Loe raamatut: «Greek Mavericks: His Christmas Conquest»

Chapter One

TIMOS HONOR looked at Theo over the rim of his wire-framed spectacles and stifled a sigh of compassion and sheer frustration. They both knew what he was going to say and the fact that Theo had had him flown over at great expense on his personal jet was not about to alter his recommendations.

‘Spit it out, Timos.’

‘There was no need to get me over here, Theo…’

‘There was every need.’ Theo’s mouth thinned in hostile acceptance of what he knew he was going to hear. He was also well aware of the wisdom of Timos’s words. He had already consulted the finest specialists that London could offer and been told the same thing. What had been the point of flying over Timos Honor, old family friend and top of his field in Greece? His story was going to be the same, but Theo had needed to hear it from one of his own, someone who might just be able to understand the torture he had been going through for the past eighteen months. Maybe he had needed to hear the stark reality with just a little bit of sympathetic packaging wrapped around it.

From the dubious sanctuary of his coldly minimalist penthouse apartment, Theo grimly regarded the thin, kindly man sitting in front of him.

‘The bones in your foot have failed to heal properly and this second accident has only served to worsen the condition. What possessed you, man?’

‘I wasn’t skiing in the hope of finding the nearest obstacle into which I could collide, if that is what you mean.’

‘You know it’s not.’ If Timos had had a full head of hair, he would have raked his fingers through it in exasperation. As it was, he made do with gently patting his balding head before linking his fingers on his lap. ‘One skiing accident on a black run was bad enough, Theo, and we all understood the insanity that took you down that. Losing Elena just before you were due to be married…Well, it would be enough to send any sane man temporarily mad…but that was well over a year ago…’

‘This last accident had nothing to do with Elena,’ Theo said abruptly.

Of course it was a lie and he knew it. Theo was an accomplished skier. Recklessness had never been part of his agenda. But the past year and a half had seen him tackle the world with scant regard for himself. He had driven himself to exhaustion, working hours that no man was constructed to work, had embarked on deals that had made his cautious partners gasp and had only succeeded with them through good luck and his own staggering talent. Not once had he lost sleep over the fact that they might not have worked out. Great wealth, he supposed, brought freedom to be, frankly, adventurous. And, at the back of his mind, he was aware that something had to change. He couldn’t keep living his life on the edge. He had to move on.

‘Well, here is my diagnosis, for what it’s worth, Theo. That foot of yours needs time to heal. You cannot continue putting it under strain. Nature has a cunning way of healing but this time you have pushed the boundaries too far and, if you do not give yourself some rest, the bones will never heal correctly and, at the very best, you will be left with a permanent limp that will put a stop to every type of sport. At the worst, you could eventually end up in a wheelchair, and let us not get into the very real possibility of premature arthritis. Tell me that that is what you want and I will heartily recommend that you take the next flight to Val d’Isère so that you can tackle another black run.’

They stared at each other in silence—Timos patiently waiting for his words to sink in, Theo bitterly aware that his behaviour had become perilously out of control. He was the first to look away with a scowl.

‘So what do you suggest?’ Theo finally asked, through gritted teeth.

‘You need complete rest. You cannot keep covering the ground that you do. Your mother tells me that since your first accident you have barely stayed in one place long enough to have a hot meal.’

‘Mama is prone to exaggeration.’

‘As they all should be. But there is enough truth in her observation to warrant it in the first place.’

‘I am a working man, Timos. Sitting around watching daytime television is not going to pay the bills.’

At that Timos laughed. ‘You could retire tomorrow, Theo, and still have enough money to last several lifetimes over. And I am not suggesting that you go into hiding for the next two years. But you could slow down considerably. Work from home.’ He glanced around the expensive apartment and shuddered at the thought of doing anything in it for any stretch of time. He, himself, lived with his adored wife in a small house on the outskirts of Athens that could not have been more different. This place reminded him of a crematorium—cold, marbled, immaculate but essentially lifeless.

‘Three months would go a long way to restoring your mobility.’

‘Three months!’ Theo nearly burst out laughing.

‘Delegate.’ Timos stood up and collected his case from the side of his chair. ‘A wise man knows when to.’

‘And what the hell am I supposed to do for three months, Timos? Work from home and watch the walls?’

‘Take up a hobby. Paint. Write poetry. Use the time to find yourself.’

The last thing Theo Andreou wanted to do was to find himself.

For the past two weeks—in fact, ever since Timos had delivered his parting shot—Theo had fought against the thought of holing up in his apartment with his foot up.

It had, he reflected now from the back seat of his chauffeur-driven Jaguar, been a losing battle because, hot on the heels of the doctor’s uninvited pearls of wisdom, had come a barrage of phone calls from his mother in Greece. Roughly fifty per cent of them had involved pleas for him to come to Greece, where he could truly relax away from the pressures of London. When these had fallen on deaf ears, she had threatened to come over to England herself so that she could stay with him and make him take the time out that she claimed he needed. She had only relinquished her full frontal attack when he’d promised, swearing on the memory of his dead father, that he would leave London for a couple of months and kick about somewhere in the country. Somewhere peaceful where he would not be tempted to darken the doors of his exquisite office at the drop of a hat.

He tore his gaze away from the sullen October skies outside and did his best to focus on the colour brochure lying on his lap. He actually hadn’t even seen the cottage his car was speeding towards. The deal had been done by his personal assistant, who had located the required peaceful spot and determined the necessary small but delightful cottage whose task was to provide him with rest, recuperation and not too much by way of hard work.

The fact that the place was in Cornwall was designed to deter him from any spontaneous swoops into the office.

Gloria had personally seen the place, checked out the shops nearby, made sure that it wasn’t too far removed from civilisation and arranged for a housekeeper to come in every other day to keep it in order. Someone else would cook for him. His role would be to appreciate the scenery, do a little work now and again and have lots of early nights.

Theo was dreading the whole thing.

Thank God for the invention of the laptop computer and mobile phones.

‘Slow down when you drive through the village,’ he said to his chauffeur, dumping the brochure on top of his case and staring out of the window. ‘I want to see exactly what I’m supposed to be enjoying for the next two months.’

And there it was, suddenly in front of him, the town clinging to the sides of a hill, an engaging mixture of old and not so old buildings. Just out of sight, he knew the River Dart flowed from the wilds of Dartmoor before entering the sea just here. It was picturesque and, more importantly, not nearly so small and backward as he had imagined. Theo gave silent thanks to Gloria, who obviously knew him well enough to realise that too much nature would not be a blessing in disguise. From what he could make out, there were restaurants, cafés, some shops, at least the comfortable trappings of civilisation.

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.

It was a smile he had not used for a long time. For years, an ever changing assortment of beautiful women had been the object of his massive charm. Then he had met Elena, quite accidentally at his mother’s house on one of his quick stop overs. The stop over had lasted ten days longer than he had originally planned and, at the end of it, he had left an engaged man, smitten with the young golden-haired girl who had agreed to be his wife. Five months later Elena had been killed and with her his dreams of marriage and family. Since then, and despite the women who still flocked around him, Theo had remained steadfastly and bitterly celibate. The easy charm that had seen him fêted as the most eligible bachelor in London, the biggest catch in the sea, had been locked away behind a forbidding coldness that could deter even the most persistent.

He realised that he must be feeling ridiculously uneasy with his surroundings to have encouraged the woman to stay. Especially when she was now staring at him like a wild animal caught in a trap with no visible means of escape.

‘I’m not sure that would be entirely appropriate, Mr Andreou…’

‘Why not?’ He headed towards the kitchen, eschewing the walking stick but taking it slowly. Despite what the doctors had said, putting pressure on the foot had seemed to encourage a healthy immunity to the pain and discomfort. A day spent sitting in a car had now made him realise how tender it still was and he scowled at the limitations of a body that had never in his life let him down before.

Sophie closed the door quietly behind her and counted to ten. She reminded herself that she had to be polite. As the odious man had pointed out, he was paying her bills.

‘Aren’t you tired?’ She followed him into the kitchen and avoided his question by going down a different route. Watching from the kitchen door, he didn’t look tired. In fact, he didn’t strike her as the sort of man who ever succumbed to something as routine as exhaustion, but he wasn’t walking properly. ‘I know that trip down from London can be a killer, especially when there’s traffic around. Although I guess you travelled down by train. I didn’t notice any car parked outside.’

‘Big house for one person, or were you living here with someone else?’

Sophie drew in a deep breath and kept trying to smile. ‘Big house for a single man to rent, or are you intending to bring down someone else to keep you company?’

Theo turned and looked at her, one hand on the bottle, the other slowly drawing out the cork. His impression of her was deteriorating by the second. Added to the unacceptable insolence, he could sense simmering just beneath the surface a stubbornness that was only thinly disguised by the stiff smile on her face.

‘I mean…’ Sophie continued hastily, stepping into the kitchen and sitting down at the table, the old, worn pine table that had seen a thousand meals and school books and, later on, art work and designs ‘…Cornwall is very popular with families…Do you have a family, Mr Andreou?’

Theo yanked out the cork and poured two glasses of wine.

‘There is no need to call me Mr Andreou. The name is Theo.’ He placed a glass in front of her and was relieved to sit down and give his foot a rest.

‘And will you be bringing your family down at some point, Mr And…Theo? Or do you prefer to have solitude for your writing?’ Sophie sipped the wine and decided that she had made a good choice. She didn’t know too much about it, but obviously going for the most expensive bottle in the off licence had been a good idea.