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‘Where are you going?’ Leo questioned.
‘I thought that you and your father would appreciate privacy,’ Letty said uncertainly. ‘I mean, if he’s in the midst of a personal crisis…’
‘My father and I don’t have private or personal conversations,’ Leo parried drily, and he closed a hand round hers to turn her back in the direction of the main reception room. ‘A wife as a third party is very welcome. Panos can get very emotional.’
The distaste with which Leo admitted that truth about his father spoke volumes to Letty. Leo evidently respected men who concealed their feelings more, but Letty considered that attitude archaic.
As they entered the room the older man leapt to his feet and greeted his son in a flood of distraught Greek, which made Letty wish very much that she had made it up the stairs because it didn’t feel right to her to be present at such a meeting when she barely knew Leo’s father. Leo replied to him in Greek and in what sounded like a bracing tone but whatever he said etched an expression of grief-stricken horror on Panos’s face and he fell back down on the sofa and sobbed as though his heart would break.
‘What on earth did you say?’ Letty whispered.
‘That she’s been having affairs for over twenty years,’ Leo murmured in an undertone.
‘Is that how you would normally comfort someone who’s just had their heart broken?’ Letty snapped back in disbelief that Leo had chosen that particular moment to drop even worse news on his father about his estranged wife.
‘No, but it is essential that he understands right now that her betrayal is not an isolated episode which he can forgive or overlook,’ Leo proffered without shame.
‘I disagree,’ said Letty, approaching the older man and ordering some tea and supper for him before sitting down beside him to offer him the compassion that his son appeared to lack.
Yes, even at that point she grasped that Leo and his late sister had suffered as children at his stepmother’s unmaternal hands and that, as adults, they and even Ana’s children had been shoved out of their father’s life at Katrina’s behest. And Katrina had even tried to get Leo into bed. She fully understood that Katrina was a nasty corrupt woman, but she also understood that Panos Romanos genuinely loved her and was entitled to sympathetic support from his son, who was, aside of the children, his only surviving family. And what she saw was that Leo was not prepared to offer that support because he despised his father’s ongoing attachment to Katrina and the evidence of his grief over the loss of her.
Leo was aware that Letty thought he was being cruel but he knew better. He was being cruel to be kind. Now that Katrina’s infidelity was out in the open, it was time to be honest rather than offer empty consolations. Watching his father grip both of Letty’s hands and sob out English words, Leo rolled his eyes and walked out of the room. How could he have a father with so little control over his emotions? He cringed inwardly at the thought of ever allowing a woman to bring him down that low. It was shameful, utterly shameful for a man to be so infatuated with a woman that he thought his life was at an end because she had betrayed him. Leo assured himself that he would never descend to such a level of weakness. He didn’t need any woman and he never would, and seeing his father in such a state only reinforced that warning.
By the time Letty finally contrived to persuade Panos that he needed to go to bed and sleep, it was almost dawn and he had told her the whole story of his two marriages from start to finish. She wished Leo had stayed for those revelations because they might have made him a little less judgemental. If there was one thing she could do for Leo, it would be to persuade him to talk to his father about Leo’s mother and what their marriage had been like because Leo had put his mother on a saint’s pedestal at the age of six and had made a lot of wrong assumptions about his father. Unfortunately, Leo would probably be very resistant to the idea that there were two sides to every story.
When she entered the bedroom she had been using it was disconcerting for her to meet Leo walking out of the bathroom with only a towel linked round his lean hips. ‘Why are you in here?’ she queried wearily, too worn out by her hours of comforting Panos to voice it as anything more than a fleetingly curious question.
‘We are not sleeping apart any more,’ Leo informed her. ‘How is he?’
Letty stopped dead. ‘Do you actually care? I mean, you just walked out and left me with him!’ she said bitterly.
‘I’ve been waiting for over twenty years for Katrina to be exposed as the monster she is,’ Leo countered unapologetically. ‘Her infidelity was widely known. She made my father a laughing stock and the only reason I didn’t intervene and tell him the truth about her sooner was that she made him happy and I didn’t want to be the messenger. Forgive me if I find it too much of a challenge to cry crocodile tears over the reality that she’s now going to become his ex-wife.’
‘You need to talk to your father about his marriage to your mother. You need to hear what that was like.’
‘Who the hell do you think you are to drag my mother into this sordid situation?’ Leo launched at her, wholly taken aback by that advice.
‘Someone who, thanks to your walk-out tonight, knows rather more than I feel I should about your background,’ Letty observed heavily. ‘Seriously, Leo. You need to get over yourself and talk to your dad.’
Leo stiffened defensively. ‘It’s not a matter of getting over myself—’
‘No, it’s a matter of setting aside your prejudice and taking a fresh look at old history—’
‘You could simply just tell me what he told you,’ Leo stated impatiently.
‘No. It’s not my business,’ Letty said succinctly. ‘It’s father and son stuff. And now I’m going to bed and I’m going to sleep for hours.’
Leo was transfixed by that little conversation while cursing Letty’s sense of honour in feeling that it was not her place to share such stuff with him second-hand because he had never had a personal chat with his father in his entire life and he wasn’t looking forward to the prospect. How would he even approach such a challenge? Curiosity, however, was pulling at him.
‘Letty’s wonderful,’ his father assured him over lunch, when he came downstairs. ‘An amazing woman. So kind and thoughtful and loving. You’re very lucky.’
Leo ordered coffee on the veranda and sat down there with his father for the first time in many years. Panos still looked worn, his eyes bloodshot, his weathered face still puffy from his distress the night before. Leo was seriously hoping that he didn’t start crying again because he didn’t think he would cope very well with that but, now that the truth about Katrina was finally out, he was learning that he did feel more sympathetic towards his father’s plight than he had ever imagined he would.
Panos explained how, having missed his flight to Athens, he had returned unexpectedly to the hotel, where he had discovered Katrina in bed with one of Leo and Letty’s wedding guests. Leo nodded and answered his father’s questions about why he had remained silent for so long about Katrina’s affairs. Leo gave him the honest answer and went on to ask the kind of questions about his mother that it had never even occurred to him to ask before. And what he learned then rocked his world and his perceptions about his family. He discovered then that he could handle the tears shining in the older man’s eyes. He discovered that those tears didn’t seem so weak once he was better aware of Panos’s experiences. He also appreciated that he owed his bride enormous gratitude for pushing him into that long-overdue dialogue with his only surviving parent.
For that reason, when Letty finally reappeared, surrounded by leaping, jumping kids and with Theon tucked securely on one hip, Leo experienced one of those increasingly rare moments when he wished there were no children in his life because he wanted Letty all to himself and he couldn’t have her. Even his father gravitated straight to her as though drawn by the magnet of her warmth and smiles. Leo wanted those smiles all to himself, he registered in surprise at that acknowledgement.
Over dinner, Letty rifled through the letters that had arrived that day for her and extracted one that provoked a huge grin from her. ‘I’ve got an interview next week,’ she told him.
