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