He sounded hoarse, uneven. Very unlike him. Had he felt the way her gaze devoured him in that motionless state?
How could just looking at him fill her blood with this molten wanting?
“Come, sit here and tell me how it was,” he said softly.
While she still stood there stupidly, hovering between drugged inertia and fluttering panic, his gaze opened slowly. Traveled over her with such a thorough intensity that she could almost believe he had been dying to look at her.
In the seconds-long perusal, Leah knew he had noted everything about her, including her heightened color. Hoped he would put it down to the fact that she had been running.
She ran her palm over her forehead, wondering if she was feverish. Because that’s how she felt. Could a harmless, adolescent crush turn into a full-fledged obsession, she thought sarcastically. “I’m sweaty. I need a shower,” she finally responded, and began to walk away.
“Rosa told me you like to swim after your run. Don’t change your routine on my account. Or am I one of those incredible things that scare you, Leah?”
It was so on target that her denial shot out of her mouth like a missile in a defensive tone. “I’m not afraid of you.”
His brows rose questioningly. Then he smiled, a real flicker of warmth lighting up those tawny irises.
She could deal with Stavros hating her, questioning her worth, and thinking the absolute worst of her. This...strangely speculative mood he seemed to be in, she couldn’t.
No way was she going to put on her bikini and parade in front of him. She would probably self-combust if he so much as looked at her, even innocently. “I ran far more than I intended today. I’ll skip the swim,” she said, turning around.
“How do you like the estate?”
She was so wired up into his every breath, every nuance that her foot slipped on a wet patch.
He was out of the chair and by her side in a flash, his hand around her waist. The side of her breasts squished against him, her midriff knocked hard against his. All of her breath jarred into her throat, her muscles groaning at the impact. He was so hard and hot...
“You are unhurt?”
“I’m fine.” She pushed the words out, feeling so out of control that tears prickled behind her eyes.
What was the matter with her? Where was this desperate awareness stemming from?
He was silent next to her, his large hands still resting on her hips. She didn’t have the guts to turn and meet his gaze.
The idea of seeing the same awareness in his drove her out of her skin. The idea of seeing nothing but a patient indifference made her skin crawl.
With the guise of reaching for the lemonade, she withdrew from his touch. “It’s remote and a little out of sync with the twenty-first century, don’t you think?”
For the first time in years, she had felt completely at home, had forgotten the pain of the past and the endless, lonely future stretching ahead of her. But she had nothing to fight her reaction with, if not with her lies. Nothing except to continue the animosity between them that she didn’t even know the origins of anymore.
“Remote, yes. Out of sync with the rest of the world, no.”
She looked at him over the rim of her glass. “Perfect for you though—stark, severe and forbidding.”
“That’s exactly what Dmitri says when he visits. Says he can’t stand the relentless silence.” He smiled. “So you do not like it then?”
She frowned, wondering why he was asking. “I just... I prefer something a little flashier and more hip, like Dmitri’s yacht. Or that infamous bachelor pad of his in the business district of Athens.” When had lying become this easy? She had been to Dmitri’s flat once and it had been a soulless, colorless monstrosity of steel and chrome. “This is a bit too isolated for my taste.”
“Is it?”
She swallowed the lump in her throat at the thought of leaving here. But if this was how she was going to react to seeing him after a week, she couldn’t imagine what she would do if she saw him daily. “Hmmm.”
A little knot tied his brows and cleared again. Something she had never seen danced in the depths of his gaze.
He was going to relent. He was going to send her back to that dinky flat, back to the dragon, Mrs. Kovlakis. A breeze could have knocked her down at how desperately sad the thought made her.