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He gave a snort of subdued laughter. “No, but the shock of hearing me say so might kill him.”
What was it about the two of them, that they held each other at such a distance, she wondered. “Do either of you have the first idea of the pain that comes from waiting until it’s too late to say ‘I love you?’ Because I do. More often than I care to remember, I’ve witnessed the grief and regret that tears families apart because time ran out on them before they said the things that needed to be said.”
He paced to the windows at the other end of the aptly named garden room whose exotic flowering plants set in Chinese jardinieres must give it the feel of high summer even in the depths of winter. “We’re not other people,” he said.
“You’re not immortal, either.” She hesitated, conflicted once again by how much she could say, then decided to plunge in and disclose what she knew, because she wasn’t sure she could live with herself if she didn’t. “Look, Niko, he’ll probably have my head for telling you this, but your father’s not just battling a broken hip. His heart’s not in very good shape, either.”
“I’m not surprised. That’s what comes from years of smoking and hard living, but nothing his doctor said was enough to make him change his ways. He’s a stubborn old goat.”
That much she knew to be true. Pavlos had discharged himself from Vancouver General against medical advice, and insisted on flying back to Greece even crippled as he was, because he refused to put up with the nursing staff’s constant monitoring. They don’t let a man breathe, he’d complained, when Emily tried to talk him into postponing the journey. I’ll be carried out feetfirst if I let them keep me here any longer.
“Well, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Niko. Where this family’s concerned, you’re both pretty pigheaded.”
He swung around and surveyed her across the width of the room; another long, searching gaze so thorough that a quiver shafted through her. He probed too deeply beneath the surface. Saw things she wasn’t ready to acknowledge to herself. “Perhaps before you start leaping to unwarranted conclusions,” he purred, advancing toward her with the lethal grace of a hunter preparing to move in for the kill, “you should hear my side of the story.”
“You’re not my patient, your father is,” she said, backing away and almost hyperventilating at the determined gleam in his eye.
“But isn’t modern medicine all about the holistic approach—curing the spirit in order to heal the body, and such? And isn’t that exactly what you’ve been advocating ever since you walked into this room?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“How do you expect to do that, if you have only half the equation to work with? More to the point, what do you stand to lose by letting me fill in the blanks?”
My soul, and everything I am, she thought, filled with the terrible foreboding that unless she extricated herself now from the web of attraction threatening to engulf her, destiny in the shape of Nikolaos Leonidas would take control of her life, and never give it back again. Yet to scurry away like a frightened rabbit was as alien to her nature as taking advantage of Pavlos. So she stood her ground, pushed the irrational presentiment out of her thoughts and said with deceptive calm, “Absolutely nothing.”
“Really?” He leaned toward her, dropped his voice another half octave and latched his fingers around her wrist. “Then why are you so afraid?”
She swallowed and ran her tongue over her dry lips. “I’m not,” she said.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE was lying. The evidence was there in her hunted gaze, in her racing pulse, so easily and unobtrusively detected when he took her wrist. And he intended to find out why, because for all that he thought he’d remain unmoved by whatever he discovered when he went to meet their flight, the sight of the old man, so brittle and somehow diminished, had hit him with the force of a hammer blow to the heart. They spent little time together, had long ago agreed to disagree and shared nothing in common. But Pavlos was still his father, and Niko would be damned before he’d let some hot little foreign number take him to the cleaners.
Oh, she’d been full of righteous indignation at his suggestion that she wasn’t quite the selfless angel of mercy she presented herself to be. He’d hardly expected otherwise. But he’d also seen how indispensable she’d made herself to Pavlos; how successfully she’d wormed her way into his affections. His father had never been a demonstrative man, at least not that Niko could remember. Which had made the way he’d clung to Emily’s hand at the airport all the more telling.
If his assessment of her was correct, redirecting her attention would be simple enough. After all, a millionaire in his vigorous prime was surely preferable to one in his dotage. And if he was wrong…well, a harmless flirtation would hurt no one. Of course, when his father figured out what he was up to, he wouldn’t like it, but when was the last time he’d approved of anything Niko did?
“You’re very quiet suddenly,” she said, interrupting the flow of his thoughts.
He looked deep into her dark blue eyes. “Because I’m beginning to think I’ve judged you too hastily,” he answered, doing his utmost to sound convincingly repentant. “But I’m not entirely without conscience. Therefore, if one of us must leave, let me be the one to go.”
Ignoring her whimper of protest, he released her, opened the door to leave the room and found himself face-to-face with Damaris. He could not have orchestrated a better exit. Timing, as he well knew in his line of work, was everything. “Kali oreksi, Emily,” he said, standing back to allow Damaris to carry in a platter loaded with olives, calamari, dolmades, tzatziki and pita bread. “Enjoy your meal.”
He was over the threshold before she burst out, “Oh, don’t be so ridiculous!”
Suppressing a smile, he swung around. “There is a problem?”
“If having enough food to feed an army is a problem, then yes.”
He shrugged. “What can I say? Greeks love to eat.”
“Well, I can’t possibly do justice to all this, and since I have no wish to offend your father’s housekeeper when she’s obviously gone to a great deal of trouble…”
“Yes, Emily?”
She grimaced, as if her next words gave her indigestion. “You might as well stay and help me eat it.”
He stroked his jaw and made a show of weighing his options. “It would be a pity to let it go to waste,” he eventually conceded, “especially as this is but the first of several courses.”
For a moment, he thought he’d overplayed his hand. Skewering him with a glance that would have stopped the gods of Olympus in their tracks, she waited until Damaris mopped up her spilled drink, then took a seat at the table and said, “Try not to gloat, Niko. It’s so unattractive.”
He wasn’t accustomed to female criticism. The women he associated with were so anxious to please, they’d have swallowed their own tongues before issuing such a blunt assessment of his shortcomings. That she suffered no such hesitation appealed to him in ways she couldn’t begin to imagine. He devoted his entire life to challenging unfavorable odds. And took enormous pleasure in defeating them.
Collecting the wine bottle as he passed, he joined her and topped up their flutes. Nothing like dim lights and good champagne to set the scene for seduction. Raising his glass, he said, “Here’s to getting to know one another all over again.”
She responded with the merest tilt of one shoulder, took a dainty sip, then helped herself to a little tzatziki and bread.
“Have more,” he urged, pushing the tray of mezedes closer.
She selected an olive, but ignored her champagne.
“You don’t care for Greek food?”
“I’m not very familiar with it.”
“There are no Greek restaurants in Vancouver?”
“Hundreds, and I’m told they’re very good. I just don’t eat out very often.”
“Why is that? And please don’t tell me you lack opportunity. Suitors must be lined up at your door, wanting to wine and dine you.”
“I’m afraid not. Shift work tends to put a crimp in a nurse’s social life.”
Right. And you’re such a dedicated professional that you never take a night off!
He shook his head in feigned mystification. “What’s wrong with Canadian men, to be so easily discouraged? Are they all eunuchs?”
She almost choked on her olive. “Not as far as I know,” she spluttered. “But then, I haven’t bothered to ask.”
“What about your colleagues? As I understand it, hospitals are a hotbed of romance between doctors and nurses.”
“The idea that all nurses end up marrying doctors is a myth,” she informed him starchily. “For a start, half the doctors these days are women, and even if they weren’t, finding a husband isn’t particularly high on my list of priorities.”
“Why not? Don’t most women want to settle down and have children? Or are you telling me you’re the exception?”
“No.” She nibbled a sliver of pita bread. “I’d love to get married and have children someday, but only if the right man comes along. I’m not willing to settle for just anyone.”
“Define ‘the right man,’” he said—a shade too abruptly, if her response was anything to go by.
She dropped her bread and stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“By what standards do you judge a prospective husband?”
She reached for her glass and took a sip while she considered the question. “He has to be decent and honorable,” she finally declared.
“Tall, dark and handsome, too?”
“Not necessarily.” She gave another delicate shrug, just enough to cause her dress to shift gently over her rather lovely breasts.
He wished he didn’t find it so alluring. “Rich and successful, then?”
“Gainfully employed, certainly. If we had children, I’d want to be a stay-at-home mom.”
“If you had to choose just one quality in this ideal man, what would it be?”
“The capacity to love,” she said dreamily, her blue eyes soft, her sweet mouth curved in a smile. Outside, the wind tore at the palm trees with unusual strength for September. “I’d want love more than anything else, because a marriage without it is no marriage at all.”
Annoyed to find his thoughts drifting dangerously far from their set course, he said flatly, “I disagree. I’d never let my heart get the better of my head.”
“Why not? Don’t you believe in love?”
“I might have once, very briefly, many years ago, but then she died of a blood clot to the brain. I was three months old at the time.”
“You mean your mother?” She clapped a distressed hand to her cheek. Her eyes glistened suspiciously. “Oh, Niko, how very sad for you. I’m so sorry.”
He wanted neither her sympathy nor her pity, and crushed both with brutal efficiency. “Don’t be. It’s not as if she was around long enough for me to miss her.”
The way she cringed at his answer left him ashamed. “She gave you life,” she said.
“And lost hers doing it, something I’ve been paying for ever since.”
“Why? Her death wasn’t your fault.”
“According to my father, it was.” Her glass remained almost untouched, but his was empty. Needing something to deaden a pain he seldom allowed to surface, he refilled it so hurriedly, the wine foamed up to the brim. “She was forty-one, and giving birth at her age to an infant weighing a strapping five kilos put her in her grave.”
“A lot of women wait until their forties to have children.”
“They don’t all die because of it.”
“True. But that’s still no reason for you to think Pavlos holds you responsible for the tragedy that befell her. After all, she gave him a son and that’s not a legacy any man takes lightly.”
“You might be a hell of a fine nurse, Emily Tyler, but you’re no spin doctor.”
Puzzled, she said, “What do you mean?”
“That nothing you can say changes the fact that my father didn’t care if he never had a child. All he ever wanted was my mother, and as far as he’s concerned, I took her away from him.”
“Then he should have seen to it he didn’t get her pregnant in the first place—or are you to blame for that, as well?”
“After twenty-one years of marriage without any sign of a baby, he probably didn’t think precautions were necessary. Finish your wine, woman. I don’t care to drink alone. It’s a nasty habit to fall into.”
She took another cautious sip. “I still can’t believe that, once his initial grief subsided, having you didn’t bring Pavlos some measure of comfort.”
“Then you obviously don’t know much about dysfunctional families. My father and I have never liked one another. He has always resented me, not just because I cost him his one true love, but because I remained wilfully unimpressed by his wealth and social status.”
“I’d have thought he’d find that commendable.”
“Don’t let misplaced pity for the poor motherless baby cloud your judgment, my dear,” Niko said wryly. “I rebelled every step of the way as a child, took great pleasure in embarrassing him by getting into trouble as a teenager and flat-out refused to be bought by his millions when I finally grew up. I was not a ‘nice’ boy, and I’m not a ‘nice’ man.”
“That much, at least, I do believe,” she shot back, leveling a scornful glance his way. “The only part I question is that you ever grew up. You strike me more as someone with a bad case of defiantly delayed adolescence.”
This wasn’t playing out the way he’d intended. She was supposed to be all willing, female compliance by now, ready to fall into his arms, if not his bed, not beating him at his own game. And his glass was empty again, damn it! “When you’ve walked in my shoes,” he replied caustically, “feel free to criticize. Until then—”
“But I have,” she interrupted. “Walked in your shoes, I mean. Except mine were twice as hard to wear. Because, you see, I lost both my parents in a car accident when I was nine, and unlike you, I remember them enough to miss them very deeply. I remember what it was like to be loved unconditionally, then have that love snatched away in the blink of an eye. I remember the sound of their voices and their laughter—the scent of my mother’s perfume and my father’s Cuban cigars. And I know very well how it feels to be tolerated by relatives who make no secret of the fact that they’ve been saddled with a child they never wanted.”
Flushed and more animated than Niko had yet seen her, she stopped to draw an irate breath before continuing, “I also learned what it’s like to have to work for every cent, and to think twice before frittering away a dollar.” She eyed his shirt and watch disdainfully. “You, on the other hand, obviously wouldn’t know the meaning of deprivation if it jumped up and bit you in the face, and I don’t for a moment buy the idea that your father never wanted you. So all in all, I’d say I come out the uncontested winner in this spontaneous pity party.”
He let a beat of silence hang heavy in the air before he spoke again, then, “It’s not often someone spells out my many shortcomings so succinctly,” he said, “but you’ve managed to do it admirably. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about myself before I slither behind the wheel of my car and disappear into the night?”
“Yes,” she said. “Eat something. You’ve had too much to drink and are in no condition to drive. In fact, you should be spending the night here.”
“Why, Emily, is that an invitation?”
“No,” she said crushingly. “It’s an order, and should you be foolish enough to decide otherwise, I’ll kick you where it’ll hurt the most.”
She probably weighed no more than fifty-four kilos to his eighty-five, but what she lacked in size, she more than made up for in spirit. He had no doubt that, given her knowledge of male anatomy, she was more than capable of inflicting serious injury. Which should have deterred him. Instead the thought of fending her off left him so suddenly and painfully aroused that, for the first time, he questioned the wisdom of his plan of attack. She was the one supposed to be at his mercy, not the other way around, but so far, she remained utterly indifferent to his charms. He, on the other hand, was anything but impervious to hers.
Damaris came back just then to serve spinach-stuffed breast of chicken and ziti, a welcome diversion, which allowed him to wrestle his wayward hormones into submission and redirect his energy into more productive channels. “Why did you allow my father to coerce you into letting him travel, when he’s clearly not up to it?” he inquired casually, once they were alone again.
“I did my best to dissuade him,” Emily said. “We all did. But the only thing he cared about was coming home to Greece, and nothing anyone said could convince him to wait. I think it’s because he was afraid.”
“Of dying?”
“No. Of not dying in Greece.”
That Niko could well believe. Pavlos had always been fanatically patriotic. “So you volunteered to see him safely home?”
“It was more that he chose me. We got to know one another quite well during his hospital stay.”
An hour ago, he’d have rated that little morsel of information as yet another sign of her ulterior motives. Now, he didn’t have quite the same enthusiasm for the task. Emily the woman was proving a lot more intriguing than Emily the fortune hunter.
To buy himself enough time to reestablish his priorities, he switched to another subject. “What happened to you after your parents were killed?”
“I was sent to live with my father’s sister. He was thirty-six when he died, and Aunt Alicia was eleven years older. She and Uncle Warren didn’t have children, but they were the only family I had left, so they were more or less stuck with me. It wasn’t a happy arrangement on either side.”
“They mistreated you?”
“Not in the way you probably mean, but they never let me forget they’d done ‘the right thing’ by taking me in and would, I think, have found a reason to refuse if they hadn’t been afraid it would reflect badly on them. Of course, the insurance settlement I brought with me sweetened the deal by defraying the cost of putting a roof over my head and keeping me fed and clothed for the next nine years.”
“What happened then?”
“The summer I graduated high school, I applied to the faculty of nursing, was accepted and moved into a dorm on the university campus at the end of August. I never went ‘home’ again.”
“But at least there was enough insurance settlement left to pay your tuition fees and other expenses.”
She shook her head. “I scraped by on scholarships and student loans.”
Caught in a swell of indignation he never saw coming, he stared at her. Whatever else his father’s sins, he’d never tampered with Niko’s inheritance from his mother. “Are you telling me they spent money on themselves, when it should have been held in trust for your education?”
“No, they were scrupulously honest.” She started to add something else, then seemed to think better of it and made do with, “The settlement just wasn’t very large to begin with, that’s all.”
Something about that answer didn’t sit right, either. Wasn’t the whole point of insurance to provide adequate recompense to beneficiaries, especially minors? But although the subject bore investigation, he decided now was not the time to pursue it and asked instead, “Do you keep in touch with your aunt and uncle?”
“A card at Christmas about covers it.”
“So they have no idea you’re here now?”
“No one has,” she said. “My arrangement with Pavlos was strictly between the two of us. If my employer knew what I’d done, I’d probably be fired.”
Which wouldn’t matter one iota, if Niko’s first impression of her was correct and she’d set her sights on a much more rewarding prize. What she earned in a year as a nurse wouldn’t amount to pocket change if she married his father.
Wondering if she had any idea how potentially damaging her revelation was, he said, “Then why take the risk?”
“Because your father was alone in a foreign country without friends or family to look after him when he was released.”
“He had a son. If you’d thought to contact me, I could have been there within twenty-four hours.”
“Maybe,” she said gently, “he didn’t want to bother you.”
“So he bothered a perfect stranger instead, even though doing so might end up costing her her job. Tell me, Emily, how do you propose to explain your absence from the hospital?”
“I won’t have to. I took a three-month leave of absence and scheduled it to coincide with his discharge.”
“A noble gesture on your part, giving up your holiday to look after my father.”
“Well, why not? I had nothing else planned.”
Except setting aside an hour a day to polish your halo! Struggling to hide his skepticism, Niko said, “All work and no play hardly seems fair. We’ll have to see what we can do to change that.”
A sudden gust of wind rattled the French doors, making her jump. “Just being here is change enough. If the weather ever clears up, I’m sure Pavlos won’t begrudge me the odd day off to see the sights.”
“Count on both,” he said, recognizing opportunity when it presented itself. “And on my making myself available to act as tour guide.”
“That’s nice of you, Niko.”
No, it’s not, he could have told her. Because whatever her motives, his were anything but pure. And because he’d meant it when he said he wasn’t a nice man.
They passed the remainder of the meal in idle conversation, interrupted only by intermittent bursts of rain at the windows, but before coffee was served, she’d run out of things to say and was wilting visibly. Even he, unscrupulous bastard though he undoubtedly was, felt sorry for her. The long transatlantic flight would have been tiring enough, without the added strain of looking after his father. So when she set aside her napkin and begged to be excused, he made no attempt to stop her, but left the table himself and walked her to the foot of the stairs.
“Good night,” she murmured.
“Kali nikhta,” he returned. “Sleep well.”
She was perhaps halfway to the upper landing when a brilliant flash of lightning arrowed through the night. Almost immediately, the electricity failed and plunged the house into darkness.
He heard her startled exclamation and the click of her high heel hitting the edge of the marble step as she stumbled to a halt. “Stay put,” he ordered, well aware how treacherous the staircase could be to the unwary. Once, when he was still a boy, a new housemaid had slipped and broken her arm—and that had been in broad daylight. But he’d grown up in the villa; could quite literally have found his way blindfolded anywhere within its walls, and was at Emily’s side before she, too, missed her footing.
Just as he reached her, a second bolt of lightning ripped through the night, bleaching her face of color, turning her hair to silver and her eyes into pools as huge and dark as those found in undersea caverns. “What happened?” she whispered, clutching the bannister with one hand as she teetered on the edge of the stair.
Instinctively he pulled her close with an arm around her shoulders. They felt slender, almost childlike to the touch, but the rest of her, pinned warm and sweet against him, was unmistakably all woman. “The lights went out,” he said, resorting to the absurdly obvious in an attempt to deflect her attention from the fact that his body had responded to hers with elemental, albeit untimely vigor.
She choked on a laugh. “I pretty much figured that out for myself.”
“I expect a power pole was struck.”
“Oh,” she said faintly, aware as she had to be of her effect on him. Blatant arousal was difficult to hide at such close quarters. “Does it happen often?”
Were they talking about the same thing, he wondered, as his mind fought a losing battle with his nether regions. “No, especially not at this time of year.”