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For a moment he said nothing, his face growing paler against the white gauze bandaging his head. Finally he found his voice. “How dare you?” he demanded. “How dare you waltz into my home—?”
“It wasn’t exactly a waltz, Mr. Koumantaros. It took me two days to get here and that included planes, taxis, buses and asses.” She smiled thinly. This was the last place she’d wanted to come, and the last person she wanted to nurse. “It’s been nearly a year since your accident,” she continued. “There’s no medical reason for you to be as helpless as you are.”
“Get out.”
“I can’t. Not only have I’ve nowhere to go—as you must know, it’s too dark to take a donkey back down the mountain.”
“No, I don’t know. I’m blind. I’ve no idea what time of day it is.”
Heat surged to her cheeks. Heat and shame and disgust. Not for her, but him. If he expected her to feel sorry for him, he had another thing coming, and if he hoped to intimidate her, he was wrong again. He could shout and break things, but she wasn’t about to cower like a frightened puppy dog. Just because he was a famous Greek with a billion-dollar company didn’t mean he deserved her respect. Respect was earned, not automatically given.
“It’s almost four o’clock, Mr. Koumantaros. Half of the mountain is already steeped in shadows. I couldn’t go home tonight even if I wanted to. Your doctors have authorized me to stay, so I must. It’s either that or you go to a rehab facility in Athens. Your choice.”
“Not much of a choice.”
“No, it’s not.” Elizabeth picked up one of the prescription bottles and popped off the plastic cap to see the number of tablets inside. Three remained from a count of thirty. The prescription had only been refilled a week ago. “Still not sleeping, Mr. Koumantaros?”
“I can’t.”
“Still in a lot of pain, then?” She pressed the notebook to her chest, stared at him over the portfolio’s edge. Probably addicted to his painkillers now. Happened more often than not. One more battle ahead.
Kristian Koumantaros shifted in his wheelchair. The bandages that hid his eyes revealed the sharp twist of his lips. “As if you care.”
She didn’t even blink. His self-pity didn’t trigger sympathy. Self-pity was a typical stage in the healing process—an early stage, one of the first. And the fact that Kristian Koumantaros hadn’t moved beyond it meant he had a long, long way to go.
“I do care,” she answered flatly. Elizabeth didn’t bother to add that she also cared about the future of her company, First Class Rehab, and that providing for Kristian Koumantaros’s medical needs had nearly ruined her four-year-old company. “I do care, but I won’t be like the others—going soft on you, accepting your excuses, allowing you to get away with murder.”
“And what do you know of murder, Miss Holier-Than-Thou?” He wrenched his wheelchair forward, the hard rubber tires crunching glass shards.
“Careful, Mr. Koumantaros! You’ll pop a tire.”
“Good. Pop the goddamn tires. I hate this chair. I hate not seeing. I despise living like this.” He swore violently, but at least he’d stopped rolling forward and was sitting still while the butler hurriedly finished sweeping up the glass with a small broom and dustpan.
As Kristian sat, his enormous shoulders turned inward, his dark head hung low.
Despair.
The word whispered to her, summing up what she saw, what she felt. His black mood wasn’t merely anger. It was bigger than that, darker than that. His black mood was fed by despair.
He was, she thought, feeling the smallest prick of sympathy, a ruin of a great man.
As swiftly as the sympathy came, she pushed it aside, replacing tenderness with resolve. He’d get well. There was no reason he couldn’t.
Elizabeth signaled to Pano that she wanted a word alone with his employer and, nodding, he left them, exiting the library with his dustpan of broken glass.
“Now, then, Mr. Koumantaros,” she said as the library doors closed, “we need to get you back on your rehab program. But we can’t do that if you insist on intimidating your nurses.”
“They were all completely useless, incompetent—”
“All six?” she interrupted, taking a seat on the nearest armchair arm.
He’d gone through the roster of home healthcare specialists in record fashion. In fact, they’d run out of possible candidates. There was no one else to send. And yet Mr. Koumantaros couldn’t be left alone. He required more than a butler. He still needed around-the-clock medical care.
“One nurse wasn’t so bad. Well, in some ways,” he said grudgingly, tapping the metal rim of his wheelchair with his finger tips. “The young one. Calista. And believe me, if she was the best it should show you how bad the others were. But that’s another story—”
“Miss Aravantinos isn’t coming back.” Elizabeth felt her temper rise. Of course he’d request the one nurse he’d broken into bits. The poor girl, barely out of nursing school, had been putty in Kristian Koumantaros’s hands. Literally. For a man with life-threatening injuries he’d been incredibly adept at seduction.
His dark head tipped sideways. “Was that her last name?”
“You behaved in a most unscrupulous manner. You’re thirty—what?” She quickly flipped through his chart, found his age. “Nearly thirty-six. And she was barely twenty-three. She quit, you know. Left our Athens office. She felt terribly demoralized.”
“I never asked Calista to fall in love with me.”
“Love?” she choked. “Love didn’t have anything to do with it. You seduced her. Out of boredom. And spite.”
“You’ve got me all wrong, Nurse Cratchett—” He paused, a corner of his mouth smirking. “You are English, are you not?”
“I speak English, yes,” she answered curtly.
“Well, Cratchett, you have me wrong. You see, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
Blood surged to Elizabeth’s cheeks. “That’s quite enough.”
“I’ve never forced myself on a woman.” His voice dropped, the pitch growing deeper, rougher. “If anything, our dear delightful Calista forced herself on me.”
“Mr. Koumantaros.” Acutely uncomfortable, she gripped her pen tightly, growing warm, warmer. She hated his mocking smile and resented his tone. She could see why Calista had thrown the towel in. How was a young girl to cope with him?
“She romanticized me,” he continued, in the same infuriatingly smug vein. “She wanted to know what an invalid was capable of, I suppose. And she discovered that although I can’t walk, I can still—”
“Mr. Koumantaros!” Elizabeth jumped to her feet, suddenly oppressed by the warm, dark room. It was late afternoon, and the day had been cloudless, blissfully sunny. She couldn’t fathom why the windows and shutters were all closed, keeping the fresh mountain air out. “I do not wish to hear the details.”
“But you need them.” Kristian pushed his wheelchair toward her, blue cotton sleeves rolled back on his forearms, corded tendons tight beneath his skin. He’d once had a very deep tan, but the tan had long ago faded. His olive skin was pale, testament to his long months indoors. “You’re misinformed if you think I took advantage of Calista. Calista got what Calista wanted.”
She averted her head and ground her teeth together. “She was a wonderful, promising young nurse.”
“I don’t know about wonderful, but I’ll give you naïve. And since she quit, I think you’ve deliberately assigned me nurses from hell.”
“We do not employ nurses from hell. All of our nurses are professional, efficient, compassionate—”
“And stink to high heaven.”
“Excuse me?” Elizabeth drew back, affronted. “That’s a crude accusation.”
“Crude, but true. And I didn’t want them in my home, and I refused to have them touching me.”
So that was it. He didn’t want a real nurse. He wanted something from late-night T.V.—big hair, big breasts, and a short, tight skirt.
Elizabeth took a deep breath, fighting to hang on to her professional composure. She was beginning to see how he wore his nurses down, brow-beating and tormenting until they begged for a reprieve. Anyone but Mr. Koumantaros. Any job but that!
Well, she wasn’t about to let Mr. Koumantaros break her. He couldn’t get a rise out of her because she wouldn’t let him. “Did Calista smell bad?”
“No, Calista smelled like heaven.”
For a moment she could have sworn Kristian was smiling, and the fact that he could smile over ruining a young nurse’s career infuriated her.
He rolled another foot closer. “But then after Calista fled you sent only old, fat, frumpy nurses to torture me, punishing me for what was really Calista’s fault. And don’t tell me they weren’t old and fat and frumpy, because I might be blind but I’m not stupid.”
Elizabeth’s blood pressure shot up again. “I assigned mature nurses, but they were well-trained and certainly prepared for the rigors of the job.”
“One smelled like a tobacco shop. One of fish. I’m quite certain another could have been a battleship—”
“You’re being insulting.”
“I’m being honest. You replaced Calista with prison guards.”
Elizabeth’s anger spiked, and then her lips twitched. Kristian Koumantaros was actually right.
After poor Calista’s disgrace, Elizabeth had intentionally assigned Mr. Koumantaros only the older, less responsive nurses, realizing that he required special care. Very special care.
She smiled faintly, amused despite herself. He might not be walking, and he might not have his vision, but his brain worked just fine.
Still smiling, she studied him dispassionately, aware of his injuries, his months of painful rehabilitation, his prognosis. He was lucky to have escaped such a serious accident with his life. The trauma to his head had been so extensive he’d been expected to suffer severe brain damage. Happily, his mental faculties were intact. His motor skills could be repaired, but his eyesight was questionable. Sometimes the brain healed itself. Sometimes it didn’t. Only time and continued therapy would tell.
“Well, that’s all in the past now,” she said, forcing a note of cheer into her voice. “The battleaxe nurses are gone. I am here—”
“And you are probably worse than all of them.”
“Indeed, I am. They whisper behind my back that I’m every patient’s worst nightmare.”
“So I can call you Nurse Cratchett, then?”
“If you’d like. Or you can call me by my name, which is Nurse Hatchet. But they’re so similar, I’ll answer either way.”
He sat in silence, his jaw set, his expression increasingly wary. Elizabeth felt the edges of her mouth lift, curl. He couldn’t browbeat or intimidate her. She knew what Greek tycoons were. She’d once been married to one.
“It’s time to move on,” she added briskly. “And the first place we start is with your meals. I know it’s late, Mr. Koumantaros, but have you eaten lunch yet?”
“I’m not hungry.”
Elizabeth closed her portfolio and slipped the pen into the leather case. “You need to eat. Your body needs the nutrition. I’ll see about a light meal.” She moved toward the door, unwilling to waste time arguing.
Kristian shoved his wheelchair forward, inadvertently slamming into the edge of the couch. His frustration was written in every line of his face. “I don’t want food—”
“Of course not. Why eat when you’re addicted to pain pills?” She flashed a tight, strained smile he couldn’t see. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see to your meal.”
The vaulted stone kitchen was in the tower, or pyrgos, and there the butler, cook and senior housekeeper had gathered beneath one of the medieval arches. They were in such deep conversation that they didn’t hear Elizabeth enter.
Once they realized she was there, all three fell silent and turned to face her with varying degrees of hostility.
Elizabeth wasn’t surprised. For one, unlike the other nurses, she wasn’t Greek. Two, despite being foreign, she spoke Greek fluently. And three, she wasn’t showing proper deference to their employer, a very wealthy, powerful Greek man.
“Hello,” Elizabeth said, attempting to ignore the icy welcome. “I thought I’d see if I could help with Mr. Koumantaros’s lunch.”
Everyone continued to gape at her until Pano, the butler, cleared his throat. “Mr. Koumantaros doesn’t eat lunch.”
“Does he take a late breakfast, then?” Elizabeth asked.
“No, just coffee.”
“Then when does he eat his first meal?”
“Not until evening.”
“I see.” Elizabeth’s brow furrowed as she studied the three staffers, wondering how long they’d been employed by Kristian Koumantaros and how they coped with his black moods and display of temper. “Does he eat well then?”
“Sometimes,” the short, stocky cook answered, wiping her hands across the starched white fabric of her apron. “And sometimes he just pecks. He used to have an excellent appetite—fish, moussaka, dolmades, cheese, meat, vegetables—but that was before the accident.”
Elizabeth nodded, glad to see at least one of them had been with him a while. That was good. Loyalty was always a plus, but misplaced loyalty could also be a hindrance to Kristian recovering. “We’ll have to improve his appetite,” she said. “Starting with a light meal right now. Perhaps a horiatiki salata,” she said, suggesting what most Europeans and Americans thought of as a Greek salad—feta cheese and onion, tomato and cucumber, drizzled with olive oil and a few drops of homemade wine vinegar.
“There must be someplace outside—a sunny terrace—where he can enjoy his meal. Mr. Koumantaros needs the sun and fresh air—”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Pano interrupted, “but the sun bothers Mr. Koumantaros’s eyes.”
“It’s because Mr. Koumantaros has spent too much time sitting in the dark. The light will do him good. Sunlight stimulates the pituitary gland, helps alleviate depression and promotes healing. But, seeing as he’s been inside so much, we can transition today by having lunch in the shade. I assume part of the terrace is covered?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the cook answered. “But Mr. Koumantaros won’t go.”
“Oh, he will.” Elizabeth swallowed, summoning all her determination. She knew Kristian would eventually go. But it’d be a struggle.
Sitting in the library, Kristian heard the English nurse’s footsteps disappear as she went in search of the kitchen, and after a number of long minutes heard her footsteps return.
So she was coming back. Wonderful.
He tipped his head, looking up at nothing, since everything was and had been dark since the crash, fourteen months and eleven days ago.
The door opened, and he knew from the way the handle turned and the lightness of the step that it was her. “You’re wrong about something else,” he said abruptly as she entered the library. “The accident wasn’t a year ago. It was almost a year and a half ago. It happened late February.”
She’d stopped walking and he felt her there, beyond his sight, beyond his reach, standing, staring, waiting. It galled him, this lack of knowing, seeing. He’d achieved what he’d achieved by utilizing his eyes, his mind, his gut. He trusted his eyes and his gut, and now, without those, he didn’t know what was true, or real.
Like Calista, for example.
“That’s even worse,” his new nightmare nurse shot back. “You should be back at work by now. You’ve a corporation to run, people dependent on you. You’re doing no one any good hiding away here in your villa.”
“I can’t run my company if I can’t walk or see—”
“But you can walk, and there might be a chance you could see—”
“A less than five percent chance.” He laughed bitterly. “You know, before the last round of surgeries I had a thirty-five percent chance of seeing, but they botched those—”
