper had gathered beneath one of the medieval arches. They were in such deep conversation that they didn’t hear Elizabeth enter.
Once they realized she was there, all three fell silent and turned to face her with varying degrees of hostility.
Elizabeth wasn’t surprised. For one, unlike the other nurses, she wasn’t Greek. Two, despite being foreign, she spoke Greek fluently. And three, she wasn’t showing proper deference to their employer, a very wealthy, powerful Greek man.
“Hello,” Elizabeth said, attempting to ignore the icy welcome. “I thought I’d see if I could help with Mr. Koumantaros’s lunch.”
Everyone continued to gape at her until Pano, the butler, cleared his throat. “Mr. Koumantaros doesn’t eat lunch.”
“Does he take a late breakfast, then?” Elizabeth asked.
“No, just coffee.”
“Then when does he eat his first meal?”
“Not until evening.”
“I see.” Elizabeth’s brow furrowed as she studied the three staffers, wondering how long they’d been employed by Kristian Koumantaros and how they coped with his black moods and display of temper. “Does he eat well then?”