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Or maybe he had received them, he just hadn’t wanted to answer. He was famously rude, according to the various Kalathes people who’d tried to make contact with him. Though the people in Kingston had said that the rare times he did venture to the mainland, he was very charming and everyone liked him.
Elena didn’t know which version of him she was going to get—she suspected the rude one—but her coming upon him naked wasn’t going to endear her. Perhaps she should go back to the boat and wait until he’d got dressed.
She turned towards the jetty and the boat, and took a step.
‘Stop,’ a deep, masculine voice ordered.
Elena thought of herself as a modern woman, definitely a strong woman, and she didn’t take kindly to being told what to do by anyone who wasn’t Aristeidis, but she found that she’d obeyed the command before she’d even thought about it.
Annoyed, she turned to tell him that she wasn’t a dog to be ordered around, only for the words to die unsaid on her tongue.
Atticus Kalathes stood not far away, bathed in the Caribbean sun like a male version of Botticelli’s Venus, minus the long blonde hair and the shell.
He was very tall, very broad, and his olive skin was darkly tanned and glistening with water. Every line of him was hard, every muscle exquisitely chiselled as if out of a dark amber marble. His hips were narrow, his legs long, his thighs powerful. And between them...
Elena flushed even deeper and tore her gaze away and up to his face.
But quite frankly that wasn’t any better.
She knew what he looked like, of course—Aristeidis had many albums full of photos of a laughing boy with coal-black hair and even blacker eyes. A smiling teenager with hints of the man he’d become in his strong jaw and proud blade of a nose. And she had her own memories, too, of that day so long ago now, when she’d gripped the small pocketknife she’d found in the rubble of her home, her only weapon as a crowd of looters surrounded her. They’d seen an opportunity in the lone, vulnerable child, armed with only a tiny knife.
She’d been living in the rubble for at least a week, scrounging what food she could find, not wanting to leave the ruins of her apartment building and her family lost somewhere beneath it. She’d been terrified, blood from a cut she hadn’t even realised she had running down her face and getting into her eyes. But one thing surviving in the rubble for a week had taught her: the roaming packs of looters were predators and they could sense fear, so if she was caught out in the open, she mustn’t ever show she was afraid. Mustn’t ever look like prey.
So she’d stood there, fear like acid in her throat even as she’d gripped her knife, trying not to let any of it show. Then he had come out of the dark, a tall figure armed to the teeth. He’d worn a helmet and fatigues and he’d lifted his weapon, firing two shots into the air and shouting at the looters in a language she hadn’t recognised. The men had scattered and then it was only her and him, and she could see his face, all stark lines and sharply cut angles, and eyes blacker the sky above her head.
A handsome man, she’d thought. A prince maybe. Because he wasn’t one of the looters or the opportunists, she’d known that instinctively. He was here to save her, she’d been certain, so she’d dropped her little knife and held out her arms to him.
The eyes that looked at her now were still as black as that long ago sky, as were the uncompromising lines of his face. But she was looking at him now as an adult, not a child, and she could see how beautiful he was. Apollo come down to earth to seduce mortal women.
She’d known that though. She’d seen photos of him in the media, had read avidly all the interviews he’d given. In fact, she knew them all by heart. She could recite them in her sleep. He’d given all of four, the last one two years ago, and hadn’t been in the public eye since.
Her heart thumped hard beneath the cream wool and silk of her clothing. The sun glistened in his inky hair, still wet from the swim he’d apparently just had, and there were drops caught in his long, sooty lashes.
She’d seen pictures of naked men before. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t. In the books in the Kalathes library, photos of paintings and sculptures and other forms of art. She’d peeked, too, on the Internet, looking at various sites out of interest, but she’d privately wondered what all the fuss was about.
Now she knew. Now she understood.
A living, breathing man, glistening in the sunlight, all damp skin, hard muscle, and glittering black eyes. He was the fuss.
He didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed or bothered by his nakedness. In fact, he stood there as if he weren’t naked at all or carrying some freshly caught fish still attached to a line over his shoulder. He might as well have been wearing a three-piece suit and a crown for all the notice he paid.
She really needed to say something, perhaps the little speech she’d already prepared about how his father was dying and that it was time for him to come home, but the words got jumbled up in her head and all that came out was, ‘Um... I...well...’
‘You don’t have permission to land here,’ he said, his deep voice hard.
Elena’s mouth had gone dry and her cheeks felt hot. In fact, her whole body felt hot, and it wasn’t only the sun or the humidity, she suspected. ‘Oh, well, you possibly don’t recognise me. I’m—’
‘I know who you are, Elena.’ He flicked an impersonal glance over her. ‘You still don’t have permission to land on my island.’
An electric shock went through her and she blinked. He’d recognised her, which she hadn’t expected since the last time he’d seen her had been sixteen years ago, when he’d delivered her to Aristeidis and Kalifos, the Greek island where the Kalathes family lived.
She swallowed, reflexively straightening her jacket as if that would make her any cooler. ‘I sent you a number of emails, and I called—’
‘Yes, and did you at any point get a response from me indicating I would be pleased for a visit?’
It annoyed her that, not only did he not seem to care about his nakedness and its effect on her, he apparently hadn’t cared about her emails either. ‘No. But I thought they might have gone astray.’
‘They did not.’
