“Give me ten minutes?”
He dipped his head in a solid nod, but when she stood, he spoke, deep and gruff. “Mila?”
Her eyes widened, waiting.
“This isn’t—,” He frowned, searching for how to say whatever was troubling him.
But she understood. Instinctively, she knew the warning he wanted to issue.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she supplied gently, wondering at the pervasive ache in the center of her chest. “For either of us.” The last words were tacked on defiantly.
She’d been alone a long time. Pushing people away was an entrenched habit.
His eyes ran over her face, appraising her, independently verifying what she was saying, so she pushed an overbright smile to her lips, then spun away from him. “I won’t be long.”
His family home,she came to understand, was on an archipelago of Greece, on the very tip of an island, completely cut off from other properties by ocean on three sides and densely wooded forest on the fourth. The family compound, he explained, as the helicopter lifted off from the villa in France, had grown as they did.
“It was very important to my father to create a legacy property.”
She turned to face him, the loud whirring of the blades tuned out by the headset she wore. “Why?”
“Because he came from nothing,” Leonidas answered simply, most of his attention on the complex instrument panel in front of him. She watched as he flicked switches and maneuvered the controls, lifting them up and angling them away from the home.
Once the villa was just a speck beneath them, he continued, “My father was very poor growing up. It’s not widely known, even with us, he preferred to keep the true details of his childhood a secret.”
“Really?”
“We knew he didn’t have much, but that his father was abusive, that he ran away, and saved what he could then went and got his younger brother, these are details he didn’t share.”
Her lips parted. “Why not?”
“I believe he never wanted us to believe it was possible—that a father could beat his own son. He never got over the shame of it. Even as an old man, I know he thought of it.”
“Shame? What shame?”
“Of being beaten, of being too small to defend himself, and then, of being able to hit back but not doing so.”
“He spoke to you about it?”
“Once. One night only, when he had drunk way too much.” Leonidas’ frown was understandable. “And not in any great detail, but there was enough for me to understand: he lived in fear, as a young boy. That fear, however, turned into a determination to succeed. He was a formidable man.”
“He sounds it.” She considered that a moment. “Formidable is an interesting way to describe your father.”
“He wasn’t like other fathers.”
“No?”
“No.” He turned to face her, gaze steady, as if weighing her up. Determining if he could trust her? She held her breath, and didn’t quite understand why.
“In what ways?” She dug her fingernails into her palms, hoping she hadn’t pushed it too far, not wanting him to shut down.
“He loved us, of that I’m certain, but it was not really a love you would recognize. For a long time, I tried to work out why. I came up with many theories, over the years, some of them fit perfectly. But after that night, when he told me about his childhood, I understood him better. He was scared of loving us, scared of hurting us. Scared to let go, because he’d seen the dark side of an abundance of emotion. He’d loved once, and lost—our sister, Valentina—and never recovered from that.”
She gasped. “I didn’t realise.”
“I’m not surprised. It was a long time ago.”
Mila swallowed, immensely sorry for him, and his family. “How?” She winced, even as the word left her lips, reaching out and pressing a hand to his knee. “Forget I asked that.”