“I don’t want anyone else involved in this...in my first collection.”
“Fine,” he said, noting that the stubborn streak of independence was still there. Also that whatever advice he gave now, she wouldn’t heed it. “You’ll have the money within the hour. I will be gone next week, and during that time—”
Walking back into the kitchen, she pulled a bottle of water from the fridge. “I’ll be watched by your housekeeper and your new security head. Poor Dmitri, along with his arm candies, will be reduced to babysitting duties. Although, I don’t mind him.”
“No?” The question left his mouth before he knew he had thought it.
“Dmitri?” An almost dazed kind of smile glimmered in her expression. And he cut the irrationally possessive thought her expression evoked before it could form fully. “Of course not. He was always kind, even when Calista...” Sudden tension dawned in her gaze and she looked away from him.
“When Calista what, Leah?”
She cleared her throat and started again but resolutely kept her gaze away from him. “This one time, we snuck into his room and stole a bottle of whiskey. Only he caught us...”
“Whiskey, Leah?”
“We were just goofing around, Stavros. We were seventeen.”
“My father was an alcoholic who stole from his own parents, sold our house just so that he could drink, and drove my mother away. Calista wasn’t supposed to even touch that stuff.”
Shock flared in her gaze, widening those beautiful eyes. Only then did he realize how much he had betrayed. “I had no idea, Stavros.”
“What did he do, Leah?”
“Oh, he told us we could drink the whiskey—” color stole into her cheeks and she wouldn’t meet his eyes “—as long as we were also going to join him for a threesome after.”
“Cristo! Of all the things to say to—”
As if expecting his reaction, Leah sighed. “We dropped the bottle where we stood and we ran, Stavros. Dmitri was used to...he knew how to deal with us.”
Unlike you, her unsaid accusation screamed.
He had a feeling Dmitri definitely understood Leah far better than he did. A mistake he had to rectify...
If Giannis had asked me... He pushed away the scenario provoked by Dmitri’s taunting remark from his head and focused his mind on practicalities.
“Leah...fashion design is extremely hard to break into. On a given day, there are tens, if not hundreds, of designers launching new labels. And I don’t know whether you actually have any talent for this.”
“I know that. All I’m asking is a chance to do it, to access the resources that I do have.”
“And when—” he checked himself as she threw that trademark glare at him “—if you fail in this venture?”
“Then it will be my failure. All mine. Just as the success would be. It will be something I have put my heart and joy into, something that doesn’t scare me.”
“I thought nothing scared you, Leah.”
She offered him a perfunctory smile, and Stavros realized how much he didn’t know about the girl he had thought his bitterest penance.
CHAPTER SIX
A WEEK LATER, Leah walked over the white sandy beach on Stavros’s estate on one of the tiny islands along the Aegean coast. Stavros’s “house” turned out to be a hundred-acre estate close to the sea, a ten-minute helicopter ride from Athens that had thrilled her quite a bit.
Even with Stavros studying her curiously the whole time.
She had lived in Athens for so many years and yet she had known nothing about the little slice of heaven that was the island he called home.
Nestled amidst two tiny hills, the mansion was stunning in its simplicity. No glittering glass bars like Dmitri’s yacht, or a lifeless steel-and-chrome affair, which was lately the trend with billionaire homes.
The manor was made entirely of stone, with cathedral ceilings framed by exposed beams, whitewashed walls, a pool and a wine cellar. It was full of soaring spaces and light, stunning in its simple lines.
Austere, private and yet so breathtaking, the exact reflection of the man who owned it, it was an authentic slice of rural Greece. But even when it was only the wind chimes that punctured the silence, even when it was just the staff keeping her company as it had been at the apartment, Leah felt anything but lonely.