At The Greek Tycoon's Pleasure

The car swerved away from the town, heading south, just as his eyes focused on the figure of a girl trying to shut the door of a small office that looked more like a house than a place of work. She was struggling with it and, for a few wild, disconcerting seconds, Theo felt his heart race. From behind, whoever she was reminded him swiftly and poignantly of Elena. Same slight frame and fair hair falling straight to her shoulders. Then he blinked and was angrily aware that his mind had drifted again.

With formidable control Theo slammed shut the door on the painful memories that were always trying to fight their way out and concentrated on the picturesque drive towards the cottage.

There had been no exaggeration on the part of the estate agents. The cottage, when it finally came into view, was every bit as charming as it appeared to be in its picture. At nearly four-thirty in the afternoon, the already fading light picked up the yellow tint of the walls and turned them into burnished gold. The garden, which was not small, was lovingly pruned and trimmed back and the small path that led up to the house was exactly like something out of a child’s story book.

His mother, he had no doubt, would have heartily approved. She had always disliked his penchant for the ultramodern.

‘You can drive the car to the station when you’re done here, Jimmy.’ He let himself out of the car and, with the aid of a stick, something he frankly found ridiculous and largely unnecessary, he began walking towards the front door, key in hand. ‘Just bring the bags in. No need for you to stay.’

‘I should make sure that everything is okay…’

Theo spared him a frowning backward glance. Since when had the world started feeling sorry for him?

‘I think I can handle it from here. Apparently the housekeeper’s coming round in about an hour to check and make sure everything’s in place.’ He tried to temper the harshness of his voice with a smile. ‘No point having two people falling over themselves in a small house checking the locks on the doors. If you leave the car at the station I can find a way of getting to it if I need it.’

‘Of course, sir.’

As soon as the man had gone, Theo sank on to the sofa and stared around him.

Without the comforting sounds of distant cars and sirens outside, the silence around him seemed oppressive and unfamiliar. He spent a few well used minutes cursing his decision to listen to the combined exhortations of Timos and his mother and wondering what in hell he was going to do with any time not spent in front of his computer or on the phone. Such as now. He even missed the social life in London, which had always seemed to be forcing itself down his throat when he least needed it. But it had been contact.

With a dark scowl, he tramped his way upstairs and was in the process of doing something he had seldom done in his life before, namely unpacking his own bags, when he heard the trill of the doorbell.

On the other side of the door, Sophie Scott wrapped her jacket more tightly around her. Her scowl matched Theo’s.

This was the first time the cottage was being rented since she had moved out two months previously and she liked it as little as she had expected. She had tried to make the place as impersonal as possible, but she knew that there were reminders of her past happy life spent there with her father everywhere. From the books she hadn’t been able to transfer to her own much smaller rented accommodation in the flat above the office, to the linen, which was freshly laundered but still a legacy of the past, to the flowers in the garden, each one of which seemed capable of propelling her down memory lane.

She heard the heavy shuffle of approaching footsteps and her whole body stiffened in response.

The smile she tried hard to pin on her face threatened to harden into a grimace and she reminded herself what the lawyer had told her. That she needed the money. Ideally she should sell the house, but if not she would simply have to rent it. It could fetch a great deal of money, particularly in the summer months. Cornwall was a very desirable tourist destination and getting more so. Blah, blah, blah.

The door was pulled open and, for a few heart-stopping seconds, Sophie’s mind went completely blank as she took in the man standing in front of her.

He was very tall—over six foot—and was not the middle-aged oily Greek man she had conjured up in her imagination. Nothing oily about him at all. In fact, he was handcrafted perfection. His hair was raven-black and swept away from his face and his eyes were the green of perfect Cornish seas, but it was the angles of his face that struck her most because they gave his flawless features a harsh, powerful beauty.

He was wearing casual clothes, a faded shirt rolled to the elbows and a pair of weathered jeans that moulded his long legs. She managed to keep her gawping eyes under control, but she was well aware that his body was every bit as impressive as his face.

‘You must be the housekeeper.’

Sophie opened her mouth to explain the situation in no uncertain terms and shut it. He had stood aside to let her enter and she brushed past him, suspiciously looking around, checking to see if anything had been broken, which was unlikely considering he had only been in the place for a matter of a couple of hours. Still.

She was skin-tinglingly aware of his eyes on her—green, green shuttered eyes, and it made her feel clumsy and awkward.

‘When did you arrive?’

‘About an hour ago. No time to make any mess yet, but feel free to inspect the premises.’ Theo now recognised her. The fair hair, the colour of vanilla ice cream, the slender frame. Along with recognition came a certain amount of resentment that he could have confused her with Elena, even if it had only been for a few passing seconds. Up close, this woman was nothing like his fiancée. Her eyes were brown, not cornflower-blue, and her skin still carried the golden stain of summer. Elena, so wildly different from every Greek girl he had ever known, had been a fair-haired beauty, courtesy of her Scandinavian mother. She had not been able to cope well with the sun, always making sure that she wore hats, large straw things that emphasised her fragility. This woman was more robust-looking.

As was the direct expression on her face.

‘I’m not here to inspect the premises,’ Sophie told him bluntly. ‘I’m here to make sure that you’re satisfied with the food I’ve bought for you and to find out whether you know where everything is and how everything works. And I’m not the housekeeper. The housekeeper is a girl called Annie and she’ll be with you the day after tomorrow. Catherine is the lady you employed to cook your food and that’s all she’ll do. Cook and do the dishes. You’ll be expected to take care of the rest.’

‘If you’re not the housekeeper and you’re not the cook, then would you mind telling me exactly who you are?’ Theo maintained a semblance of politeness with difficulty. Bad enough to find himself in the middle of nowhere without having to deal with unexplained hostility from a woman who hadn’t yet seen fit to introduce herself. ‘Because I don’t think I got your name. And for the astronomical sum of money I’m forking out for this place, I expect a certain amount of civility.’

Sophie felt colour crawl into her cheeks.

‘I apologise if I seemed a bit…a bit…abrupt…’ she said. Her mouth tried a smile, which wasn’t replicated in her eyes. Just the man’s presence in her house—her house—made her bristle with resentment. ‘I should have introduced myself at the start.’ She held out her hand. ‘My name’s Sophie Scott and I own this cottage, actually.’

‘Then you might want to start thinking about being polite to the person paying the rent.’ Theo ignored the outstretched hand. He couldn’t imagine how he could ever have confused her with his beloved Elena. He couldn’t imagine Elena ever being rude to a stranger, but then again English women could be odd. Having lived in London for well over eight years, he still found their forwardness amusing and distasteful at the same time. This one seemed to be of the same mould as all the rest.

He was aware of her following him, something he found highly irritating when all he wanted to do was settle down in front of his computer with a glass of wine and check his email.

He headed towards the kitchen, pulled open the fridge and stared at the contents. ‘There’s no wine in here.’

‘No, Mr Andreou, I thought you might want to choose your alcohol yourself. If you were that keen on drinking as soon as you arrived, you should have informed us and we could have sorted something out for you.’

Theo narrowed his eyes on her, shut the door of the fridge and sat at the pine kitchen table. Her face was perfectly still and courteous but was there some insolent implication in her words that pointed to him being a drunk?

For the first time in as long as he could recall, the demonic thoughts that plagued him night and day disappeared under his sheer annoyance at the creature standing unapologetically in front of him.

‘Well, maybe you would like to sort something out for me now. Wine. White. Preferably a Chablis. You can tack the cost of it on to my bill at the end of the month and throw in extra for inconvenience caused.’

‘Of course, Mr Andreou, although I really need to be getting back home now. Would it be possible for you to wait for your wine until tomorrow? I could send Annie along with a selection of whites for you.’

‘Possible, but not desirable. I’ve had a long and tiring journey here and a glass of chilled wine is really what I’d like.’

He had no idea why he was pushing the point. He had done a certain number of reckless things since Elena’s accident but drowning his sorrows in drink hadn’t been one of them. In fact, he had avoided alcohol for the most part. Looking at Sophie’s ramrod figure, however, he could only think that her simmering anger at his high-handed attitude made a pleasant change from the soft shuffle of people tiptoeing around him just in case they said the wrong thing.

‘Right. Would there be anything else?’

‘Just the wine.’

Sophie nodded and headed out of the door. Theo was frankly surprised that she didn’t slam it shut behind her, but then again, if the house belonged to her she would have no choice but to pander to her tenant. A tenant who was paying top whack even though the high season was emphatically over.

It was all of fifteen minutes before Sophie returned, the cool night air having done very little to improve her frame of mind.

Yes, he might be a writer, and writers were notoriously moody and temperamental, but that was no excuse to be downright rude. Maybe, she fumed, clutching the bag containing two bottles of wine, because clearly he bordered on alcoholic if he couldn’t keep away from the stuff for a few hours, he thought that his looks gave him some kind of imperious right to do away with the need to be considerate.

She toyed with the seductive scenario of telling him that he could find somewhere else to stay, that she would rather have no tenant than a tenant like him.

Common sense plastered a polite smile back on to her face as the door was opened and she felt as taken aback by his physical appearance as she had the first time round.

‘The wine.’ She held out the carrier bag and kept well behind the threshold.

‘Join me.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘For a drink. By way of apology for my arrogant behaviour.’ Theo directed a smile at her that made her blink in sudden confusion.