by Kim Lawrence
There you go with the denial again, Kat, taunted the voice in her head. Afraid you’ve got more of your mother in you than you admit to?
‘All right.’ She set her shoulders. ‘So what now?’
‘Now I escort you to the villa and introduce you to your new home.’
Standing up, her head ducked, she followed him towards the open doors.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE TWO CARS, the first carrying the minimal baggage and the second themselves, drew up onto the illuminated forecourt. Night had fallen with a speed she found confusing, a clear starlit night scented with the smell of the sea and wild thyme.
Zach, who had gone around to open her door, left her to the assistance of the driver and moved forward to meet the woman who appeared in the massive set of double doors that were flung open to welcome them.
Dressed in a tailored black dress that suited her curvy figure, the woman was average height. It was hard to tell from this distance if the silver streaks in her dark hair were natural or a fashion statement. The chignon it was arranged in appeared as smooth and immaculate as the rest of her.
Kat felt travel-worn and untidy by comparison. She tucked the stray strands of hair behind her ears and told herself if she started worrying about what impression she made on everyone here she’d be a nervous wreck within the week.
Zach’s voice drifted across the space to Kat; it sounded warm.
‘Selene.’
As she watched from where she stood beside the car it seemed to Kat there was a genuine affection in his greeting as he put his hands on the shoulders of the woman, who Kat judged to be in her forties, and kissed her cheeks.
The rapid interchange was in Greek, and, as the woman glanced over in her direction several times, it didn’t seem paranoid to assume they were discussing her.
Get used to it, Kat, she told herself as they began to walk back towards her.
‘Katina, this is Selene Carras, your grandfather’s housekeeper. This, Selene, is—’
‘You have a look of Mia, my dear.’
Kat’s cautiously polite expression melted in wondering disbelief. Eyes sparking eagerness, she sounded incredulous. ‘You knew my mother?’
‘Indeed I did.’ The smartly dressed woman’s kind brown eyes crinkled deeply at the corners as she smiled, her teeth as white as the double row of pearls around her neck. ‘My own mother was the housekeeper on the island before me. When we were girls your mother and I would play together during her school holidays before we got older and...she was missed greatly by many.’
Emotion filled Kat’s throat. There had never been anyone in her life she could speak to about her mother, never anyone she could ask all the questions she wanted, needed to ask.
‘She used to tell me stories when I was little about an island where the sun always shone and the sand on the beaches was white. I thought they were stories. I never thought...’ When her throat clogged with unshed tears of emotion, she turned her head, blinking hard, embarrassed less by the overspill of emotion than by the fact Zach was witnessing it.
Though, ironically, it was Zach who unwittingly came to her rescue.
‘Did I hear dinner mentioned?’
‘Of course, Mr Zach, but first things first. I will show Miss—’
‘Kat, please,’ Kat begged, not caring if this was etiquette or not.
The woman tipped her head. ‘I will show Kat to her rooms, give her time to freshen up and then I’ll have dinner served in half an hour?’ She glanced from Kat to Zach, taking their silence as agreement, and continued cheerfully. ‘Mr Zach will bring you down to dinner.’ She glanced at him before explaining. ‘The house is not exactly compact and it takes a little time to get your bearings.’
Not compact!
If the hallway they entered was any indication, the place was massive!
Underfoot the marble glowed while, high above, the massive antique chandeliers glistened. The central sweeping staircase ran up to the gallery above and then upwards to another floor.
It was Zach’s voice, deep and inflected with dry irony, that interrupted her shocked silence.
‘Alekis is not really a fan of less is more, and he really thinks that size matters. There isn’t a room in the place that you couldn’t have a game of cricket in. Well, not really my game, but...’
‘It didn’t stop you trying.’ The older woman touched Kat’s arm. ‘The rooms are a little large.’
Kat only dimly registered the interchange.
‘Ah.’ Zach breathed and paused when he saw what had stopped her in her tracks.
‘She is beautiful,’ Kat said, staring.
‘Your grandmother, I believe.’
Kat, her eyes wide, glanced at him and then back at the portrait in the heavy gold frame. It was positioned on the far wall lit by several spotlights. She took a step closer to study the woman, one she had never met or even knew existed.
This woman was her grandmother.
The roots she had been longing for all her life, Kat realised, were here. But did she belong? This was all so alien.
‘My grandmother?’
The woman in the painting was wearing a classic shift dress that would have looked fashionable today, the knee-high boots elongated her legs and her dark hair was dressed in a slightly bouffant updo. With her dark eyes outlined by kohl, her rosebud lips pale and her lashes spiky and long, it was an iconic sixties look.
‘She looks like Mum...’ The face that she thought she remembered floated into her head. ‘I think?’
Zach could not see her face, just hear the almost quiver in her voice, but it was the set of her narrow shoulders and the emotions he could feel literally radiating from her that made something twist hard in his chest. Something he refused to recognise as tenderness. An equally unfamiliar impulse to offer comfort made him move forward.
He had been so focused on the solitary figure staring up at the painting that he didn’t realise he wasn’t the only one affected by the poignant image she made, until the housekeeper wrapped her plump arm around the younger woman’s slender shoulders. The touch was brief but enough to draw a smile of warm gratitude from Kat as the older woman moved away.
Spontaneous expressions of support and comfort were not really in Zach’s comfort zone. Far better, he decided, watching the moment, to leave it to those with more experience with touchy-feely stuff. Despite his ineligibility he found the feeling that he’d been cheated out of the feel of her warm skin lingering, digging deep enough to make him ache. Everything between them seemed to come back to one thing: this desire that never quite went away and flared in an unpredictable way. Problematic but not anything he couldn’t deal with—he had never allowed his appetites to rule him.
The housekeeper studied the portrait. ‘She did, more so as she grew up.’
Kat sent her another look of teary gratitude. ‘I don’t have any photos, just what I remember, and I’m not sure how much of that is real,’ she admitted.
Listening, Zach found himself wanting to tell her she was lucky; he wished his own memories of his childhood were open to misinterpretation, but his were all unpleasantly real.
‘This way.’
‘I’ll show her the way,’ he heard himself say.
‘Really?’ Selene shook her head and recovered her poise. ‘Of course.’
‘This is a lot for you to take in.’
Kat nodded. ‘Pretty overwhelming. Until now I hadn’t thought of my mother being here, not really.’ She stopped as her throat closed over, not conscious that Zach had slowed to keep pace with her. ‘Do you remember your mother?’
Midway up the sweeping staircase, he stopped. Puzzled by his rigid posture, so did Kat.
‘Yes,’ he said finally, and began to walk again.
‘I wish I remembered more.’
He stopped again, this time at th
e top of the staircase, and looked down at her, his expression sombre.
‘Be careful what you wish for.’
He remembered; he remembered a once beautiful woman worn down by single parenthood and the two or three jobs she’d needed to pay the rent on their apartment and keep him in clothes. She had always been tired, and Zach remembered promising her that one day she would not have to work. He would have a job that meant she could rest; rest had seemed like the ultimate luxury.
He never got the chance; he was ten when she died. For years he’d assumed it had been the exhaustion that had taken her life, a life that had been a constant, unrelenting grind. Only later he’d learnt by accident when he’d found her death certificate that she had succumbed to pneumonia. In her weakened condition she hadn’t been able to fight the infection that had ravaged her body or afford the medicine that might have saved her.
Unable to explain even to herself this need in her to know more about him, more about the man who wore power so comfortably, she tentatively pushed. ‘After your mother died you went to live with your grandmother, and—?’
‘Dimitri, my uncle.’
The bleakness in his voice was reflected in his face as he continued to speak. She had the impression that he had almost forgotten she was there as he continued.
‘If she could love anyone, she loved him, in her way, though of course that love came a poor second to the bottom of a vodka bottle.’
‘She didn’t love you?’ The question slipped out. She knew it was one she had no right to ask but anger pushed it through her caution.
‘Me?’ He laughed, the sound hard. ‘She resented me almost as much as she had resented her own daughter. She forgot I was there for the most part and left me to Dimitri. Dimitri was a weak man who blamed the world for anything that went wrong in his life, and, like many weak men who could not take responsibility for their own actions, he was a bully. He used me as a punching bag.’
Kat felt the tears press against the back of her eyelids. He remembered every blow, every curse. She knew it without him telling her.
‘I hate bullies!’
Her fierce declaration brought his eyes back to her face as she stood there, her hands clenched into fists, the empathy shining clear in her glorious eyes. He froze. What the hell had he just done?
What had begun as a lesson in caution had become some sort of soul-baring session. Feelings that he had put into cold storage had been resurrected. His jaw clenched. He had every intention of putting them safely back behind the mental ten-foot-high steel-reinforced walls that had taken him years of painstaking effort to construct.
‘I remembered...’ The housekeeper’s voice drifted up the deep stairwell and they both turned as she mounted the first few steps.
Kat tore her eyes off Zach’s curiously expressionless face.
The older woman, standing at the bottom step, was breathing hard as though she’d just run back.
‘You mentioned photos—I have some. They are mostly from a few summers. I will look them out for you,’ she promised. ‘There used to be lots about the place.’
‘Thank you,’ Kat called down, genuinely touched by the gesture.
‘This way,’ Zach said, indicating the corridor to the left. He sounded distant and cold. She was assuming he was regretting opening up to her. It was pretty obvious he was not a man who was into sharing his feelings.
‘So what happened to the photos of my mother?’
‘Before my time,’ he said abruptly, before adding, ‘I’m not sure, but your grandfather will know.’
Unless he’d destroyed them, Kat thought, imagining the angry man trying to wipe his daughter from his life. The thought left her feeling deflated as she walked beside a silent Zach down what seemed like several miles of corridors until Zach stopped at a door.
‘You’re here.’ As he spoke a maid emerged from the room. She seemed flustered when she saw them.
Zach said something in Greek that made her smile and tip her head towards the room and say something in her native tongue before moving away.
‘What did she say?’ Kat asked.
‘You’re not going to learn if I keep translating for you.’
Kat, who had turned to follow the girl’s progress down the wide corridor, turned back to Zach. He was a lot closer than she had anticipated. She took a hasty step backwards, nothing to do with retreat and a lot to do with self-preservation. His closeness had a disturbing effect on her nervous system.
‘So how am I going to learn? Or is that the idea—to make me feel like an outsider?’ She regretted the self-pitying addition the moment it left her lips, but in reality she felt as though she always would be an outsider here. It seemed impossible that she would ever fit in.
‘You could take lessons.’
She noticed he didn’t offer.
‘Though they say immersion’s the best way to learn a language.’
‘Who’s they?’ she jeered, unimpressed.
‘Experts.’
She snapped her fingers to express her opinion of experts. ‘I call it stupid, a bit like saying throwing someone in the deep end is the best way to learn to swim.’
‘But you can’t swim,’ he reminded her, picturing her in a very small bikini, emerging from waves. It was a very distracting image. ‘Well, this is your suite.’ He tipped his head and walked away. ‘Half an hour, then.’
She wanted to ask where he was sleeping but stopped herself. It sounded too needy. She thought of saying she wasn’t hungry but she realised she was actually starving. Nerves had meant she hadn’t eaten a thing all day.
Kat walked in the room and leaned against the door. The room she had entered was furnished in the style of a French chateau, the walls peachy gold in colour, the stunning fireplace with its top-heavy carving dominating the room.
She found the opulent luxuriousness of it all fascinating. The antiques, the drapes, the handmade wallpaper. This was the embodiment of money being no object. It was clear there had been an effort made to inject some personal touches. Kat was appreciative of the flowers and candles. The antique furniture, probably worth a fortune, was all a bit too ornate to ever feel comfortable; her tastes were simpler.
The bathroom was a place where she didn’t mind the extravagance. It was spectacular. Someone had already lit the candles around the massive copper tub. She was sorely tempted but was conscious of the time factor and Zach’s parting words. Instead, she contented herself with washing her face—her make-up was long gone anyway. She applied a smudge of grey shadow to her eyelids, two flicks of mascara, and rubbed some clear gold on her lips. Her hair, after a severe brush, she left shiny and loose, before changing her top for a clean, though slightly creased, black silk blouse from her case, which somehow had arrived in the room before her.
With three minutes to spare she was outside the bedroom in the corridor, not pausing to analyse her determination not to have him step inside her room. It wasn’t as if he was going to carry her through to the French-boudoir bedroom with its canopied bed that was probably a lot of women’s dream. The same women probably dreamt of having a man like Zach throw them on it and make mad, passionate, head-banging love to them...or should that be with them?
She had never felt that her ignorance of head-banging sex was a disadvantage in life previously, but now she found herself wondering what she was missing.
‘You don’t want to know, Kat. It’s not you.’
The echo of her announcement had barely died away before a voice very close by responded.
‘What don’t you want to know?’
Kat felt as if guilt was written all over her face, but she managed a very credible recovery. ‘If they dress for dinner here.’ It was, she decided, inspirational but, now that she thought about it, actually quite relevant.
‘Well, there is no they, just us, and as you see...’
She accepted the invitation of his downward sweeping gesture and felt her tummy muscles quiver in helpless appreciation as she took in the pale shirt, open at the neck, and the black jeans that clung to his narrow hips and suggested the powerful musculature of his thighs.
The wash of colour lent a peachy glow to her skin as she put effort into controlling her breathing and dragged her eyes back to his face. His dark hair was damp, as though he’d just stepped out of the shower.
‘That’s good, then.’ She turned and began to walk briskly away. He let her go a few feet before calling after her.
‘Wrong direction.’
She compressed her lips. ‘You might have said!’
He might have, but the truth was he had been enjoying her rear view too much. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’m not really a formal sort of person.’
‘Alekis rarely entertains, but I’m sure he will want to show you off when he is discharged.’
She turned her head, falling into step beside him. ‘He looked...frail. How ill is he, really?’
‘He has a history of what I believe he euphemistically has in the past called “cardiac events”. This time, however, he had more than one cardiac arrest. He is not a young man.’
‘You mean he died?’ His neutral delivery made it impossible for her to figure out if he would care one way or the other. She got it that some people didn’t wear their heart on their sleeve, but this was ridiculous!
Did he think it was weakness to show emotion?
‘So they tell me.’
‘Should I...?’ She shook her head. ‘No, it doesn’t matter—’
He hefted a sigh. ‘Your first lesson is to stop thinking about what the right thing is, and think instead about what you want.’
She skipped a little to catch him up and angled a puzzled look at his profile. ‘Do you mean you never do anything you don’t really want to?’
‘Why would I?’ It was a question he had been trying to answer since Alekis had foisted the task of bringing his granddaughter home. A spreadsheet would have shown that any debt he felt towards Alekis was fully paid up by the knife he’d taken for him, but some things could not be defined by spreadsheets and analysis.
