Violet Winspear - The Awakening of Alice

The Awakening of Alice Winspear, Violet (2012)

THE AWAKENING OF ALICE

Violet Winspear “When I have finished with you, sweet icy girl,” Stefan said grimly, “Damoskinos will have the anguish of knowing that you have endured the ultimate at my hands!” Alice Sheldon was trapped on a lonely island in the Aegean, kidnapped by a man intent on avenging the murder of his fiancee. Haunted by the ghost of a tragic love, he meant to make Alice his instrument of revenge. How could she convince him that Damoskinos didn’t even know of her existence? CHAPTER ONE TRAVEL was said to broaden the mind, but throughout the journey to Greece the mind of Alice Sheldon seemed bent on a wheel that went round and round in a tormenting circle, She stared beyond the window at the sky and saw imprinted there the pretty, frightened face of her young sister. ‘He’ll kill me!’ Alberta’s seductive tone of voice had held a note of panic that made it shrill. ‘No girl promises to marry his sort and then backs out— apart from which I’ve sold the ring he gave me in order to pay for my airline ticket. I’m flying out to Harry, so don’t try and change my mind. Now his wife’s dead—you know she drank and made his

life miserable—we’re free to be together. I never cared for Ionides. It was his money that attracted me, and he must have guessed how I felt. As if any woman could love someone like him!’ ‘What do you mean by that remark?’ Alice demanded. She had never met the Greek whom Alberta had met on holiday in Crete, though she had assumed that he was a number of years older than her sister. ‘You’ve never talked much about your Greek tycoon, so you’d better tell me what you mean.’ ‘Well, he can’t walk.’ Alberta gave Alice an impatient look. ‘He’s paralysed from the waist down, which speaks for itself, doesn’t it?’ Nothing had ever shocked Alice more than to have this sprung on her, added to which Alberta announced that she was running out on the man. She and Alberta weren’t all that dose and led their own lives, but it felt like a jet of icy water in the face to learn that her sister was going to add insult to injury by jilting a man who had the misfortune to be disabled. ‘He hardly sounds as if he could kill you,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re saying that in order to ease your conscience.’ ‘You don’t know Greeks.’ Alberta gave a toss of her blonde head and her big china-blue eyes dwelt

rather scornfully on her sister’s plain, bespectacled face. ‘Not his sort! He has bodyguards who are absolutely devoted to him. If he wanted to have a girl beaten up, they’d do it for him without batting an eyelash.’ ‘Don’t be so melodramatic!’ Alice exclaimed. ‘Civilised people don’t behave like that -‘ ‘No,’ Alberta agreed, ‘civilised people don’t, but there’s something in Greek men you just wouldn’t understand, never having met one. Ionides has tons of money, all of which he’s made from his fleet of tankers and cargo boats, and he has only to snap his fingers and someone does his bidding. I— I’m scared, Alice. I love Harry and I just can’t live without him, and I’m frightened Ionides might hurt him in some way.’ ‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you,’ said Alice. ‘How can a man who can’t even walk hurt someone who works miles away in Ceylon? Do talk sense, Berta. If you don’t want to marry the man, then go and see him and explain how you feel. Tell him Harry is now widowed and that, .you’ve known each other since you were teenagers. I’m sure if he has the brains to make a fortune, he’ll understand -‘ ‘He won’t,’ Alberta insisted, running a distracted hand through her hair that was as softly fair as a child’s. She had a deceptively innocent appearance, but Alice knew

there was a streak of wilful selfishness in the angelic-looking Alberta, who had led Harry Melvin such a dance that he had finally married a much older woman, to the regret of both of them. Alice could understand her sister’s feelings up to a point, but she was certain Alberta was being overdramatic in her statements about this Greek whom she no longer wanted now Harry was free to marry her. It was all too true that Alice had never met a Greek—most men were inclined to ignore her and she had grown used to an un— romantic life, even though she was only twentyfour. Surely Greeks weren’t that vengeful! ‘To a Greek,’ said Alberta, twisting her fingers together, ‘an engagement is almost as binding as a marriage, and Ionides only let me return to England so I could buy my trousseau here. Then Harry wrote to me and asked me to go, to him, and it seemed such a pity to waste all those lovely clothes on Ionides when I could go to Harry looking like a dream, especially after what he’s been through with that woman -‘ ‘I gather Ionides Damaskinos paid for the clothes?’ Alice interjected. ‘Of course. Where would I get the money? My wage at the dress shop hardly runs to haute couture, and what Daddy left me has long

gone. Oh, Alice, can’t you help me? You’re so sensible and you’ve always helped me when I’ve got myself into a jam.’ ‘And what sensible thing do you suggest I do?’ Alice spoke dryly. ‘Go to Crete and offer myself to the man as a substitute for his blonde Venus?’ Alberta, who was rather lacking in a sense of humour, gazed at her sister in utter amazement. ‘Offer yourself in my place?’ She gave a scornful toss of her head. ‘Men as rich as Ionides are only interested in women for their looks, and you haven’t any, have you, Alice dear?’ Alice smiled, too used to this little line of sarcasm to be hurt by it any more—as their father had always pointed out, she was the brainy one and Alberta was the pretty one. ‘You got yourself into this jam, Berta, now you’d better get yourself out of it. My advice is to be frank with the man—I’m sure there are other pocket-sized Jean Harlows for him to choose from.’ ‘,You always were envious of me,’ Alberta said sulkily. ‘Now you’ve got the needle because I’ve got two men wanting me while you haven’t a soul in sight who cares two hoots about you. It’s exciting, having two men on a string, but I want Harry and I’ve never stopped wanting him, so I’m going to cut

loose from Ionides. Only I can’t face him. I shall fly off to Ceylon right away -‘ ‘Using the money from that emerald ring which by rights should be returned to your fiance.’ Alice wasn’t in the least envious of her pretty sister whom men had always wanted to spoil, one way or another, but she was disturbed by such heardess treatment of a disabled man who had probably wanted Alberta as an adornment rather than an adoring lover. Love was probably no real part of the arrangement, but all the same it would anger and shame him to be let down in this ungrateful way, especially after paying out all that money for a trousseau Alberta was going to use to dazzle another man. From all accounts rich men didn’t mind what they spent on pretty women, so long as they reaped the pleasure of the woman’s company. ‘I’ll send Ionides a wire,’ Alberta said defiantly. ‘He’ll have to accept the fact that I’ve changed my mind about marrying him——’ She broke off and shivered visibly. ‘The trouble is he has such a fearful temper and there’s a lot of talk about him on the island which he owns. They say he took vengeance on the man who made his sister unhappy, and then there was the mysterious death of the nursemaid who allowed his sister’s little boy to drown -‘ ‘Good grief!’ Alice gasped as if a fist had

landed in her stomach. ‘It’s like something out of Eugene O’Neill, isn’t it?’ Alberta ran a tremulous hand over her soft blonde hair. ‘But it’s all true— his sister Elektra told me, no doubt to try and frighten me off. She had this little boy from this man Who was already married, and that’s regarded as rather awful in Greece, but Ionides took to the child and treated him like a son. Anyway, soon after the poor kid was drowned his nursemaid was found dead in the swimming-pool. According to the verdict they called it suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed, but the island abounds with rumours to the contrary. The whispers are that Ionides paid someone to do away with her.’ Alberta drew a shaky breath and her big blue eyes were fixed upon Alice’s face with a kind of childlike trust in her -ability to straighten out the tangle she had got into. ‘Now you can understand why Ionides scares me, can’t you?’ Alice frowned, for if there was even a few shades of truth in what Alberta had told her, then Ionides Damaskinos was a complex and possibly dangerous man. ‘Yes, you’d better go and marry Harry,’ she said at last. ‘I shall go to Greece and explain things to the Greek tycoon.’ ‘You’ll really do that?’ Alberta

exclaimed. ‘He’ll take his temper out on you.’ ‘Will he?’ Alice slid the frame of her spectacles more firmly on her nose. ‘Well, he can’t damage my looks, can he?’ Alberta stared at her sister and for once she seemed shaken out of her selfcomplacency into some faint realisation of what it must be like for a young woman to go through life being ignored by young men, and being left out of all the varied excitements associated with romance. But having accepted long ago that girls in specs weren’t attractive to the opposite sex, Alice had settled for a career and was doing quite well as a commercial artist whose work was bought by the women’s magazines. Too often had she been hurt at dances and the swimming club, left to wilt like a wallflower while Alberta collected more partners than she could cope with. No more did Alice venture where she might again hear a young man say to his companion: ‘I bet there’s no fun in kissing Alice Sheldon. She’s such an owlish little school-marm compared to that gorgeous sister of hers, who’s a real honeypot, old boy, who can get stirred up in the most delicious way!’ They had laughed in a knowing way, and Alice had been left in no doubt that Alberta had

experienced the audacious sensuality of being close to a man, of having his lips on her skin and his pleading entreaties in her ears. Alberta would love it all, and laugh at it. Alice, whose heart was warmer and whose feelings were far more sensitive, felt sure she would go hungry for the attentiveness of a man. She wore glasses and had one of those quiet, reserved faces that concealed much of her inner self. She couldn’t bubble like champagne and flirt with Berta’s assurance … it just didn’t show that she had warmer blood in her veins. She buckled her safety-belt as the jet zoomed in for a landing at the Hellenikon Airport a few miles outside Athens, and wondered what would be the reaction of Ionides Damaskinos when she confronted him instead of the curvaceous Alberta with her ready smile and spungold hair. Why, Alice wondered, was she taking on the task of telling the Greek that he had been jilted? Was it because she felt sorry for him? Or was she a romantic fool who felt some kind of need to scorch her untried wings in the fury of a scorned lover? Half an hour later the cab drove her into the glimmering, dusky heart of Athens, where a few minutes later she was signing the register at the reception desk of the Hotel Metropolis where she had booked a suite for a

week. The rooms were bright and comfortable and Alice had the comfort of knowing that she could request room service in English and not have to gargle with her consonants in an attempt to speak the Greek words contained in her tourist guidebook. What a language! It looked as intricate as Arabic, and some of the men she had noticed looked as dark as Turks. She walked about the bedroom in her bare feet, a habit when she was alone, arranging her clothes in the. closet and drawers provided. Having unpacked she then wanted to take a shower and have some supper— something Greek, she decided, and picking up the receiver of the telephone she confidently asked for room service, holding the phone away from her as a deep, harshly resonant voice struck against her ear. ‘I wish to order a meal,’ she said. ‘You speak English? I was told at the reception desk -‘ ‘Yes, madame, I speak English. What do you wish to order?’ ‘ Alice frowned slightly, for there was something so brusque about the voice that she was half inclined to wonder if she was speaking to the hotel manager instead of a more lowly member of the hotel staff. ‘I—I rather fancied moussaka—it’s a pie of minced meat and aubergine, isn’t it?’ ‘A

very Greek and tasty dish, madame,’ he replied. ‘Might I suggest small stuffed marrows and sweet new potatoes to go with the moussaka?’ ‘Oh, that sounds perfect.’ ‘A melon to start with, madame, and perhaps a Turkish pastry and coffee to complete your meal?’ ‘Perfect,’ she said again, and found herself staring at the receiver, the warmth of a flush in her cheeks. There was something utterly male and almost arrogant about that voice, and she couldn’t help wondering what the owner of it looked like. ‘May I have your name and the number of your room, madame?’ ‘I am in Room 120 and my name is Miss Sheldon.’ There was a pause, as if he were making a note of the name and number, and then his voice struck her ear again. ‘Is that Miss A. Sheldon?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You are from England, ne?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Your supper will be brought to you in a short while.’ There was a sharp click and Alice replaced her own receiver with the thought that Alberta was right about Greeks —they were alarming even over the telephone. Anyway, having ordered her supper Alice went into the bathroom to freshen up. with a shower. Having removed her glasses she peered at herself in the mirror, seeing

what was always concealed from other people behind those tortoiseshell frames and myopic lenses—the self-dreaming, rather mysterious depth to her greeny-blue eyes. When she was a schoolgirl she had often wished to have china-blue eyes like Alberta, with a flirtatious sparkle in them that caught the attention of men. Alice wasn’t a frigid, nun-like girl, but that was the way men had always regarded her, and even yet it could hurt that a young man should say disparagingly that she wasn’t kissable. Alice had often wondered what it might be like to be in love and she didn’t look forward to a lonely life, though she concealed proudly from other people the fear of unloved loneliness that lay like a shadow over her heart. Was she really so unattractive? When she took the pins from her hair it fell in a soft brown swathe to her waist, quite straight and without the wave that Alberta could push into her blonde hair. The planes of her face were faintly hungry and her skin was like pale cream in contrast to her hair. ‘You don’t make the most of yourself,’ Alberta was fond of telling her. ‘You scrape your hair back in a bun and instead of highlighting your eyes with mascara and eyeshadow you leave them to be obscured by those dreary

glasses.’ ‘What’s the use?’ Alice replied with a shrug. ‘Dorothy Parker was right when she said that men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. Somehow men associate specs with a lack of sex.’ It wasn’t true of Alice and she knew it. She stepped bare and white under the shower, her hair covered by a plastic cap, and felt her own sensuous response to the warm water pounding down over her body. She was much slimmer than Alberta and as untanned as her sister was sun-honeyed by the weekend trips she took to the coast to lie in the sun with her assortment of friends. They never invited Alice along, for it had become a habit for everyone who knew the Sheldon sisters to associate Alberta with fun and games, and Alice with books and a sketching-pad. Alice turned about under the water, the rivulets of bubbles sliding down over her skin, bringing to her lips a rather mischievous smile. If only she had the audacity to be more like Alberta, to cloud herself in scented talcum and wrap her body in nothing else but the pink chiffon robe she had bought for this trip. Watermelon-pink, the girl in the shop had called it, with filmy sleeves that fell away from her arms and a silk braiding outlining the bosom.

Dared she be seen in it when the Greek waiter brought her supper to her room? Her sister wouldn’t bat an eyelash but would relish having his eyes upon her … oh, what did it feel like, Alice wondered, to see the admiration and longing take fire in a man’s eyes? She was twenty-four, but had never had that kind of experience. When a man looked at her it was with polite indifference, as if she totally lacked what it took to make the blood race in masculine veins, inducing that state of breathlessness she had noticed when a man came near Alberta. The talcum flew as she dusted it on, smelling fragrantly of Je Reviens, Alice had spent quite a bit of money on this trip to Greece and she didn’t really know why. She had bought several new outfits and the kind of lingerie she didn’t usually wear, as if like some foolish spinster she hoped to meet in Greece a man who might pause long enough to notice that she was a woman and worth at least a smile. With a touch of defiance she drew on the chiffon robe and tied its silkiness over her cool, bare, scented skin. It gave her a tingling, rather naughty feeling, and she certainly liked the effect when she removed her shower cap and her hair fell in soft disarray around the pale pink of her robe. She went to put on her glasses and then

decided that as she was only going to eat supper she might as well leave them off and not spoil her rather glamorous appearance. She smiled hazily at her reflection in the mirror. ‘Loose woman,’ she murmured. ‘What would that unkind young man say now if he walked in and saw you looking like this, Alice in Wonderland?’ Alice entered her sittingroom just as there was a knock on the door. She opened it to admit the waiter with the food trolley. As she stood watching him she felt acutely aware of herself in the chiffon robe. As shyness clutched hold of her, she wished she hadn’t given in to the impulse to try and emulate her self-assured sister. She felt the man glance briefly at her. ‘Would the thespoinis like her food on this table?’ he asked, and he gestured at a small circular table in the alcove between the windows, where the curtains were still open upon the light-studded city. That voice! Alice shot .a look at the waiter and saw that he was tall and extremely dark, the white coat he wore intensifying his darkness of hair and eyes. He met her glance politely enough, but there was something about him that set up a vibration of nerves inside her, maybe because she was clad so lightly and he might guess that all she had on was

the robe. ‘W-we spoke on the telephone?’ she said. ‘When I ordered my meal?’ ‘Ne.’ He inclined his head, then turned to the trolley and began to place the various dishes on the alcove table. He lifted a lid and the aroma of the moussaka drifted across to Alice, stirring in her stomach the realisation that she was hungry. She had barely eaten on the journey here, and was now ready to enjoy her supper with good appetite. ‘Come.’ He drew forward a chair for her and Alice hesitated about crossing the room towards him, intensely aware of her nudity beneath the chiffon, which though lined with silk had a sort of clinging effect that must reveal the shape of her figure. Unlike her eyes, whose shortsightedness without her glasses made everything slightly misty, his were probably very sharp, for it wouldn’t do for a waiter to be myopic when he had to be at the beck and call of people. Feeling a little drymouthed, Alice tried to look as casual as possible as she moved towards the table …. only to catch the toe of one of her slippers in a rug she hadn’t noticed. She tripped and would have sprawled on the floor if the waiter hadn’t leapt forward and caught hold erf her. She felt his arms close around her, so strong that they felt like a steel trap. Her slim, flimsily clad body was pressed to his

for a shocking instant that seemed to last an eternity and now she could see his face more clearly, dark, proud, with the bones thrusting beneath the sunbitten skin. The mouth was somehow relentless and black eyebrows were linked above the bold nose. He returned her look with a searching intensity and she knew at once that dangerous thoughts were going on behind his steely dark eyes. ‘I-I’m all right——’ She attempted to pull away from him and for an instant it seemed as if he would hold on to her, then to her relief he let her go and walked towards the door. ‘I shall return later for the trolley, Miss Sheldon,’ he said, and though he spoke politely enough, there was something in his deep voice which tightened the nerves inside Alice so that she wished she had the nerve to tell him to send someone else for the dishes. The door closed behind his tallness and she was left standing there, with a hand grasping the folds of her robe to her shaken body. For the very first time in her life she had been intimately close to a man, a dark foreigner with an ominous quality to him that made her question her wisdom in coming alone to Greece on a quixotic mission that Alberta would forget the moment she found herself in the arms of her teaplanter. As her nerves quietened Alice ‘told

herself not to be an idiot. Alberta had warned her that Greeks had this forceful, dramatic quality … and also a virility Alice had been very much aware of when she had tripped straight into the arms of the one who had just left her room. Oh, she was lightheaded and needed some food, and taking her seat at the table she shook out her napkin and served herself with the tasty-looking moussaka, layers of aubergine, minced meat, cheese, tomato and egg. She carried a forkful to her mouth and found it utterly delicious, as was everything the waiter had brought for her supper. At the end of the meal she took her cup of Turkish coffee to the window and stood there gazing down at the lights and the passing traffic. Tomorrow she would get acquainted with Athens … there was time enough to get into touch with Ionides Damaskinos. Alice sipped her coffee and found it thick, sweet, and with a curious but not unpleasant under-tang which she supposed was some kind of Turkish essence. Suddenly a draught stole through the window and setting aside her cup she pulled the long curtains and closed out the night where lovers walked arm in arm, or sat at a sidewalk table and drank coffee together, fingers

linked across the table top and a thousand promises exchanged in a single glance. Alice gave a sigh and refilled her cup with fresh coffee. She was usually able to assuage loneliness with, her art work, but tonight she was alone in the heart of a strange country, clad as if for a lover, she thought wryly, in floating pink chiffon that only a Greek waiter was ever likely to see, and he was probably used to female tourists wandering about their hotel rooms in negligees. She sank down on the couch and gave a yawn. She was growing tired and in a short while would go to bed and forget all these pathetic yearnings of a poor unwanted spinster. She at least had the satisfaction of knowing she was a success at her work … which ironically enough was often an illustration for a love story, and more than once she had been told by magazine editors that she created the type of masculine face most women readers appreciated—lean, dark, and suggesting a hint of sensual hunger. She placed her empty cup on the coffee table and allowed her drowsy head to relax against a cushion. Her eyes felt heavy, but somehow after that accidental moment in the arms of the waiter she didn’t want to prepare for bed until he had returned and removed the food trolley. There was no knowing what conclusion he might

jump to if this time he found her in her nightdress! A sleepy smile touched her mouth; he knew she was staying here alone and even if she didn’t have the kind of looks that Englishmen found exciting, there was the remote possibility that a Greek might be intrigued enough to attempt the seduction of an English spinster. Especially after that moment when she had tripped and fallen into his arms … he had been instantly aware of how lightly she was clad and she had felt the instinctive pressure of his hard maleness against her and every nerve in her body had been aware of the ease with which he could have overcome her. With a swing of his fist he could have knocked her senseless … yet was that what a man wanted, a passive, unresponsive, unaware body in his arms? Alice somehow doubted it of that tall, lithe Greek with his wide shoulders. He probably had a passionate young wife and several small replicas of himself running about the rooms of his Greek house, and he would have forgotten by now that his lean body had imparted to a lonely woman the first intimate thrill of her life. Heaven-help her, was she so in need of affection that she had to relive that brief moment of sensual contact with a perfect stranger? Was she about to

become one of those pathetic creatures who cried into her pillow because there was no one to hold her in the dark and fill her with the inexpressible joy of being loved, needed, wildly desired? Alice stifled a groan. She had been an impulsive fool to come to Greece … she should have remembered that this was the land of the two most potent symbols in the mythology of love … Aphrodite of the foam, and Apollo of the sun. Apollo, the audacious god from whom no virgin was safe. She sleepily told herself that in the morning, in the sane light of day, she would be her sensible self again, her hair back in its bun, her glasses back on her nose, and a sensible suit covering her body. It only made her feel vulnerable and lonely, letting her hair down and trying to behave like Alberta. Armoured in her nononsense suit and shoes, with her true self concealed behind her spectacle frames, she was able to look as if it didn’t matter that she had no one to turn to for the comfort of love. Yes, in the morning she would put out of her mind her brief encounter with the warm, vital body of the Greek whose black hair slashed downwards on his forehead in a black peak, and whose eyes at the

outer corners had a fascinating slant to them. He might look like Apollo, but she-was no beautiful Daphne whom men liked to chase. She was chaste Alice Sheldon, the girl who had overheard a man say that she’d be no fun to kiss. A tired little sigh escaped her and her head slid lower on the cushion and she curled into a more comfortable position on the couch, her long smooth hair half-veiling her face and falling across the bosom of her robe. Her heavy eyelids strove against a weight that seemed to pull on them, pulling her down, deep down into the velvety depths of slumber … on her lips the sweet lingering essence of Turkish coffee. She slept profoundly and started to dream … in her dream the tall Apollo came and enfolded her in a big dark cloak and carried her off to his island in the sun. She struggled for a moment and gave a little cry, but he overpowered her and she lay helpless in the folds of his cloak, dark and yet like a flame around her. CHAPTER TWO THE chime of bells woke Alice, and then came silence and the curious sway of the couch on which she lay. She stirred and half sat up, and something red-lined slid from her shoulders. She glanced about her in total bewilderment, and

then decided that she had to be dreaming. She touched the folds of what covered her and found it to be cloak-like, dark on the outside, with an inner lining of deep scarlet. Oh God! Her dream rushed back into her mind and she glanced wildly about the room in which she had awoken to find her dream had become a reality. The walls around her were panelled and across the teakwood floor lay shaggy rugs. There were books lining a shelf and a dock under a dome. Set within the walls were a pair of circular windows, and from outside the room her ears caught the sound of footfalls and the next moment the door swung open and a tall masculine figure stood in the aperture, clad in a coat of sheepskin and holding in his hand a mug that steamed. ‘Kalimera,’ he said, and there was an abrasive quality to his voice that Alice well remembered. ‘At last you are awake, eh?’ Alice stared at him with dilated eyes and vibrating nerves, taking in his dark face, the lean and agile body she had last seen wearing the neat white coat of a waiter at the Hotel Metropolis. ‘W-where am I?’ she gasped. ‘This isn’t the hotel!’ ‘Indeed not, Miss Sheldon.’ He approached her and whence reached the couchside he seemed to tower above her and his eyes held a glint of steel as he regarded

her, crouched there in the cloak as if magnetised by him. ‘You are aboard my caique and we are bound for the island of Solitaria—come, you had better drink this before you faint from shock.’ He offered the mug, but when Alice saw that it contained dark coffee she shrank even further away from him and shook her head. ‘It’s probably drugged,’ she accused. ‘Like the coffee you gave me last night!’ ‘You are quick on the uptake, aren’t you?’ A mocking smile edged his mouth, but his eyes remained adamant. ‘This cup of coffee isn’t drugged and will help to revive you. You have gone white and I don’t want, you to go into complete shock. Come, take the coffee!’ It was a definite command, and Alice felt so dry-mouthed and nervous of him that she took the mug without further argument. She took a sip and found the coffee strong but of ‘a different flavour from the Turkish variety which had induced such a drugged sleep that she had been only vaguely aware of being carried away from her suite at the hotel. This Greek had kidnapped her and brought her aboard his boat, and it made no sense at all that he should do such a thing. ‘Why have you done this?’ Her eyes were fixed wide and hazy upon his face. ‘W-what do you

mean to do with me? I’m not worth anything, if you’re thinking of asking ransom for me!’ He regarded her in silence, swaying slightly to the motion of the boat, his hands thrust into the pockets of his sheepskin coat. ‘Have you ever heard the word ekthekissis?’ he asked. The Greek word sounded as barbaric as he looked, his hair in damp black strands across his forehead, his mouth narrowed to a bitter line. ‘It means justice— vengeance,’ he told her. ‘I have waited a long time to achieve it, Miss Sheldon, and you aren’t on board my caique because I plan to ransom you.’ ‘Then—why am I here?’ Her pulse fluttered madly and she recalled her foolish notion of last night, that a Greek might be tempted to seduce a lone English spinster. ‘You are the bespoken of Ionides Damaskinos,’ he said deliberately, ‘and that is the reason you are here with me.’ ‘No—’you’re wrong!’ Alice shook her head, a hand reaching up to sweep the hair out of her eyes. ‘My name is Alice Sheldon—it’s my sister who was going to marry him!’ ‘Your sister, eh?’ His eyes swept over her, taking in her pink-clad figure half draped in the folds of his cloak, her hair a tumbling mass of soft brown. ‘You are quick to use your wits, but you

don’t fool me. The moment I saw your name in the hotel register I knew you had come to Greece for just one purpose, and that purpose is a man I hate and despise with my very soul.’ He began to pace the cabin, dark, brooding, and sleekly agile, his angry pain biting into him. Alice watched him, and never in her life had she felt so wary of another human being, or so aware of her inexperience when it came to placating a male of the species. He obviously had some grudge against Damaskinos and thought to have his own back by running off with Ionides’ girl… except that she wasn’t any such thing, and neither was Alberta any more. Alice clenched a hand against her heart, which felt as if it would choke her if it didn’t slow down. ‘Please listen to me,’ she begged. ‘I’ve never even met my sister’s fiance,’ ‘Don’t lie to me.’ In a single stride her abductor was standing over her and his eyes were darkly enraged. ‘Why would you be here in Greece if you weren’t the one he’s supposed to marry? Lies won’t help you, Miss Sheldon, nor all the wide-eyed pleading. I daresay Timareta pleaded with that brute, but she died just the same!’ ‘W-what are you saying?’ Alice crouched away from him, and the coffee mug shook so much that he

impatiently snatched it from her hand and slammed it down on a nearby shelf. ‘Don’t you know? Has he never told you what a delightful family you’re marrying into?’ The Greek gave a brief, bitter laugh. ‘No, he probably would hide his real self from you until after the wedding.’ ‘Oh, but can’t you see,’ she cried out, ‘a rich man like that wouldn’t want to marry someone like me!’ ‘Someone like you?’ The dark eyes raked over Alice unsparingly, from her unbound hair to her skin in the opening of her robe, milky pale except where a dark little mole lay under her collar-bone. His hands abruptly reached out and Alice gasped fearfully as his lean fingers closed on her shoulders. He jerked her towards him and when the cloak fell right away from her body she became unbearably aware of herself beneath the petal-fine chiffon. She began to struggle, and this seemed to let loose a frightening savagery in him and with bruising hands he pulled her up against him and the world was oblivion, wiped out for Alice by the force of his mouth taking hers. It was a brutal kiss, sparing none of her innocence a less infuriated man might have noticed. He forced upon her a kiss so hurtful that she reacted like a child being maltreated; she moaned in his arms and scared tears

sprang from her eyes. At once he flung her back against the couch cushions and stared at her stricken face. He gave a soft oath. ‘What are you, eh? A very good actress, or a child in a woman’s body?’ ‘I-I’m Alice Sheldon,’ she choked. ‘W-why won’t you believe me?’ ‘I do believe you.’ He leaned over her and watched her with narrowed eyes. ‘You came to Greece to marry a wealthy man confined to a wheelchair, which is typical of your type—pale and distant as the moon, and as empty of warm giving as a moon crater. You came with the intention of getting all you can out of this man who can make, no physical demands of a normal sort upon you … only it isn’t going to work out that way, little one. You are in my hands! All of you, from your long smooth hair to your slim ankles, and when I have finished with you, sweet icy girl, Damaskinos will have the hell of knowing that you have endured the ultimate at my hands!’ Alice lay flinching from his words, tear marks on her cheeks and a hand crushed to her mouth as if to hold back a scream. She swallowed in order to moisten her throat. ‘Why—why do you hate him So much?’ ‘Does it trouble you?’ he mocked. ‘Do you pretend to have some affectionate

feeling for him?’ ‘I don’t even know him,’ she protested. ‘No, only his enemies really know him.’ A warm, very masculine hand moved across Alice’s body and she gave a little jerk that brought a twisted smile to his mouth. ‘You react to my touch as if for the first time, yet I have heard it said that English girls lose their chastity in the school playground. Are you chaste, eh? Is it possible Ionides found for himself a virgin he hoped to keep intact? That would be his way, when he doesn’t have them destroyed!’ ‘I don’t know what you’re implying when you say that——’ Alice moved as if to sit up, then bit her lip against a deep inward tremor as his lean hand slid to her hip. ‘Please— please let me go!’ He deliberately shook his head. ‘After all the trouble I’ve taken to abduct you? I have waited too long, guzel, to tamely let you go because you cry so movingly. And if you are Ionides’ virgin it will give me all the more satisfaction to take what he can’t—it will make up just a fraction for the way Timareta was drowned in his swimming-pool. Suicide, they called it, after blaming her for the death of a child belonging to Damaskinos’ half-crazed sister!’ Alice listened to

him with a sense of doom, and it all came rushing back, what Alberta had told her about the tragic events which had taken place in the Damaskinos household … the drowning of the illegitimate child and the nursemaid found dead in the pool. Her eyes dwelt with fear and fascination upon the face of the man who related these events with such bitterness, and suddenly the name he had mentioned broke from her lips: ‘Was Timareta the nursemaid?’ ‘Ah, so you are aware of what transpired in that house?’ His hand reached out swiftly and this time his fingers gripped her by the hair, until she gave a cry of pain. ‘What were you told—the same story as everyone else? That Timareta, the girl I was to marry, took that child swimming and allowed him to lose his young life? She would never have done such a thing! I knew her from infancy—we grew up together in the same village and I know that she was as good as she was lovely. Any child would have been safe in her keeping! No! It was Elektra Damaskinos who made away with her love-child, and then out of fear of her brutal brother she laid the blame on Timareta and he took revenge on her.’ The tormenting fingers tightened as if they wanted to scalp Alice and tears smarted in her eyes. ‘You’re as brutal as he is,’ she gasped. ‘You find it

just as easy to hurt a woman, don’t you?’ ‘I find it easy to hurt his woman.’ He jerked her head back until the agony was such that she gave a scream. ‘Ah, God help me, but I could rip your lovely hair out of your head!’ Abruptly he let go of her, and she shuddered in a residue of pain and flung her hands over her face as if to shield herself from a devil. ‘None of this has anything to do with me.’ She was trembling and couldn’t seem to stop. ‘I—I came to Greece to tell Damaskinos that my sister wanted to be released from their engagement -‘ But the tall Greek wasn’t listening to her. He swung on his heel and made for the door. ‘I have to go on deck to make sure the caique is on course. On this trip I have only a boy with me—apart from you, Miss Sheldon.! ‘You can’t do this to me,’ she flung at him. ‘I’m English and this is abduction—there are laws against such things!’ ‘I know only one law with regard to Damaskinos and his kind.’ He leaned his back against the door and regarded her with narrowed eyes, his dark brows linked in a frown that added to his look of menace. ‘He went unpunished for what he did to my girl, but he won’t go unpunished for what I do to his English girl. When we met for the first time last night I realised

just how embittering it will be for Damaskinos to have ruined goods flung back at him in place of the shy-eyed, untouched young woman who opened the door to my knock. Right away I could see why he would want you … you actually have an aura of modesty and virtue, and he collects unflawed gems, does he not?’ ‘I-I don’t know what he collects— how many more times must I tell you that I’m not his girl! If you were to see my sister you’d soon realise your mistake. She’s blonde, pretty, and men have always flocked around her.’ ‘Do you imagine,’ he drawled, ‘that Greek men like the sort of female who has had other men’s hands all over her?’ The dark face was sardonic and scornful. ‘Damaskinos is as Greek as I am and he’ll roar like a wounded bull when I return you to him and you no longer have the look of purity. My eyes, my touch, my kisses will have been all over you, Miss Sheldon, by the time I hand you back to your rich suitor.’ Alice stared at her Greek abductor as if through a mist, but his words were all too clear. ‘You’re out of your mind,’ she gasped. ‘Damaskinos doesn’t even know me!’ ‘He won’t want to know you, little one, after I have flawed his pure English gem. He won’t be able to

display you among his other valuables, and that will hurt his stony pride far more than if I broke your neck and left your innocence intact. Such innocence in a young woman from the isle of liberation and the birth pill! A man can hardly credit such a rare phenomenon, unless it’s a very good act.’ ‘I’m not acting and you’ll be committing a crime if you -‘ Alice bit her lip … she had already had a taste of his hurtful strength and she could feel the throb of the bruises he had inflicted on her. He hated Damaskinos on account of that drowned girl and he was out to exact vengeance. Her appeals were beating against a stone wall, and that her name was Sheldon was sufficient for him. He had her at his mercy, and in a lost way she dragged the red-lined cloak around her as if to hide herself from eyes that had already seen the silken white texture of her skin. Even Alberta had less perfect skin than she, but Alice had never dreamed that a man would one day see it in such circumstances as these. ‘You’re a cruel, headstrong man,’ she accused. ‘You won’t listen to reason— you won’t believe that I haven’t the remotest connection with the death of your girl. You have to punish someone, don’t you? Punish me, even break my neck, but it won’t affect Damaskinos in the

smallest degree. I shall be the only one to suffer— along with your conscience!’ ‘You make quite a picture.’ His eyes swept over her in the cloak, her long tousled hair catching some of the sunlight that was threading its way through the portholes of the cabin. Tears had matted her lashes and turned them to dark little spears, and her eyes unshielded by her glasses were a hazy green-blue. ‘There will be a certain pleasure in taking my ekthekissis; a certain sweetness that might for a while dilute some of the bitterness of these last few years. I had great regard for Timareta, but what would you know of love, Miss Sheldon, a young woman prepared to sell herself to a rich beast?’ Indeed, thought Alice, what would she know of love, a woman whom men had passed by until this man mistook her for Alberta and carried her off on his caique. His caique? But last night he had been working at the Hotel Metropolis as a waiter! ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘What are you?’ ‘Apart from a devil?’ he mocked. ‘My name is Stefan Kassandros, and I am not a waiter at the Metropolis but the owner. I am the proprietor of several like it—what else have I had but hard work to keep my mind and body occupied?

The girl who would have shared my leisure is lost to me. Hard-driving activity and an existence almost monklike have been mine for a long time, Miss Sheldon, but that will change when you and I reach Solitaria.’ He paused as if to let his meaning sink into her mind. ‘Oh yes, I also have an island, but a very different sort from the one where Ionides Damaskinos rules like a decadent tyrant. Mine is wild, solitary, far out in the Aegean Sea, and there with me you will pay back with every hair of your head all those hours of loneliness when the stars have shone and the wild herbs have given off their incense, and I have walked alone, by the sea. You will stay with me on Solitaria until I tire of you … you will be mine in everything but my name. Do I make myself perfectly clear to you?’ Clear as a bell, each word striking through Alice with astounding clarity. This tall, striking Greek was telling her that she was to be his possession … she, Alice Sheldon, who in her spectacles and neat blouses had never attracted a man. On a wild Greek island in the sun she was to live with this man in the kind of intimacy she had never dared to think about. Such imaginings weren’t good for lonely women; they only intensified loneliness … and dear God,

how lonely she had been J Her life had been but work and a nun-like existence, and now this man Stefan Kassandros was telling her that she was to be his in everything but his name! ‘Don’t do this to me!’ She flung out a hand in mute appeal. ‘We’ll both be degraded -‘ ‘Measurably so,’ he rejoined. He walked back to where she half-knelt on the couch and now he was close to her again she saw the dark Greek beauty of his eyes and the proud hard bones thrusting beneath his sun-darkened skin. She shivered as his hand slid across her shoulder to her nape, enclosing it in lean powerful fingers. ‘I am taking you with me, so you had better stop fighting the idea. You had better give in to it, for you look as if you bruise easily.’ ‘Y-you have already bruised me,’ she said in a shaken voice. ‘I’m not used to being manhandled!’ ‘Indeed you are not.’ His hand travelled over her hair. ‘Like wild brown silk wrapped around skin more white then I ever dreamed a woman’s skin could be. It’s too late for conscience, because I already have you on board my caique. It’s too late for compassion, because my heart has fed too long on hatred of Damaskinos.’ His fingers wrapped themselves in her hair, but this

time he didn’t hurt her. ‘Deny it though you will, you are his, woman—you feel and look the virgin that beast would lure into his den with his money. I don’t condemn you for wanting wealth, for it has many uses and I have worked for it myself, building my hotels and enticing into them the many tourists who are lured to Greece by its history and the old pagan beliefs that haunt its ruins. Land of the quail, of herb-scented hills, and the dolphin waters. Land of Psyche, the soul in every man.’ Alice gazed up at him and never in her life had she heard a man speak in such a way, with a kind of uninhibited passion for the land of his birth … a passion that might lurk in every bone and sinew of him, in everything he did. He leaned over her and now he spoke with a soft menace. ‘Now you are mine! You became mine from the moment I entered your suite last night and saw that you had just emerged from the shower .;. I could smell the perfume on your skin and when you tripped and I caught hold of you, I liked what I touched. You knew it, didn’t you? That I could have taken you! But the island is better—we shall be almost alone on Solitaria, which is inhabited by only a few farming families and the people I employ to take care of my house and its gardens. There you will give me vengeance, and pleasure to

an intense degree—I see it in your sea-coloured eyes.’ Caught, trapped by his smouldering eyes, Alice felt a wild suffusion of colour over her entire, body. Agitated pulses seemed to throb everywhere and it was as if she were on the verge of delirium. All her entreaties had been dashed to nothing against the adamant resolve of this man, and each moment that passed, each heartbeat she felt, meant that the caique was sailing nearer all the time to his island called Solitaria. Wild, no doubt picturesque, with the sea winds blowing across its rocks and turf, where a few Greek peasants tilled the soil, and a white-walled house stood waiting for a man and a woman … a house he must have built for himself and Timareta. Alice fought the magnetism of his eyes and her lashes made shadows on her cheeks. ‘I-I’m not the person you take me for,’ she said, and this time she knew she was fighting not him but herself. ‘I wear glasses and men consider me a frump She broke off as Stefan Kassandros laughed and pulled his fingers free of her hair. ‘You will tell me next that you wear false teeth, or that your hair is glued on.’ ‘I’m terribly shortsighted,’ she rejoined. ‘I didn’t trip over that rug on purpose last

night, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ ‘No, I saw the look of helpless surprise on your face when you felt yourself falling, and that’s why I caught you in my arms.’ He smiled down at her and she saw the deep brilliance of his eyes. ‘You will never know how long it had been since I held a woman so close to me. I had almost forgotten how pleasant the sensation could be—it rather sealed your fate, did it not?’ ‘What do you mean?’ Alice gave him a helpless look, for that was the way he made her feel, his wide shoulders stretched above her and that faintly mocking smile on his mouth. ‘I had already decided that something had to be done about the little fly which had walked so innocently into my parlour. I thought to ask an enormous ransom for you from Damaskinos to be paid to a charity, but that was before I felt your slim and scented body in my aims. The moment that happened, guzel, I knew the gods had arranged a for more subtle and exciting ekthekissis on behalf of Timareta.’ ‘You’re crazy-—criminal,’ Alice gasped. ‘You can’t really expect to get away with such a thing! You can’t imagine that I shall willingly let you treat me like—like an object, to be flung aside when

you’ve had your fill of vengeance.’ ‘How will you stop me?’ he mocked. ‘I’m a whole lot stronger than you, and I’m a very determined man when I set my mind on something. Damaskinos robbed me of what I loved, so I shall do the same to him.’ ‘But he doesn’t love me,’ Alice exclaimed. ‘I’m nothing to him— you’ve got to believe me!’ ‘Oh, I quite agree that he couldn’t love a woman with any tenderness, or even respect,’ Stefan Kassandros agreed. ‘He only knows how to possess people, and so I shall possess you—only rather more thoroughly than he ever could. He’ll choke on that like a bone in his throat.’ ‘Will it really make you happy to have all your hatred out on me?’ Alice asked, a frightened catch in her throat. ‘It will give me immeasurable pleasure.’ He traced with a fingertip the line of her cheekbone to the corner of her mouth. ‘How fortunate that the woman of Damaskinos is not a shallow, insensitive flirt but a woman whose inner emotional self is very vulnerable. I like that, Alice. You are the most unguarded woman I have ever met, with a misty loneliness in your sea-coloured eyes.’ Alice couldn’t take those eyes from his face; he was more physically attractive than any man she had ever seen, and he was equally ruthless. Hours had already passed since he had entered her suite

and served her with drugged coffee, and there wasn’t a soul to care what became of her. Alberta had flown off to Ceylon to be with her lover, and Alice had no close friends to be concerned for her. Her plight was quite helpless, and she had a feeling she should be screaming and tearing her hair … wasn’t that the tradition when a woman was calmly informed that she was going to be ravished? ‘You’re the most unscrupulous man I’ve ever met,’ she said. ‘Oh no,’ he shook his head. ‘I’m a saint compared to that satyr you came to Greece to marry. I’m years younger than Damaskinos and my feelings with regard to women are normal and not all twisted up.’ ‘You call this normal—what you are doing to me?’ ‘I am doing very little at the moment,’ he drawled. ‘In fact I am about to leave you for a while, so don’t weep and make a misery of yourself. Your suitcases are at the foot of the divan, so dress yourself and come on deck. I shall get the boy to cook some sausages and bacon. Are you hungry?’ ‘No— ‘I think you are.’ This time his stride towards the door had definite purpose to it. ‘The sooner you accept the inevitable, Alice, the better it will be for you. I shall be waiting for you.’

The door closed behind him, and Alice crouched there on the divan and listened to his receding footfalls. Alberta had warned her that Greek men could be devils, and instead of taking heed of that warning she had come on impulse to Greece and now found herself at the mercy of a handsome devil who made her shiver in retrospect. Hurt by a tragic love, he meant to make her suffer for it—deaf to her cries that Ionides Damaskinos didn’t even know of her existence, or that if he knew it was as a vague figure in Alberta’s background. She slid from the divan and went across to one of the portholes, the cloak still clutched around her as if to protect her from a pair of dark eyes. The sea looked incredibly blue and was running fast, as if the caique was moving swiftly across the Aegean, putting many miles between Alice and the comparative civilisation of Athens. This was real and those romantic stories for which she did the art work were far behind in her London flat. Up there on the deck of the caique stood a tall Greek bent on vengeance, and down here she huddled in his cloak like a trembling Victorian virgin. Only she wasn’t about to have the vapours, and that devil wasn’t going to have his way without

one hell of a fight! Alice dropped the cloak, tossed back her hair and lifted her suitcases on to the divan. If he thought he had run off with a siren, then she was about to show him her real self, in neat skirt and blouse, spectacles and her hair in a bun. CHAPTER THREE THE caique rode the swells with effortless grace and below her sails of deep rusty red the sea gleamed turquoise, its surface scattered as if with countless fish scales. Alice had mounted to the deck very quietly and now she stood partly concealed by some ship’s tackle watching Stefan Kassandros at the wheel of the craft, its great sails belling out in the fresh wind off the sea. He had removed his sheepskin coat and his wide shoulders strained the linen of a white shirt as he steered his piratical caique towards the island he had called Solitaria because it was far out in the Aegean and he could take a woman there and do as he wished with her. Her eyes slid down to his lean hips in sun-bleached trousers. His body had animal balance to it combined with a look of power and innate toughness. His shoulders were imposing but not heavy, and Alice’s hand climbed to her throat as she watched him. She hadn’t known that the silent physical presence of a man could be so

overwhelming; he seemed supremely selfsufficient, and yet he carried an aura of loneliness as. he stood there guiding this great bulk of mahogany and teakwood through the dazzling waters. A beautifully carved balustrade outlined the tiller and Alice could see the shape of a figurehead high above the helm. ‘The Owl and the Pussycat,’ she thought. Only this was a tiger with whom she was sailing away, tawny-skinned from the wind and the sun that had burned into him. A man who had admitted to living monklike since the untimely death of his girl, but who meant to change all that when he reached his island with the woman he had dared to abduct… like a Greek pirate. All of it was incredible, like some fantastic dream that held her spellbound. She breathed the tang of the ocean and felt the sun against her skin, and for the first time she saw Stefan Kassandros with clarity. At first after glancing through her belongings she had panicked because she had been unable to find her indoor glasses, then had realised that he hadn’t bundled them in with her other things. They had been left unnoticed on the bathroom shelf, but fortunately she possessed a pair of sunglasses, not too deeply

tinted, and these would have to suffice for everyday use. She was wearing them right now, along with a slim dark skirt and sedately collared blue blouse. Her hair was neatly coiled into a bun at the nape of her neck and she wore not a trace of make-up. Now she was Alice Sheldon again, the primlooking sister of the glamorous Alberta, whom men passed by without a second glance. She braced her spine, which was actually as straight as an arrow, giving to her slenderness a look of balance she was inclined to be unaware of, so that when she walked along Kensington High Street she had a rather snooty air. Her tinted spectacles sat firmly on her nose and she hoped she was going to give her kidnapper quite a jolt to his masculine libido. ‘Here I am, Mr Kassandros,’ she said, in her primmest tone of voice. ‘I’ve dressed and come on deck, as you ordered.’ He glanced down lazily at her and the first thing his eyes settled on was her bunned hair. ‘Loosen your hair, Alice, and don’t argue with me,’ he said, and though she had sworn to control her nerves, his voice still had the same alarming effect on her silly female knees and she felt them tremble the instant he opened his mouth. ‘Go to the devil,’ she muttered, hating him for his male assurance and his attitude of being her master.

‘It’s my hair, and I always wear it this way. I—I only ever loosen it when I go to bed.’ ‘How provocative,’ he drawled. ‘But I happen to like it unbound when you aren’t about to go to bed, so take out the pins, or whatever else secures that bun, and let the sea wind play with your hair.’ ‘Another direct order from the captain?’ she asked, hands firmly locked together behind her. ‘I thought you ought to get used to the way I really look.’ Again his eyes swept her up and down … the darkest, most disturbing eyes she had ever encountered, making her aware of the deep potential for passion in this man, alike to the sea all around them, fathomless, fearful, hiding secrets and storms. Struggling free of his gaze, she fixed hers upon the heavy jade seal that hung against his brown chest in the deep opening of his shirt. Overhead came the creaking and rustling of mast and sail, and his hands were firm on the great span of the wheel. ‘What in the world is wrong with the way you look?’ he wanted to know. ‘Loosen that soft cloud of hair and you’ll look more yourself.’ ‘This is myself,’ she said insistently. ‘I’m not a teenager to go about with my hair floating in the breeze.’ ‘Then why wear it long at all?’ he queried,

a glint of mockery in his eyes. ‘Why not have it cut off? Shall I tell you why you don’t, Alice? Because you know how enticing it looks when you let it down, but you don’t have the nerve to wear it that way in the street. You’re an inhibited young woman, aren’t you?’ ‘And I suppose you’re a psychologist as well as being a hotel keeper, a sailor and an abductor?’ she rejoined. ‘What I am is my own business.’ ‘Not any more.’ He let his voice sink down meaningly on the words. ‘You are now my business—mine to control just as I fancy.’ ‘You’re acting just like a damned pirate!’ she exclaimed. ‘When the authorities catch up with you ——’ ‘I don’t think they will, Alice. It was dark when I carried you away from the Metropolis and brought you aboard the Phaedra. Your name has been skilfully removed from the hotel register and there is no evidence at all to show that you were there.’ ‘What about the clerk who booked me in, and to whom I spoke?’ she demanded. ‘A cousin of mine who likes his job. Family relationships in Greece ate very close and feudal, Alice.’ ‘A—and what about the boy you have on this boat? He’ll see me-—-‘ ‘Doubtless.’ The edge of the well-cut mouth gave a quirk. ‘He is the son of another

cousin, and there will be no questions inside or outside my family with regard to what I do with the woman of Damaskinos. Sufficient to say that our loyalties are iron-bound.’ ‘You’re made of iron,’ she accused, even as she saw the rise and fall of his chest and the movement of the jade seal against his skin. His muscles were firm, but there was an alive quality to his body that Alice couldn’t ignore. She almost wanted to touch turn, and stabbed her palms with her fingernails in a kind of self-punishment. This man was little more than a criminal, and here she was reacting like the traditional spinster starved of male chemistry. ‘I despise you,’ she said. ‘You’re just an arrogant bully!’ ‘Most men are,’ he agreed. ‘From boys they are aware of a superior strength, so they use their physical power in order to dominate, but on the reverse of the coin there is the female who realises that by using charm she can often subdue the arrogant male. Perhaps you aren’t aware of having this charm, Alice. Perhaps you will have to be taught how to use it.’ ‘And you, I suppose, are going to be my tutor?’ She spoke crisply, in the way she had learned since overhearing it said that she wouldn’t be fun to kiss. ‘You may finish up with a very disappointing pupil,

kyrie.’ ‘We shall see. It amazes me that Damaskinos had the wit to realise that lurking inside the prudish Miss Sheldon, with her blouse buttoned all the way up and flat heels to her shoes, there is a very different person longing to get out. A shy, silky, spitting little cat, eh? Tell me, Alice, did someone say to you when you were little that you were plain?’ ‘I know I’m plain.’ ‘So is rice pudding, until you get the taste of sugar and spice.’ ‘Thanks! It’s flattering to be told I’m a bit of a cat, with the disposition of a rice pudding.’ He laughed, a throaty male sound which Alice had heard so infrequently in her old-maidish life. He laughed and said these provocative things, but only because he believed he had on board his caique the fiancee of a sworn enemy. He had waited a long time to score off Ionides Damaskinos and it was seeing her last night, masquerading as Alberta rather than herself, which had led to her being with him on this graceful craft, which rode the swells with sails full- stretched in the wind. Never in her wildest dreams had Alice imagined something so improbable—and improper— happening to her, and with some guilty, deep-down part of herself she almost wanted him to go on believing that she was Alberta. Even her popular sister had never been dated by a man who

looked like Stefan Kassandros, with a lithe, strong grace to his body, and a look of command in his face. With eyes that vowed retribution for emotional suffering ! ‘You have never loved,’ he had said to her. ‘You were ready to sell yourself to a rich beast.’ Alice listened as the laughter sank down gratingly in his brown throat. Her protestations had been ignored and because he wouldn’t believe the truth she was in the position of living a fantastic lie. Short of leaping over the side of the Phaedra in an attempt to escape him, she was as much at his mercy as a woman abducted on the high seas by a corsair of long ago. An alarming sensation shot through her when he suddenly reached out a hand and found the knobbed pin that secured her hair. He plucked out the pin and her hair tumbled free of its confining bun, softly burnished by the sun as it tumbled about the shoulders of her blue silk blouse. ‘A snip of defiance I will tolerate,’ he said, ‘but I don’t intend to be denied my pleasures. There, that looks much more fetching.’ ‘You’re abominably Sure of yourself, aren’t you?’ Nothing so intimate had ever happened to Alice … and no one had ever called her fetching! ‘I suppose you’re playing games with

me, like a—a naughty boy with a fly in a bottle?’ ‘A boy—even a naughty one?’ He smiled mockingly, and flicked the pin into tie sea. ‘Never again fold your hair in a bun like a matron.’ ‘I don’t happen to like my hair in an untidy mess about my face,’ she rejoined. ‘I’m not a schoolgirl.’ ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘but neither are you on the verge of middle age and in need of dignity. Now shall we do something about the blouse? The colour is charming, but shall I undo some of those top buttons, or will you do the unbuttoning yourself?’ ‘No-—-‘ Alice flung up a hand and covered her sedately buttoned collar. ‘I won’t be turned into some kind of—of wanton to suit you! You have no right to give me such orders!’ ‘You’re mine to do with exactly as I please.’ His smile had a wicked edge to it. ‘You have encased yourself in a tightly laced mental corset, haven’t you, little one? Now the time has come to release some of those reservations that won’t permit you to breathe freely— to throw back your hair in the sun and wind and let the elements caress your skin. You have the most beautiful skin I have ever seen in my life—don’t you know it?’ When he said that Alice felt as if she blushed all over. Oh yes, she had

known that she had good skin, but only in the privacy of her bathroom. But such privacy was now at an end, she realised, and there wasn’t the smallest doubt in her mind that if she didn’t open one or two of her blouse buttons, he’d yank her close to him and do it for her … and get pleasure out of doing it. With a mutinous set to her lips Alice undid the top button, cast a look at his face and undid the next one. ‘One more,’ he drawled. ‘Three is a lucky number.’ ‘Perish you,’ she said, but did as she was told, feeling at once the soft wind blowing against her throat. His dark eyes were upon her throat, brooding there as if he were remembering the way she had looked in the petalsoft chiffon. At once she looked about her in a hunted way and took a step towards the side of the caique. ‘The water looks beautiful,’ he said, ‘but there are sharks in it.’ ‘You’re only saying that to scare me -‘ ‘Then try it, pedhaki mou. I suppose Miki and I could always try and sew you up with sail thread.’ Alice gave a shiver. ‘You’re as hard as nails, aren’t you? Wwhat was that you called me in Greek?’ ‘My little lover.’ ‘I’m no such thing!’ ‘You will be.’ His eyes brushed her, watching the wind play with her hair.

‘I rather fancy my shy, silky, spitting little cat, and it’s been a long time for me—and never for you, eh? It’s life, Alice. Like the sea and the wind and the tide. It’s ethekissis, and I want it!’ ‘Regardless of my feelings?’ she demanded, swaying to the motion of the caique on legs gone tremulous from his words. Already she knew that he never said anything he didn’t mean. He wasn’t making conversation and passing the time … he was telling her what lay ahead for her on the island of Solitaria. ‘Your feelings will be considered,’ he drawled. ‘I shan’t whip you into submission.’ ‘You may have to! You don’t imagine I shall give in to you like—like some love-hungry spinster!’ ‘You will give in, Alice, one way or another. Ah, here comes Miki with breakfast—a little late, but nonetheless welcome, eh?’ She wanted to tell him to give it to the fishes, but once again was betrayed by her own body. She was ravenous, and the food on the tray had an aroma that was out of this world. The boy Miki gave her a smile, as if it were-: quite the usual thing for him to assist in the abduction of an Englishwoman. Or maybe he had been led to believe that she was an eager passenger aboard the caique … she wouldn’t put anything past

Stefan Kassandros! ‘Arrange that box so Miss Sheldon can sit and eat her breakfast,’ he said to Miki in English. ‘Miki is bi-lingual like quite a few young Greeks,’ he explained to Alice. ‘His father, my cousin, spent some years in America and brought home with him a Greek wife who had been born there. A lot of my people go to the States for a while, but they invariably return to Greece. Few other countries have our history and timelessness, and even your own country, England, is being spoiled by so-called progress. Don’t you agree?’ She did agree and had to admit it, taking her seat on the box Miki had arranged so she was partially shaded from the sun and accepting from him a plate of hot smoky bacon, fat little sausages, tomatoes and fried bread. As Miki poured the coffee he kept giving her quick glances from faun-shaped brown eyes, above which he had a head of curly dark hair. He was good-looking and Alice couldn’t help smiling back at him. No doubt all the male members of the Kassandros clan were alarmingly attractive in a wholly Greek way—lean, agile, assured in their maleness. ‘Take the wheel, Miki, while I eat,’ said Stefan, and the - boy sprang to do his bidding. ‘We’re dead on course, so you keep it that way, eh?’ ‘Ne, kapetanies.’ The boy braced himself at

the wheel, and Stefan Kassandros caught Alice’s eye as he came to where she was eating and there was a glint of amusement in his eyes. The sun struck his dark head and his thick hair also had a glint to it, and Alice couldn’t help noticing that the widow’s peak was exactly centred above his brows. It was incredible to her … beyond belief that she, plain Alice Sheldon who sat at home while other girls had fun, could have aroused in this imperious Greek a desire to make love to her. As he lounged against a mast and ate his food, forking sausage and bacon with uninhibited appetite, Alice could only assume that his desire for her was so rooted in his hatred of Damaskinos that only by taking possession of her—whom he believed to be the would-be bride of the Greek shipping owner— could he assuage the bitterness and heartache stored up in him for so long. He must, she thought, have been tremendously in love with Timareta to have kept away from other women ever since her death, for this wasn’t a man whom women would pass by without a second glance. Alice lowered her gaze to her plate and realised how physically aware of him she was … oh lord, was she so love-starved that

she actually felt some kind of pleasure in this abduction? This man was sailing away with her like some buccaneer, and here she was eating his food and actually admiring his wide shoulders tapering to lean hips, and his legs that were so long and thrusting in the sailcloth trousers. ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Surely I can have my thoughts to myself,’ she said resentfully. ‘You don’t intend to demand those, do you?’ ‘The fact is, Alice, you intrigue me because you don’t seem to have any of the usual female tricks. It’s almost as if you had led a life of seclusion, which can’t really be possible when you found time to throw a hook into Damaskinos. He’s going to struggle like mad when you fail to show up, isn’t he?’ ‘He’ll probably send out his gunboats.’ Alice made the retort before weighing its implications, and her pulses gave a throb as she realised what she had said. Stefan Kassandross gave a soft, rather menacing laugh. ‘So you think he might put two and two together and come after you, eh? Well, we shall be dropping anchor at Solitaria before the day is out, and by the time he sends a rescue mission it will be a case of fait accompli.’ ‘What do you mean?’ she gasped. ‘My dear girl, must I

spell it out?’ He held a watermelon between his hands and deliberately broke it apart so the juice ran over his skin. Alice wasn’t sure what he meant to imply by the gesture, but when he handed her one of the halves he was smiling to himself. ‘I—I believe you’re just making threats,’ she said. ‘Do you?’ He bit into his watermelon and his eyes mocked her. ‘Then it’s going to come as a shock to you, Alice, when my threats turn into realities. Eat your karpouzi. It’s deliriously sweet, just like honey.’ A seducing sound had come into his voice and Alice could feel the heat in her cheeks as she took a bite of the fruit. ‘A reversal of the procedure, eh?’ he drawled. ‘This time the man does the enticing and as the fruit of temptation was never really specified and all things grew in Eden, it could well have been karpouzi that Eve shared with Adam.’ ‘And you know what happened to Eden, don’t you?’ she retorted. ‘Your island sounds a haven of peace, but will it still seem like that after you’ve used it to carry out your vendetta? You may find afterwards that instead of karpouzi you have the taste of ashes in your mouth.’ ‘You have a very modest opinion of your own charms, Alice, if you really believe that I shan’t

enjoy my vendetta.’ He tossed the rind of his watermelon into the sea, and for a moment he looked like a Chiparus javelin-thrower Alice had once seen in bronze in the window of a little antique shop in Chelsea. She had an immediate longing to own the figure and had gone in to ask the price, which had been too much at the time for her slender purse. Later on when she could have paid the price, the figure had been sold, and she had felt an acute sense of loss. Her eyes dwelt bemused on Stefan Kassandros behind the frames of her tinted spectacles. It was as if the bronze figure had come to life, with an agile flexing of concealed strength and assured menace in the proud face. ‘Aren’t you curious about my house on Solitaria?’ he asked. ‘After all, you’ll be living there.’ ‘That should cause quite a lot of gossip among the islanders, Mr Kassandros, or am I to be passed off as another cousin?’ ‘The general opinion will be that I’ve wasted time enough living without a woman. Greeks can be incredibly open-minded about these matters of a liaison.’ He carried a flame to the thin dark cheroot he had placed between his lips. ‘Added to which it’s nobody’s damn business but my own.’ ‘I rather thought I was involved!’ He had spoken with such casual arrogance that Alice could

have rushed across to where he stood and struck him across the jaw. ‘I’m not a thing! I have feelings, a-and I’m not accustomed to being pointed out as some man’s scarlet woman!’ ‘What an outdated term, my dear.’ He puffed cheroot .smoke with cool enjoyment, lounging there .against the mainmast with the great rust-red sails spread above him. ‘But in some ways you are an oldfashioned girl, aren’t you, as if you keep your emotions under lock and key. I imagine that was why you were attracted to a man with only half the use of his body? You could have his fortune without paying the usual sort of dues.’ ‘You think I’m like that?’ Alice gasped. ‘The facts speak for themselves, don’t they?’ ‘The facts as you interpret them! I’ve said again and again that I’m not the woman you take me for, but such is your arrogance that you obviously believe you can’t make mistakes. You say I’m an oldfashioned type of person and in some ways I probably am, in which case is it really likely that a rich sophisticate like Ionides Damaskinos would consider marrying someone whom you have called inhibited, shy, outdated?’ Alice stood up and swept a disparaging hand down her own body. ‘I am what I appear to be, Mr Kassandros. I am inhibited and shy, and I don’t go in for swinging affairs and casual

abortions. I live a quiet life in my London flat and I work as a commercial artist. I can’t keep a real cat in the old-maid tradition, so I have a china one with a long neck and big eyes. When I can afford a seat at the theatre I go alone, but Hack the gall to sit alone in a restaurant, and our lovely old Lyons Corner Houses have become gambling halls. I also lack whatever it is that men like and I have long since resigned myself to life alone—but if I ever loved a man, it wouldn’t be because he has money, or because he couldn’t make love to me. I’m not frigid! I’m just on guard against being hurt!’ Stefan Kassandros smoked in silence for. several moments, and then he slowly shook his head in a kind of wonderment. ‘You’re good,’ he said. ‘You’re really so good you should have made acting-your profession. D’you know something— I’m really looking forward to uncovering the real Alice Sheldon.’ ‘You mean—you don’t believe me?’ she exclaimed. ‘My dear girl, I made it my business to find out about the fiancee of Damaskinos and I learned that she was every inch the good-looking English woman, in her early twenties, — with exceptionally nice hair and a slim figure … and that

her name was Alice Sheldon.’ ‘Alberta -‘ ‘My very definite information was that the young woman’s name was Alice.’ His voice cut across hers with the sharpness of a blade. ‘I know your name is Alice because I took the liberty of examining your passport while you lay sleeping. I know you were born in the county of Middlesex, and that your exact age is twenty-four. You have no scars or marks— just one small mole on your entire body.’ He paused there and his eyes dwelt on the open neck of her blouse, near her collar-bone. ‘Many women would give their back teeth for your skin, Alice. A man would never cease wanting to touch it.’ Abruptly he tossed his half-smoked cheroot into the sea. ‘Come here!’ he ordered. ‘Go to the devil!’ Alice retorted. She saw the crispation of his forearm muscles and the smouldering light of danger in his eyes. ‘You will do as you are told, if you know what’s good for you. I can be kind to you, or I can be cruel. Take your choice, and take it now, for this moment sets the mood between us— this moment when I see your hair blowing in the sea wind, and your hands are tensed like cat claws that would like-to rip into me. Come, Alice, I am just a few steps away from you, so come and try a little ripping.’

All of her was tense, while a question burned in her mind. Why had Alberta pretended to be called Alice, for that was obviously what she had done? It could only be connected with something Alberta had said years ago, when they were children and reading the Lewis Carroll books. The pert and pretty Berta had turned to their father and said that she was the one who should have been called Alice because she had fair hair and blue eyes and was the enquiring child of the family. Their father had laughed and Alice remembered how he had looked at her, with a kind of concerned affection as if he had known that Wonderland would never be easy for her to find. Suddenly a pair of hands were gripping her shoulders and she was swung forward against a hard masculine chest. Her startled eyes lifted to the savagely resolved face and saw the dark head coming down to her. As a gasp broke from her, her lips were crushed in a relentless kiss from which there was no breaking away and her slimness was pressed to his lean hardness until he actively hurt her. ‘So this is the way you want to play?’ He spoke roughly against her mouth. ‘There’s to be no giving—I have to take!’ ‘Oh— what else did you expect?’ She struggled for breathing space, but his muscles were unyielding

against her body, locking her to him from her shoulders to her hips. His left arm was around her and she felt his fingers searching her spine, finding sensitive buttons of nerve and bone that made her catch her breath as his fingertips played over them. ‘Must you—here?’ Her voice was tormented. ‘The boy will see you— —’ ‘So you want to hide?’ He dragged her roughly behind some piles of boxes and canvas, and there she was forcibly kissed on her mouth, her neck, and down in the opening of her blouse. His lips were warm and urgent against her skin, so that even in her inexperience she realised that he was unleashing his hold on his passions and letting them get out of control. The powerful length of his body was forcing her to yield against the folded canvas, and her thrashing, fear-stricken struggles seemed to destroy his last link with civilised behaviour. Suddenly he lifted her bodily and carried her down the steps to his cabin. He dropped her to the divan and she lay there dazedly and heard the lock click. ‘No,’ she said distractedly. ‘You can’t -‘ ‘I can.’ He removed her glasses and his face blurred above her even as she felt the quickening of his breath and knew that passion was sweeping away the last remnants of his

control. A frightened moan broke from Alice and she raised a hand to strike at his face. She could hear herself pleading with him, but her blow went wild and merely struck his shoulder. ‘Ah—no!’ She was lost in his arms and her hair was flung across the cushions. Lips moved across her throat, pausing at the vein that beat in unison with her racing heart… a swooning feeling came over her and Alice slumped into a weak, unaware stillness, her face drained to a whiteness that only a dead faint could induce. Her eyes opened languidly … and there he was, seated on the side of the divan looking down at her and moistening her lips with brandy. He set aside the glass as her eyes fluttered open, dazed for a moment, and then gradually filled with recognition and trepidation. He leaned over her, his shoulders rampantly strong above her. His hand brushed the hair from her damp forehead, and she stared up at him, into eyes whose outer corners had a slant to them that added to his hateful fascination. ‘It seems I frightened you,’ he said dryly. ‘Are you all right now?’ ‘I—I think so.’ Her eyes still held a residue of the terror he had inspired in her. ‘I’ve

never fainted before in my life.’ ‘You went out like a light.’ He touched her cheek with the back of his hand, and Alice shrank from his touch, instinctively aware that he was concerned for her in a possessive way. ‘I thought only terrified females in Victorian novels did that sort of thing—you really are an extraordinary creature, Alice.’ ‘It’s you— you,’ she said shakily. ‘I’ve been drugged and brought on board this boat for you to maul about—what did you expect me to do? Throw my arms around your neck 1-like some gratified old maid who finds an intruder under her bed?’ This brought a brief smile to his lips. ‘Want to finish the brandy? It might bring a little colour back into your cheeks.’ ‘Y-you know what I want.’ Her eyes clung pleadingly to his, the pupils widened and their green-blue colour intensified by her pallor. ‘I want to be taken back to Athens— please!’ He lounged above her, his eyes moving over her disordered hair and down to where his lips had disarranged her blouse so that it showed her white skin. Very deliberately he shook his head. ‘We are more than halfway to the island and I have no intention of turning back to Athens just because you had an attack of the vapours. I shall just have to go a little more slowly with you, Alice. You come into a

different category from those other liberated Englishwomen who come abroad, titillated by romantic tales of ruthless Greek ship owners. You intrigue me more than ever.’ ‘Damn you—damn you!’ she gasped. Her skin took flame from what had come into his eyes, for potent between them was the memory of his kisses and his warm lithe body pressed to hers in all its power and mystery. She gripped the divan cushion where she lay and dug her fingernails into it, as if making of it a substitute for his adamant face. Words failed her and she could hardly endure it that he looked at her so possessively, as if the fact that she fainted at his hands was subtly exciting to him. ‘You’re as hard as iron,’ she said bitterly. ‘You aren’t, are you?’ His hand touched her shoulder, warm through the silk of her blouse. ‘You are sensitive to the core and I think I do you a favour in taking you away from Damaskinos. You are probably too naive to realise the type of man he is.’ ‘I hope you aren’t making yourself out to be some kind of a saint?’ Alice gave him a scornful look. ‘I don’t imagine there’s much to choose between you and Ionides Damaskinos. I expect you’ve both achieved money and power out of

using other people and not caring who got hurt in the process. I daresay that’s what frightened the wits out of me —I felt the devil in you!’ Something flickered across his face when she said that and his body went dangerously tense. ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘I won’t tolerate being compared with an assassin employer.’ ‘You do your own dirty work, is that it, Mr Kassandros?’ ‘I think you had better start calling me Stefan.’ His jaw was like iron, and at the centres of his eyes tiny cores of anger were burning. ‘We are on course for Solitaria all the way, and you can scream, faint, or rip those cushions to shreds, and all you will achieve is exhaustion. Relax and rest and stop forcing yourself to insult me.’ ‘I assure you I don’t have to force myself,’ she rejoined. ‘It’s the only thing about this trip I’m enjoying!’ ‘Then enjoy it in solitary comfort.’ Abruptly he stood up and gestured at the glass with brandy in it ‘Drink that and go to sleep.’ ‘Go to hell, Mr Kassandros,’ she said quietly. ‘I shall never forgive you for forcing me into going to your island, but once I’m there I shall find some way to get out of your clutches.’ ‘By all means dream of doing so.’ He gave her a mocking bow and strode to the door,

and in an access of torment Alice leaned to one side, snatched up the brandy glass and flung it across the cabin at him. It missed him and broke in a wet pool on the floor. He stood there quirking an eyebrow. ‘Now do you feel better?’ he asked. ‘Heaps better.’ She flung round on her elbow and showed him her back, biting her lip as she heard him laugh softly to himself before closing the door behind him. ‘Perish him!’ she muttered, and she lay there feeling the motion of the caique and hearing the creak of its timbers as they sailed on inexorably towards Solitaria. Sometimes in the loneliness of her London flat she had dreamed of finding romance in the arms of a tender, caring man… but instead a perverse fate had thrown her into the possession of a tall and merciless Greek, driven to seek vengeance and certain he had found it in the shape of herself. In her he intended to find release for all his pent-up hatred, all his restraint since the girl called Timareta had died. Alice knew that he cared nothing for her feelings … he firmly believed that her hopes and dreams resided in a man he despised. She was here, suffering like this, all on account of her reckless and selfish sister who told lies and went blithely on her way, reaping not a crumb of the havoc she had sown.

A little tremor of remembered fear ran through Alice … she hadn’t known of the degree of helplessness that a man could make a woman feel… a helplessness that was probably enjoyable in the arms of a man in love. Stefan Kassandros didn’t love her, but that wouldn’t stop him from eventually taking his ethekissis. Once again she would feel those relentless lips and hands, and the next time she might not escape his intentions by having the Victorian vapours, as he had called it. Alice lay there and wondered about herself. She had always believed that her reserve was a defence against being hurt, but was it possible that she was basically afraid of giving herself to any man? There were women like that, and until her fateful meeting with Stefan Kassandros she hadn’t been given the opportunity to find out if she was passionate or cold. Alice clutched a cushion to her and felt terribly lost and insecure as the Phaedra carried her across the deep Aegean to the island of a man who had her completely in his clutches. CHAPTER FOUR ALICE stood taut by the rail as the caique was skilfully eased among the rocks that grew in dark clusters beyond the beach of Solitaria. Dusk was falling and streaks of flame lay across the

sky; the wind blew her hair across her brow and her lips were more red than usual against the paleness of her face. It seemed that the island was encircled by those dark-ripped rocks deeply submerged in the blue Aegean, making of it a kind of stronghold that would appeal to the • corsair in Stefan Kassandros. Beyond the sands were great sculptured cliffs made brazen, by the sunset, and even from here she could see the house he called Fireglow, rooted there on the hulking cliffs, wild, almost forbidding in its air of loneliness, dominating the sea from which it arose on bedrock a deep ocean turbulence must have thrown up aeons ago. ‘There is the kastello—my sea castle.’ A deep note of possession rang in the voice of the man who owned the island, the house, and the woman to whom he spoke as he gripped the great wheel, strong legs braced against the deck as he brought the Phaedra safely through the reef and into harbour/The anchor ratded on its chain as it was lowered, and even though Alice came here under duress there was still a certain excitement in finding herself about to be rowed ashore to a Greek island. The baggage was put aboard the skiff and it was lowered, and about twenty minutes later Alice actually set foot on Solitaria, on sands as pale as

the towering cliffs were fire red. As she leaped ashore she glanced upwards and her eyes were filled with the incandescent, flamy glow of the sky. Her spectacles were in the pocket of her jacket, for waves had splashed across the skiff and so bedewed the lenses that they had become more of a hindrance than a help. Now as she looked around her everything had a kindly haze to it, somehow lessening her initial sense of apprehension. ‘Well?’ Stefan stood there proud and hard-bodied, his dark head poised in that haughty, defiant way upon the sun-bronzed column of his neck, moulding down in a truly Greek way into the wide, strong shoulders and chest. ‘This is a moment of miroloyia, eh?’ ‘I don’t know what the word is supposed to mean.’ Still she couldn’t speak to him in a normal tone of voice, or look at him without a feeling of weakness in her. knees, so that she had to take a grip on herself. It added to her sense of outrage that he looked so casual, and even had the gall to show a certain amount of possessiveness. In his every glance there was a suggestion that she belonged to him and had better accept the situation. ‘Miroloyia means destiny,’ he replied, and he caught her gaze and held it to the depths of her eyes.

‘If we are fated for certain things to happen to us, then inevitably comes the moment when they will happen. Accept that, Alice, and we might get along without too much attrition.’ ‘What an easy get-out for you,’ she said scornfully. ‘You carry me off like some pirate, and then blame it on destiny.’ ‘Under normal circumstances a tourist would pay well to travel oh a craft like the Phaedra,’ he said dryly. ‘I’m being quite considerate when I remember the way Timareta was drowned in a rich man’s pool.’ ‘Oh—please,’ Alice flung out a hand, ‘don’t keep blaming me for that poor girl’s death!’ He caught hold of her hand, his fingers locking about her slender ones. He raised her hand and studied it as if fascinated by the contrast between his tanned skin and the white texture of hers. ‘You have nice hands, my dear, the kind that should touch a man with tenderness. You have a lot to learn, pedhaki mou, and the next time I hold you in my arms I shall hope not to be stabbed in the back by your fingernails.’ ‘Oh, did I hurt you?’ she said, mock innocently. ‘I’m so glad.’ ‘You fought like a little she-cat.’ He gave a sardonic laugh. ‘It felt as if you were digging a trench in my back, and some men would have slapped you for it.’ ‘But you’re a

gentleman,’ she retorted. She forcibly dragged her gaze from his and let it travel up the steep cliffside. ‘Don’t tell me we have to climb up there in order to reach the kastello?’ ‘No, we go this way.’ He reached into the skiff for her suitcases, then led her -across the sands that were reddening beneath the fiery blaze of the sun as it was pulled towards the sea. Ahead of them was an arch dug from the cliffs, where an iron-gated elevator had been installed in a shaft drilled in the iron-hard rock, a feat of engineering which must have cost a good deal of money, making Alice realise that Stefan Kassandros was possessed of some solid, hard-earned wealth. When they entered the elevator a light went on automatically and the cage, which was just about big enough for two people and some luggage, climbed carefully up the shaft. Had Alice been alone she would have felt nervous of the lift, shrinking inwardly at the thought of it stalling in that long tunnel of rock. ‘This contraption rarely goes wrong.’ Stefan was looking at her as if he knew what she was thinking. ‘Many years ago when Fireglow was used as a monastery, the monks used to actually climb up and down the cliffs, and they’d have their supplies from the mainland hoisted up to them in big baskets. When I took over the place and

had it put to rights I didn’t relish the idea of climbing up and down like a goat, so I had this lift put in. You don’t suffer from a fear of being enclosed, do you, Alicia?’ She stared at him, realising that he had subtly altered the sound of her name, as if now they were on his island she was going to be moulded exacdy to his requirements. ‘I’ve never liked lifts very much,’ she said. ‘I would prefer to be called Alice in the English way, if you don’t mind? I’m not a Greek woman and I don’t intend to bow down to you.’ ‘Really?’ He quirked a black eyebrow. ‘Haven’t we already established that I can bend you to my will any time I’m in the mood to do so?’ ‘Oh yes, you’re good at using brute force, kyrios.’ She gave him a cold look. ‘But it might grow a little tedious for you never to have someone who’s willing, or who wants .to kiss you because she likes you. I utterly despise you and you aren’t always going to enjoy being despised—men don’t, do they? Their mothers teach them to need affection, from women, and that’s something you can’t force me to give you.’ ‘My dear girl,’ his expression was sardonic, ‘if you fondly imagine that I require affection from you, then you’re mistaken. My sole purpose in bringing

you here should be perfectly clear to you by now.’ ‘It is, kyrie,’ she assured him. ‘So long as you understand that I hate your arrogance and everything about you!’ ‘Of course I understand.’ He gave a softly mocking laugh. ‘I’ve ruined all your cosy plans for the future. I expect you were going to sit at the stricken tyrant’s knee and read him Gothic romances in that charming English voice of yours, all sweet servitude to look at, but secretly content to be the wife of a half-man who could never toss you over his shoulder and teach you to be a real woman.’ ‘Is that what you intend to do?’ Alice gave him a scornful glare. ‘You’re just a brazen bully who merits a term in prison. You’ll pay in the end for what you’re doing—they call this abduction!’ ‘Who will make me pay, my dear?’ His eyes were infinitely mocking as they dwelt on her upraised face. ‘Who will believe that the reputable owner of hotels gave you drugged coffee so he could carry you quietly on board his caique? You are just another foreign woman who came travelling in search of a rich protector—it happens every day of the week, women such as yourself invite the attentions of a wealthy man, and then demand a reparation that gets laughed out of court.’

‘You’re an unspeakable devil!’ Alice couldn’t help giving him a shocked look. ‘You know I’m not one of those women!’ ‘Do I?’ He looked indolent as he leaned on the wall. ‘When I entered your suite last night you were clad very invitingly, and then you contrived to fall into my arms. What is a man supposed to think when a woman does that sort of thing—that she’s asking for a cup of warm milk to help her fall asleep?’ ‘I tripped and you know it!’ Her eyes were alight with indignation. ‘What I know, little one, and what I would say in a Greek court if you dared to take me into one are two different things. Do I make my meaning clear enough for you?’ ‘Despicably clear.’ Her voice shook with fury. ‘You’d drag me through the mud when I’m the offended party! You’d tell lies and make me out a wanton who picked you up! If you are so sure you’d get away with it, then why not try it? It would be a very cruel ethekissis, wouldn’t it?’ ‘Indeed it would, Alicia, except that I don’t intend to deprive myself of your company at my kastello.’ Alice caught her breath at his meaning, and then she said desperately: ‘Do you imagine Damaskinos will let you get away with such outrage?’ ‘My dear,’ he had

stroked the hair away from her stricken eyes before she could prevent him, ‘I wouldn’t place too much reliance on his gallantry. I can’t imagine Damaskinos still wanting you when he finds out that I have you. He’s far too shrewd not to guess purpose, and too much a fellow Greek not to realise that I don’t just make threatening noises. He’ll suffer the torments of the impotent—and I understand they are rather acute—and then I regret to say, Alicia, that he’ll cast you aside. But don’t look too wounded, little one. I shall ensure that you’re fully compensated before I let you go.’ ‘What do you mean—compensated?’ She had retreated from him as far as the walls of the lift would allow, but still his height and his width of shoulder made him seem overpoweringly close to her, reminding her too vividly of a physical contact she ached to forget. ‘Money, my dear.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Isn’t that what you wanted most of all from Damaskinos?’ It was what Alberta had wanted, and Alice felt as if she fell deeper all the time into a trap she had half laid herself in a jungle she should never have dared to enter. ‘I—I’m not mercenary,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t why I came to Greece——’ ‘Then fate must have brought you,’ he drawled. ‘You chose to book

in at one of my hotels and the reception clerk happened to mention to me that a young Englishwoman had taken a suite.’ His eyes held hers. ‘Ethekissis.’ And as he said the word the lift jarred to a halt and he slid open the gates, motioning Alice to precede him. She stepped out into a small courtyard and was confronted by a heavy oval-shaped door which must have given entrance to the house when it was still a monastery. She gazed at the door as if it gave entrance to a prison, which in a sense it did. She shied back from it and turned as if seeking escape from Stefan Kassandros and his cliff-top kastello. Instead she blundered into him as he stood feeling about in his pockets, presumably for the doorkey. ‘I—I can’t see a yard in front of me without my glasses -‘ Alice knew with despair that there was no getting away from him right now. She dragged her tinted glasses from her pocket and put them on. ‘I’m terribly shortsighted.’ ‘Don’t be on the defensive about it,’ he chided her. ‘Those large frames make you look vulnerable.’ ‘People who can’t see properly are vulnerable.’ She tilted her chin and looked directly at him. ‘Don’t my glasses put you off, kyrie? Most men seem to regard women who

wear them as female eunuchs. We either get looked through, as if our entire bodies were made of glass, or we get spoken to with a curtness men don’t use on other women, no matter how drab and unattractive.’ ‘Greeks would appear to be a little more perceptive, wouldn’t you say, Alicia?’ His smile was on the edge of being taunting. ‘I don’t think you can say that I’ve treated you like a female eunuch—now what the devil have I done with my key?’ It was such a domestic remark, as if they were a couple who had been out for the day and had just come home. Colour flooded anew into Alice’s cheeks as she watched him digging about in the pockets of his sheepskin jacket; her gaze lifted to his dark frowning face and she relived the warm assault of his mouth on hers. Had they met in normal circumstances, and had he not believed that she was engaged to Damaskinos, then he would have passed her by as lacking in female seductiveness. ‘I hope you’ve lost it in the sea,’ she said tensely. ‘I don’t want to enter your house—it’s the last thing I want to do!’ ‘Is it?’ His hand emerged from an inner pocket with the key and he showed it to her mockingly. ‘You walk in or I carry you, but one

way or the other you enter Fireglow. Which is it to be?’ ‘Have you always been an unmitigated bully?’ she asked. ‘Let us say I was much nicer in my youth.’ He inserted the key in the lock of the oval door and it swung open ponderously, revealing a large inner courtyard set round with thick stone archways leading into the lower reaches of the house. Around the sprawling upper storey the windows were aglow with the sunset and the walls were a deeper red, dark-shadowed here and there by thick patches of vinery. They walked across keypatterned flagstones worn silky smooth by the passage of years and the sandalled feet of the monks who had strolled here and meditated beneath the cloisters, wide oval archways surmounted by iron tracery in which was twisted the thick stems of climbing plants. The windows above were set deep in the walls, looking like emblazoned glass as the sun gradually faded. Alice glanced about her and her nostrils tensed as the trees gave off a dusky incense and she saw spiky flowers growing along the branches. ‘Monk’s Pepper,’ Stefan told her, catching her glance. ‘The chaste trees said to quieten the passions of men.’ ‘Then you had better sit beneath them,’ she retorted,

unaware that she was going to say such a thing until the words were out of her mouth. He gave that brief laugh that seemed to grate in his throat. ‘With you here, guzel, I plan to avoid the chaste trees for all I’m worth. Mmm, are you blushing?’ He reached out a hand and touched her cheek, laughing again as she jumped nervously away from him. ‘I thought blushing had gone out of style in your country.’ ‘I told you!’ She blushed even deeper at her silly tendency to blush at all. ‘The adage holds true there —the men don’t make passes at girls in glasses.’ ‘Really? And I was informed by my uncles that the British sailors who came to these islands during the last war were intent on chasing anything in a skirt— and some of our shepherd boys wear a type of kilt.’ Alice felt a smile forming on her mouth, which she hastily suppressed. If she allowed herself to respond to his sardonic sense of humour she might find herself responding in other ways, and then heaven help her! ‘You talk about uncles and cousins,’ she said. ‘Have you no parents alive?’ He shook his head. ‘My mother died when I was born, and my father, who was a fisherman, went down with his boat when I was nine. I was brought up by relations. They were good to me, so now I return the compliment.’ ‘Do any of your relatives live

here at Fireglow?’ she asked. She could feel the fast beating of her pulse as she waited apprehensively for his reply … this situation was hard enough for her, and it would be made even harder if she had to live with him among members of his family. To her intense relief he shook his head. ‘Fireglow is my very private retreat, though I do have relatives on the island who have small farms.’ ‘Will I have to meet them?’ she asked diffidently. ‘It will be inevitable,’ he said, as if careless of her embarrassment when it became common knowledge on the island that she was living in his house and was not a guest … in the ordinary sense. ‘Don’t you care at all what people will think?’ In her nervousness she took off her glasses and her eyes met his pleadingly. ‘I know you seem to have the idea that English women aren’t as careful of their good name as Greek women, but we aren’t all alike and I—I don’t think I deserve what you’re doing to me.’ ‘The islanders will soon get used to seeing you around.’ His hand closed on her shoulder and Alice felt the aggression in his grip. ‘Don’t try to appeal to my better nature, because I have none where the woman of Damaskinos is concerned. You

must accept that you are now my woman and I have only just begun to enjoy your company. You’re an unusual type of woman, Alicia, and I have been celibate far too long. My house might once have been the abode of monks, but I’m not one of them.’ ‘No,’ she agreed, wriggling her shoulder in an attempt to free herself of his touch, ‘there’s nothing of the monk about you!’ He smiled, a flicker of strong white teeth in the dusk. ‘We unleash the restrained devils in each other, have you realised that? It’s rather exciting even if you refuse to admit it.’ And so saying he swung her to him and his arm held her firmly to his lean hardness, tightening about her waist in a hold she found impossible to break. He leaned down to her and she felt his breath warm and quick against her cheek. ‘Even if I had no reason for keeping you here, I would still keep you, Alicia. I’ve been starved of the warm sweet touch of a woman and I am hungry for more of you —you are so strangely shy and wild in my arms and I’m going to have the satisfaction of taming you before I lose interest in you. I’m going to teach you all the ways of loving before I am through with you, and I may even teach you to prefer a whole man to half of

one.’ His possessive hold and the things he said made Alice feel weak; she perceived the hard, vibrant intention of his body and shivers ran down her spine as he moved his lips against her neck. She had so little defence against his strength, to which was added the overwhelming fact that he was master of the island whose residents were bound to, him by kinship, or dependence upon his employment. She had little hope of being able to persuade one of them to help her get away from him, and right now she felt as trapped in his arms as a bird in a cage. His arms tightened and he pulled her close to him inside the folds’ of his jacket, and she sensed from the deliberate way he kissed her that he was trying to make her feel a sensual response to him. She strove for the very opposite, forcing her lips and body to he as tense as possible. ‘Relax,’ he murmured. ‘You will never like me until you allow yourself to accept me—and accept me you are going to. Shyness, frigidity, playing the statue, none of it will stop ,me. If I had meant to behave like a gentleman, then I wouldn’t have brought you this far. Stop being a child and get it into your head that I don’t pluck a peach in order to look at it.’ ‘I can assure you I don’t take you for a gentleman.’ she said coldly. ‘But neither do I

regard myself as a—peach.’ ‘Stop being so damned modest,’ he jeered, his eyes sweeping her up and down. ‘You are going to be taught to put a new valuation upon yourself.’ ‘Your kind of valuation, I take it?’ ‘Yes, mine.’ ‘I’m to be moulded to your requirements like a lump of clay, is that it?’ ‘I wouldn’t describe you as a lump of clay, my dear. I have an image of all that long brown hair of yours half wrapped about your silky white body—let us say a white peach, eh? When you learn to be less self-conscious you will lose that prim look you have, and one day you might gaze in a mirror and see the Greek ocean reflected in your eyes. In the meantime I shall enjoy the secret wild thoughts of a man who has a woman of virtue to look forward to— loving.’ ‘Love!’ she exclaimed. ‘I don’t believe you know the meaning of the word!’ ‘I used to know it, Alicia.’ Gripping her suitcases, he walked into the house and Alice was obliged to follow him, noticing how arrogantly he carried himself. She was frightened and at the same time mystified by his attitude towards her … the girl other men had referred to as unexciting. Alice’s eyes became a little wistful; her capacity for excitement had never been put to the test. Young

men had accepted her prim looks as an expression of her personality … Stefan Kassandros was hungry for revenge and he had flung off the hair-shirt he had put on following the death of his sweetheart, the pretty long-haired Greek girl he had been engaged to marry, and with hunger and anger in his heart he had taken Alice to assuage feelings that in the end would leave him contemptuous. She had to remember that, every minute of every day, and most especially at night, when lonely people were at their most vulnerable. They had entered a room with a high ceiling and white walls upon which were hung a few dazzling Greek rugs. There were tall carved cabinets and spider-black chairs whose upholstery was in some kind of animal skin. ‘Wolfskin,’ Stefan told her. ‘This high in the hills they’ roam about in search of sheep.’ He confirmed her feeling that the island was comparatively untamed, like the people who farmed it and the animals that roamed it. She gave one of those nervous shivers she couldn’t seem to control. This was a new, strange, unlooked-for world she had to come to terms with; to touch and feel and somehow accept. She moved towards a great stone fireplace

where a log burned slowly, rather scentedly, in a soundless glow. She leaned towards the warmth, holding forth her hands to it. ‘This room is the saloni,’ he said. ‘Do you like it?’ Alice glanced around and saw on the cabinets quaint pottery jars painted with leaping goats. There was a satin-like gleam to the dark furniture, as if he insisted on the house being kept spotless even when he was away from the island. There were oval windows in which panes of coloured glass were meshed in thin lacy iron, and the curtains looked handembroidered. Across the floor lay big shaggy carpets, and her gaze was caught and held by a jewelled ikon gleaming against a wall on its own. ‘Ypu appear to have eliminated most of the monklike atmosphere,’ she said. ‘In here at least.’ ‘You will find it so in most of the rooms,’ he assured her. ‘The basic structure of the kastello is strong and built high like this it has atmosphere, but I certainly didn’t wish the interior to be in any way austere. We have at the rear a granary where the grapes are hung on wooden trellises, and upstairs I’ve had several of the rooms—or cells as they were called in the old days—turned into bathrooms.’ ‘It seems a big house for a bachelor,’

Alice remarked, her gaze upon the fireplace in which an ox could have been roasted. ‘I suppose it is,’ he agreed. ‘But when a man makes some money his thoughts turn to having a house of his own.’ ‘And an island, of course,’ she said, still with her gaze turned away from him, ‘Where he can be lord and master of all he surveys.’ ‘In a manner of speaking that is exactly what I am.’ A drawling note had come into his voice and he moved into her line of vision, planting himself against the high stone mantel of the fireplace with his elbow resting there. He had removed his sheepskin jacket and the way he lounged pulled his shirt away from the brown skin of his chest; the jade seal gleamed darkly there and Alice was vividly reminded of its pressure against her own skin when he had held her in his arms and made her submit to him. His strong hands had shackled her clawing hands, and she felt the frightened throb of her pulse at the remembered power in those long hard legs in the sailcloth trousers. The sentient nerves tightened inside her … his eyes were agleam behind the half-lowered lids of his eyes, as if he too were recalling the details of that near-seduction aboard the Phaedra. ‘The island and the house will seem strange to you for a while,’ he said, ‘but you’ll get used to them. You told me

you were a commercial artist and I assure you, Alicia, you’ll find plenty to draw and paint on Solitaria.’ ‘Oh, am I going to be allowed to do that?’ she asked, a trifle sarcastically. ‘I thought I was going to be at your beck and call every minute of the day.’ ‘Not every minute of the day,’ he mocked. ‘It’s only at night when I shall require your full attention.’ Her cheeks went scarlet … her entire body seemed to catch fire from the smouldering aggression in his glance. In a defensive gesture Alice flung up her hands and pressed them to her burning face … he looked so big, so dark, so dominating. She felt her cowering reaction to him and just couldn’t control it. ‘Don’t be a little fool,’ he said curtly. ‘It really is time you started to enjoy being a woman, and if there weren’t enjoyment in it the human race would have come to an end a long time ago.’ ‘As if men ever cared one way or the other,’ she rejoined. ‘All most of you care about are sex symbols to gawp at, and maternal types to see after your comforts. I don’t know into what category I fit, unless it’s paramour!’ ‘My dear, from what daring book did you pick up that word?’ he mocked. ‘I don’t really believe you’re as coy as you make out—you weren’t coy

when I walked into your room last night. You were very charming in that pink garment with the wide sleeves falling away from the slim whiteness of your arms, and when I caught hold of you, you felt heavenly and smelled divine. Don’t pretend to me that you would rather I found you unappealing— quite , frankly, little one, I’d like to take you right here on the rugs, but at any moment my housekeeper is going to walk in. It might look a little undignified, eh?’ ‘You’re shameless,’ said Alice, feeling as if she couldn’t take a deep breath. ‘No doubt.’ He flexed his shoulders lazily. ‘I look forward to making you feel the same way. It’s a most enjoyable sensation, like honey in the bones, and if you were a real woman instead of a repressed little English spinster, you would delight in your ability to make a man feel—aroused.’ She backed away from him, feeling a distracted urge to hide herself away from him, as she used to when a child and relatives made a fuss of Alberta because she was much prettier. ‘You’re making fun of me,’ she accused. ‘You get a kick out of it because you’re sadistic.’ ‘I am no sadist.’ His face darkened. ‘You will not call me that!’ ‘Why, don’t you like to be told the truth?’ He

took a step towards her and his brows were darkly merged above his angry eyes. ‘You will not confuse me with Damaskinos, do you hear? I have never hurt a woman in my life, unlike that brute who is as twisted in his mind as in his body. How you came to take up with him can only be explained by your obvious reluctance to make love. Didn’t it ever occur to you, you little fool, that he would make other sorts of demands on you—or were you prepared for that?’ ‘I—I don’t know what you mean -‘ Alice felt the hot confusion sweep over her at his reference to lovemaking and the way he looked, glowering down at her with his black hair disordered on his forehead, as if despite the imminent arrival of his housekeeper he might say to hell with dignity and carry out his threat to throw her to the shaggy rugs. ‘How old are you, Alicia?’ He was actively scowling at her. ‘Twenty-four.’

s ‘And you are trying to pretend to me that you don’t know about the more perverse forms of physical gratification?’ Alice stared at him, realised what he meant and blushed anew. ‘Of course, but you don’t understand -‘ ‘All too well I understand you,’ he growled. ‘You wanted the security of marriage but not the marital duties, but if Damaskinos led you to believe that all he required of you was your sweet cool companionship, then you are a naive fool. I daresay it’s easy for a man in a wheelchair to put on a brave, lonely act, and it’s written all over you that you live in a world of Wuthering Heights, but since the death of Timareta I have learned things about that man I wouldn’t repeat to any woman. At the time of Timareta’s employment in his household he had the outer trappings of a man of wealth and respectability, but underneath all that, like the beetle-infested foundations of an outwardly serene building, there was corruption and actual crime.’ Stefan paused, and then reached roughly for Alice’s arm, jerking her forward by the wrist until she felt the hard, angry warmth of his body. ‘At this precise moment you aren’t going to believe that you are better off with me than you are with Damaskinos,

but it happens to be true. I shall treat you like a woman, but he would have made a thing of you. Do I make myself understood?’ Alice gazed up at Stefan and gave a little shiver. H what he said about Ionides Damaskinos was true, then Alberta had had a narrow escape. Alice felt thankful about it, but that didn’t alter the fact that she was in bondage to another sort of Greek. The grip of his fingers about her wrist was like a shackle, and there in his eyes was the adamantine look of a man in whom had been aroused the powerful force of vengeance, and the desire for a woman’s body. Her body :.. unbelievable though it seemed to her when she was unable to forget that she had been called unexciting. The warmth that came from him swept over her in a wave … she must inevitably share with this aggressive stranger the most intimate of human relationships. He would force her into unity with him; it was there in his eyes, on his lips, carved into the set of his jaw. His pupils were dilated as he gazed down at her, and there was a slight flare to his nostrils. Alice sensed that her very reluctance was like a spur to him, and because she was at heart a romantic, she found it unbearable that she must give. herself to him

without love. ‘If I could prove to you that I’m not the Alice Sheldon who was engaged to Ionides Damaskinos, would you let me go?’ she asked. ‘Ah, arc we back to that?’ he drawled. ‘Are there two Alice Sheldons in the world, both of them with a reason for visiting Greece?’ ‘I have a sister named Alberta who has now gone to Ceylon to marry a man she has known since she was in her teens. He was married to someone else and during that time my sister met and became engaged to Damaskinos —an engagement she decided to break when the wife of this other man suddenly died. That was why I came to Greece. I— I thought it wasn’t right for my sister to, run off to someone eke without telling her Greek fiance that she no longer wished to marry him -‘ ‘The woman engaged to Damaskinos was named Alice.’ Stefan’s face was iron all over and it had even crept into his eyes. ‘Alberta lied about that -‘ A note of desperation was creeping into Alice’s voice, for he had to believe her and let her go. ‘She always preferred my name to her own, and for some odd reason she used it when she became entangled with Damaskinos. But I can get in touch with her in Ceylon. I can prove to you that she exists. Please, give me a chance to set things right

—before we both do things we’ll regret.’ ‘I think you are just stalling for time,’ he said harshly. ‘I don’t doubt that you have a sister in Ceylon, but I do doubt the tale you have just spun me. Coming here in the Phaedra you flung at me that Damaskinos would send his men after me for snatching you away from him -‘ ‘Yes, because I felt desperate aand I hoped you would turn about and take me back to Athens.’ ‘Turn tail out of fear of that man?’ he jeered. ‘You don’t know me, Alicia——’ ‘You don’t know me,’ she rejoined, ‘if you imagine I would be in any way attracted to the Damaskinos you have described to me. I’m not like Alberta. She and I have different outlooks, as well as different looks. She’s blonde and beautiful—I told you that!’ ‘And what are you going to do, my dear, to prove that she was the one who got herself engaged to Damaskinos?’ Alice felt the tightening grip of his fingers, hurting her slightly, and then relaxing as he controlled his impatience with what he considered a false story. ‘I—I wondered if you could arrange for a cable to be sent to her? She’ll now be living at the plantation house with the man she’s going to marry, and I shall ask her to wire back an affirmation that she was the fiancee of Damaskinos.’ ‘I see.’ Dark eyes studied Alice for

several tense moments. ‘Are you and your sister very close?’ ‘Not really—we live our own lives.’ ‘But all the same, Alicia, if you asked her to lie for you, then she would do so, eh?’ ‘What do you mean —lie for me?’ ‘Affirm something untrue for the sake of helping you out of what you consider a contretemps.’ ‘No, it wouldn’t occur to Alberta,’ said Alice, with a touch of irony. ‘She’s inclined to be a person who puts her own self-interests first. She was engaged to that man and she’ll admit it without bothering to wonder if it lets me off the hook.’ ‘The hook being my hold on you, eh?’ He spoke dryly, but his eyes were hard and unreadable as they flicked from her face to his grip on her wrist. ‘May I send the cable?’ Alice asked. ‘I shall send it,’ he said decisively. ‘You will give me your sister’s address in Ceylon and I shall do the enquiring. In a few simple words I shall ask for the truth, and that truth, my dear, will settle things between us without further argument. Agreed?’ ‘Oh yes.’ Alice visibly relaxed. ‘How long do you think it will take before we receive an answer?’ ‘Perhaps a week.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps more. Ceylon is halfway across the world and the plantation, I imagine, is somewhat in the wilds.’

‘A-and in the meantime -—?’ Alice couldn’t put into words what was in her mind, and when he smiled at the edge of his mouth she knew that he had read her mind. ‘In the meantime I will allow you to be safe from those attentions that give you the vapours.’ He let go her wrist with a mocking smile. ‘But be warned that if the cable from Ceylon is a denial of what you affirm, then I shall want my ethekissis to the last kiss and the last curve. Understood?’ She nodded, and from sheer trembling relief sank down on a big leather couch while a lighter clicked and cheroot smoke drifted her way. ‘Tell me just one thing,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you loved as a child?’ ‘Of course I was loved -‘ Yes, but never petted as Alberta had been, made much of and told she was cute and pretty on the knees of male relatives. Alice had been the one with her nose buried in a book, absorbing the print through a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. They had called her the serious one and had laughed a little, and she had overheard an aunt remark that it was a pity about the glasses because they made her seem .plainer than ever. ‘She and dear Berta are chalk and cheese,’ her aunt had said. ‘It’s obvious right now who will be most popular

with the boys.’ Alice slowly raised her eyes to the dark, distinctive face of Stefan Kassandros. He wanted her (even if only to work off a grudge) and yet she asked him to send a cable whose answer would be her passport back to a lonely life. ‘There’s no need to look like that.’ He was frowning down at her. ‘I promised to send the cable and I shall keep my promise. A Greek always does.’ ‘Thank you,’ she said politely. She sat there slim and rather lost on the big couch of real leather framed in strong wood, the tangy smoke of his tobacco in her nostrils. She must try not to anticipate Alberta’s reply to the cable, and for her own peace of mind it might help if she made believe she was here on this Greek island for a short holiday. She had a swimsuit in her case and suntan lotion. She had a sketching block and pencils and could try and capture some of the untamed beauty of Solitaria. Her eyelashes flickered and she studied the Greek face of this man whose danger hadn’t really diminished because he was giving her the chance to prove she was a total stranger to the man he hated. Perhaps she might even do a charcoal drawing of Stefan Kassandros to take back with her to Kensington. ‘As I told you, it has been a long

time since I enjoyed the exclusive company of a woman.’ He said it abruptly and his eyes narrowed at her nervous reaction. ‘Though it might suit you to dress so neatly and sedately, I would prefer you to be a little more relaxed. I am sure you have other charming garments like the one you were wearing last night, so please wear them, and allow your hair to have its freedom from the bun.’ ‘Are you giving me orders?’ she asked. ‘Orders?’ He raised a black eyebrow with sardonic deliberation. ‘I am merely a host requesting my guest to enjoy my hospitality by relaxing as much as possible. Surely you don’t buy attractive clothes in order to wear them when you’re alone. That strikes me as rather sad.’ ‘I’m not a frivolous person, Mr Kassandros.’ ‘Yet I noticed when I refilled your suitcases last night that you had garments that could be called frivolous.’ He flicked his cheroot stub into the fire. ‘Please to wear them, and address me by my first name.’ ‘What if I choose not to?’ She had tensed in every nerve and her fingernails were digging into the leather. ‘I am doing you a favour, Alicia, so why not reciprocate?’ He drew himself to his full height and made her aware that she was still very much his

prisoner on the island until Alberta sent a reply to his cable and he had to release her. ‘I suppose I have no choice?’ she said tensely. ‘Not a great deal,’ he agreed, and with a slight smile he turned his attention from Alice to the woman who had just appeared in the doorway of the saloni. She was like a figure out of a Victorian album, wearing a lace cap, a black silk dress with lace at the throat, and jets in her ears that dragged at the earlobes. Her eyes pierced Alice for a moment and they were as jetty as the stones she wore. ‘The thespoinis will be staying as my guest, Katerina.’ Stefan glanced blandly at Alice. ‘This is my housekeeper who will be helpful to you in any way you require. You have only to ask.’ ‘How do you do?’ Alice said politely to the Greek woman. Katerina inclined her capped head. ‘The lady will require the guest apartment, kyrie?’ she asked. ‘Of course.’ His eyes dwelt on Alice’s face and mockery glinted in them like tiny pieces of mica. ‘You might as well take Miss Sheldon to heir rooms right away, Katerina. She will wish to unpack and make herself charming for when she joins me for the late meal.’ Alice restrained herself from giving him a glare in front of the housekeeper, whose eyes were so sharp and shrewd. Her best defence was to assume an air of

cool politeness, and this she strove for as she rose to her feet. ‘What time do you dine?’ she asked him. ‘At nine o’clock, Alicia.’ ‘I shall see you then—Stefan.’ He inclined his head and his eyes dwelt meaningly on her neat blouse and skirt. ‘The late meal is always a formal affair —a little whim of mine which I feel you will gratify.’ ‘If you insist.’ She forced her tense lips into a smile, and then was escorted to her apartment by the housekeeper and a boy who carried her suitcases, mounting the great half- ,wheel of a staircase that stretched across the hall and led to the branching upper regions of Fireglow. CHAPTER FIVE THE bedroom had a curious charm to it, in which was a deep arched alcove where a divan bed was overlaid by a woven cover in cream, plum and gold. The rugs on the floor were equally brilliant, as if to offset the dark austerity of the furniture, the white walls, and the cool sea-blue of the ceiling. A curious feature was the deep balcony with several steps leading down into it. Over its iron rails clambered a passion-fruit creeper with the tiny fruits attached, and a deep basket chair was set there, with a woven cane table

beside it. This was a moussandra, Alice was informed by the housekeeper—a word whose English equivalent could be little room. ‘It’s charming,’ Alice exclaimed, and she leaned over the railing and saw a courtyard leading off into a vast garden, lit by wall lanterns that cast a rather ghostly light over the trees and shrubs. The depths of the garden were dark and rustling. She followed Katerina back into the bedroom and was shown the bathroom leading off from it, where there was a deep bath-tub and double-u, both of them in gleaming white porcelain with a mahogany surround and stainless steel attachments. The pedestal hand-basin was rather more colourful, with a marble bowl adorned by leaping dolphins and shells. Above on the wall was a mirror that reflected Alice as she gazed around her and had a feeling of being transported hack into Victorian days, especially when she looked at the Greek woman in her long dark dress and jet earrings. Katerina indicated a big water-boiler on the wall. ‘The kyrios has installed his own electric generator, so there is always hot water for the bathrooms. He has made this house very comfortable, but once upon a time it was a sanctuary for an order of monks and in those

days very primitive.’ The jetty eyes were fixed upon Alice, and then she said in a lower tone of voice, ‘The kyri hardly ever brings visitors to his island, therefore would it offend the thespoinis if I asked how long you have been acquainted with him?’ ‘Not very long,’ Alice replied, for she could hardly blurt out to the woman that she had been abducted by him. It was still hardly believable to herself that he had carried her away unconscious from Athens and brought her to Solitaria on his caique. ‘I should like to show the thespoinis something, if you would be so good as to come with me?’ Katerina was looking at Alice in a very curious way. ‘I think you would be interested.’ ‘By all means.’ Alice summoned a smile, but she felt a sense of reluctance as she followed the housekeeper out of the apartment and along the gallery that was lit by clusters of wall-lamps, and one huge brass lantern that hung above the stairwell. Katerina paused outside a door at the far end of the gallery and she seemed to hesitate for a moment as if with nervousness. Then she reached for the brass handle of the door and turned it, beckoning Alice to follow her as she switched on the light. Alice caught her breath as she entered a white and gold-panelled bedroom, with a set of

ornate furniture and a fourposter bed swathed in pure white netting. The posts of the bed were carved with pomegranates and fig-leaves, and the throwover was one huge chinchilla that glowed animal-dark against the big silk pillows. The ceiling overhead was a mosaic of Greek mythology, with powerful, tawny-skinned gods chasing nymphs in flimsy draperies and garlands. There were silkseated chairs and a toilet-table set with crystal containers on lace mats, and the floor was entirely covered in white shag pile. ‘How beautiful,’ said Alice, glancing around her in great curiosity. ‘Who sleeps here, Katerina?’ ‘A ghost,’ the woman replied, and taking Alice by the wrist she led her across tie room to an alcove, where she pressed a switch and concealed lighting revealed a large portrait hung there in a carved frame. Alice stared at the girl in the painting. She was standing on a seashore with the rocks and the waves behind her and her long brown hair was blowing in the wind, as was the material of her dress, moulding itself to her slender body. Her feet were bare, the toes deep in the sand. One arm was outflung as if she were beckoning to somebody … but it was her face that caught and held Alice’s

attention. Not exactly beautiful but with something piquant and arresting about the soft scarlet mouth and the wide, wild-shy turquoise eyes set within a frame of soft dark lashes. ‘Who is she?’ Alice found herself whispering, as if suddenly struck by a feeling of trespass. ‘Her name was Timareta.’ The housekeeper was looking at Alice rather than at the portrait. ‘The kyrios had the picture painted from a snapshot, which I believe was many times enlarged so the artist could capture the details so vividly. You will notice the ring on her hand and that it has stones to match the colour of her eyes. And do you see the gold bracelet on her wrist, and the little scar on her leg where her dress blows to one side?’ Alice slowly nodded and almost unaware she had lifted a hand to touch her own face. ‘And you also see the likeness to yourself, don’t you, thespoinis?’ ‘No -‘ Alice made the denial involuntarily, as. if she didn’t wish to believe that there really was a likeness to herself in the face of the girl who had died in strange, tragic circumstances, leaving as her legacy a man who still loved her and brooded over her. ‘Yes,’ Katerina murmured. ‘It is there in the eyes, in the shape of the mouth, and look how your hair matches hers. I saw it at once, and I knew that

was why he had brought you to Solitaria.’ ‘No.’ Alice shook her head. ‘That isn’t the reason at all, I assure you. He loved Timareta, so how can you imagine —oh, it’s really too absurd! I—I am merely here to take a short holiday a-and to make some sketches of the island. I’m a commercial artist, though not in the same class as the artist who painted this portrait. It’s very good, though I can’t see any real likeness to myself.’ ‘There is a likeness,’ Katerina insisted. ‘But now we must come away before the kyrios catches us here.’ Alice drew away from the portrait as Katerina darkened it, and once again she glanced around the lovely room … a kind of shrine, she realised, to the memory of the girl Stefan Kassandros had planned to make his bride. There was the bed he would have shared with her. There were the scents and cosmetics she would have used to make herself attractive for him. There were the cupboards in which she would have hung her clothes … the lovely gossamer things he would have bought for her. ‘Are the cupboards empty?’ she found herself asking. And then as if compelled Alice moved across the deep carpet and opened the double doors of the closets that rose almost to the ceiling. Her breath caught in her throat, for a single dress hung

there, long-skirted and entirely of ivory lace that had obviously been made by hand. She reached out to finger the lace, woven in leaves and tiny lilies … the kind of design meant for a wedding dress. Such a tender obsession should have moved her, but instead it struck her as morbid and she quickly closed the cupboard doors, hiding away once more the lovely dress that would never be worn by a bride. ‘Why won’t he accept that she’s dead and that this kind of thing -‘ Alice swept a hand around the room. ‘It can only keep alive for him the sadness and shock of losing her. Nothing is going to bring her back/Nothing on earth.’ . ‘Who can tell?’ Katerina moved her jetty eyes up and down Alice’s slim figure. ‘Thereare men who having loved in that way either become wed to their memories, or they search for someone who can revive those memories. The kyrios is still a young man, for he and Timareta were adolescent sweethearts and he was only twenty-three when he lost her. Why should he make do with a memory, no matter how sweet to him, if he can find someone to take her place?’ ‘Are you implying that I’m to take her place?’ Alice exclaimed. ‘Do you really imagine that’s why I’m here?’ ‘Isn’t it, thespoinis?’ Alice

shook her head and her unbound hair moved against her blouse, so that as she became aware of it she had an urgent desire to bind it close against her nape and dispel the vagrant look of Timareta that it gave her in its loosened state. She walked quickly out of the room on to the gallery, and was glad when Katerina firmly closed the door on Stefan’s memories. ‘I’m here for only a week,’ she told Katerina. ‘At the end of that time I shall be going back to England. That’s where I belong, and I have no intention of becoming a fixture on this island just because you imagine I bear a faint resemblance to someone Mr Kassandros once loved—still loves, from the evidence of that bedroom and the wedding dress he keeps hanging there. It’s obvious that no other woman could take her place in his heart.’ ‘There is more to a man than what he feels with his heart,’ Katerina said meaningly, as they paused outside the door of Alice’s bedroom. ‘Will the thespoinis require a maid to assist in any way? I can send up a girl to help you bathe and dress, and arrange your hair in one of our charming Greek styles.’ Then, before Alice could retreat into her room, Katerina stretched out a hand and took hold of her hair. ‘Good hair, thespoinis, thick and

shining like that of a Greek girl. Are you entirely English?’ ‘Of course -‘ Then-Alice broke off, recalling that her mother had been Irish. ‘At least, on my father’s side. My mother came from Ireland, but she was much darker than I am, though she had the same sort of skin. She died when I was six years old, but I still remember her. She was much prettier than I am.’ ‘What is there in being pretty?’ Katerina pulled a slightly contemptuous mouth. ‘There are other things that make a real woman— the inward things that reveal themselves in the eyes and the mouth. For a Greek it is passion, not prettiness, that he looks for!’ Alice jerked her head away, pulling her hair free of the Greek woman’s fingers. ‘I shan’t need a maid,’ she said. ‘I’m only a working girl and I’ve never been used to that sort of thing.’ ‘As the thespoinis wishes.’ There was a rustle of stiff silk as the housekeeper moved towards, the stairs, and Alice quickly entered her apartment and closed the door behind her. Her nerves felt churned up by what she had been shown in that white and gold bedroom, and by the things Katerina had said. She moved across to the mirror of the dressingtable and she pressed the switch of the lamp

standing there and leaned forward to peer at her own face. Her blue-green eyes looked apprehensive and there were tremors at the corners of her mouth. If Katerina had noticed that she had some haunting resemblance to Timareta, then Stefan Kassandros had certainly noticed it. When exactly … last night when he had seen her in the pink robe with her hair let down from the habitual bun? Oh lord, why had she given in to vanity and tried to look a little more of a vamp! If she had kept on her glasses and rolled up her hair after bathing, and put on her sensible camel-hair robe, then at least he wouldn’t have seen something in Alice Sheldon that reminded him of the Greek girl who had won his heart when he was a youth and still held it fast now he was a man, with an island of his own. whose wild beauty would surely have appealed to Timareta, if that portrait was a true expression of her personality. A deep sigh shook itself free of Alice and she sank down on the cane stool at the foot of the bed and stared at one of the bright rugs. Would Stefan Kassandros keep his promise and let her go when he got an answer to Alberta’s cable? ‘There is more to a man than what he feels with his heart,’ Katerina had said, and remembering what had almost occurred on the Phaedra, there was no

way Alice could deny the truth and wisdom of the older woman’s statement. Now the mystery of what he saw in her was partially solved … her hair and the wild shyness of her eyes, a similar colour to Timareta’s, triggered off long-suppressed impulses in him. It wasn’t really her, or the person that she was, that awoke his desires. It was a longing to hold Timareta in his arms again, to kiss her mouth, to feel her slim body, to possess what death had taken from him. The web in which Alice felt trapped had become more complex in its weaving and already she had the feeling that she wasn’t going to escape from it as easily as she had believed when he had promised to send that cable to Ceylon. She glanced at her wristwatch and saw that the time was getting on. She had better unpack and try to compose herself as much as possible. At present there was little she could do but appear to submit to his orders; perhaps in a day or so she might find a way to elude him. There might be someone on the island who would accept money to take her back to Athens —money was said to speak most languages. She unlocked her suitcases and shook out the garments which Stefan’s masculine hands had bundled into

the cases. He had ordered her to wear something feminine and attractive, and to leave her hair unbound. She felt wilfully inclined to do the very opposite, yet instinct warned her that he would march her upstairs and make her do what he wanted, even if she yelled the house down … a Greek household where the staff would proceed with their duties just as if they heard nothing. According to Greek philosophy, women liked to be roared at, and then wooed. Alice realised that she had to bow to the devil in order to keep him as tame as possible, and with this in mind she studied one of the more glamorous dresses she had bought for her trip to Greece. It was of tiger-striped chiffon, with a generous back-plunge, and meant to be worn over skin that was partially bare. It was sheer Alberta, really, and Alice wondered if she had the nerve to put it on in order to dine with Stefan Kassandros. Would she be asking for another dose of semi-rape if she appeared downstairs in the chiffon? She stroked a hand down the soft skirt and somehow had the feeling that it was the sexual timidity which she displayed which had an aggressive effect on Stefan. Perhaps if she approached him with more boldness he might-be less inclined to treat her as if her innate shyness

was finespun glass he had to shatter; as if the innocence in her eyes had to be proved false. Katerina was wrong in supposing that Stefan liked it that the woman of Damaskinos, as he called her, bore a kind of resemblance to the girl he had madly loved. He hated it… but what was his reaction going to be when Alberta revealed the truth in her cable? Alice’s fingers clenched the chiffon nervously … her likeness to Timareta might take on a new meaning for him when that happened, and Alice felt a skipped pulse beat as she imagined him looking at her as he must look at that portrait of a long-haired ghost who forever beckoned to him with a hand on which his ring glowed like the turquoise eyes long closed in drowned sleep. Suddenly Alice didn’t want to look like Timareta. She wanted, if possible, to look like Alberta and in the tiger-striped dress to borrow some of her assurance and boldness. Yes, she would wear the dress and try to make of it her armour against the man who hated her and yet felt impelled to have her with him on his island, within reach of his punishing hand … or as a substitute for a woman who clung with the drained white fingers of the drowned to his living heart. Alice laid the

dress in readiness across her bed, along with a silk slip also designed with a plunging back-line. She unpacked a pair of highheeled evening sandals, and opened the velvet case in which her few pieces of jewellery were kept. Her fingers played with the moresque necklace which had been a lucky buy in one of those hideaway shops she was fond of exploring, and then she picked lip a cross fleury, which seemed appropriate to the evening which lay ahead of her … as if she were about to fight a demon for possession of her soul. An absurd yet persistent notion as she took her bath, soaking for a while in the fragrance of bath-oil and water that seemed silky, as if it fed the household pipes from a wild spring in the island hills. Usually it took Alice only a short while to dress, but having made up her mind to achieve some semblance of her sister’s glamour she carefully arranged her hair in one of those chignon styles Alberta had been keen on, until she had her hair cut into bouncy bubbles. A bubble style wouldn’t have suited Alice, but the woven knot was complimentary to her slim white neck. When she had zipped herself into the tiger-striped chiffon and added the cross fleury, Alice barely believed that

she was looking at herself in the mirror. Even with her blurred vision she could see the alteration in her appearance. The high heels made her seem willowy, and the. brief lingerie made the chiffon cling in a softly seductive way to the slimness of her body, gently outlining the shape of her bosom and hips. She paraded back and forth across her room in order to get accustomed to the high heels and the feel of her bare skin where the dress plunged to her waist at the back. She had never felt so daring, but was inclined to wonder if she’d lose her nerve at the last moment and change hurriedly into a dress that was more sedate. Even as she debated this, her nerves gave a leap at the sound of tapping on her bedroom door. Her gaze was fixed upon the door as it opened to reveal a young woman wearing a maid’s uniform of fawn linen with a crisp little cap. ‘Ah, the thespoinis is dressed!’ The maid’s English was not as good as the housekeeper’s, but it was certainly understandable. She wore small gold rings in her ears instead of jets, but the sharp dark eyes in the olive-skinned face were so identical to Katerina’s that Alice guessed at once that the two women were related. ‘My aunt thought I should come and see if you needed any assistance,’ she added, ‘and

perhaps to escort you to the dining zala.’ ‘That’s kind of you.’ Alice stood hesitant and fingered a fold of her chiffon skirt; she felt a sudden compulsion to change the dress, but the maid was standing there with the door open and it might seem odd if she suddenly blurted out that she wanted to change. ‘The thespoinis looks very nice,’ the maid said, her sharp eyes moving rapidly up and down Alice’s figure, ‘You are wearing a Parisian dress, Mees Sheldon?’ ‘Why no, I bought this in London.’ Colour came into Alice’s cheeks, for never in her life had anyone intimated that she looked stylish. ‘We have some very nice shops there.’ ‘Of course.’ The maid smiled. ‘I have there a brother who runs a small restaurant and I have thought of joining him. I speak quite good English, do you not think?’ ‘Your English is excellent.’ Alice smiled rather wistfully. ‘I only wish I could speak your language so well.’ ‘Greek is difficult, unless one learns it from a child.’ The dark eyes were now fixed upon Alice’s face, as if there might have been some discussion between niece and aunt regarding the fact that the English Miss bore a resemblance to the portrait of the kyrios’s dead sweetheart. ‘Is this your first visit to a Greek island, thespoinis?’ ‘Yes.’ Alice turned

to the dressing-table to pick up her chiffon handkerchief, shielding her eyes in case , they betrayed her fear of Stefan Kassandros, who suavely played the host and concealed from everyone but Alice motivations that were sinister. ‘Would you know at all if Mr Kassandros has arranged for someone to take a cablegram to the mainland?’ ‘Yes, about an hour ago, Mees Sheldon. The motor-craft wasn’t due to fetch supplies, which were brought by the hyrios on the caique, but it set out about eight o’clock and my aunt informed me that Theo, who pilots the launch, had been given a special message to carry.’ ‘Oh, good.’ Alice smiled her relief. ‘It concerns my return to England in about a week’s time.’ ‘You will only be staying a week, thespoinis?’ The maid gave Alice a surprised look. ‘Yes, only a week,’ Alice said firmly, as if to convince herself as much as the maid. ‘What is your name, by the way?’ ‘I am called Hesta.’ The dark eyes scanned the bedroom, whose neatness Alice had barely disturbed. ‘I once worked in Athens for an English lady who worked at the Embassy and she was most untidy and used to leave her clothes all over the place. You are very tidy, Mees Sheldon.’ ‘I’m used to looking after

myself and it makes a. lot of extra work if one has messy habits.’ Alice knew she sounded prim, but she was a prim and proper person who had got involved quite against her will with these inhabitants of a Greek island. ‘I have work awaiting me in England and I can’t afford to lose the commission. I draw illustrations for magazine stories.’ ‘My aunt informed me that you were an artist,’ said Hesta. ‘You must be very clever.’ ‘Indeed not.’ Alice gave a laugh. ‘It’s just a knack that I’ve put to use and made a living out of. I only wish I did have real artistic talent, but it’s a rare commodity. Many people can make pictures and patterns on canvas, but it isn’t often that one comes across real, glowing talent.’ ‘Like the picture in the Ivory Room,’ Hesta murmured, her dark eyes fixed upon Alice’s face. ‘It’s very striking, ne?’ ‘Wonderful.’ Alice didn’t intend to be drawn on that subject and she moved out of her room and switched off the light. ‘You had better show me the way to the zala. I don’t want to keep Mr Kassandros waiting for his dinner.’ They made their way down the stairs, the gracious span of it stretching across the hall and lighted by the enormous hammered brass lantern which had

probably been here at the time of the monks. When they reached the foot of the stairs Hesta led Alice across to a wide oval-shaped door and opened it so she could enter the room. Thank you.’ Alice entered tentatively and glanced about her, but Stefan Kassandros had not yet appeared. Hesta watched her a moment, and then departed, leaving the door slightly ajar. Alice could feel her heart beating fast beneath the chiffon of her dress, and her nostrils quivered at the smoky scent of cypress stealing from the great log that burned in another of those great open hearth?. She was glad of the warmth, for she felt a sort of nervous chill in her sleeveless dress cut to the waist at the back, revealing the pale nudity erf her skin for those dark slanting eyes of the man who would soon be joining her. To offset thoughts of him she studied the zala, in which the soft radiance of wall-lamps cast a glow on the panelling. Embroidered drapes had been pulled across the deep windows, and carved chairs from another century stood at either side of a circular table set for dinner with tall candles in silver sticks, crystal glasses on long stems, and an arrangement of freesias and fern in a lovely old bowl at the centre of the table. Set into the corners of the room were cupboards of inlaid wood, with

small pierced niches in which stood ikons painted on wood and inlaid with various colours. Across the floor lay a rich Greek carpet in a mixture of black, silver and bronze colours. A fascinating room and entirely foreign, and with her artistic eye Alice recognised that like the rest of the house it had been furnished with taste. Everything harmonised, and there was only one ornament that seemed a little out of place, and Alice moved across to where it stood and examined it more closely. It was a quaint little lamp with turned up ends made of brass; the kind of lamp that might have stood in a child’s nursery at some time. She reached out and stroked a finger against the brasswork. Had it belonged to that tall Greek when he was a child? A rather lonely childhood, she supposed, as he had never known his mother and had lost his father when he was nine years old. He had probably grown up quickly because of that, discarding boyhood altogether when he fell in love with Timareta, a village girl who had to go away and work, as a nursery maid, carrying dreams in her eyes that were never to be fulfilled. The eager hand which had beckoned to him on a beach had become a hook in his heart, and Alice stood there beside the

little brass lamp and felt a sudden chill run down her bare spine. She swung round and there in the doorway stood Stefan Kassandros, who with that noiseless tread of his had come upon her while she had been lost in brooding thought, touched to sympathy by the tragic outcome of his romance, and yet afraid of the bitterness in him. Right now he looked powerful and temperamental as he came into the room, his darkness intensified by a claret dinner jacket over formfitting dark trousers, a winecoloured tie against the speck-less whiteness of his shirt. Suddenly the atmosphere of the zala was alive with vibrations, and Alice tensed as he came within a foot of her and swept her from head to toe with his dark eyes. ‘That dress is quite shameless,’ he murmured. ‘It makes you look like a tiger moth.’ ‘A moth trapped in a complicated web,’ she said, and caught her breath as he abruptly caught her by the wrist and swung her around so his eyes could sweep her bare back. ‘So you decided I wanted to dine with a demi-mondaine,’ he drawled. ‘If we weren’t dining alone, then I should ask you to change into something a little less provocative.’ ‘You were the one who wanted me to wear something frivolous,’ she Said breathlessly.

‘You’re a very illogical man, aren’t you?’ ‘I am a Greek,’ he said decisively. ‘That dress plunges almost to your derriere.’ , ‘If I had dressed as my normal self, you’d have found something else to criticise.’ Alice tried to pull away from him, but his grip was relentless. ‘One of these days, Mr Kassandros, you are going to have to accept the fact that I am plain Alice Sheldon and not—not someone else.’ ‘The reply to the cable will put me wise to you.’ He swung her to face him. ‘I’ve arranged for it to be sent, and the messenger will bring back your spectacles from the hotel. You will need them for your sketching, eh?’ ‘Thanks,’ she said ungraciously. He might at least have reacted to her dress with a little of the appreciation Alberta could arouse in men so easily. It would seem that in a pin-tucked blouse ..or elegant chiffon she lacked the essential ingredient that brought out the charm in the male of the species. ‘Look well at me.’ A hard finger was placed beneath her chin and her face was tilted so she had to look full at him. ‘I am a Greek and I don’t accept readily from a woman a deliberate attempt to be insolent.’ ‘But I’m not being insolent,’ she protested. ‘You demanded that I dress up to dine with you, and

that’s exactly what I’ve done.’ ‘You look as if you’ve undressed to dine with me.’ His frown drew his black brows together. ‘If I took this mode of dress as an invitation, then what would you do, eh?. Develop another convenient attack of the vapours?’ ‘I’ll go and change the dress if it offends you so much,’ said Alice, her cheeks flushed. ‘It won’t take me more than a few minutes -‘ ‘Our dinner will be arriving in a few minutes.’ His gaze dwelt upon the cross fleury agleam against her neck. ‘Was the devil to be enticed and kept at bay at one and the same time?’ Alice felt the flush rise to her forehead, for he had guessed her feelings when she had decided to wear the dress and the cross. She had to bite back the impulse to ask if he had expected to dine with a ghost, for last night at the hotel, and earlier today on his boat, she had undoubtedly reminded him of Timareta, but the tiger-striped dress and the more sophisticated hairstyle had banished the resemblance and he felt cheated. Cheated and annoyed, and it showed in the hard set to his mouth as he drew out one of the highbacked chairs from the table and held it ready for her. As she slipped into it a fold of her chiffon dress clung for a second against his dark trousers, as if he gave off a kind of magnetism. ‘I’m sorry -‘

Her hand reached for the truant chiffon and the next instant she had touched him without meaning to. Her fingers tingled and the feeling swept straight up into her armpit. ‘Sorry!’ ‘Don’t be.’ His warm breath was against her neck as he leaned down to her. ‘I quite enjoyed it.’ Her gaze lifted swiftly to his face before she could prevent it and she saw that the corner of his mouth had dented into a sardonic smile. ‘I hope you don’t imagine I touched you on purpose?’ Alice burned at the very thought. ‘Often we do things that we aren’t aware of doing purposely,’ he drawled. ‘There’s a baffling quality to you, Alicia. Deep wells of impulse and motivation which you; may not be fully aware of yourself.’ ‘You make me sound very involved,’ she said. ‘But the explanation is really quite simple—I’m a sort of barbed-wire maiden whom men don’t care to get entangled with.’ ‘I should have said that we were well entangled.’ ‘Only because you think -‘ Alice bit her lip. ‘I’ve often wished I was more like my sister Alberta. I suppose that’s why I bought this dress, thinking it might make me feel like her even if I could never look like her.’ ‘So she is the one who wears dresses like this?’ And with a slow deliberation he

ran his fingers down Alice’s bare spine, so that she sat bolt upright, as if from the shock of an electrical charge. He laughed to himself and strolled round the table to take his own seat, where he regarded her across the freesias with a quizzical glint in his eyes. ‘Are you very much younger than your sister?’ he asked. ‘I’m a couple of years older,’ she said, and still she could feel her backbone tingling from the touch of his fingers, which had travelled right down to where the dress ceased to plunge. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Somehow from what you have said about her I gathered the impression that she was older and more worldly.’ ‘She is younger and more worldly,’ Alice said wryly. ‘We aren’t a bit alike, not in our colouring, ©ur looks or ways. I—I’ve always envied her, to tell you the truth. She’s able to enjoy life without taking it too seriously.’ ‘One of the butterflies, eh?’ He made a fluttering movement with his hand so the dark-stoned links gleamed at his white cuff. ‘And what are you, Alicia? A chameleon who changes its aspect in some mysterious fashion?’ ‘There’s nothing that exotic about me,’ she rejoined. ‘I’ve always had a kind of seriousness about me that girls aren’t supposed to have, not if they want to be

popular. People used to find it amusing to compare my sister and me to the Owl and the Pussycat. She could climb on to knees without inhibition, while I used to perch in quiet corners and no doubt look like an owl in my glasses. It wasn’t that I craved to sit on male knees, but I did think it would be nice for once to be given a bangle or a pretty hair-slide instead of a book or a box of paints.’ ‘Did the feathers never fly between the brown owl and the pussycat?’ he asked, watching her intently. Alice shook her head, ‘I—I didn’t care to be thought jealous, so I pretended not to care when Alberta showed off her gold bangle at school.’ ‘It might have been better for you, child, had you thrown a tantrum or two and demanded a gold bangle for yourself.’ ‘I was never the demanding sort.’ Almost unaware, Alice raised a hand and fingered the cross fleury at her throat. ‘I save up and buy my own trinkets.’ ‘You bought that yourself?’ His gaze was upon the cross suspended from the enamelled heart. ‘Yes, I see that it holds some symbolism for you—your guarded heart, eh? The heart you protect because otherwise it gets hurt—how it must have ached that day in the school playground.’ ‘I survived,’ she said, glancing away from him

because it was disturbing to have her childhood winkled out of its shell by his probing questions. It came as a relief to hear the arrival of the dinner trolley, which was wheeled into the zala by Hesta, who was followed by the dignified figure of Katerina. ‘Ah, that all smells very good,’ Stefan told his housekeeper, as she set about uncovering the dishes and serving the food. ‘The lamb should be excellent, kyrie,’ she said. ‘It was brought from Aleko’s farm only a couple of hours ago. His son was telling me that the sheep have been disturbed again by that wild dog. He reckons it will have to be caught and killed or they will lose some of the lambs.’ ‘I shall call on Aleko and arrange the matter. Tell me, how go the daughter’s wedding arrangements?’ ‘From all accounts the farmhouse has become a madhouse,’ Katerina replied with a smile, ‘with the women sewing and baking at all hours. The wedding should be quite an occasion, though it’s a pity the couple will be off to Rhodes so soon after the marriage. As you. know, kyrie, the young man is employed in the rose gardens there.’ ‘And he carries off his new rose to join the others, eh?’ Stefan’s hard fingers drew the cork from the wine, and Alice felt his glance upon her. ‘I shall have to ask Aleko’s daughter if I might bring my

English guest to the wedding. A Greek wedding is interesting and colourful, isn’t that so, Katerina?’ Alice felt the three pairs of Greek eyes upon her, and she also felt a sudden sense of panic. ‘Don’t forget, Mr Kassandros,’ she said, ‘that I’m only staying at the kastello for a week. I’m returning to England next week.’ ‘And when does the wedding take place, Katerina?’ he asked. ‘Let me s’ee,’ Katerina did some mental arithmetic. ‘In twenty days, kyrie. Ah, what a shame that the thespoinis reckons to be gone by then.’ We’,’ he murmured, rising to his feet to come and pour wine into the stemmed glass beside Alice’s plate. She didn’t dare to look at him, for that little silence was impregnated with meaning … she could leave, he had said, if the reply to his cable satisfied him. ‘We will eat now, Katerina,’ he said. ‘Efharisto pol?’ ‘Patakalo,” she murmured, and beckoned her niece to follow her from the zala. The door closed behind them, and Alice became intensely aware of Stefan’s tall figure beside her chair. ‘We call this wine Gold -of Attica,’ he told her. She sat there tensely, her eyes fixed upon her dish of small oysters on their rough shells, which had been set ready with crusty bread and little balls of butter. ‘Look at me,’

he ordered suddenly. She reluctantly did so. ‘What would those people think if they knew I was here under duress?’ She forced herself to look into his eyes, whose depths were as impenetrable as his true intentions. ‘Who do you imagine they would believe?’ He strolled to his chair and sat down. ‘A stranger to them, or someone they have known for several years who gives them employment in a fine house? Greeks are very loyal to each other, you know.’ He raised his wine glass and studied the deep gold colour of the wine through the crystal. ‘Anyway, what are you worrying about? You have assured me that your sister will back up your story, and it would go against my sense of philotimo if I then broke my promise to you. The terms of our arrangement are quite specific, are they not?’ ‘I’m never sure with you,’ she rejoined, and into her mind stole an image of that portrait in the Ivory Room. ‘Can’t I have it in writing?’ ‘No, you can’t!’ Suddenly his brow was dark. ‘Come, let us eat and drink and forget for a while that we don’t—like each other. Let me give you a toast, Alicia. Never harvest your figs before their time.’ ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ Her fingers clenched the

stem of her wine glass, for she didn’t trust him and felt herself surrounded by Greeks who would support him no matter what he did with her. ‘Do you need to have everything in black and white?’ His eyes mocked her across the table. ‘Figs are a symbol of fertility and they have to come to their full ripeness—like love and childbirth. Is that specific enough for you?’ Alice felt the hot colour beating against the skin of her cheeks and in order to avoid looking at him she bent her head to her plate and jabbed at an oyster with the slim silver prong. ‘Have you had them before?’ he asked. ‘No, but I’m not a complete child.’ ‘Your reactions to what I say are curiously childlike.’ He came round to her again, took the prong from her fingers and neatly speared the oyster she had been jabbing at so it slid around the shell. ‘Come, open your mouth, child, and let the oyster slide down your throat.’ ‘Are you going to insist?’ She could feel her heart banging. ‘They aren’t medicine,’ he mocked. ‘Come, tilt your head and it will go down deliciously.’ Obedience seemed the better part of valour and Alice did as she was told, gulping as oyster and juke slid against her palate and left a curious but

not unpleasant tang in her mouth. ‘Was that so bad?’ he asked. ‘You can tip them straight off the shell if you prefer the less ladylike way.’ He resumed his seat and proceeded to eat his oysters by tipping them off the shell straight into his mouth, swallowing fish and juice all in one. Figs and oysters, she thought, all tied up with pagan beliefs in love … this man had so filled the house with his personality that it was hard to believe that once upon a time its corridors had echoed to the chanting of monks, and that perhaps in this very room they had broken bread and eaten soup from wooden bowls. ‘Doesn’t it ever bother you that this was once a house of penance and prayer?’ she asked him. ‘Why should it?’ He took a deep sip of his wine. ‘I’ve worked hard for what I have, so why should I live like the monks who once resided here? It’s possible for a man to sublimate himself in work, and you’d be amazed at how hard-working are the people who enter a religious order, but it isn’t a natural way of life. Had it been so, would the good Theos have created woman? Surely it might have been less complicated for human beings to be like the trees and plants that are pollinated by the winds. Instead he gave them passions, did he not?’ His voice deepened on those last few words,

as if he meant to remind her of that scene on the Phaedra, when she had been scorched for the first time by the passions of a man. ‘I’m sure you have an opinion on the matter.’ He laughed softly. ‘Men and women are complicated by their extreme differences from each other, are they not?’ ‘Some men are more complicated than others,’ she said pointedly. ‘Also some women. You, Alicia, are afraid to be your real self, but a week on my island might alter that, eh? Something pagan in its atmosphere might get into you and you might throw off your shoes, and maybe even ‘your inhibitions, and run barefoot through the wild thyme.’ Like Timareta, she thought at once. Like the girl in the painting with her unbound hair and bare limbs? ‘You saw the real Alice Sheldon on your caique, Mr Kassandros. A neat, bespectacled career woman who will be only too glad to get back to work in the calm atmosphere of my London flat.’ She halfrose as she said this, as if she meant to try and get away from him this instant. ‘Sit down,’ he ordered. ‘You aren’t going anywhere without my permission.’ CHAPTER SIX ALICE obeyed him involuntarily,

her eyes blazing across the table at him as he fingered the stem of his wine glass. ‘I refuse to believe that you mean a single word of what you have just said. You are deluding yourself, Alicia— or me.’ ‘I’m stating the plain facts.’ He so infuriated her in that moment that she could have flung her wine straight in his masterful face. ‘I choose to believe that you are twisting them -‘ ‘Damn you,’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re a male chauvinist!’ ‘Most Greeks are, in their infinite wisdom. Now shall we eat our adjem pilaje before it gets cold?’ He served up the roast lamb, adding potatoes and eggplant stuffed with rice. ‘Is that sufficient?’ ‘Heaps, thank you.’ She gave him a glare as she picked up her knife and attacked her lamb. ‘A Greek likes to see his hospitality appreciated,’ he drawled. ‘Hospitality?’ She almost choked on the word. ‘You’re the one who’s deluding yourself—I didn’t exactly come here of my own free will, did I?’ ‘We shall forget about that for the time being.’ And before she could protest he had refilled her wine glass. ‘I shall behave like the perfect host and you will react like the perfect guest. The lamb is good, eh?’ ‘The lamb is certainly good,’ she said meaningly, and she found herself tucking into her dinner without too

much effort. If only she could believe him when he offered to behave like the perfect host, for it really would be something to remember if she could relax enough to enjoy for a week this Aegean island in the sun. ‘Are you .often resident on your island?’ she asked him suddenly. ‘A few times each year, when I can manage to get away from the hotel business. The trouble with success is that it becomes your own taskmaster, and the more you are taxed the more money you have to make in order to pay the tax. Sometimes I tell myself I will sell out to a combine and retire to Solitaria to become a grower of apricots and lemons, and that I might even cultivate again the fig and olive groves that flourished when the monks were here. However, for such a way of life a man needs to feel settled.’ He shrugged his shoulders in a cynical way. ‘Content with his life.’ ‘And you aren’t content,’ she said, and found it impossible to associate the word with a man so restlessly vital. ‘Are you?’ He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Do you consider that you have found the answer to all your dreams?’ She knew what he was getting at but wasn’t going to get involved in that argument again. He would learn soon enough from

Alberta’s reply to his cable that she had never been engaged to anyone, least of all a ruthless shipping tycoon. No wonder Berta had lost her nerve about marrying the man and had been only too ready to let someone else break the news of her defection to him. In retrospect it had been pure folly on her part to have taken on the task, especially when Berta had warned her that Greeks weren’t the easiest of men to deal with. ‘Tell me about your island, Mr Kassandros,’ she said. ‘It must satisfy you to own a chunk of land in the Aegean?’ So for the remainder of the meal he talked of Solitaria and what it offered in the way of amusement for a guest. The swimming was good, so long as one kept a sharp lookout for the questing fin of the shark. There were cliffs to climb and explore, and the beach for sunbathing. He also talked about the cultivation of the island, and the remains of pagan worship to be found on it. He made it sound fascinating, and Alice felt sure it was an idyllic place for a holiday … if only she were resident of her own free will and could look upon Stefan as a genuine host instead of a man who played a waiting game with her. When he poured coffee from a swan-necked copper pot she was reminded by the aroma of the Turkish

coffee he had drugged, and as her nostrils tensed she felt the flick of his eyes across her face and knew that he was reading her thoughts. ‘This won’t send you to sleep,’ he drawled. ‘How can I be sure of that—after last night?’ ‘Then watch me drink mine—ah, delicious!’ His eyelids half-closed as he sipped his coffee. ‘This is the way Greeks like it, hot and sweet as a virgin’s kiss. Come, you must learn to trust me if we are going to be living together.’ ‘I’d hardly call it living together.” She couldn’t keep a shocked note out of her voice. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ His eyes for a moment were brazen as they met hers. ‘I shall be sleeping under the roof of Fireglow, just in case you imagined that I was going to sleep aboard the Phaedra. I’m not one of those gallant gentlemen who puts himself out for a woman.’ ‘I never supposed you were, Mr Kassandros, but I’m merely staying in your house, I’m not living in it.’ ‘Ah, perhaps there is a subtle English distinction in the wording, is that so?’ ‘You know very well there is, so don’t pretend it’s Greek to you. Your grasp of the English language is remarkable and you know it.’ ‘I trained for hotel management in England,’ he said, taking her by surprise. ‘Most things can be learned in your

country, Alicia, and a number of my countrymen go there for that purpose. Accountancy, banking, soldiering, or tailoring, it can all be learned to the last detail on that island of yours … which you are wishing you had never left, eh?’ ‘Can you blame me?’ ‘Are you so disappointed in Greece?’ he mocked her. ‘We offer a history as colourful as England’s, a culture 1 older than that of the Romans, and certainly more sunshine. More coffee?’ She glanced at her empty cup in surprise, and he gave that soft, ironic laugh of his as he refilled her cup. ‘Come, let us go and sit in the saloni. We don’t want to converse over the dinner plates and the chairs in there are a little more comfortable for a lightly clad woman.’ Alice felt like saying that she’d prefer to go to bed, and yet she felt so awake and was fascinated by this hard, self-made, rather wilful Greek. From being an orphan he had become a rich hotel owner, and that must have taken a lot of enterprise … the kind he had used to kidnap a woman without caring a damn that he broke the law. Never in her life before had Alice known a lawless man, and she followed him into the more comfortable room across the hall,’ where she sat down in a deep chair near the glowing wood fire and breathed again that tang of

cypress smoke. On a little table of slotted pieces of deep-coloured glass there was a container of Turkish delight stuffed with nuts, and slices of candied fruit. ‘Are you entirely Greek?’ she found herself asking him. ‘Why do you ask?’ He stood tall by the fireplace, the coffee cup fragile in his lean dark hand, ‘I don’t know—many Greeks have Turkish blood in them, so I’ve heard.’ ‘My mother came from the Macedonian mountains,’ he said. ‘A tough and rather pagan race of people. Does that answer your question?’ ‘Entirely.’ Her glance ran swiftly up his long body to his wide shoulders in the claret material of his jacket. The clothes were really the most civilised thing about him, and it showed in his strongly defined bones and intensely black hair that he had a strong pagan streak in him which money and power had intensified. Perhaps had Timareta lived she might have tamed him, and yet somehow he didn’t look the type of man any woman could ever really hope to tame … or really want to. That last thought sent a jolt through Alice, and she drank her coffee and stared into the flames of the fire; blue-edged flames that shot from the burning log that lay gripped by iron fire-dogs. She heard the

click of a lighter and then came the drift of strong cheroot smoke. ‘Have some Turkish delight,’ he said. ‘It’s homemade, and from the way you ate your dinner I don’t imagine you’re a woman who goes in for dieting and such nonsense. You have a naturally good body.’ She felt a second jolt and this one was enough to set her tingling. She didn’t want him to think about her body, let alone talk about it, but at the same time it was curiously gratifying to be told such a thing. She leaned towards the table and took a chunk of the nut-stuffed candy, which as she ate it had a tang of roses. ‘I believe it’s made from an old Turkish harem recipe,’ Stefan drawled. ‘The beys used to stuff their ladies with sweets, until some of them grew so enormous they had to be carried to the master’s bed on a silk litter. When I bought this house and began to furnish it, I acquired a small library of books at an auction and some of them were leatherbound copies of books by an Englishman named Burton. If you like to read, Alicia, and I suspect that you do, then you might find them intriguing. It seems he spent some time in collecting facts about Eastern harems and it’s truly fascinating what went on in those places.’ ‘What makes you imagine I’m

interested in Turkish harems?’ Alice gave him a cool look. ‘I imagine it must have been pretty awful being shut up in some scented prison to languish away in idleness if you didn’t happen to appeal to the bey?’ ‘Are you thinking that would have been your fate?’ Smoke edged its way from the corner of his amused mouth. ‘Some of those ladies were quite ingenious and found ways to attract the bey when he came to call on them, and if they were very clever they often won a permanent place in his affections. Of course, even that had its dangers. Intense jealousies flourished in the harems and the eunuchs could be bribed to get hold of poisons that were insinuated into the sweets and sherbets, so that the life of a particular favourite was in constant jeopardy unless she persuaded her lover to give her a private apartment.’ Stefan glanced lazily about the saloni, which fine furnishings and handwoven drapes had made extremely comfortable. ‘Do you find my house the kind of place a woman would like, Alicia?’ She followed his glance from the carpets and drapes to the oval windows filled with panes of glass meshed in thin lacy iron. What was going through his mind, she wondered, that he had a woman as

much at his mercy as those women locked up long ago to amuse a man? He casually inclined his head as if agreeing with her thoughts. ‘Yes, it’s an intriguing situation, guzel. No matter how tastefully furnished a room might be, it somehow takes the presence of a woman to bring it alive. That couch where you sit, that carpet your foot brushes as you lean forward to take a sweet from that dish. It’s as if there is in a woman a kind of radiance that makes everything more living, and warm … an inborn fire that never really goes out even when it smoulders very low. Men have energy, but it’s women who possess the beckoning flame.’ Alice tensed where she sat and realised how quiet the house was, as if his servants had gone to bed and left her very much alone with their master. ‘It’s getting late,’ she said. ‘I really think -‘ ‘You want to go to bed, is that it?’ His tone of voice was insinuating and it took a lot of control for Alice to remain seated when she wanted to make a dash for the door. Such an action would be folly … if she fled him then he would give chase and what had happened on the Phaedra might be repeated if he caught her in his arms. Alice didn’t really believe that he was a cruel or harmful man, but there was a lot of loneliness stored up in him. The touch of her, and that vagrant

look of Timareta, .could release it, touching a spark to all the loneliness she had lived on for so long. She had fainted on the caique from sheer nerves, but tonight she was a woman who had been dined and wined and warmed at a log fire, and Stefan’s wide shoulders made her feel weak in a different way. ‘Yes, I feel very tired,’ she said, making her voice cool and formal. ‘Would you mind if I left you and went to my room, otherwise that lovely fire is going to send me right off to sleep.’ He gazed down at her and a gradual glint of sardonic humour came into his fine dark eyes. ‘And then I should have to carry you up to bed like a sleepy child, eh?’ His mouth quirked. ‘Are you scared, girl, that I shan’t keep my promise to you?’ ‘Can you wonder if I’m scared?’ she asked. ‘I’m stranded on your island and you won’t let me go until you have it in writing that I’ve told you only the truth.’ ‘It had better be the truth, little one.’ His eyes hardened and his gaze moved up and down her body. ‘I don’t like a woman to lie to me, and I believe you may be stalling in the hope that a rescue might be launched. It’s very unlikely, Alicia. No one saw me carry you down in the service elevator at the hotel, or put you in my car. I

drove swiftly to the dock and all was quiet and dark when I carried you aboard. It’s amazing how well a quickly made plan can work.’ ‘You—you will let me go when you receive my sister’s answer to your cable?’ Her eyes were raised to his face, wide and shadowed by the mixed feelings he aroused in her. ‘It will prove I’ve not been lying to you.’ ‘It had better prove it.’ He tossed his cheroot stub into the fire. ‘Come, I’ll take you up to your room -‘ ‘Oh, I can find it on my own.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Please, you don’t have to bother to come with me.’ ‘Afraid I might want to come in with you?’ he jeered. ‘I said I would behave like the perfect host and it wouldn’t be polite of me to let my guest go alone to her apartment. You might feel nervous going up those stairs where the soft-footed monks used to walk.’ Alice shivered uncontrollably as his fingers closed on her elbow and he led her to the door. They walked across the hall to that wide stretch of stairs and Alice noticed that the hammered lamp had been extinguished and only wall-lights cast illumination on the staircase as they mounted it towards the gallery. There were shadows in the angles of the stairs, and tiny creaks

and movements from the treads. Yes, she might well have imagined that a hooded figure walked at her heels if Stefan hadn’t come with her, tall and strong at her side, a man made lonely and hard by a lost love. They walked along the gallery to her door, and when they paused he suddenly moved his hand up her arm to her shoulder, his fingers hard and warm against her skin. ‘I’ll bid you kalinikta,’ he said. ‘You will find that your bed has bees warmed by a pan filled with hot charcoal and spices. I hope, little one, that you won’t feel lonely.’ Their eyes met and held, and Alice was intensely aware that he wanted to come into her room and that it would take only the barest nod from her to have him follow her. Her pulses hammered and an image of what would ensue was there in his dark eyes … his fingers would unbind her hair and he would look into her blue-green eyes and make believe that he held Timareta in his hungry arms. No … she backed away and sought wildly for the door handle. It turned and she pushed open the door. ‘Goodnight !’ She rushed inside and closed the door on him and leaned there, feeling as if all the strength had left her legs. She pressed her ear to the door and felt him standing out there. Go away, she prayed. Please go away! She knew that

eventually he went, as silently as the ghost of a girl with brown, water-tangled hair. A shaky Sigh escaped her and she moved across to her bed and sank down weakly on the side of it. The lonely, loveless life she had led for so long hadn’t prepared her for this land of thing. Had she been Alberta she would have known exactly how to behave with a man, but instead she had panicked … and she knew why she had panicked. There had been a disturbing loneliness in Stefan’s eyes and for an instant she had felt like putting her arms around him in a gesture of consolation, forgetful that he was her kidnapper who had not considered her feelings but was merely intent on assuaging his own. Oh God, what was happening to her? Alice dragged hear fingers through her hair and loosened her chignon, and her hands travelled down over the contours of her body. Was she becoming attracted to this man … was there something sensual in her that was reacting to him despite the indignity of being brought to his house against her will? Her eyes brooded as she thought of the look of him in his tailored dinner suit, his shirt so white in contrast to his swarthy skin. He was the kind of man who would be noticeable in a roomful of people,

and Alice couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t noticed his look of sensual power. It was in his features, in the way he carried himself … he was every inch a man, and never in her life before had Alice been thrown into contact with anyone like him. Out there on the gallery she had felt a compulsion to touch him, and suddenly she was afraid of female instincts over which she might have no control. She wasn’t cold or frigid, but for too long she had repressed her natural feelings because there had been no one with whom they could be released. Now there was Stefan Kassandros, a man who had ruthlessly abducted her, who made a prisoner of her on his island, surrounded by all the luxury he had created for someone dead and gone. It was like the fantasy of a lonely woman, and yet all of it was real. The rich comfort of this room, and out there in the night the dark glimmer of the ocean that lapped the shores of Solitaria. When she took a breath the strangeness of it all was in her senses, her bed warmed by charcoal and spices, the faint flicker of the lamps, the jewelled gleam of the ikon on the wall facing the bed. She wouldn’t wake up and find it all part of a dream … she was living the dream with its aspects of fear and fascination. He had

known, with devilish instinct Stefan had known that she didn’t really want to. return just yet to the uneventful routine of her life in London. ‘You are deluding yourself,’ he had said. And then almost with menace, ‘You had better be telling me the truth.’ The truth that would release her from his custody and set her free to return to her selfcontained flat where she worked, read her favourite books, and watched the occasional television programme. Neat, ordered, where the only man who intruded was the plumber or the meter-reader. Alice stared across at the door she had almost slammed in Stefan’s face. What did it really indicate, that she was trying to slam a door on her secret desires? Trying to put some kind of a shield between her and this man who had erupted into her life with such dark force? Had she so fed herself on romantic dreams that she couldn’t face up to. reality … that a man and a woman might arouse in each other a need which had nothing to do with the moonlight and roses of the magazine fiction which she illustrated with her lean-faced men and starryeyed girls? Oh, but she couldn’t sit here all night tormenting herself with such thoughts. She was probably strung

up and ready to imagine all sorts of things in this house that stood on sea-rock, whose balconies overhung the Water, whose chimneys jutted against a sky where the sunrise would Same with a vehement fire, as if to express all that was pagan and untamed on this island. She began to undress, walking about on bare feet while she put away the dress Stefan had found provocative and slipped out of the brief filmy lingerie she had never dreamed of wearing until she came on her sentimental mission to Greece believing that a man in a wheelchair deserved to be told to his face that his engagement was broken. Alice had slipped into silk, sleeveless pyjamas and was brushing her teeth in her bathroom when she caught the sound of her bedroom door being opened. She grabbed a towel and wiped her mouth, and again the panic was showing in her eyes when she stepped into her bedroom and saw a tall figure beside the bed. She stood watching him as if powerless to move and the apprehension spread through Her and gripped her throat muscles. ‘Go away!’ she wanted to cry out, but the words wouldn’t come, and then as if he sensed her standing there he turned to face her, his eyes probing her slim body in the thin apricot tunic and trousers. A nervous quiver went through Alice and

the muscles of her throat unlocked. ‘What do you want?’ Her words were unnaturally high, flung from the peak of her rising panic. ‘What are you doing in here?’ ‘I did knock on the door,’ he drawled, ‘but you were running water in the bathroom and didn’t hear me. I’m merely bringing you a nightcap—a fruit and spice drink which will soothe your nerves, which do appear to be highly strung at the moment.’ Alice stared at the container in his hand as if it held a drug, and at once he smiled and she trusted him even less. ‘I don’t want it,’ she said. ‘My nerves are perfectly all right when you’re not around.’ ‘What a provocative remark—so I disturb you, Alicia.’ The goldshaded lamplight glimmered in his eyes, and he had removed his jacket and tie and the upper part of his white shirt was open against his throat. He could not have been more disturbing to Alice if he had been a tiger in her room, and suddenly she backed away from him as if making for the protection of the ikon with its Virgin in Repose. She hit her lightly clad body against the corner of a panelled chest and winced, and at once he said to her: ‘Don’t be foolish. This drink is quite endaxi and isn’t some kind of love potion to make

you lose your head. I would prefer a woman to do that without the aid of an aphrodisiac. Come, why does a kind gesture from me have to seem to you so sinister?’ ‘Could you trust someone who had carried you off to a benighted island, Mr Kassandros?’ ‘Very well, let me prove to you that the drink is quite harmless.’ He raised it to his lips and drank from the silver rim of the container. ‘This drinking-cup is what is called a ciborium—rather lovely, isn’t it?’ He showed it to her, shaped rather like a water-lily, with a chasing of flowers in the silver. ‘I Shall put it here on the table beside your bed.’ He did so, and Alice saw him glance at the neat bed with its folded-back bedcovers ready for her to slip between them. She felt as if her pulse was pounding little drums inside her, and when he glanced at her with his eyelids drooping a little she saw in his eyes the gleam of male arrogance that was instinctive in the gaze of a man looking at a woman in her nightwear. The lamps burned softly, giving the room and the bed a look of intimacy, and Alice felt her nerves quivering as Stefan slid his gaze over her tumbled hair and silk pyjamas that left her arms bare to the shoulder. She felt an instinctive urge to shield herself and again she

moved towards the ikon until she stood beneath its panels of blue and gold. She saw his mouth move in a half-smile. ‘Do you think that would stop me?’ he asked mockingly. ‘I—I never supposed you were anything but a pagan,’ she said, ‘but I think you probably draw the line at rape.’ ‘Would it be rape, Alicia? If it’s true that you have led a lonely existence, then you might be more hungry for love than you realise. Such white skin, such sweet curves … don’t you really tremble to have them caressed by a man? I wouldn’t hurt you, my sweet fool. I might make you cry out with the pleasure a man and a woman can make together.’ ‘Go away,’ she said tensely. ‘L-leave me alone and stop — insulting me!’ ‘Is that what I’m doing?’ He raised an eyebrow and a touch of hard insolence came into his face. ‘I thought I was flattering you, and according to what you have told me few men have dared to push their way past your defences in order to get a real look at you. What did you call yourself? The neat, bun-haired, bespectacled career girl, altogether too prim and proper to excite the blood in a man’s veins.’ His eyes moved over her so deliberately that it was as if he was touching her inch by inch. ‘It’s true you aren’t as obviously pretty as other English girls I have seen, but you

have a concealed and pervasive charm which reminds me of those flowers only the most persistent bees dare to explore, in which they sometimes get trapped so you can hear them angrily buzzing. I once saw a bee emerge from such a flower with pollen clinging to him from head to tail.’ ‘And what is that supposed to signify?’ she demanded. ‘My dear Alicia, do I really have to explain the facts of nature to you, a young woman of twenty-four? I really can’t make up my mind about you, whether you are naive, overwhelmingly modest, or the actress playing me along behind a mask. I’m sure you are aware that the players in Greek drama wear a mask.’ ‘Isn’t it a fact of life that we all wear masks?’ she retaliated. ‘How many people are there to whom we could trust our true selves?’ ‘Too true, and you have hit upon the basic reason why Greek drama is played that way.’ He glanced around him, taking in the bedroom to which she had added one or two intimacies such as her lingerie dropped on to a chair along with the sheer nylon stripped from her legs and dangling there towards the shag of a rug, where one of her highheeled shoes lay overturned. His gaze drifted to the vanitytable where her few

cosmetics were grouped, along with her turtlebacked hairbrush with the initial A outlined in tiny pearls. He strolled across and picked up her hairbrush and ran the ball of his thumb over the raised initial. ‘I remember another girl who used to brush her brown hair until it crackled and shone and then lay like a silk cape around her slender shoulders.’ He glanced up deliberately and stared at Alice as she stood there and watched him with eyes widened with the strain of trying to read his intentions in his face. ‘In some ways you remind me of her, except that she was more open, more spontaneous in her reactions— more honest.’ ‘You’ve no right to call me dishonest, and I’m— I’m sure I don’t look anything like the girl you were in love with.’ Alice wasn’t going to tell him she had seen the portrait of Timareta, or the room which he kept as a kind of shrine to her memory. Seeing them had been a kind of intrusion, and somehow they had lit a little flame of resentment in Alice. She didn’t want to look like someone he found impossible to forget. ‘I’m sure your fiancee looked every inch a Greek girl,’ she added. ‘I’m a typical English spinster -‘ ‘No,’ he shook his dark head as he came towards her, so that instinctively

she retreated from his advance. ‘In a simple Grecian blouse and embroidered skirt, your hair loosely worn-:—’ ‘No, I’m not Timareta.’ Alice heard the rising inflection ift her voice and couldn’t stop it. ‘Leave me alone—I’m me, and I can’t bring your ghost alive. Let her rest—and let me alone or I’ll scream!’ She cried out, in fact, stumbling backwards over an oblong stool and losing her balance before she could save herself. She fell with a thud and lay breathless, and the next instant Stefan had dropped to his knees and was lifting her up against him, resting her across his arm so she was looking at him, the hurting on her face, her pupils widened so her eyes were strange and lovely and a little dazed. ‘Have you hurt yourself, little fool?’ he asked, and his voice was resonant, with husky depths to it. ‘Y-you frightened me,’ she said shakily. ‘It was as if you were reaching out for her —for Timareta. Please, I can’t resurrect her for you —I know it must hurt to lose what you love, but you seem as if you want to blame me and yet make me into her. I—I can’t be anyone but myself.’ ‘Alice Sheldon, eh?’ His hand massaged her shoulder, which she had struck as she fell. His touch was firm and very warm against her bare

skin. She shivered and little tremors of sensitivity ran down towards her breast as the silk of her tunic tautened, making her aware of her body as a separate unit whose feelings could be in conflict with the fears of her mind. She seemed to go a little dizzy and tried not to believe that she had wanted his fingers to stroke downwards and touch her as men had been touching her sister Alberta since she was sixteen. Alice knew about those petting sessions because Berta had bragged about them, and about those times when she sometimes went to a party wearing only a thin silk slip beneath her dress. ‘There are men who love it,’ Berta had giggled. ‘Knowing you’re there among all those people—like that.’ ‘Is it Harry who likes you to go out with him like that?’ Alice had asked, shocked because her sister was only seventeen at the time and it could have led to trouble. But Berta had shaken her head. Harry, she had replied, was a bit straitlaced when it came to anything too daring. I’m straitlaced, Alice told herself, but was suddenly unsure of what she believed about her own nature, feeling only a sense of helplessness as Stefan carried her to the bed. He • laid her down and his hand rested in her hair as he leaned over and studied her face. She gazed up at him, seeing above

her his wide shoulders rampant with masculine force, and a strong protectiveness that made her want to reach for them. Oh God, it was wanton to feel this way … like ‘ Alberta who had never been able to tell the difference between gratification and love. As Alice shrank from her own thoughts, she seemed to shrink from him and he stood up abruptly to his full height. ‘What sort of a woman are you?’ His eyes flicked her up and down, with a kind of arrogant curiosity. ‘Are you holding out for a wedding ring, eh?’ His words plunged through Alice like a knife, and then he swung away from her and made for the door as if he no longer trusted himself alone with her. He pulled open the door impatiently, hesitated a second, and then left her without saying goodnight. When the door closed behind his tallness the room felt suddenly cold to Alice. She lay as he had left her, her left arm bent limply on the pillows, the tunic of her pyjamas moving rapidly up and down with her breathing. Was she to believe that his words had held the incredible hint of a proposal … that his loneliness was growing so hard to bear that he contemplated a marriage of convenience with her?’ Marriage to Stefan Kassandros! As the idea

slowly infiltrated through her mind and body Alice sat up, pushing the hair back behind her shoulders as she reached for the fruit drink in the silver cup he had called a ciborium. Her throat felt suddenly dry and she drank the sweet, spicy contents thirstily, and thought of the arrogant, speculative sweep of his eyes over her body … a Greek who decided he had need of a wife and wasn’t too concerned that he wasn’t in love with her. By means of her colouring she bore a certain resemblance to a girl he had loved, and it had to be remembered that Greeks didn’t always marry for romantic reasons. Her hands fondled the ciborium and she noticed there were tiny demon faces among the chased flowers, and she wondered what demon drove Stefan to hint at marriage. As she set the cup aside Alice noticed a book on the bedside table, and banking the pillows behind her shoulders she reached for the volume and casually opened it at the title page. It was called The Harem and had been translated from French, with original illustrations and the announcement in italics that it was unabridged. Alice turned the pages and caught her breath audibly at the range of drawings that caught her

gaze. Her cheeks grew warm, for even as she admired with an artistic eye the detail of the drawings she couldn’t help seeing how explicit they were. She felt her toes curling, and felt a sudden conviction that the book had been placed at her bedside on purpose … as if Stefan were indicating that in his arms she would look like the girl in the pictures, her head flung back on her long hair, eyes dreamily half-closed as he made love to her with his strong tawny body. Alice closed the book with a snap and as she replaced it on the bed-table she supposed it was one of the volumes Stefan had bought at auction in order to help furnish his home. She lay, back against her pillows and a reluctant smile caught at her lips. It would be like him to poke that kind of fun at her, especially after the way she had taken fright in his arms on the Phaedra. She turned off the lamp and slid down in the bed. Was it her shyness and the hint of repression in her that provoked him? Was he out to prove that he could make her respond to him like the girl in the book? Alice burrowed her warm face into her cool pillow and though she tried to blot from her mind those explicit embraces, their imagery was persistent. She felt the quick beating of her pulse and wondered if real lovemaking was as rapturously

ruthless as depicted by those drawings. Oh dear, how pathetic in a way to be so innocent at the age of twenty-four! No wonder she had always seemed such a joke to Alberta … and no wonder Stefan had to have fun with her by leaving her a bedtime book that would provoke her naive curiosity. She gave a quivering sigh as sleep began to overtake her, and started to dream that strong, tawny arms were sliding around her languid body … arms she no longer resisted but welcomed. She pressed into them, and then stirred, half awake to the reality of being alone after all. CHAPTER SEVEN To awake in a strange bed was always startling, and Alice sat up with a little cry, her gaze caught by the ikon that glittered from the sunlight that was flooding into the room. Her grip relaxed on the bedcovers as she remembered where she was, and as some of the initial alarm petered out of her, it was with a certain pleasure that she took in the details of the room. So very Greek, and so different from her neatly-papered English bedroom, with its plain suite of furniture and beige carpeting. She slipped out of bed and after going to the bathroom, swung a robe about her shoulders and

stepped down into the balcony called a moussandra by Katerina, the woman who kept house for Stefan Kassandros. Alice touched the fruits on the passion-vine that draped her balcony rail and leaned over to get a glimpse of the courtyard below. A man was down there with a towel flung over his shoulder, talking to an elderly man who leaned on a long pair of garden clippers. Alice caught the grating resonance of the Greek speech, and there was no mistaking that dark head and the width of Stefan’s shoulders as with a final word to his gardener he sauntered away through an arch and was presumably on his way to take a morning swim. As he carried only a towel Alice supposed that he was clad in his bathing briefs beneath his trousers … or was he entirely pagan and swam in the nude? Her fingers clenched on the rail and she found herself wishing that he had asked her to go with him. It was a wonderful morning, the air filled with sunlight and birds and the scent of pine trees, and through those towering pines and cypresses Alice could glimpse the ocean, glittering bluegreen, with an inviting swell to it. Why not? Her eyes lit up. She had been told to behave like a guest, and swimming was one of the

skills at which she had always been better than Alberta, who preferred to model a bikini rather than to get it wet. But it wasn’t a bikini that Alice Wore down to the beach, going by way of the cliffside steps because the lift in its shaft of rock was something that unnerved her. She carried a bright towel over the shoulder of a white one-piece swimsuit, and wore a pair of multicoloured sandals. The suit showed off the firm curves of her body and the tapering slimness of her legs, whose pallor she hoped would soon be tanned by the strong Greek sun. From here as she paused on one of the rough ledges she could see that the beach was shaped like the curving blade of a dagger. Overhead flew the seabirds and out there the ocean had a breathless beauty and invitation, with giant rocks profiled against the turquoise swell of the water. Alice gazed down at the unfathomable depths of the sea at the bottom of the cliffs where the spray leapt. She hadn’t forgotten what Stefan had said about the danger of sharks off-shore; that a wary eye had to be kept alert for the steely-blue killers with their white underbelly. But she wanted to swim and she had seen Stefan making for the water, and with a little toss of her head in its white bathing cap she continued on her way down the

steps. Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who had said that the basis of optimism was pure terror, and wasn’t that why life was more exciting when a hint of terror was in the air? Ocean sharks and a tall, dark Greek combined to quicken the blood in Alice’s veins and when she reached the sands she flung her towel over the henna-hued branches of a tamarisk and ran among the rocks to the tideless Greek sea, tossing her sandals back over her shoulder so they fell somewhere in the vicinity of the tree. , The sea ripples curled around her toes as she waded into the water until it was breast high and she could strike out, a good swimmer who was unafraid of the buoyant swell as it lifted her and flung her forward. With firm strokes of her arms she swam out towards the graceful, sail-furled shape of the Phaedra, at anchor two miles beyond the bay. She had an idea Stefan had made for his caique and it seemed to her not unwise’ to swim in the vicinity of the boat just in case there was a shark about. Ah, but what a morning! Alice couldn’t recall enjoying herself like this in a long time … if ever. She turned on her spine and backstroked and there was no denying the realisation that her life until now had been a very bland mixture; mostly

work and very little play. And then out of the blue the fates had swept her into the path of a marauding Greek, and here she was a virtual prisoner on his island that was aptly named Solitaria, for right now she might have been aeons of miles from the conventional life of a single woman who had to work continuously in order to support herself in reasonable comfort and security. Ah, but she didn’t have to think about any of that for at least a week … and neither must she allow her thoughts to drift in the dangerous direction they had taken last night. Nightfall had a way of intensifying emotions and reactions, and Stefan had only meant to be sardonic when he had asked if she was holding out for a wedding ring. Now it was daylight and she could view that scene in her bedroom with more sobriety. He was a man who filled his days with activity, but found his nights lonely and empty, and it wasn’t unreasonable that a man so vital should be aware of the woman under his roof. A woman he connected With the tragedy in his life. A woman whose hair and eyes seemed to hold similar tints to those he had admired and lost in Timareta. Lost in her thoughts, Alice had backstroked closer to the Ptiaedra than she realised and the shadow of its hull and rigging was above her before she had time

to reverse and swim back to the shore. ‘Ahoy there!’ . She flung the water from her eyes and glanced up the side of the caique … Stefan was there looking down at her. ‘So you swam out to join me, eh?’ She shook her head, but he only laughed, and the next moment a rope ladder was flung down and the invitation was all too apparent. When she hesitated, swimming in a small circle, he ordered her to grab hold and come aboard. ‘Come along! A hovering object is always more inviting to a shark.’ Alice grabbed at the ladder when he said that and hauled herself upwards to the deck, where he was waiting to swing her to the teakwood boards. At his touch she went as tense as if electricity had struck her wetness, and his eyes mocked that tension as he gripped her around the waist and swung her towards his sea-bleached slacks and dark-blue shirt that swung open against his brown flesh, hardened by sea and sun. ‘We could have swum out together,’ he said, his teeth glinting hard and white as he gazed down at her, ‘but I thought you might want to lie in after your late night. How did you sleep?’ ‘Very well, thank you,’ she said, her polite tone of voice in contrast to her inner tumult at the feel of his strong body against hers in the swimsuit which

clung wetly to every line and curve of her. ‘Did you fall asleep straight away?’ he asked. ‘Sometimes it’s difficult in a strange bed, in a house where the nighttime noises are not familiar. I wouldn’t want to think that you lay awake, tossing and turning.’ ‘I didn’t,’ she assured him, and she knew very well from the amused gleam in his eyes that he was only playing at being the concerned host. ‘I was tired and I fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.’ ‘Did you really?’ He quirked an eyebrow and his hands tightened on her hips. ‘I would have taken you for one of those people who needs to relax with a book before falling off into dreamland.’ ‘Not when I’m tired,’ she informed him coolly, and wild horses wouldn’t have dragged from her an admission that she had glanced into that pillow book he had left at her bedside. ‘If I ever feel restless at night I read crime fiction.’ ‘You find that less disturbing, eh? I thought women liked to read about love and its attendant joys and tribulations.’ ‘Spinsters become cynical about romance, kyrie. Crime offers them more escape than reading about the sweet swindles of love. People in love are like gamblers, they seem unable to stay away from what never really satisfies them.’

‘Ah, that is indeed a cynical statement, Alicia.’ He caught her so suddenly close to him that he hurt her, perhaps unaware that his body might feel that extra bit hard to a girl who hadn’t learned how to accommodate her softness to a man’s muscularity. ‘It provokes me into wanting to prove you wrong— so you like to swim, eh?’ ‘Very much -‘ Colour lay high on her cheekbones, for she could feel the warmth and maleness of Stefan right through her swimsuit, which seemed like a skin he might break through, right into her secret inner self which for such a long time had lain quiescent, unawakened, and certainly unexplored. ‘It makes you feel alive, eh, to use every fibre and cell of the body in the attainment of a pleasure.’ He looked down into her eyes, holding them with his own. ‘You swear you don’t tell lies, then tell me you didn’t glance into that book.’ ‘I -‘ She clamped her lip with her. teeth and bit back her denial. ‘You had no right to leave such a book lying about!’ ‘There are no children in my house—not as yet, Alicia. There is only a man and his staff, and a young woman of twenty-four. It really is time you outgrew the foolish notion that it will cause you some damage if you relax in a man’s arms. You are

able to let go of your tensions in the sea, so why not surrender to your feelings when I hold you? There’s no shame in it, child. The body holds no terrors for a Greek, and the words he has used down the ages in connection with it are incorporated into your own language, so that when you learn to speak mine some of the words will strike you as familiar.’ ‘I— I’ve no intention of learning Greek.’ She attempted to pull away from him, but there seemed to be iron in his dark-haired arms. ‘You’re playing some kind of game with me and I—I won’t endure it!’ ‘Then why did you swim out here to the Phaedra if you didn’t want to be alone with me? Admit that’s why you came!’ His voice had become as insistent as the pressure of his hands, clasped around her body so his fingers were locked to her hip bones so that in struggling with him a contact was induced that flooded her skin with confused warmth. ‘It isn’t true that I swam out here—to you!’ ‘What was your idea, then?’ His eyes narrowed as they held hers. ‘Did you think you could bribe the lad into taking you to the mainland? What were you going to entice him with—this slim body that tenses itself as if on a bed of nails when I touch it?’ ‘How dare you?’ An expression of deep shock

came into Alice’s eyes that he could say such a thing to her, that she might have thought of giving herself to his deck boy in order to get away from him to Athens. ‘What a low mind you have, kyrie!’ ‘I’ll admit it was more elevated before I met you,’ he gritted. ‘Are you impulsive, or a devious little schemer who has set her sights on a rich husband regardless of who he is?’ ‘Do you imagine I want you for a husband?’ she gasped, straining away from him with her upper body, yet locked unrelentingly to him from her hips. ‘I—I find you insulting and insolent, and if you don’t let me go -‘ ‘Yes, I had better let go of you.’ He did so abruptly and swung to grip the deck rail, legs braced as the Phaedra - rode on her anchor to the undulations of the sea. Alice gave him a veiled look, aware deep in her nervous system of him standing only inches away from her, tensed and unpredictable. ‘So you would regard it as an insult if I wished to marry you,’ he said, with a quietness which seemed to her like the lull preceding a storm. His shoulders had about them a hard look of tension, and his knuckles showed white under the tanned skin of his hands clenched over the sunlit rail, below him the glitter of the sea into which he was glowering. ‘There seems to me no reason why you should make such a

— statement,’ she rejoined. ‘I’m oldfashioned. I happen to believe that people should be in love— or at the very least compatible and fond of each other—before taking such a step.’ ‘A step in the dark, eh?’ ‘In lots of ways.’ Alice swallowed the dryness from her throat, the tang of salt on her lips. ‘I don’t pretend to know much about it -‘ ‘Oh, come,’ his voice was edged with irony, ‘I’m not yet convinced of that, my dear. It has yet to be proved that you aren’t playing a game with me, but the single positive fact is that you arouse in me the hungry needs I had sublimated in my work, and if you are a woman with no meaningful life in England, then why not consider remaining here with me? I don’t ask that you adore me, though I would expect your loyalty, and you would need to understand that a Greek marriage is binding.’ As he bit out the words Alice gazed at him in a stricken way … the coldhearted proposal had been made as she had suspected it would be, in a voice totally devoid of tenderness and real concern for her feelings. It seemed as if his ability to care with his heart had been buried long ago with the Greek girl he could no longer hold in his arms. All he wanted, Alice

realised, was the shape and feel of her, and the vagrant look of Timareta which she had. She suddenly felt a desperate need to get away from him … she mustn’t allow him to touch her and so persuade her that sensual passion could replace the flame that should smoulder between a couple, constant in joy and trouble; there to keep at bay the fears of the night, and the loneliness of the Unloved. Alice was a lonely girl and she had never denied it to herself, but she wasn’t going to leap desperately at what Stefan Kassandros offered her … it seemed that he offered heartache along with the passion, and Alice leapt without hesitancy from the side of the caique into the sea and began to swim away from him. Only seconds later there was a splash and she knew he had dived in after her. Alice was a very proficient swimmer, but Stefan was a powerful man and soon he had caught up with her. ‘Don’t try and stop me!’ she cried out. ‘I wasn’t going to.’ For an instant their eyes met across the water, dominance and defiance clashing like silent blades. Then they swam in unison until they were about a quarter of a mile from the beach of Solitaria when he suddenly fell back until he was swimming at her heels. ‘Go very fast now,’ he

ordered. ‘Don’t panic, but swim as if you are determined to get a gold medal for Britain.’ She flung him a questioning look over her shoulder, and then had no need to ask why she had to quicken her pace. The jutting fin tad broken water a short distance from them, and sharks were notoriously swift and instinctive when it came to tracking any kind of prey. Alice felt as if her heart dropped into her stomach and her first reaction was to panic, and sensing this Stefan dived suddenly beneath her and caught her around the body, as if holding her heart in place. ‘Swim like the devil and try to do it smoothly,’ he urged. ‘I am right behind you.’ And once again she was aware of him at the rear of her, offering his own long legs to those voracious jaws should the shark decide to attack them. No one had ever done anything so selfless for Alice, not in all her life, and she was sobbing a little as she swam with every inch of stamina she could muster, aware that the faster she could swim the better it would be for Stefan, trailing her all the way to the shore … if they could make it without that awful snout rising from the depths to snap and grind and fill the bluegreen ocean with bright threads of life-blood. ‘Good girl,’ Stefan urged. ‘Not far to go now and we’ll be on land.’

Alice was gasping and shivering by the time they trod water and waded among the rocks to the sand. When they reached it she sank to her knees and fought to get the breath back into her lungs, and then at last she looked at Stefan, who stood above her thrusting the wet black hair out of his eyes, water streaming down his body. All sound seemed burned out of the warm air and the sun flickered in his eyes and across his bare wet shoulders. He had flung off his slacks and shirt before diving from the Phaedra and he balanced on bare feet like a sculpture of tawny lights and shades. ‘Let’s thank the gods for having fed that brute before we swam into his vicinity—that was quite a race, eh?’ Stefan shifted his gaze from the water and caught Alice’s eyes with his own. She was intensely aware of his naked vigour, of his tawny skin shadowed by dark hair. Then he abruptly reached for her and swung her up against him. He held her and bent his head so he could crush her lips with his own, salty and savage. Her toes gripped the hot velvety sand and the moment brewed a quick response in her and she let herself be kissed, until he suddenly pushed her away from him and gave a curt laugh. ‘Danger can always do it,’ he drawled. ‘Let loose in women like you what you keep locked up at other times.

Keep your virtue, little one, though I know I could take it right here on the sands.’ She gazed at him with eyes still dilated from their close brush with danger and the terror of torn limbs. If the shark had attacked, Stefan would have shielded and protected her as best he could, at the probable loss of his strong legs, rising like brown columns to support his fine body. Alice turned away from him on tremulous legs, aware of a need to shield what might be showing in her eyes. ‘You’re a powerful swimmer,’ she said shakily. ‘You could have said to hell with me and who would have blamed you?’ ‘No one on Solitaria,’ he agreed carelessly. ‘Now let us go to the house so you can take a shower and have some food. Come!’ She walked a little ahead of him, confusedly aware of him sauntering at her heels as naked as Apollo. When they reached the tamarisk tree where she had left her beach towel Alice reached for it and silently handed it to him so he could drape it around his hips. ‘Evharisto.’ he said dryly. ‘Is this concern for me, or to protect your own modesty?’ ‘You know what it is, so there’s no need to be sardonic.’ Her eyes flickered to his face and she was aware of him folding the colourful towel around his lower body. ‘I’m not

that much of a prude, I hope.’ ‘I hope it as well, Alicia.’ There was no mistaking the meaning in his voice as he stood for her to enter the cavern where the elevator was situated. A momentary gloom descended as they were cut off from lie sun and Alice tensed as he suddenly ran his fingers down her spine. ‘You have backbone, girl, and a straight and supple spine which knows how to express your moods. You mustn’t underrate yourself just because your sister has the prettier face and callow young men sought her attentions. Beauty in a real woman is the capacity to feel things very deeply, and to be hurt to the same intense degree.’ As he spoke Alice could feel his fingertips roaming her shoulders and all that separated her from his hard brown body was the beach towel. He was certainly no callow youth but had a dangerous streak of droit du seigneur in him. ‘I know it isn’t just prettiness that men admire,’ she said, and she recalled the provocation of Alberta’s mouth and the invitation in her eyes when men were around. At other times her mouth could look petulant and her eyes as coldly blue as Delft china. Her awareness of the male sex had seemed to flick a switch inside her which lit her up

… that switch had never lit a glow in Alice when a man walked into the room, and then as if overcharged it had flared and fused at the entrance of Stefan Kassandros. ‘What it is that men want from women?’ His fingers pressed into her collarbone, and she felt again that electrical tingle through her body that set her on edge, and even made her ache in a diffused way. ‘Men like exciting, receptive women, and they have antennae that lets them know when their signals are being received.’ He laughed quietly. ‘You have given it some thought, I see.’ ‘ ‘Not exclusively, Mr Kassandros. Had you not had a reason for wanting to meet Alice Sheldon, then you wouldn’t have given a second glance to the plain English spinster who booked into your hotel.’ ‘By the Virgin!’ Suddenly his brown arm was locked about her waist and he gave her body a shake. ‘A woman is plain only when she keeps her feelings locked up as if they were the Crown Jewels! Why when you came to my hotel did you let down your hair and leave off your glasses? To test the reaction of the Greek waiter when he came to your room?’ ‘No -‘ ‘Little liar. You bathed and scented yourself and draped your body in chiffon I could almost see through—the reaction you received was more than

you bargained for, eh? You were on foreign soil and out to vamp a man——’ ‘That really isn’t true,’ she protested. ‘I had brought with me a few nice clothes and I felt like wearing them.’ ‘In order to excite my waiters, eh? In the privacy of your hotel room? The typical stunt of a woman who behaves in public as if she has an electrified fence all around her.’ Alice stared up at him, seeing the rather cruel look on his face as he said these things to her … she wanted to resent them but instead was hurt by them. She couldn’t fathom why lie was hurting her when out there in the sea he had offered his protection so unstintingly. Was it something he would have done for anyone in those circumstances? The thought was strangely depressing and she gave way to a little shiver of coldness. At once he released her and opened the gates of the elevator and they rode up in silence to the kastello. As they crossed the courtyard lizards with brown and black markings darted across the sunstruck tiles and Alice noticed that they had the menacing face’s of small demons. Katerina was in the hall when they entered and Alice noticed, with heightened colour, the veiled look she gave Stefan, taking in the beach towel that was fixed about his

bare loins. ‘We have been swimming,’ he said casually. ‘Miss Sheldon will have breakfast in her room, and do make sure it’s a substantial one and that the coffee is good and hot. For the second time in her life she has encountered a shark, but fortunately this one wasn’t in the mood for a tender leg of lamb.’ Alice caught her breath and shot him a look which he returned by elevating his left eyebrow in a mocking way. ‘Go upstairs and take a warm shower,’ he ordered. ‘Later we shall meet and I’ll show you over the kastello.’ ‘Very well, and thank you -‘ He knew to what she referred and gave a slightly ironic bow. ‘Knighterrantry isn’t quite out of style, but neither is piracy in Greek waters. You are more impulsive than yon realise, Alicia, and if I had decided to stay aboard the Phaedra you might have swum into the direct path of the shark—with your lack of clear vision.’ That his remark held a double meaning she didn’t doubt, but right now she felt too fatigued to argue the point and began to climb the stairs on rather unsteady legs. She was glad when she reached her apartment and was able to shut herself in, though there was no escape from the tumult and questioning of her thoughts. Why was it

that being near him had diffused into something more painful than fearful… and Alice was under the shower when the shattering answer exploded in her mind. She was a twenty-four-year-old virgin who hadn’t experienced until now the very personal ache of being awakened to the potency of a man. That was why she had leapt into the sea away from him, because she could no longer trust herself to resist him when he touched her. He stirred her blood, which circumstances had kept at a cool temperature until she came to Greece. He made Alberta’s string of young men seem callow and dull, for not one of them would have dared to carry off a woman regardless of the consequences. He wouldn’t even be repentant when the moment of truth came with Berta’s reply to his cable; he would merely shrug his strong shoulders and blame the fates for allowing the wrong woman to cross his path. The penultimate question Alice asked herself as she slipped into a cool peppermint-striped dress… did he mean to let her go when he learned that she had never been engaged to Ionides Damaskinos? He might believe at the present time that he was justified in keeping her a prisoner on his island, but once he learned the truth he couldn’t force her to stay … or could he?

She pinned up her hair for coolness and then stepped down into her tnoussandra to await her breakfast. Hesta brought it on a tray and there was uriconcealed curiosity in her eyes as she arranged the dishes on the cane table and regarded Alice. No doubt she had been informed of the way the kyrios had returned from his swim, naked as some sea god apart from Alice’s beach towel, and such intimacy between a man and woman must indicate that they were personally involved. ‘I hope the shark didn’t frighten you too much, thespoinis?’ Hesta stood ready with the coffee pot as Alice sat down at the table, in front of a delicious-looking herb omelette and hot rolls. ‘I was glad I wasn’t swimming alone when he arrived on the scene.’ Alice hoped she smiled casually as she broke a roll and buttered the crusty, smoking bread straight from the oven … bread such as she hadn’t tasted in her life before. ‘I daresay I’d have panicked and attracted the brute’s attention, but as it was I bad to keep my nerve or receive a clip on the jaw from the kyrios.” ‘So already you begin to understand about Greek men,’ Hesta murmured as she poured the rich dark coffee and added cream to the cup. ‘Meaning, I suppose, that women have to bow to their wishes or be made to do so?’ ‘Women like it, thespoinis, in their heart

of hearts. Why not let the man be the master when he has stronger muscles and a broad back— there are enough aches and pains for a woman Without getting hurt in a battle of wills. Nature knows best. When she means a girl to be born, a girl duly arrives. When a boy is on the way, hey presto, there he is, complete with all that makes a boy become a man.’ Alice couldn’t help smiling … she had certainly learned today what made a man! ‘Greek women certainly have a wisdom the women of my own country seem to be losing sight of,’ she said. ‘Although I don’t agree that a woman should entirely subordinate her will to that of a man— she is surely his partner and not his slave.’ ‘Let us say, thespoinis, his lover and friend who lets him know that he makes life easier to bear. The woman who never tells a man he is essential to her is asking to be neglected while he goes in search of someone who will enjoy leaning on him.’ ‘I’ve never leaned on a man in my life,’ Alice said wonderingly. ‘Have you a young man, Hesta?’ ‘Yes, I am betrothed.’ Hesta’s eyes lit up. ‘I was fifteen when our hands were joined, but Elias is working in the city and we shan’t marry until we have enough

money between us to buy a house.’ ‘You must miss him?’ ‘I do, thespoinis.” Hesta clasped her hands together and a quiver of emotion ran over her face. ‘It is hard not to be with him, but harder to start our life together under any roof but our own. There is nothing better than being private together in your very own house, with the door closed and everything nice and cosy for just the two of you. We love each other, but we shall wait for the figs to fall when they are ripe … they will be all the sweeter for the waiting.’ A sentiment that echoed in Alice’s mind when a little later she sat alone on her balcony, made secluded by the draping of passionvine. She ate dark-skinned grapes and felt almost relaxed in the deep basket chair; it was almost possible to pretend that she was a carefree holidaymaker, that frantic feeling of unrest held in abeyance so she could enjoy the bees humming in the air, scenting out the flowers that would yield the most pollen which they carried from one shrub to another, doing nature’s work even as they sucked the nectar for the honeycomb. Nature knows best, Hesta had said. But nature was mysterious and subtle, and Alice was very aware of the seducing beauty of Solitaria as

she enjoyed the sweet grapes which had ripened in the sun and the sea breezes. She was an artistic, vulnerable person and she couldn’t ignore her-own reaction to this island house and what lay at the root of its resurrection from half-ruin to tasteful beauty. A man had loved a girl and the abiding memory of her had driven him to create the kind of home she would have loved sharing with him … their door closed on the outside world as they explored their own private domain. The figs had not fallen ripe for Stefan … they had died, but he had not lost his very natural urge for a woman to share his future. He didn’t expect to love or be loved, but he did want everything else that went with marriage, and being a Greek he would certainly want a few children. Alice leaned her head against the cushion of the chair, her eyes concealed behind the tinted lenses of her glasses …. her thoughts unconcealed as she let them roam over the events of the morning and the way Stefan had mentioned marriage as if he were proposing a business merger. Did he really hope to persuade her into such a marriage, and did she imagine she could resist him and cling to misty, romantic dreams in place of reality? A house such as this one to live in … a man such as Stefan for a husband? What if he didn’t love her? It certainly

wouldn’t stop him from giving full rein to the desires of his strong vital body, and Alice felt a convulsion of her pelvic nerves as she relived her physical contact with him on the beach of Solitaria. He had awakened the dormant woman in her, but could she live at Fireglow and be able to bear it that he visited the ivory and gold bedroom where Timareta beckoned to him from the vivid portrait on the wall? A shudder of revulsion ran through Alice—no, it was too much to ask of her! She wasn’t invulnerable enough, or the mercenary type who could put creature comfort before the contentment of loving a man who loved her. Stefan was an exciting, dynamic, ruthless man, but his heart was given to the memory of someone else, and Alice knew herself well enough to know that she couldn’t live happily with a man who merely wanted her body. Desire, unlike love, was a fickle emotion, and what would her life be when he eventually tired of her? Alice couldn’t face the awful picture her imagination painted for her, of a man and a woman bound to a marriage with no real meaning to it. She jumped to her feet and began to pace back and forth across the balcony tiles. A week of Stefan’s company lay in front of her and

she must fight his physical attraction for all she was worth. A lonely life might be awaiting her in London, but what Stefan offered could lead to an insupportable type of misery … being always the substitute for a dead girl. She was Alice Sheldon, and if he couldn’t love her for herself, then she certainly couldn’t dream of marrying him. She would return to England and he would eventually console himself with another Greek girl. A pretty girl with a simple outlook on life, who would be content to have his children and wouldn’t think it essential that he love her with all his power. Alice paused by the balcony rail and her fingers closed on one of the passion-fruits. She stood there with her neck and face flung back to the sun … passion was like the sun stroking your skin. It was part of your marrow, and it ran in your veins through the very chambers of your heart. Passion alone could never satisfy Alice’s dreams … anything less than love would be like water when she longed for wine. Right at this moment she was convinced of it, and nothing was going to change her mind or her heart. CHAPTER EIGHT IT was a breathless evening,

with a flame in the sky. The stunning scent of pine trees drifted in through the open windows, and out beyond them the sea had a phosphorescent glitter that mirrored the stretched wings of birds flying inland to the fire-coloured cliffs. A landscape so dramatic it gave rise to emotional thoughts—even a poetry of the senses, and as each day passed at the kastello Alice felt herself awakening to its wild and beautiful surroundings … the breath of lemons in their secretive grove, the heady wine-scent of hillside maquis, the fragile yellow-flowered iode trees haunted by butterflies of lacy red and black, almost sinister in their beauty. Nothing was more intoxicating than the scent of the lemons in their vaulted, shadowy grove, having grown so closely together they formed a green canopy in which cicadas persistently grated. Alice had explored most Of the kastello in the week she had been here and had found it oddly fascinating, with rooms tucked away behind sudden corners and steps leading to sunlit roof levels from which the entire island could be seen. The kitchen was enormous, with a big fire-oven where all the food was so deliciously cooked. There were deep cupboards, a dark red-tiled floor and scrubbed tables. In the pantries arranged on wide .shelves were bottles

and jars of pickled fruits, jams, preserves, honey and wine, all of them made from the produce of the gardens and groves. She never grew tired of wandering in the gardens, where masses of bright rambling flowers grew over the walls, some of them pomegranates with scarlet blossom, the fabled fruit of the Greek goddesses. In the orchards grew pink pistachio fruits, almonds and apricots. Golden oaks and myrtles mingled their leaves, and among the angelic trumpets of the thorn-apple grew the venomous little fruits. There were rockeries rampant with tiny rock plants, royal blue, dazzling orange, deep purple and palest shell pink. Here on such an island Alice could believe in some of the ancient legends of Greece. Daphne might well have changed into a laurel tree when Apollo chased her, and Helen might have cured a plain child by stroking her head. And at midday, when the sun struck the island to stillness, the maenads might have come floating from the caves in their diaphanous veils to dance in the heat haze. Alice stepped down into the moussandra and gazed at the sky, which looked as scarlet as if the heavens had burst into flames, tinting with a touch of red the apple-green silk of

her dress whose styling was almost Gothic with its laced bodice and flowing skirt. Her nostrils tensed to a smokiness in the air, mingling with the spiciness of pine and cypress and the tang of seaweeds that grew like a matting around the rocks and the base of the cliffs. She felt a nervous tension, almost a sense of fear as she gazed at the awesome sky. It was as if something was brewing above the sea, or was her feeling of apprehension linked to the fact that Miklos the boatman had been to the mainland and could have brought back the cable Stefan was expecting any day? It would tell him who had been involved with Damaskinbs, and then he would be honour bound to let her go. Suddenly Alice seemed to feel a sort of rumbling in the air and it struck her that a storm might be on the way. Sky and sea were filling with that dramatic red glow and the sinking sun was quite lost in it, like a burning ball that would surely send up clouds of smoke when it hit the water. Again it felt as if the ground quivered slightly beneath the soles of Alice’s silver-kid shoes … or were her knees trembling in expectation of being told by Stefan when they met for dinner that he had finally received Alberta’s reply to his cable?

Alice stood with her hands clasped over the iron railing and the flamy incandescence of the sunset had a barbaric quality that held her rigid, until all at once she started backwards as a bright streak of lightning forked down towards her, seeming to strike sparks from the railing she had only just released. She darted into her bedroom and quickly closed the long windows and pulled the curtains together. A storm was coming, and that was why she felt so on edge. Alice wasn’t normally afraid of storms, but she had never faced one on an island that was open on all sides to the elements. She didn’t like to think of its trees and flowers and wildlife being unmercifully pounded by the rain and struck at by the lightning. With a nervous shiver she decided to go downstairs, where a log fire would be lit in the saloni, for though the island was so warm during the day the atmosphere rapidly cooled when the sun went down, a combination Alice rather liked. It meant that the enormous stone fireplaces were kept in use and there was always a scent of blazing cypress logs in the evenings. Trying to look composed even if she didn’t really feel it, Alice made her way down the widely curving stairs, aware that she walked in the treads worn into the wood by the hard-soled sandals of the

monks. It seemed strange to walk in their footmarks, for in those days a woman would never have entered this house, for women were still believed to be the gateway of the devil… so Stefan had told her when he had showed her some Greek words scrawled in the stonework of an arch leading into the olive grove. There a young monk had probably worked among the olive trees and had been pestered by unholy thoughts of women. One day in revolt against his thoughts he had taken the time to inscribe with a sharp piece of stone or iron the words, ‘Woman is the devil’s gateway and hell is paved with her bones. She is the profane angel and the divine transgressor, and men do ungodly things because of her.’ ‘They do indeed,’ Stefan had murmured, his fingertip tracing the words which time and weather had not yet worn away. ‘It’s the mystery of the ages, isn’t it, when all she represents is a hank of hair and a nice piece of engineering. Just for the sake of that the battle of Troy raged and men were slaughtered so one man could hold Helen in his arms.’ ‘What would you have done?’ Alice had asked him. ‘Cut her up in small pieces and given her to the soldiers to roast on the points of their

swords?’ ‘Why not?’ Those elusive glints of laughter had played in his eyes. ‘She would probably have made a very tasty souvlaki, with rings of onion and tomato.’ ‘You have no romance in you,’ Alice accused him, and he had bowed his head in mocking agreement. ‘You have enough for both of us,’ he had said. Alice paused on the stairs, her thoughts cut dead as her gaze fixed itself upon the swaying brass lantern that hung in the stairwell… back and forth it swung like some huge bell that made no sound and yet pealed a warning that made her gather her skirts and go racing down the rest of the stairs as if pursued by something wild. She reached the hall in a breathless rush, where the silence was suddenly broken by a laugh and the deep timbre of male voices as Stefan and another man emerged from an arched doorway. This was Alex Kassandros, a cousin of similar age to Stefan who had arrived by amphibia aircraft a few days ago. He was in charge of the accountancy side of Stefan’s hotel business, and with a tolerant air of amusement had chosen to accept the explanation that Miss Sheldon was a guest at Fireglow. The two men came to an abrupt halt as Alice ran

breathlessly into their path. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she gasped. ‘Look up there!’ She pointed upstairs at the great lantern which only seconds before had been swaying like a big brass bell. Alice couldn’t believe her eyes, for now it was rock-steady, as if she had had some kind of hallucination: ‘What are we supposed to be looking at?’ Stefan wanted to know. ‘The lantern was swaying—quite wildly.’ Alice gave him a bewildered look. ‘I—I thought there was going to be a tremor.’ Alex stepped to the foot of the stairs and peered up intently at the lantern, but still it was quite motionless. He turned to smile at her, his dark eyes crinkling. ‘You must have imagined that it moved,’ he said. ‘I have always said to Stefan that this house of his has a strange atmosphere when night begins to fall, and once I could have sworn that I saw the shadow of a monk on the gallery wall.’ Alice bit her lip. She felt convinced that the huge lantern had swung on its chains, but when she glanced at Stefan there was something about his demeanour that made her decide not to insist. There was a hard set to his jaw and something flinty in his eyes. ‘There is going to be a storm, isn’t there?’ she said. ‘I’m not wrong in imagining that—the sky was spectacular as the sun went down, and I saw a flash of lightning.’ ‘Yes, I

noticed how red the sky was,’ Alex agreed. ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight,’ Stefan drawled, and still his gaze was fixed upon Alice and there wasn’t a fraction of his cousin’s amiability to be seen in his features. ‘It might be that tomorrow we shall have a day to remember.’ Alice’s senses were intuned this evening to pick up discord and she saw and felt it in Stefan. Her heart gave a heavy beat and she felt convinced that Miklos had returned from the mainland bringing Alberta’s reply to the question which had been cabled to Ceylon seven days ago. It could only affirm what Alice had told Stefan, and yet the look he was giving her was so stern it could mean only one thing. He was disappointed he couldn’t hold on to her and use her as a whip against Ionides Damaskinos. He had to .release her or break his word of honour, and it there was one thing a true Greek couldn’t endure it was to be dishonourable. ‘Let us go and have an aperitif before dinner.’ Stefan swung towards the saloni and there at the door he waited for Alice and his cousin to precede him. As Alice passed him she felt his eyes flick her hair, which to suit her dress she had braided into a coronet style. His eyes continued their scrutiny all

the way down her dress, and she didn’t imagine that his face was as hard-set as if cast in bronze. ‘You are looking exceptionally charming this evening, Alicia,’ he remarked, as he moved over to the cabinet on which stood the decanters and various shaped glasses. ‘One would assume you were dressed up for a very special occasion—are you celebrating something, eh?’ Alice glanced at him and realised that she was beginning to feel rather afraid of his mood. In his smoothly tailored dinnersuit he had a lean, pantherish look which intensified her feeling that tonight he was a man to beware of. ‘Come,’ smiled Alex at his cousin, ‘a woman doesn’t have to find an excuse to make herself charming. I shudder to think what life would be like for men if women didn’t have a streak of Narcissus in them. It pleasures them to look glamorous, and it most certainly pleasures us, unless, Stefan, you are allowing the monks who once lived here to cast their celibate shadows over you.’ ‘I can assure you, Alex, that such a thing isn’t happening to me. Ouzo for you as usual, cousin, or will you try a dry sherry?’ ‘Sherry is for the ladies.’ Alex had seated himself on the arm of the big leather couch and was looking directly at Alice,

as if really wondering if she dressed up in order to make an impression on Stefan. It just hadn’t occurred to her that the apple-green dress might strike an exotic note ,.. or had she unknowingly worn it as a sign of farewell to Solitaria? If Stefan was in possession of that cabled reply, then this would be her last night on the island and she might be flown to Athens in the amphibian with Alex. She sat down with an air of composure and accepted a fluted glass of sherry from Stefan. After handing ouzo to his cousin, he then went and stood in his usual place by the fireplace, his own drink a whisky sour. ‘You have certainly made this house remarkably comfortable,’ Alex remarked. ‘Though speaking for myself I wouldn’t care to live in a one-time abbey. For such an undertaking one has to be of a rather romantic disposition, and I prefer my modern apartment in the heart of the big city.’ ‘You were always the pragmatist, Alex.’ Stefan took a deep swallow of his drink. ‘But I doubt if Miss Sheldon would agree with you that I am a romantic —she’s inclined to take the view that I am something of a pirate, isn’t that correct, Alicia?’ Alice fingered her sherry flute and didn’t quite meet his eyes. ‘I would say that it takes a dash of the pirate to be successful in a cut-throat business,’ she

replied ‘With tourism so much on the increase, being in the hotel business must be very competitive.’ ‘You can bet on that.’ Alex gave a slight laugh. ‘Stefan has the hard head of a Greek tycoon, but his soul is something else and I would have thought you’d have found some affinity with the romantic in him. You are an artist, and you certainly aren’t like some of the frantic, sun-seeking Europeans who come to Greece. Some of those women! They are quite shameless in their advances. Somehow I can’t imagine you make advances to a man—and may I call you Alicia? It’s rather an attractive name.’ ‘I’m really Alice,’ she told him. ‘Your cousin has chosen to make my name sound rather Greek, but as I keep telling him I’m entirely English, with a dash of Irish from my mother.’ ‘Ah, that would account for the eyes.’ Suddenly Alex was gazing at Alice with his own eyes narrowed, then he shot a look at Stefan, seemed about to say something and caught back the words. But Alice knew what had struck him about her … that hint of a resemblance to the girl Stefan had loved and whose memory wouldn’t stop haunting him. ‘They are nice coloured eyes,’ Alex smiled. ‘Almost the colour of your dress. What do

you think (rf this house, perched on the cliffs like the eyrie of an eagle, and so curiously built with its odd little rooms and passages?’ ‘I find it interesting,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve been doing some sketches of Fireglow to take back to England with me.’ She felt Stefan looking at her as she spoke, and then he said in his most sardonic voice, ‘Has your visit to my house been so memorable, Alicia? I am flattered that you should want a reminder of it— may I dare to hope that you have also sketched the master?’ ‘You aren’t an easy subject to capture,’ she said, and this was true, and disconcerting, for each time she had tried to make a sketch of Stefan her hand had developed a tremor and she had been unable to make the bold strokes needed to delineate him. This hadn’t happened when she sketched the house and the people about the estate, but sheer nerves took over when she tried to capture his likeness and it annoyed her that he should affect her artistic skill in this way. It was a face she wanted to draw, with its commanding features, shades of irony around the mouth, and that brooding intensity deep in his eyes. But it seemed that she only had a talent for inventing the faces of magazine heroes. ‘Yet Stefan has a very definite

face,’ said Alex. ‘I -wonder why you find him hard to portray?’ ‘He seems to be there looking over my shoulder when I try.’ She gave a laugh which she hoped had a careless ring to it. ‘So you prefer city life to living on an island, kyrie? I live in London myself.’ ‘And do you like city life, Alicia?’ Alex gave her a shrewd look, as if he doubted it. ‘To succeed as a city dweller one must have a good social life so that one doesn’t develop a feeling’ of being boxed in. Are you a gregarious person? I somehow should have doubted it— ah, I am not saying you are unfriendly, but I think that like Stefan you don’t like lots of company. I am right, eh?’ ‘You make me sound unsociable, kyrie. It’s just that I always have plenty of work on hand and I don’t find the time to go to parties.’ ‘Ah, that is invariably Stefan’s excuse.’ A gleam had come into Alex’s eyes and he shot a glance at his cousin, who merely raised an eyebrow at the intimation that he and Alice had something in common. ‘All work and no play is like subsisting on bread and water.’ ‘On the other hand,’ Stefan rejoined, ‘champagne and cream cake could become unbearable after a while. It’s finding a way to strike the happy medium that’s the difficulty. Of getting from life a fulfilment, that won’t dull the senses or the mind. Bread and wine,

perhaps.’ ‘Perhaps.’ Alex frowned slightly, as if the conversation had become a little complex for his liking. ‘So long as you aren’t going to keep your nose to the grindstone all your life—you haven’t the disposition of a monk, Stefan, though houses are inclined to pick up and transmit the aura of those who have occupied the premises.’ ‘Would I bring a woman to a house whose atmosphere might be opposed to her?’ Stefan looked directly at Alice. ‘Have you felt a sinister influence while you have been here. Alicia? Something which has disturbed your sleep, perhaps?’ ‘I can’t say that anything supernatural has disturbed me,’ she replied, meeting his eyes and letting him know the true source of whatever unrest she had felt. ‘I’m not really a person who believes in the occult, and if there are mysteries beyond our reasoning I don’t think they’d make a screaming idiot of me.’ ‘It would take reality to do that, eh? A man of flesh and bone rather than a shadow on a wall?’ ‘Yes.’ She said it firmly. ‘Despite all the jokes about spinsters looking under the bed in the hope of finding a man there, it is a fact that women alone, single women, do develop a fear of being attacked.

When they travel by train they invariably make for a compartment in which other women are seated. Men don’t really understand because they’re physically strong, but women have an intense fear of being overcome by a stranger—by someone unknown to them. They find the idea petrifying, believe it or not.’ ‘Oh, I do believe you,’ he said. ‘A woman in that situation might actually faint, eh?’ ‘Oh yes,’ she said fervently, and for a moment the walls of Fireglow seemed to disintegrate and she felt as if she were gripped again by his violence, his desire to make her suffer for something she hadn’t done. Only by fainting had she been able to escape his intention to humiliate her, and now if he had Alberta’s reply to his cable he must know that he had treated her outrageously and owed her an apology, at least. Alice searched for some sign of repentance in his gaze, but all she saw were the unreadable depths of those Greek, eyes, fathomless and darkly lashed, revealing no hint of his feelings as he suggested they go in to dinner. As always the meal was excellent, and for dessert they had honey flan from an old Turkish recipe. This led Stefan to talk about the seraglios and the Turkish system of veiling women and keeping them

subjugated, a way of life no longer in existence (there was even a law forbidding women - to wear a veil) and yet he had a friend named Khalid Bey who had told him that many of the women chose to wear the flimsy yashmak when dining with their husbands. ‘It is an attractive mode of dress,’ Alex smiled thoughtfully. ‘A lovely pair of eyes looking at a man across a veiled face. Enticing, would you not agree, Stefan? Imagine Alicia in a yashmak. Suddenly she would not look English, but with her brown hair and turquoise eyes she could easily pass for a girl of the East. Ah yes, seen above a veil those eyes would glow like jewels, eh?’ Alice felt the colour rise to her cheeks and. she expected Stefan to scoff at the notion, but instead he gave her an intent look. ‘Yes!’ It was as if he chopped the word with a blade. ‘It isn’t often that one sees eyes of that particular shade of blue-green. Blue eyes can be cold or shallow and sometimes disdainful. The girl has nice eyes. I would be the last to deny it.’ ‘Doesn’t she remind you -?’ Alex broke off and Alice saw his fingers tighten about the stem of his wine glass. ‘More wine?’ Stefan abruptly pushed the carafe towards his cousin, and it was at precisely that

moment that the glasses tinkled and the curtains at the windows billowed as if something was trying to gain entrance to the room. Smoke gushed from the fireplace and the next instant a heavy peal of thunder shook the house. ‘The storm has arrived,’ Stefan said, and Alice noticed that he was watching the sway of the red wine in his glass, which stood beside his dessert plate. She remembered how the big lantern had swayed above the stairs … what was he thinking, that the thunder might be the prelude to something more destructive? He reached for the wine glass and the black sapphires glimmered at his white cuffs. ‘Are you nervous of storms?’ He shot a look at Alice, but she returned his glance quite composedly. ‘Not unduly so, kyrie. I’ve never felt an earth tremor, of course. We don’t have very violent ones in England.’ ‘What makes you mention an earth tremor?-‘ he asked, sipping casually at his wine. ‘Because I really did see the lantern sway and I wondered -‘ ‘There is always the possibility,’ he agreed. ‘We have strong stone cellars beneath the house where the-monks kept their store of homemade wines. If I feel there is a chance of danger, then we shall go to the cellars. Beneath the ground one at least escapes falling masonry, though such tremors are always

unpredictable and if the ground should open —’ ‘Oh, don’t I’ She gave a shiver. ‘Please don’t outline the horrors. I read about that Turkish earthquake in the newspapers and saw some of the newsreel on television. They must be ghastly things!’ ‘Yes, nature can be a cruel enemy, just as she is often our kindest friend. Perhaps she is fickle because she is female.’ ‘I wonder why we always assume that nature is of the feminine gender?’ Alex remarked. ‘Because she gives birth. Trees, plants, oil-wells and volcanoes, they all have their roots and springs in her.’ ‘And where does that leave the male of the species?’ Alex laughed. ‘He’s the wind that carries the seed, the rain that waters the earth, the sun that quickens everything into growth.’ ‘The pagan philosophy of the ancient Greeks, eh? That the wind, the rain and the sun took shape as godly men and walked the earth.’ Alex swung his gaze to Alice. ‘Didn’t I tell you that Stefan was a romantic at heart? In our village when he was a youth he could have posed for Apollo, except that he wasn’t a promiscuous chaser of. girls.’ ‘Girls were your hobby,’ Stefan drawled. ‘The more the merrier.’ ‘It’s wise when young to play the field, cousin.

Less of a folly to make a game of love.’ ‘Meaning?’ Stefan’s eyebrows quirked in that characteristic habit, but Alice noticed the way his eyes narrowed. ‘You know what I mean, Stefan. When one is young, girls are for laughter and flirtation and the real business of loving comes later, when the mind has matured with the body.’ ‘Like wine?’ Stefan interposed, mockingly. ‘Yes.’ Alex spoke firmly, but suddenly his gaze seemed to shift about as if he wanted to say something and was nervously uncertain of Stefan’s reaction. ‘I mean, to put a girl on a pedestal—’ ‘What do you mean by that—a pedestal?’ Stefan’s voice held a cutting edge, and Alice tensed, in her chair, her nerves jolting as thunder cracked above the rooftops of the house. ‘That’s what you did.’ Alex took a gulp of wine. ‘After all this time I will tell you something. Your little angel didn’t spend all her time in that elevated position. Like the others she liked to defy her parents and flirt—with me.’ Stefan was gazing hard at Alex, a deadly glitter at the centres of his dark eyes. ‘You’re a liar —a barefaced liar!’ he pronounced. ‘I am not, Stefan.’ Alex ran the tip of his tongue around his lips. ‘It strains my patience that you won’t face the

truth that she was just an ordinary, playful girl behind that demure mask she wore for your benefit. She was flattered that you should think so much of her and she wanted to marry the best-looking, most ambitious youth in the village, but in the meantime she found me a little less earnest.’ ‘If all this is true, damn you,’ Stefan leaned towards his cousin,’ then why have you kept it to yourself all this time?’ ‘I saw no reason to speak of it -‘ ‘What reason now presents itself?’ Stefan looked savage. ‘I have Miss Sheldon here and yon imagine there is something in it? Romance, perhaps?’ ‘It isn’t beyond reason,’ Alex argued. ‘Alicia is a young woman and you are a man in the prime of life.’ ‘So automatically she and I must be attracted, like needle and magnet? It would be interesting if you asked Alicia for her reaction to your deduction. She will tell you that I am the last man on earth she would dream of being in love with.’ Alex glanced at Alice as if he might have the audacity to ask such a question, but she had decided it was time to change the subject before the Greek cousins came to blows. ‘May I see your cellars, kyrie, where the monks stored their wine?’ Alice rose to her feet and slanted a smile at Stefan, hoping it didn’t show

in her eyes or voice that she was shaken by what Alex had revealed to him about Timareta. He had so loved the girl and thought of her as having all the virtues, and now he had to accept that she had been a fallible and sometimes foolish creature who had probably been less in love with him than he imagined. ‘Yes, why not?’ He pushed back his chair. ‘Are you coming, Alex?’ ‘If three won’t be a crowd,’ Alex jested. Stefan glanced at him with a scowl. ‘I would be obliged if you stay off that subject, and count yourself fortunate you haven’t had my fist in your face.’ ‘For telling the truth?’ Alex dared to ask. ‘What’s the matter, Stefan, are you getting cynical and no longer trust anyone to tell the truth? That is the trouble with tycoons, you begin to believe that people only want you for your money and will say anything to get in with you. It’s a bad habit, kyrie. Some of us like and admire you for yourself. You always had a rare integrity and it’s one of the things about you I’ve always envied. I’m capable of guarding your money to the last cent, but I can’t promise to do the same where your women are concerned.’ Alex strolled towards Alice and proffered his arm. ‘May I be your escort on this exploration of the

monks’ wine cellars? Do you think they used to imbibe when the abbot’s back was turned?’ ‘You’re a rather wicked man,’ she told him. ‘A streak of it runs in the family, thespoinis. Stefan isn’t quite a saint, though he lives in a house of celibacy.’ ‘Oh, I’m quite aware that my host isn’t a saint,’ she said, and laid her fingers in the crook of Alex’s arm. He laid his own fingers over them and she saw that the nails were manicured and that he wore a diamond ring on his little finger. He was an attractive, worldly man, but a trifle flashy compared to Stefan. He would always have been fonder of a good time than his more ambitious cousin … he wouldn’t have had much conscience about flirting with the brown-haired Timareta behind Stefan’s back. All at once, coming as a shock to her inmost feelings, Alice was wishing it was Stefan whose arm was linked with hers; whose strong, brown, ringless fingers were holding her hand. The cellars turned out to be well-lit and vaulted, with the long-necked bottles of wine stacked in a honeycomb of racks. Wines made from all kinds of fruit and herbs and even vegetables. Stefan found some fluted glasses and poured a pale gold wine into them. ‘Try this,’ he said. ‘It’s almost like champagne and could have come from one of

the finest French vineyards.’ There in the cellar they stood Sipping the wine, which was incredibly delicious, and rather potent, for Alice felt it rising a little to her head. ‘These wines,’ he said, studying the racks that in the far corners were swathed in spider webs, ‘hold secrets that are hundreds of years old. The monks only pass on their wine blending secrets to each other, and who knows what this particular wine is composed of.’ ‘Sheer ambrosia,’ said Alex. ‘I can’t believe they made such wines without enjoying them. I mean, it’s a refinement of torture to go without the love of women, but I refuse to believe they lived on bread and water.’ ‘Such a life wouldn’t suit you, eh?’ Stefan leaned his shoulder against one of the racks and he was standing in such a way that one half of his face was in shadow, so that he looked rather menacing. ‘Being down here, Alex, reminds me of the story of the vengeful husband who drugged the vintage wine he gave to his wife’s lover, who when he came to his senses found himself bricked alive in a wall of the wife’s bedroom. What a refinement of torment that must have been!’ Alex stared across at his cousin, and Alice saw the amusement ebb from his eyes. ‘Don’t let us fall out, Stefan, over

something that happened years ago. I thought you had at last put your memories to rest, otherwise I’d have kept my mouth shut.’ ‘Always the wisest course, Alex.’ ‘I think you inflict self-punishment on yourself, Stefan, because you weren’t rich at the time and the girl had to go away and earn her living!’ ‘You are a psychoanalyst as well as an accountant?’ Stefan asked sardonically. ‘You know what village parents are like. Her father said I must put a roof over her head before he would give his permission for our marriage. I went to England to learn hotel management, and then I received the news of her death and came hurrying home— yes, perhaps I do blame myself in part for what happened! Had I been less Greek in my own attitude I would have carried her off with me -‘ He broke off and caught Alice by the wrist, his grip more tight and painful than he probably realised. ‘Come, it feels rather chilly down here and a moment ago I saw Alicia shiver. We shall go and finish off this bottle of wine in the saloni and play those bouzoukia records you brought from Athens.’ And this they did, an adamant set to Stefan’s jaw that warned Alex to stay off the subject of Timareta. Yet

as Alice sat in a deep chair and listened to the music, with its pagan pulse-beat that seemed to say that joy and pain could never be separated, she was aware of the tension in that tall figure in-the shadows beyond the lamps. He leaned there against a column of the window arcade as if lost in the Greek music, but Alice knew with all her senses that he was thinking of the sweet-faced girl he had idealised. He had treated her as someone special, and then behind his back she had played kissing games with his less gallant cousin. A girl, Alice realised with-a jolt, who had been rather like her own sister Alberta. Born to play with fire, only in Berta’s case she had gone too far and her boyfriend Harry had found out and married someone else. It was only by a stroke of fate that Berta was now back with Harry, and Alice could only hope that she had the sense to stay faithful to him. From the corner of her eye Alice saw Stefan clench a hand in his jacket pocket and she felt a quivering of nerves in her stomach. She felt sure he had Alberta’s reply to his cable in his pocket, and yet he was keeping her in suspense and refusing her the right to see it. Or was he waiting for the right moment, when Alex went off to bed and they were alone? That had to be the explanation, for he

wouldn’t want his cousin to know the real reason why she was here on the island. Alex was of a different type from Stefan; his feelings were more on the surface and he would never understand the kind of passion that induced a man to abduct a woman. Least of all a passion whose motivation was revenge. The strong but pleasant smoke of cedar-wrapped cigars drifted about the room, the sounds of the storm were still intermittent, coming in over the sea quite noisily, and then giving way to the music again. Each time Alice caught the angry growl of thunder, she couldn’t help wondering what would happen to this house if a bad tremor struck the island. Would its thick walls crack open and its roof of oval’shaped tiles fall plunging to the sea? The thought wasn’t just frightening, it was actively painful, for there was something about Fireglow which she found strangely appealing. Its thick, crusted walls from which the balconies hung like iron-wrought cages. The roofs that overlapped at various levels and the way it dominated -the cliffs, its Babylonianlike gardens hung with lemons and leaves, and soft green cascades of adder’s tongue and moonwort, deep crimson rock roses and bushy

yellow pines. A myriad plants clinging to the stone walls with a kind of loving … much as a woman might cling to a man who was outwardly hard and dominating. The music died away and the steady ticking of the clock filled the room. Stefan remained where he was, his dark head swathed in cigar smoke, but with a yawn Alex rose to his feet. ‘Your country air makes me drowsy,’ he said. ‘I am off to my bed— may I escort you to your room, Alicia?’ As she hesitated, Stefan said quietly: ‘I wish to have a few words with Miss Sheldon, so we’ll bid you kalinikta., ‘Kalinikta.’ There was a slightly droll note in Alex’s voice as he glanced from his cousin to Alice. He gave her a slight bow and strolled to the door. ‘Let us hope the storm isn’t saving up its fury for the middle of the night—sleep well, you two.’ He was gone with these rather insinuating words, and Alice was left staring at Stefan with wide, apprehensive eyes. CHAPTER NINE STEFAN came slowly to the fireplace and tossed his cigar stub among the glowing remnants of the cypress log, then he turned to look at Alice and his face was set in determined lines. ‘I suppose you’ve guessed why I wanted to speak with you alone?’ His tone of voice matched

the firmness of his mouth. ‘Miklos brought you a cablegram, didn’t he?’ Her voice shook slightly. Stefan produced it from his pocket and handed it to her. Alice could feel the. tremor in her fingers as she opened it and read the printed words. She stared at them and was appalled by her sister’s deceit. There in black and white was the statement: Man by name of Damaskinos unknown to me or my husband. Best wishes. Alberta. ‘What have you to say to that?’ Stefan demanded. Alice gave him a shocked look. ‘Berta isn’t telling you the truth,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s because she’s afraid of how Harry, her husband, would react. She once told me that he’s straitlaced, and when they were first acquainted she led him such a dance that she lost him. She doesn’t want it to happen again, so she denies knowing Damaskinos. You’ve got to believe me! Berta was always inclined to be unscrupulous when it came to protecting herself. I don’t believe it would occur to her that I could be hurt by her lies.’ ‘Her lies?’ Stefan stood there with his hands locked behind him, as if he didn’t trust their impulses. ‘Really, my dear, why should your sister steal your name, and why if she’s an adventuress would she run out on a millionaire in order to marry a teaplanter?’ ‘Because she obviously realised in

time that she loves Harry -‘ ‘Love?’ Stefan regarded Alice through dark, lowered lashes. ‘Is this how you love your own sister, by trying to use her in order to get away from me? Well, your little scheme isn’t going to work, my dear. I said I’d release you from the island if you were telling me the truth, but the cablegram confirms that you are the woman who came to Greece to marry a man for his money.’ He paused and let his eyes stray over Alice, then he reached out, took the cablegram and flung it on the fire. ‘I have money as well, Alicia, more than enough to satisfy a little mercenary like you.’ ‘Mercenary?’ Alice stared at him and felt the gathering forces of an emotional storm right here in this room. ‘You have no right to say that—I have never -‘ ‘That is always your cry,’ he said scornfully. ‘You have never done anything and would have me believe you’ve led the life of a veritable nun! I might in my salad days have been fooled by the demure airs and graces of a girl, but I’m no longer quite so green.’ As he spoke he began to approach Alice, who instinctively backed away from him on legs so nervous they threatened to give way beneath her. His entire manner was like that of a panther stalking

its prey, and she gave a cry of fright as she backed against the couch and he closed in on her. He grasped hold of her and when she tried to pull free of him there was a ripping sound and her dress tore away from the shoulder. ‘Oh, look what you’ve done!’ she gasped. ‘You’re insufferable -‘ ‘I’ll buy you a hundred dresses to make up for it.’ He jerked her into the hard circle of his arms and she saw the blaze of emotion in his eyes. ‘I really began to think I had misjudged you, Alice. Watching you all this week, down on the beach with your sketching fools, or diving slim as a knife into the sea. Wandering about this house just like Alice in Wonderland, or coming in from the coolness of the lemon groves with their scent in your brown hair. You had to be genuine and innocent, I told myself; you couldn’t really be the type who would sell yourself to a beast.’ Stefan gathered a handful of her hair as he looked directly down into her eyes, uncaring that his grip made her scalp tingle. ‘Yes, you almost misled me into thinking you as sweet as your deceptive little face can look when you sit demurely at my table, sipping your wine as if afraid it might go to your head and release your inhibitions. I ought to say to the devil

with you, but I never became successful by being prudent all the time, and so I’m going to marry you —someone has to, for Damaskinos won’t want you. He’ll conclude like everyone else that I’ve been your lover.’ ‘But you haven’t -‘ Alice tried desperately to twist herself out of his arms. ‘Oh, how can you speak of marriage when you—you despise me?’ ‘I desire you, and that cancels out whatever else I might feel.’ He gazed down at her and his eyes seemed veiled in a hundred secret thoughts behind those thick Greek lashes. Alice gazed up at him and saw the taut yet sensuous lines of his mouth, and though she longed for the strength to wrench free of him, her bones seemed to be melting and she could feel herself drawn to him as if magnetised. She saw smouldering in his eyes the passion that made her feel weak all over, but this was no moment to feel such weakness when she needed the strength of will to oppose his loveless proposal of marriage. He didn’t love her … love was being able to trust someone implicitly, and he chose to believe Alberta’s story. He felt himself confirmed in his belief that she was a woman for sale, and there was an arrogant little light in his eyes which told her he meant to have his way with her.

‘Don’t fight me, Alicia,’ he warned, as if glimpsing the resistance in her eyes. ‘We are two people who are tired of living alone, and so we might as well combine our lives and live together. I know you have taken to my house, and a house needs a woman to add those touches that turn it into a home.’ ‘You have a housekeeper, and an excellent one,’ Alice broke in. At once his arm tightened about her and the fingers of his left hand buried themselves deeper in her hair, as if he were gathering himself to possess her. ‘I’ve never met a woman who tries my patience as you do,’ he said gratingly. ‘I sometimes think the only way to deal with you is in the way of the Spartan warrior, who silently and savagely took his woman and didn’t care a damn if she screamed or fainted. Shall it be that way, my dear? Here in this room, on the rug at our feet?’ Alice felt the vibration of his words against her skin, and the hard thrust of his forearm muscles binding her to his strong body. When she looked at him with wide, uncertain ~ eyes, he abruptly bent his head and locked their lips together, allowing violence to slacken into a slow, sensual movement of his mouth upon hers. ‘There would be infinite pleasure in taking you,’ he whispered. ‘And I’ll do it if you go on defying me like a dainty little cat

who puts out her claws when she’s stroked.’ ‘Oh, Stefan——’ She felt as if her resistance was quite broken. ‘You’re a man of iron whose heart is sealed with nuts and bolts. You’re so ruthless and I —I’m so tired of fighting you. I just haven’t the weapons and you make me feel so defeated -‘ ‘Good.’ His fingers slid through her hair to the nape of her neck and clasping the slim column he kissed her mouth with total possession, softening her lips with his until she was alive to nothing but the waves of sheer sensation, rippling through the deeps of her body like some strong, dangerous, irresistible undertow. She had to give in to it, and when she came to the surface of consciousness again her arms had clasped themselves about his neck and her body was admitting its hunger even as her mind sent out warnings to her lips, her hands, her yielding senses that what she gave and what he would take would never balance on the scales of love. Stefan kissed her to the point of madness, but Alice could feel him withholding the tenderness of his love, until suddenly she could take no more and with a shuddering little cry buried her fare in his shoulder. ‘At least you didn’t faint,’ he murmured. ‘When you

forget yourself, little one, you are quite a woman. I don’t think we shall bother with a lengthy engagement, but I want to put my seal on you and I have just the thing in my office safe. Come along!’ He gripped her by the wrist, but she hung back until she saw the look of determination in his eyes. ‘There isn’t any need, Stefan.’ ‘Of course there is.’ He fingered the rent in her dress. ‘I am sorry about this, but you’ll have dresses galore and rings on every finger before I’m finished with you.’ ‘I—I don’t want things-—-‘ She gave him an appealing look. ‘I just want you to believe in me—can’t you?’ ‘Forget all that.’ He drew her to the door and out into the hall, where javelin points of lightning struck silently across the far walls. Stefan opened the door of his office and ushered Alice inside, where there was a large desk, leather chairs,, a splendid Turkish carpet that stretched from wall to wall, and a bronze inkstand of fauns and satyrs that threw shadows across the green blotter when he turned on the desk lamp. He went to the safe that was situated behind a painting of a Venetian castle with rambling walls pierced by Gothic windows and topped by battlements, with a fat round tower. Alice stood by the desk as Stefan delved about in

his safe, and this moment seemed more unreal than any other she had known since being brought to Solitaria. From this moment onwards she belonged here and was never going back to her London flat, where she had passed so many solitary hours at her drawing-board, sometimes working well into the night in an effort to forget that she had no one with whom to share those hours. It seemed almost too unbelievable that the powerfully attractive man who came towards her with a flat leather case in his hand was, as he had put it, about to put his seal on her. She stood against the desk in almost a defensive attitude, unable to relax with him and to truly accept that they were going to be man and wife. His eyes as he drew near to her swept her slim, tense figure and his mouth was edged by a faintly sardonic smile. ‘Women usually hold out greedy hands for jewellery,’ he said. ‘Are you pretending that you don’t like receiving such presents?’ ‘I wouldn’t know the procedure,’ she rejoined quietly. ‘No man ever gave me any jewellery.’ His eyes narrowed as he stood tall in front of her and snapped open the leather jewelcase, dazzling her gaze with a necklace, matching bracelets and a ring set with aquamarine-coloured gems bonded into deep gold. Alice caught her

breath, for never in her life had she seen such pure, shining stones, as if the sea had solidified and trapped the sun inside. ‘Emeralds, my dear. Don’t they make your eyes shine?’ Stefan drew the necklace from its bed and held it aloft in his fingers so the light of the desk lamp played over the facets of the stones. ‘They’re a beautiful colour, aren’t they? Much clearer and prettier than green emeralds, and they should match your eyes.’ Alice gazed at the necklace sparkling against the tanned skin of his hand, and all at once a cold little shiver ran over her own skin. ‘You mean Timareta’s eyes,’ she said. ‘They belong to her!’ ‘Timareta is dead.’ Each word seemed to fall as if from the edge of a blade. ‘The emeralds are yours, Alicia, to wear against that white skin. Come, take your present and don’t pretend you aren’t thrilled by emeralds—shall I put them on for you? The jewels might move your heart a little more than I do.’ Alice gazed at him speechlessly, holding back a protest that he had no effect on her feelings. That was the trouble … he had a very disturbing effect on her, and all she meant to him was someone who looked sufficiently like his lost dead love to help him rebuild a dream. But a broken dream could no

more be assembled than a mirror fallen from a wall, or a lovely vase from its pedestal. ‘Take the necklace,’ he ordered. ‘Don’t be shy about it, my dear. I shall make you earn it.’ Warm colour played across her cheeks and her fingers felt clumsy as she accepted the necklace and stood as if mesmerised by the scintillating centre of each perfect gem, deep wells of mystery and motion. ‘I—I can’t,’ she breathed. ‘It isn’t fair of you to expect me to step into a dead girl’s shoes—I won’t!’ She gave him a frantic look, and then dropped the necklace in a glowing pool on the desk blotter and ran from the room, catching hold of her long skirt as she fled across the hall to the staircase. It was as she reached it that the floor suddenly heaved beneath her feet like the deck of a ship, pitching her forward so she would have fallen had she not clutched at the pilaster of the stairs, holding on tightly as shock waves of motion passed and re-passed beneath the soles of her silver shoes. Earthquake! The dreadful word cried through her mind and its echo was taken up by every nerve in her body. She experienced the threat of a violence beyond human control, and even as her hands gripped the firm wooden pilaster her ears caught the sound of roof tiles crashing, and

something far more immediate as the ceiling above the stairs cracked open and the great brass lantern swung .crazily on its chains before they wrenched loose from their moorings and the lantern began to hurtle downwards. It came with all the deadly accuracy of a giant hammer aimed at Alice, who stood chained to the pilaster by fear-locked fingers. She felt utterly powerless to move a limb and knew she was going to be crushed by the great bell of brass which had tolled a silent warning at the start of this stormy evening. There was a roaring in her head which drowned her cry of pain as she was dragged free of the pilaster and lifted bodily to one side as the lantern fell with a deafening crash on the bottom half of the stairs, its chains whipping and snarling with, exposed live wires, the pilaster a broken heap of wood and splinters where Alice had stood petrified. Those rough but effective hands had dropped her into the shadow of an archway, where she lay aching in Stefan’s grip as the house rocked and the flooring came loose, spouting water and dirt into the hall. Great clumps of bricks and plaster fell around them and items of furniture toppled on the heaving floor and fell with a sound of shattering glass and china

as cupboard doors broke and shelves spilled their valuable contents. Alice could feel her nails digging into Stefan, but she had to hold on to him or be swept into the chaos of noise and destruction. He was the only solid reality in her world right now, and she burrowed close to his powerful body and was thankful for him. It was like being on a ship that had foundered and could no longer hold steady, and she cried out as the floor opened beside her like a great yawn and half an antique chest fell through the hole. Cursing in Greek and exerting a pull on her that felt as if it would crush her ribs, Stefan dragged her against the thick wall within the archway and then lay close to her like a shield. He grunted as something struck his body, and she felt the heat of his breath against her neck. They clung desperately together and it seemed to her as if his ruthless Greek gods were hurling stones at them and forcing her to realise how much she really wanted to stay with him, even if he couldn’t love her as he had loved Timareta. ‘Hold on!’ He pressed his hard cheek to hers as a cloud of brick dust enveloped them. ‘These convulsions will end in a while and so will the noise. It’s like the end of the world, eh?’ Shaking like a leaf, and yet unafraid at heart because he held her, Alice clung to him as the

final earthwaves shook Fireglow, lancing upwards through the bedrock to cause a resounding disturbance within the house, a rumbling, shattering noise of falling masonry, as if one of the gables must have collapsed and fallen inwards. The noise was shot through by a woman’s scream, and Stefan tensed as if about to leap to his feet. ‘Don’t!’ Alice clutched at him. ‘Stay here, Stefan! Let it end—oh, let it end before you go up there!’ The pitching and the tumult died gradually away and was followed by a startling stillness that made over-loud the sound of falling brickwork, slate and tile from damaged walls and roofs. The floor stopped heaving, but water-gushed in the hall from broken pipes and over everything hung a pall of dust and smoke. Stefan leapt to his feet and raced towards the saloni, from which the smoke was coming. When Alice ran in through the door he was beating at the flames with a heavy velvet curtain dragged down from the window … she saw a trickle of flame running towards the door and began to stamp on the sharp bright tongues. ‘Mind your dress!’ Stefan roared at her. ‘It. will catch alight!’ Alice caught hold of her long skirt, tugged the dress over her head and flung it to one side. She ran in

her slip to the heavy sideboard that remained upright and took hold of the carafe of water, which she flung on the flames that were trying to lick their way into the hall. ‘Take this!’ Stefan flung her the curtain so she could beat at the flames, his long arms tearing down the other one to expose the cracked windows. Panting from the effort, her eyes smarting from the smoke, Alice kept on beating the flames with the curtain until they were out. Less than an hour ago this room had been charming, now it was a wreck, and she sagged against the door with the charred curtain hanging from her fingers. ‘Oh, God!’ A teardrop channelled her grimy face. ‘What a mess!’ ‘Don’t worry.’ Hard fingers gripped her bare shoulders. ‘This can be put to rights, but something happened above stairs that has me very worried. You heard the crashing noise—and someone screamed! Here, take my jacket and put it on.’ She wearily obeyed him, buttoning the jacket that was several sizes too large but warm from his body. She followed him across the hall to the shattered staircase … above on the gallery his cousin was leaning on the balustrade with blood trickling down the side of his face. ‘Are you all

right?’ Stefan bellowed up the stairs. ‘Some flying glass cut my face.’ Alex came halfway down the stairs and then stood staring at the great lantern that sprawled over the lower half of the staircase. ‘That will take some shifting—a good thing no one was standing underneath when that fell. Alice said she saw it swinging on its chains.’ ‘Yes.’ Stefan shot a look at Alice and she met his eyes instantly—but for his agility in reaching her in time she would be lying crushed and dead beneath that enormous weight of brass. ‘What exactly happened up there?’ Stefan demanded of Alex. ‘We heard one of the women scream—has someone been hurt?’ ‘No, badly frightened.’ Alex glanced back up the stairs, where the housekeeper appeared, her arm about Hesta, who was crying. They were both in their night clothes and their hair and faces were cloudy with plaster dust. ‘It is all right now, kyrie., Katerina tried to speak calmly. ‘Hesta and I were beneath her bed when it happened, but she would go and run into the corridor. The noise was so alarming—as if the world was coming to an end.’ ‘An enure corner of the upper structure appears to have caved in,’ Alex told Stefan. ‘It has completely wrecked one of the bedrooms— most fortunately a

room that was not in use when the earthquake struck. I think the women and I must try and get down into the hall in case there is another bad tremor. We shall have to try and climb over the rubble, eh?’ This hazardous procedure was only made possible after Stefan, with Alice assisting him, had draped beautiful Turkey carpets over the debris, so the women wouldn’t cut and bruise themselves as they scrambled down that heap of brass, shattered wood, and heavy chains whose ends were sharp and torn, and still very much alive. The electric generator that fed the estate was housed in a small stone building at the rear of Fireglow and luckily it hadn’t been damaged, so at least they had light, even as they had puddles of water to slosh about in. Others members of the staff began to appear from their hiding places and there was a great deal of chattering and embracing because everyone in the house had survived what Katerina called the wrath of the earth-gods, which when Alice glanced around her seemed a more than appropriate way of expressing it. ‘We must get organised.’ Stefan silenced everyone with an upraised hand, standing in their midst with his authority unimpaired by a dirty face, a scorched shirt, and black hair plastered to his sweaty brow.

His eyes swept the group and Alice felt certain she saw amusement glint in them as they rested a moment on her comic figure in his jacket. ‘The first necessity,’ he added, ‘is hot strong coffee, and then the water must be mopped from the floor. Miklos, you will find a large torch and come with me to the cellar where the water-main is located; it must be turned off before the house is flooded.’ As he gave further orders that would keep them all occupied, Hesta stood clicking a. chain of shining worry-beads through her fingers. Her dark eyes still held a dazed look and when Stefan told her to assist Alice in finding as many unbroken cups as she could, she didn’t seem to hear him. ‘That beautiful room,’ she exclaimed. ‘Everything smashed to pieces—ruined!’ Katerina took hold of her niece and gave her a slight shake. ‘Come, Hesta, it is over for now and we are alive.’ ‘fie careful with her.’ Stefan came and took an intent look at Hesta. ‘She is still rather shocked and should lie down for a while.’ ‘I—I’m all right.’ Hesta gave a shiver and stopped clicking the beads. She gazed upwards into Stefan’s eyes and said sombrely: ‘There is nothing left of her room, kyrie, so let her rest in peace.’ Katerina gave a sharp exclamation and flung a hand

over the mouth of her niece. ‘Be quiet, you don’t know what you are saying, girl!’ ‘I think she does.’ Alex Was leaning against an archway column lighting a cheroot. As the smoke wreathed about his face, on which the blood had congealed, his eyes found Stefan. ‘Hesta is talking about the room with the portrait— the room in which a ghost used to sleep, cousin. The earthquake has wrecked it from wall to ceiling. If anyone living had been using it tonight, they would have been instantly killed. It must have been on the cards, Stefan, that you would choose to give that room to a ghost.’ As Alex spoke everyone in the hall seemed to be looking at Stefan as if he might reveal his feelings, but Alice knew that he wouldn’t. Whatever he felt with regard to the destruction of the ivory and gold bedroom where Timareta’s portrait had smiled from the wall, he would keep to himself. His eyes were unfathomable and his mouth seemed to take a sterner set as he looked at his cousin. ‘We must be thankful the damage isn’t greater and that we are all unhurt, though you must have your face attended to as soon as possible, Alex. In the meantime perhaps you would set to rights some of the furniture, while you, Alice, will see to it that

Hesta has a lie down. A drop of brandy might help settle her nerves, eh?’ Alice nodded and taking Hesta by the arm led her into the saloni, where she dusted off the big leather couch and made Hesta lie down on it. She went to the sideboard, passing the blackened panelling where Stefan had beat out the fire, and her own hands were tremulous as she poured brandy into a glass and took it to Hesta. The glass gave little nervous jerks as Hesta drank from it, and her ebony eyes were fixed upon Alice. ‘The kyrios is so kind,’ she said. ‘Always good to everyone, and since you came to the island, thespoinis, all of us have hoped that you might stay with him. A man like that —he shouldn’t have to live with a memory. Don’t you think it is like a judgment that her room should be damaged like that? Everything crushed and torn and of no more use— the bed, the pretty things on the dressingtable, the portrait. It will be awful for him when he sees it for himself.’ ‘But as the kyrios said, no one has been badly hurt, Hesta, and that is more important to him. The rooms and furniture can be restored to how they were- -‘ Yet would he restore the ivory and gold room to its former shrine-like beauty? Alice dug her hands into the pockets of his jacket, her fingers clenching on his lighter and

cigar-case, items he had handled so often that it was like touching part of him. No one knew that he had asked her to marry him, and if she really wanted to leave the island he couldn’t stop her from going with Alex in the amphibian to Athens. Her fingers fondled the cigar-case and she recalled every tense moment of the earthquake in his arms … it had been a primitive awakening to the forces of nature and in the midst of the tumult she had discovered in herself a deep need to feel the strength and closeness of Stefan’s body. Not only his body, but the dreams and despairs of his entire personality. The earthquake had not only rocked the island, but it had revealed Alice to herself. She couldn’t take her love away from Stefan, she had to stay and give it to him, even though she knew that all he asked of her was the slim shape and the long, brown hair that could delude him into believing he made love to Timareta. All that day, and for the next few days, everyone was busy at the house putting things in order. As much of the masonry as possible was cleared from the more severely damaged rooms, and tarpaulin was placed over the great gap left by the collapsed

gable. A builder and his team would have to come from Athens to start the work of restoration, and in the meantime the once lovely bedroom was like a gaping wound halfway along the gallery. Stefan didn’t choose to speak about it, and Alice kept busy along with the staff, immensely glad of something to occupy her body and her mind. Several of the farmhouses had also suffered damage, and some of the livestock had been killed, but the only human casualties had been a couple of children and their mother who at Stefan’s orders had been flown in the amphibian to a hospital in Athens. Alex had gone with them, and Alice felt no sense of regret when she had watched the seaplane lift into the air and leave her once more alone with Stefan. Her choice had been made the night of the earthquake and he seemed to realise it, though they didn’t speak of it. One evening she found his emeralds on her dressing-table and knew that he was asking for a visual sign that she commit herself to him. That evening she wore the bracelets, and after dinner they walked in the lemon groves and there in the shade and scent of citrus he took her in his arms and kissed her possessively. Alice didn’t resist him, but closed her mind to everything but the

physical need he had of her. ‘Now you learn,’ he murmured, stroking his fingers through her long hair, ‘that I’ll have no noble, silently suffering wife. We attend a village wedding on Saturday and you will see how it will be for us— a Greek marriage is binding, you realise. I take, my dear, and you will give me —everything.’ ‘That’s only fair, I suppose,’ she said, the emeralds glowing on her arms upraised about his neck, ‘when you give me expensive jewels to wear. Katerina was telling me that it’s a Greek custom for a bride to bring a dowry to her husband, but you do realise, Stefan, that I have very little money and no embroidered sheets and pillows to contribute to your household. The bits and pieces of furniture I have in my London flat would hardly suit your house; they’d look out of place.’ ‘Virginity is the dowry of the girl who brings no goods and chattels,’ he rejoined. ‘Why are you so certain I shall be bringing that?’ she asked. ‘You have disbelieved everything else about me, so why believe that an Englishwoman of twenty-four is still— innocent?’ ‘That particular .innocence is in your eyes, and in the .way you receive my kisses.’ He tilted her head back against his arm and all at once his eyes were demanding. ‘Touch me, kiss me without reserve, the way I kiss

you! Let me have that at least, Alicia.’ His mouth found hers and in that moment the will to struggle was finally overcome by the will to submit, yet even as her lips responded to his, and her hands caressed the nape of his neck, she was tensed for what he might whisper as his lips explored her neck and pressed urgently into the soft hollow of her throat. She dreaded the name that was not hers … that he might altogether forget that she wasn’t the girl who haunted him. His name broke from Alice’s lips as his kissing aroused her to a sweet shuddering she couldn’t control, but Stefan took it for rejection and thrust her away from him. She felt stunned, like the big white moths who stunned their wings against the wall lamps, and her widened pupils filled with the image of Stefan as he stood there thrusting at his black hair, a tinge of whiteness about his flared nostrils. She knew there and then that she would perish before this strange love of him ever died … born so reluctantly, and now so alive. He gave her a look of almost savage intensity. ‘You are mine because I want it so.’ He reached out and touched her arm through the dark blue chiffon of her sleeve. ‘Skin like gleaming white ice, but I shall melt you, guzel, I promise

you!’ That he had already melted her heart he didn’t realise, and there was still too much shy pride in Alice to permit her to tell him, so she faced him with an air of cool reserve, the night sky above ghostly with stars and all around them the grating throb of cicadas. They went indoors and parted at the foot of the stairs, roughly mended for now by a local carpenter but awaiting from Athens a craftsman who would restore them to their former grace. Halfway up the stairs Alice turned as if compelled and Stefan was still standing below in the hall, watching her with narrowed eyes. Her hand clutched the staircase rail and she wanted to run down to him, to throw off all inhibition and beg him to love her because she was alive and not a memory who could give him nothing but a sense of regret. Alex had said that Stefan’s torment was selfinflicted, rooted in regret because he had not opposed Timareta’s parents and. taken her with him when he went to England. If he had done so, then she would still be alive. Alice hovered on the stairs and was on the verge of running down to Stefan when he swung on his heel and moved away into the shadows, carrying himself with that proud

certainty that she would marry him for money alone. She continued On her way to the gallery and she felt a very personal pain right inside her. Why had Alberta denied her association with Damaskinos? Was she so uncertain of her new husband’s love … were the Sheldon sisters doomed to live with men who couldn’t trust them? Shadows lay along the far end of the gallery where the wreckage of that lovely room was still uncleared. No one had touched it, unwilling to do so unless Stefan gave specific orders. It was as if a thunderbolt had hit it, crushing the fourposter bed, breaking open the cupboards, ripping into rags the ivory wedding dress, burying beneath the rubble the portrait of a girl who had beckoned Stefan to join her on a beach of long-lost memories. Yet they weren’t memories of a young girl’s heartfelt love and devotion … to whom had Timareta really been beckoning on that sunlit beach …? To Alex of. the carefree eyes, whose sights had not been fixed on success as Stefan’s had been. Orphaned Stefan, who had longed for a home of his own, and had one at last on an island of his own. Alice fingered the bracelets on her wrists, and suddenly she stretched out her arms as if to show the emeralds to a ghost. ‘I have him now,’ the gesture seemed to say. ‘I mean to make him forget

you, Timareta!’ CHAPTER TEN A HOLLOW, mocking whisper seemed to float along the gallery, though Alice knew it was really the wind blowing through the cracks in the broken walls of the ruined bedroom. Try! The echo followed her into her own room and lingered in her mind as she stood at the dressingtable and removed the bracelets that glimmered richly in the lamplight. She ran the gems through her fingers, tokens not of love but of Stefan’s unshakeable belief that it was material security which she wanted. She laid the bracelets in the leather case and paced her room in a restless torment she had never expected to feel… not Alice Sheldon, who had seemed to other men too prim and reserved to be worth their attention. She hadn’t known herself that she could feel this depth of emotion, but there it was, running warm and tingling through her veins when she thought of Stefan, along with a sense of injury that he should want to marry her though he thought her a mercenary person. She had worn some of the jewellery because he had wanted her to do so, but she would prefer to see his eyes sparkling with love of her. Alice pressed her face into her hands and couldn’t forget the

speculative way he had watched her tonight… had he been thinking that in the near future he would mount the stairs beside her and they would enter his apartment as man and wife? The thought made her knees buckle and she sank down on the side of her bed. It would be exciting in his arms but hardly tender, not when he only wanted to fulfil the masculine hungers he had for a long time sublimated in his work. Alice rested her cheek on the chiffoned arm he had touched with hard, possessive fingers…. it was something, wasn’t it, to be desired by such a man; so tall and dark, and with a muscular grace she had noticed from the moment he had entered her room at the Hotel Metropolis? He really was a tremendous catch for spinsterish Alice Sheldon, but even as the cynical thought entered her head she flinched from it. Whatever his reason for wanting her, the Greeks took very seriously the state of matrimony, though they celebrated it with a great deal of gaiety. The local Greek wedding they would attend together would be like a rehearsal for them. She lay in the soft darkness and wondered what to wear for such an occasion. She would have to ask Katerina and

perhaps arrange to buy or borrow a local costume. Alice smiled to herself. Yes, she would enjoy dressing up as a Greek girl … and then her heart seemed to turn over in her breast, for to dress up like that would be bound to intensify her resemblance to Timareta. Was that at the root of her impulse to wear a Greek costume … to pretend for a day that she was the girl to whom Stefan had given the core of his heart? Alice pressed her face into her pillow in a tormented way … she knew she was going to have his body, but how she yearned for his heart as well. Stefan had already proved how devoted he could be to someone he truly loved, and Alice longed to be the recipient of his ardent, exclusive, zealous love. What more could she ask of life if she could be all in all to Stefan Kassandros? Next day she spoke to Katerina about acquiring a Greek dress, and the solution turned out to be so simple that Alice found herself committed to her impulse. Katerina had such a dress in her own wardrobe, which she had kept in a linen bag so the moths wouldn’t get at the material. The thespoinis was welcome to wear it, and she added, significantly, that it would make Alice look almost like a Greek girl. ‘You don’t think people will laugh -?’ Alice looked uncertain and suddenly

wanted to drop the idea. ‘Indeed they will be pleaded that the English guest of the kyrios wishes to be one of them,’ Katerina assured her, though Alice noticed there was a speculative gleam in her dark eyes. ‘I shall go now and fetch the dress, thespoinis, and we can see if any alterations are needed. In my youth I was as slim as yourself and I believe it will fit you very well.’ ‘Do you think the kyrios will mind if I wear it?’ Alice couldn’t keep the anxiety out of her eyes, for the one thing she didn’t want was to upset Stefan in any way. ‘What real man ever minded that a woman made herself pretty? Now if-the thespoinis had the tinted blonde hair, or the painted lips and eyes, then a real Greek woilld be annoyed to see her wearing a national costume. But you are different from that sort, thespoinis. You look and behave like a lady, and I would like to tell you that you made Hesta feel so very much better when you sat with her the night of the earthquake. She told me you were so calm, and yet you cannot be used to such happenings.’ ‘I imagine it’s being English,’ Alice smiled. ‘We have this sort of built-in control switch, which is all very well in a crisis, but it can lock up other feelings we would sometimes like to

release.’ ‘Feelings of emotion, eh?’ Katerina looked wise and just a little amused. ‘You mustn’t think that Greek people never have this problem, thespoinis. The deeper felt the emotion the more difficult it is for people to let it have its way. We are like the earth, I think. The pressures build up until they must give way and naturally this can cause quite a shock.’ ‘Like the earthquake the other night,’ Alice murmured, and hoped she wouldn’t set a spark to tinder if she accepted Katerina’s kind offer and wore the Greek dress to the wedding on Saturday. There was a brooding, unpredictable side to Stefan which Alice knew she went in fear of. It would be different if he loved her … love could smooth the most troubled emotions and turn the fiercest anger to piercing sweet forgiveness. For lovers to quarrel and make up was probably one of the most exciting facets of their, relationship, and Alice sighed and wished it were a facet of her relationship with the man who invited her into his life but refused her the key to his heart. ‘I will fetch the dress for the thespoinis to try on.’ Katerina turned towards the door, and it was that nagging, fear-edged uncertainty which drove Alice to say: ‘No, I’ve changed my mind! I think I shall go to the

wedding in a blue suit which I have -‘ Katerina paused by the door. ‘It is for the thespoinis to decide, of course, but try on the dress, my lady. You might like yourself in it.’ ‘But will he?’ The words escaped Alice before she could prevent them from revealing the cause of her uncertainty. ‘If women thought about the pain that loving a man might bring them, then they would flee into nunneries,’ Katerina replied. ‘But it can also be a pleasure to love One of these self-willed, often thoughtless, but warm-natured creatures. They need care and affection as the earth needs rain and sunshine, and it suffices for many things.’ ‘Does it, Katerina?’ Alice tinkered with her spectacles and a frown knit her slender eyebrows together. ‘Even if a woman has to face up to sharing a man with a memory?’ ‘A memory cannot respond to his affection, thespoinis.’ ‘Is that—everything?’ ‘Discover for yourself if it is, my lady.’ ‘Then why do you remain widowed, Katerina? Why have you not found another man to give you affection?’ ‘Because I am a Greek woman.’ ‘No, it’s because your husband loved you and you still belong to him. He loved you, didn’t he?’ ‘Ne.’ Katerina had to admit it. ‘We were everything to

each other, it is true, and I would be unlikely to find another like him. Ah yes, that is the pity of a deep, abiding love. It is hard to accept anything less.’ Alice’s fingers clenched on her spectacles; if she married, Stefan then she was going to have to accept less than she hungered for. She was going to have to take second place in his life and hadn’t realised until now that she could feel so possessive, so ardently greedy for all of him as a passionate Greek woman. Was it the atmosphere of this Aegean island that made her feel this way, or had the potential for deep-felt passion lain unaroused in her until she found herself with a man like Stefan? Now that she admitted to loving him, Alice couldn’t help but realise how physically exciting and mentally stimulating she found his power, his presence, his striking darkness of hair and eyes. Her eyes met Katerina’s and she sensed that the housekeeper had guessed how matters stood between herself and the kyrios, but she didn’t attempt to pry. ‘You must try on the dress, thespoinis,’ she said. ‘You must have the courage to stand up to—her.’ ‘Timareta?’ ‘Prove to him, thespoinis, that you have magic.’ ‘I—I’m a very ordinary person, Katerina.’

‘You will not say that when you see yourself in a Greek dress,’ the housekeeper assured her. ‘Believe me, thespoinis, if I didn’t think you would do justice to it, then I wouldn’t offer to let you wear it.’ ‘You’re kind,’ Alice smiled. ‘You Greek people aren’t easy to know, but I am learning how kind your hearts are beneath that rather watchful air you have. I found it rather intimidating at first.’ ‘That would be true of the kyrios, no doubt.’ Katerina’s own smile was sagacious. ‘Until people get to know him they assume that he is rather ironnatured, very shrewd and without sentiment. He is all those things, but he is also a man with loneliness In him. Here on the island we worry about him, you know. We care that he finds happiness for himself. There have been women who have tried to marry him because he has been very successful in business, as Greek men are when they set their mind to it, but he has the zoikos of a true man of this land and he deserves -‘ Katerina paused, considered, and moved her hands in a clasping gesture—’great giving from a woman, not just the taking, you understand. That is the problem for a man of wealth; he can never be certain that a woman wants him for himself alone.’ ‘A man like Stefan?’ Alice exclaimed. ‘No woman would think

first of his money——’ ‘No real woman,’ Katerina agreed. ‘But some are children at heart. They want toys, gifts, payment all the time for the giving of their pretty selves. They don’t realise that love is giving, not taking. And men? Even the shrewdest of them can be fooled by the big eyes that seem to offer bliss, but they are really the big eyes of a greedy child wondering what good things are going to be given in exchange for her kisses. You are not one of those, thespoinis. I can see that—I knew it right away. You have much to give and it is all locked up waiting to be given. The kyrios would be a fool if -‘ ‘He. has asked me to marry him,’ Alice said shyly. ‘Ah!’ Katerina’s eyes were agleam. ‘You have agreed, eh?’ ‘I—I’m not sure if I should, Katerina. He doesn’t really love me and that kind of marriage can be hell—I do have a career I can go back to, aand I think it might be best -‘ ‘It would not make you happy, thespoinis.” ‘Would it really make me happy to be a wife who knows that when my husband looks at me he’s comparing me to someone else; looking for a smile or a mannerism I don’t have? That when he touches me he’s closing his eyes and pretending I’m—her?’ ‘Will you be

happier miles away from him, my lady? Never seeing him—never being touched by him?’ ‘Oh, there’s more to life than belonging to a man, Katerina!’ ‘You think so, eh?’ Katerina shook her head slowly, as if at the foolish remark of an adolescent. ‘The Greek gill believes all her life that one man alone is set aside for her by the gods, and she knows him when she meets him and she marries him if she can. It may be that he seems to love her less, Or perhaps her parents have provided a dowry he couldn’t resist. It doesn’t matter to the girl. This is the man she must have and she accepts the challenge of making herself indispensable to him. Believe me, thespoinis, many a marriage in Greece has begun in that way and ended as a love story.’ ‘A challenge,’ Alice murmured; and she could feel her straight young spine bracing itself as she thought of Stefan’s pride and self-will, and his certainty that she was a cool little mercenary who wanted a man with money. ‘The thought is exciting, eh?’ Katerina nodded. ‘To fight against odds and to win, thespoinis, is one of the most stimulating things in life. Shall I fetch the dress?’ ‘Yes, please.’ Alice had made up her mind and her eyes had a sudden brilliance that lit the

contours of her face and replaced her uncertainty with eagerness. Perhaps what had held her back from having the same kind of fun as the other girls was her lack of confidence in herself. Young men had thought her dull and proper and she had not attempted to prove them wrong. But she was going to prove Stefan wrong in his estimation of her. She was going to dress up for this Greek wedding, cling to his arm and let everyone see that she was going to belong to him and couldn’t wait for her own wedding bells to ring. She had to do it! She had to triumph over shyness and reserve, and mustn’t let herself mind that he didn’t want her love … he only wanted her body. Katerina brought the dress to her and Hesta slipped away from her duties to attend the fitting. Alice found the Greek costume stunning and quite irresistible with its flounced skirt of Cos silk patterned with many tiny bunches of flowers. There was a bolero of velvet and a silk blouse with full embroidered sleeves. A beaded cap and severalskirts to puff out the skirt were included, and she stood there in the ensemble and slowly turned so the two Greek women could inspect her from every angle. ‘Well?’ Alice looked from one face to the other and her eyes were anxious. ‘Do I look all right—oh, do tell me if I look a sight or

not!’ ‘Look in the mirror, thespoinis.’ Katerina was smiling. ‘The dress might have been made for you.’ Taking a deep breath, Alice turned to the long mirror and regarded someone she had never seen before … the Greek garment seemed to bring out the person who had always been hidden inside herself. Someone who had never entirely liked the modern world in which her sister Alberta had always been so much at home. The beautifully blended colours of the dress seemed to find their reflections in her eyes and hair, which looked against the Cos silk as silky brown as the water of a rock pool. She looked alive and eager … a girl who might have stepped from a Byzantine mosaic. ‘It fits you very well.’ Katerina fussed a little with the skirt. ‘Do you like yourself, thespoinis?’ ‘I—I frighten myself,’ Alice breathed. ‘I feel like pinching myself to find out if I’m real. Oh, dare I wear it, Katerina? I just don’t look like myself dressed up like this.’ ‘Perhaps for the first time you are seeing yourself, my lady. We each have an inner self, and the dress reveals who you really are.’ ‘I look like someone from another century, as if my face and figure don’t belong in modern clothes.’ Alice broke into a smile as she turned away from

her disturbing reflection. ‘No wonder people thought of me as an oldfashioned girl! I suppose that’s how I struck them.’ ‘You will look like one of us if you wear the dress to Marina’s wedding,’ said Hesta. ‘One of our young men will fall in love with you—or maybe two or three.’ ‘You mustn’t talk such nonsense,’ Katerina reproved her niece. ‘Mees Sheldon will be there as the exclusive guest of the kyrios, and the other men will be wise to keep their distance.’ Hesta glanced enquiringly at her aunt. ‘But that is only in the case of an understanding between a girl and a man, and there will be dancing and the thespoinis will be asked to join in. At a wedding there is always plenty of zoikos in the young men and someone young like the thespoinis cannot be expected to sit in dignity with the older women because, she is the guest of the kyrios.’ ‘Chattering girl!’ Katerina clicked her tongue and glanced at Alice. ‘My niece has romance on her foolish mind all the time, and it will be as well when she is married herself.’ ‘It would be nice to join in the Greek dancing.’ Alice smiled rather wistfully. ‘Will I be expected to sit on my dignity? Surely the kyrios won’t expect that of me?’ ‘It is for the

thespoinis to know what he expects,’ Katerina said evasively. ‘At any English wedding everyone dances and joins in the fun. Surely the kyrios won’t just stand there on his dignity? I know he’s the guest of honour, but he’s also a young man with lots of zoikos of his own and Greek music is so compulsive.’ ‘He will dance with the bride, thespoinis, for that is traditional, but it is only with his permission that you will be allowed to dance with another man.’ Hesta caught her breath when her aunt said this and her eyes gleamed with comprehension. ‘Ah, so that is the way of the wind -‘ ‘And you will keep quiet about it, my girl,’ Katerina warned. ‘The thespoinis has kindly taken me into her confidence, but nothing must be said until the kyrios makes the announcement.’ ‘I knew it,’ Hesta exclaimed. ‘We all saw the likeness to his first sweetheart -‘ ‘Hesta,’ her aunt said ominously, ‘you will go down to the kitchen and start peeling potatoes. Your tongue runs away with you and the thespoinis doesn’t wish to hear your nonsense about other sweethearts.’ ‘All the same, it’s true.’ Alice stood there in the Greek dress that flounced from her slim waist and moulded itself to her racing heart. ‘I am to take her

place as best I can— that is, if I marry the kyrios. I know it, everybody else knows it, so why pretend there might be any other reason why he should want to marry me? He’s rich enough to please himself and Fireglow needs a mistress, so why shouldn’t he indulge his fancy?’ Alice swirled to face the mirror once again and her smile was bright and her voice brittle as she added: ‘At least in your dress, Katerina, I look quite fancy. Yes, I shall wear it to the wedding, and I do thank you for the loan of it.’ ‘You are more than welcome, my lady.’ But Katerina was looking at Alice with rather worried eyes, as if she knew quite a lot of aching was going on under the velvet bodice of deep ruby red. Alice didn’t really know what to expect when she came down the stairs on Saturday to find Stefan waiting to escort her to the wedding of Aleko’s daughter. He looked superbly well groomed and intensely dark in a suit of navy blue with a wine-coloured shirt, and Alice almost missed her footing on those rough bottom stairs as his lithe good looks struck at her nerves. ‘Mind!.’ he said, and he flung out a hand for her to grasp. Her fineboned fingers were lost in his as he drew her towards him until her flounced skirt was touching the legs of his trousers. She felt the

deliberate movement of his eyes as he scrutinised her from her Greek scrolled hair (she had decided not to wear the beaded cap) to the toes of her shoes. Her heart was beating with excitement and she wanted more than anything for him to like the look of her and not blind that she dressed as a Greek girl. She prayed that he wouldn’t think she was masquerading as Timareta, and yet she wanted him to be as kind, as tender, as loving as he would have been with his Greek fiancee. ‘Where are the spectacles and the bun of hair?’ he mocked. ‘Is this the Alice Sheldon who assured me she was a plain and proper person, all dressed up in borrowed plumes.’ Her fingers tensed in his and she felt indescribably hurt by the way he spoke and looked her over, as if he found her overdressed … a tawdry imitation of the real Greek girl he had loved and lost. ‘Do you want me to go and change?’ she asked. ‘I—I knew I was making a mistake in wearing the dress.’ ‘A mistake that can’t be remedied, there just isn’t the time.’ He spoke curtly. ‘I don’t know what game you think you’re playing at, but you’ll just have to go through with it, my dear.’ ‘I’m not your dear,’ she gasped, making a wrenching effort to withdraw her hand from his but finding his grip impossible to break. ‘I was crazy

enough to think you’d be pleased if I made an effort to— to look like other girls at the wedding -‘ ‘But you aren’t one of them, are you?’ He leaned down to her and his eyes were dark and demanding. ‘You are the English girl I have decided to marry and I don’t ask that you masquerade as a Greek one -‘ ‘Then allow me to go and change,’ she began. ‘It won’t take me more than a few minutes—please, Stefan! I shall be unhappy in the dress now I know you don’t like me in it- -‘ ‘Like you in it?’ His eyes raked over her once again. ‘Was that why you wore it, in order to make me like you} Come, the horse and buggy will be waiting and I don’t wish to be late.’ There was nothing to do but go with him, and she even had to endure his hard hands around her waist as he lifted her into the buggy and then jumped in to take the reins. They went at a smart trot along the winding lanes through the highgrowing maquis that smelled of honey, where clusters of butterflies when disturbed fluttered into the air with a scarlet flurry of underwings. Far down Alice could see the blue-green sheen of the sea, and suddenly she wished she had gone in the amphibian with Alex. To marry Stefan, even if she loved him, was to lay in a store of heartache …

right now she could feel herself aching because of his cold, hard manner. ‘I can’t help it,’ she wanted to say, ‘because I’m not Timareta.’ She. sat there wretchedly in the Greek dress as they trotted through the narrow streets of whitewashed houses, with flowering vines trailing over the stonework, gay and green. They came to the courtyard of the chapel, with its huddle of helmet-like roofs, with tiles that hunched in the sun with a coppery gleam. The sky above was smoky mauve and gold and sheets of bougainvillaea hung down the sunstruck walls of crusted limewash. ‘We are late!’ Stefan growled as he lifted her down to the cobbles. ‘All the others are inside—come, don’t pull back! You are coming inside with me!’ Alice stood with him throughout the ceremony, though she was aware that most of the other women were seated together, with the dark-clad men in the seats behind. She watched bemused the strange and rather lovely ritual of the marriage, enacted there at an altar on which stood several lighted candles and ikons. The bride wore an embroidered gown in traditional patterns, with a long lace veil that hung to her ankles. The groom had an intense, tanned face and black curly hair and every time he glanced

at his bride, women in the congregation glanced at each ‘other as if to say that this was a love match and the boy wasn’t marrying the girl merely for her dowry of goats, a pair of good horses and a chest of fine linen and china, which the happy couple would take with them to Rhodes where they would set up house together. The wedding coronets were made of white flowers and were joined by a long white ribbon, and these were held above the heads of bride and groom as the priest spoke the vows and gold rings were exchanged and placed for always on their right hands. Then the couple circled the altar three times with the bridesmaids following with the lighted candles. The couple drank from a wine cup which was then handed to the best man. Two pairs of lips kissed the silver Bible, and the bells began to peal in the belfry of the chapel. Alice felt a cold shiver of emotion run through her and she didn’t dare to glance at Stefan, but felt sure his face was hard and distant as his thoughts. So would he have stood with Timareta to exchange lifelong vows and golden rings; so would he have shared the loving cup with her and given her the lingering glances that Marina’s groom was bestowing on her. Glances of pride and longing … of trust and promise. Outside in the sunlight everyone pelted the

laughing couple with rose petals and rice, and then bride and groom led the procession to the nearby taverna where the food tables were laid beneath the shade of the trees. On a turning spit a pig was roasting, and there were large platters of country bread, flagons of wine, and bottles of strawberry cordial and lime juice. Some of the women set to unloading the baskets that contained a variety of eatables and fruit. It was a bright and colourful scene, and a feeling of happiness was as palpable in the air as the warm sunlight. Alice wanted to enjoy it all, but she couldn’t relax and could feel the tension in her smile when she was introduced to the other guests and replied to them in Greek. ‘Chero poli? I am pleased to meet you.’ Her costume, despite Stefan’s disapproval, came in for some admiring comment. She felt him glance at. her in a sardonic way when an aunt of the bride’s wanted to know if the English guest of the kyrios had a little Greek blood in her veins, for it was unusual for a foreigner to look as nice as Alice did in the Greek dress. Stefan dryly translated the remark for Alice’s benefit and she felt herself flushing, and then because this was a wedding and she didn’t want to feel that cool distance between

them all day, she suddenly dared to tuck her arm through his and felt instantly the tensing of his body. ‘You don’t have to pretend in front of other people that you care for me,’ he said, and she let go his arm as if she had touched a live wire, stung and smarting from his assumption that she was putting on an act. She had to move away from him … and suddenly found herself walking away under the trees, gripping her skirt and hurrying through an archway that led into a lane. She didn’t pause or look back, and gradually the sounds of talking and laughter died away behind her and the scent of maquis was in the air as she climbed a hill and was all alone but for the grating throb of cicadas in the tall grass. Alice kept walking until she had put a safe distance between herself and the man who had hurt her in a way that was so personal, so acute, it was as if he had driven a knife into the pit of her stomach. She sank down on the grass in the shadow of an old squat windmill whose sails stood motionless beneath the conical roof. No one was working today because of the wedding, and she alone seemed cut off from the joy of if all. A sob rose in her throat and the forlorn tears rolled down her

cheeks. She hadn’t wanted to love him! He had made her do that, and now she was vulnerable to his every remark, his every mood, his rejection of her back there at the wedding where people were affected by the feeling of new, young, hopeful love in the air. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered to herself. ‘I can’t go through with it,’ Her thoughts travelled to England, to the neat, quiet flat where she could at least live in peace, without this kind of pain to bear. Some stones shifted and rattled down the track that led from the windmill, and she turned her head to gaze at some wild olive trees whose gnarled limbs clung to the hillside. A breeze blew the scent of maquis towards her, and her gaze drifted over a spill of spineless white caper and clumps of wild iris. Again there was the rattle of stones being dislodged, as if a goat was foraging for herbs in the grass. She sat up and pushed at her disarranged hair … she supposed she ought to be getting back to the wedding, for Stefan wouldn’t be pleased if all at once he couldn’t account for the whereabouts of his English guest. Alice was smoothing her hair when the foraging animal appeared from among the olive trees … her spine stiffened and a chilly sensation ran down it. Standing there looking at her, his lips drawn back

slightly from canine teeth, was a rough-haired dog with a bushy tail. Alice sat very still, aware that if she made a sudden move the animal might spring at her. From the look of its coat the dog had been living very much as a stray, and it was also obvious that he didn’t get very much to eat, for his rib cage was apparent under the dirty fur. Swallowing the dryness from her throat, and being very cautious about it, Alice took from her pocket the sandwich she had thoughtlessly, crammed into it when she had fled from the party. The two slices of bread were thick with roast chicken and removing the meat from the bread she began to toss it to the hungry-looking dog. But still he watched her with suspicious eyes, though his nostrils quivered as he caught the aroma of the meat. ‘Go on, boy,’ she said. ‘Eat it—I know you’re starving, you poor old chap.’ The animal was plainly tempted, but she was a human being and he had obviously not been treated too well by one of her sort. He moved, but still he showed his teeth, and Alice knew that if he sprang at her she would be badly mauled. ‘There’s a good boy,’ she said softly. ‘You aren’t going to hurt me, are you? I don’t mean you any harm, and the chicken will taste much better than I shall.’ The

dog gave a growl, but it wasn’t too threatening, and with his gaze still fixed upon Alice he moved nearer to the meat and no longer able to resist it, snapped it up in his teeth and ate as if he were starving. Alice then broke up the bread and flung that to him, which he ate with equal hunger. He drew nearer to her, as if hopeful for some more food, but she had no more and was now quite at the mercy of the animal’s mood. Taking a chance, she held out her hand to him. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I know you aren’t as tough as you look—that you’re lonely and hungry and no one loves you. I—I know how you feel, old lad. I know what it’s like when you’d like to get close to someone, only you’re afraid they might lash out at you. Who has lashed out at you? Someone you trusted who turned you out to fend for yourself. Poor old thing, you can come to me, because I won’t hurt you. I only wish I had a nice dish of meat for you, because you certainly look as if you need it—I wonder, are you the dog they said was wild and might kill the lambs? Left to roam about and go hungry, you will in the end, and you are really a nice dog who needs someone to trust in.’ Gently, keeping her voice steady, Alice coaxed the animal into coming within

reach of her hand. She felt his dry nose touch her fingers, heard the low-down growl in his throat, and then he was permitting her hand to fondle his shaggy head. He gave a little whine; and then as if to prove that he could also be trusted he laid himself down on the grass beside Alice and rested his nose on her knee. ‘God in heaven,’ a voice groaned, ‘you were taking a chance, my little fool!’ Alice turned her head and glanced up at the tall figure who stood above her on braced legs, as if preparing to leap to her defence. ‘Don’t raise your voice,’ she warned. ‘I think this poor wretched dog is too hungry—too starved for affection to really hurt anyone, but it could have been a man who turned him loose from a warm fire and a square meal. Men can be cruel brutes! I know!’ The dog quivered and cocked an eye at Stefan. He seemed to consider whether it was worth his while to go for him, and then settled down again with his grubby, flea-bitten head on Alice’s lap. ‘He looks as if he’s got fleas on him,’ Stefan remarked. ‘A good soapy bath will soon get rid of them,’ she rejoined. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I bring him home and feed him? He isn’t wild, he’s just unloved.’ ‘I’m glad you realise that it makes a fellow wild if

he isn’t loved.’ Alice stared up at Stefan and there was something in his face she had not seen before … her heart lurched, for what she saw in his eyes, what was softening his proud features, was a disturbing tenderness. He lowered himself to one knee beside her. ‘Why did you run away from the wedding?’ he asked. ‘Was it because of what I said —about pretending to care for me in front of other people? Weren’t you pretending?’ ‘I’ve never pretended anything,’ she said, and she couldn’t remove her eyes from his face. ‘I’m just me—Alice Sheldon. I was never anything else, but you seemed to want to believe that I was two-faced and only interested in being rich. I’m really like this poor old dog. I only ever wanted a roof over my head and a little bit of love. I—I’m afraid I can’t marry you, Stefan. I can’t live with a man who has no trust in me.’ ‘I can’t live without you, Alicia. I’ve known that from the day I brought you to Solitaria, and if I’ve been a boor to you today, it’s because— because I thought you were dressing up to try and look like someone you aren’t.’ ‘I know I’m not— Timareta,’ she broke in, raising her voice a little so the dog stirred and raised his head, and then lowered it when he saw that she wasn’t angry with him. ‘I’m tired of the comparison you make

between me and her—I know you loved her, and that you don’t love me -‘ ‘I love you like mad,’ he almost snarled. ‘I’ll kill you before I’ll let you leave Solitaria. You’re my Alicia and there’s no other woman like you in the world. I knew when I received that cablegram from your sister that you weren’t the one Damaskinos got engaged to, but I had to find some way to keep you with me -‘ ‘How did you know?’ she demanded. ‘Stefan?’ ‘I knew that Alex had met the man at functions and I asked if he had ever met the woman who was supposed to marry Damaskinos. He said he had seen her … that she was a tinted blonde with chinablue painted eyes, that she looked rather like a film starlet, or a copy of one. The Alice Sheldon I knew didn’t look like that—never had and never could!’ ‘And yet you—you were a brute to me today.’ Alice could have hit him for making her suffer so, and yet at the same time she wanted to kiss him. ‘When you saw me in this dress you looked as if you could have ripped it off my back.-‘ ‘That’s the way I felt,’ he agreed. ‘I want you looking like you, not some imitation of a girl I once cared for.’ ‘You adored her,’ Alice exclaimed, half in agony. ‘I did what Alex said, I put her on a pedestal instead of,

kissing her. If I’d ever done that, I might have found out what I really wanted from a woman. Depth, intelligence, compassion for the underdog.’ Stefan glanced at the canine bag of bones in Alice’s compassionate lap. ‘He isn’t going to let mc change places with him, is he?’ ‘Not right now,’ she agreed, fondling the shaggy head, and then giving Stefan a rather uncertain smile. ‘Are you jealous of a poor hungry dog?’ ‘I’m hungry too,’ he growled. ‘Hungry for you! You aren’t going back to England, my girl. You are going to stay and marry me, and you can have just about anything you ask for. I’ll make you love me. You’ll have to in the end, or die of exhaustion.’ That made her laugh. ‘Oh, Stefan—Stefan, you crazy Greek fool! You don’t have to buy me, and you certainly don’t have to kill me with love. I want it to be a sharing thing—don’t you see? I want to do my share of giving. I don’t want to take it from you, darling. I—I want to be your other half.’ ‘My other half,’ he murmured, and his dark eyes began to sparkle as he reached out a hand and touched her brown hair. ‘I suppose you want to keep this fleabag of a dog, eh? It’s a good thing he came to you, guzel, because it was on . the cards he’d be shot as

being wild. It took you to tame him, eh?’ She nodded, smiling. ‘I didn’t know I had such a talent for taming rogue males.’ Stefan drew his fingers down her cheek to her lips. ‘My’ Alicia.’ His voice was warm and savagely tender. ‘You have made a place for yourself deep in my heart. You are like no one else I have ever knew. You are mine!’ ‘Yours,’ she sweetly echoed, knowing at last that it was utterly true.