The Passionate Greek (7 page)

She turned on her heel and stalked away from
him. In her confusion she realised she was at the wrong end of the
terrace to gain entrance to the villa. The only exit left to her a
low gate beyond which was a flight of stone steps she knew led down
only to the sea. She could not retrace her steps without passing
Nicos. Feeling more than a little foolish she hesitated. She heard
his sharp voice behind her calling her name.

She turned briefly to see he was on his feet
and looked furious. She had had enough of confrontation for one
night. She grasped the handle of the gate only to find it locked.
Without a thought she swung her long legs over the gate and fled,
down the steep stones steps, stumbling in her stilettos and
clinging to the rail for support.

‘Come back! Don’t go down there.’ The sound
of his voice propelled her on, the only thought in her head to get
away from him.

She rushed headlong downwards in a mindless
panic, conscious now of the sound of his feet behind her. The
handrail she was clinging to came to an abrupt end and where the
last step should have been there was a steep drop. She fell
awkwardly on to the sand. The fall knocked the breath from her and
shocked, she began to sob. Suddenly Nicos was there on the sand his
strong arms about her and he was lifting her up.

Holding her tightly to him, he spoke softly
into her ear; tell me you are all right? I would never forgive
myself if anything happened to you. Why did you run like that?’ He
held her till her sobs subsided, rocking her gently and stroking
her hair. Suddenly aware of his closeness she tried to struggle
free but Nicos held her to him.

‘Let me go,’ she said weakly.

He half released her and with one hand
cupped her cheek and gently stroked her face wiping away the tears.
‘You know I would never hurt you. Why did you take off like
that?’

‘You were shouting at me.’ Even to her own
ears she sounded childish. ‘You looked furious.

‘I wasn’t angry. I was just worried. We keep
that gate locked because the men are working on the steps at the
bottom. I had terrible visions of you falling and lying injured on
the beach. I only wanted to stop you. It’s dangerous in the dark’
Without thinking he had used the old Greek endearment for her. ‘I
can’t afford to lose another nanny,’ he said softy teasing and was
rewarded with a muffled sob and choked laugh.

‘What on earth were you going down there for
anyway,’ he asked. A look of understanding crossed his face. ‘Ah,
you didn’t want to admit you had flounced off in the wrong
direction.’ But his voice was low and tender, just the way he used
to be with her, All the while he was talking he was stroking her
face and now she felt his hand trail softly down her neck to her
bare shoulder.

‘I will have to give you a tour of the
island tomorrow to refresh your memory. Had you forgotten we never
came down here? The rocks here are slippery and dangerous.’

He was stroking her shoulder in a soft
circular motion. Melanie, mesmerized, felt his hand slip under the
silk top of her dress and felt his touch was on the soft mound of
her breast. He pinched her nipple between his fingers, gently at
first then harder, and she felt control slipping away from her,
swept away by surging sexual need of him.

‘His was looking into her eyes intently and
questioningly, as if trying to gauge her desire for him. ‘I want
you. I’ve always wanted you.’ His voice was harsh with need. His
lips crushed down to hers and she opened her mouth willingly under
his probing tongue. He dropped his head to the base of her throat
and began licking, at first gently, then moving down and down to
her breast till she felt his teeth bite her nipple. His arms had
dropped below her waist, folding her to him as he moved her
rhythmically against him. ‘Say it’s me you want. Say it, say it,’
he groaned.

Wordlessly, she pulled him down to the sand
with her and he was tugging the flame silk chiffon from her body.
His own clothes were heaped on the sand. He knelt over her and
almost reverently parted her. They moved in unison, locked in a
world where only their desire for each other mattered.

Melanie could not judged how long they lay
there afterward, their passion spent. It might have been ten
minutes, it might have been an hour. They were silent, wrapped in
their own thoughts. He no longer touched her. For her part she did
not want to meet his eyes. Regret swept over her. At last he spoke.
His voice seemed to come from a distance. ‘I suppose I should say
sorry.’

‘There’s no need,’ Melanie said in a tight
voice. ‘I was as much to blame.’

‘You can’t fix something that’s broken with
sex.’ His words jarred Melanie into saying ‘I didn’t realise we
were trying to fix anything.’ He was on his feet and pulling on his
clothes. Melanie awkwardly reached for her dress. He bent down and
handed it to her. ‘If you like to go first I will wait down here
until you are back in the villa.’ Melanie felt they were like two
strangers trying desperately to be polite to each other. She
dressed hurriedly in deep embarrassment. As she turned to go he
caught her hand. His expression was unfathomable to her...

‘I never meant this to happen, you must
believe me.’ Melanie, at a loss for words, gazed at him miserably.
Suddenly, he pulled her towards him and held her close. Melanie,
near tears, let him. ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he was muttering
into her hair, burying her head into his shoulder. ‘But there are
things I need from the woman I am going to spend the rest of my
life with. If you knew you would understand.’ He stroked her hair.
‘Don’t you know I would have given anything for things to have
stayed the same as they were between us?’

Melanie looked up at him. ‘But you didn’t
give anything, did you?’ she said sadly. ‘You gave me lawyers,
blocked phone calls and sent my letters back unopened.’ His mouth
tightened and the hand stroking her hair stilled. His look
soured.

‘The letters marked Her Majesty Prison?’ he
said bitterly. Melanie felt her face flame. Freeing herself from
his hold, she said ‘If you had bothered to read those letters you
might have understood.’

‘Understand!’ His voice rose. ‘I understand
that you lied in court for another man. You committed a criminal
offence, you were sent to prison for perjury and you want me to
understand?’’ His tone was incredulous. Melanie, stung beyond
endurance, felt her anger rising. ‘I am not even going to attempt
to answer that,’ she hissed. ‘You are determined to believe the
worst. So believe the worst.’ She spun away from him and made for
the steps. He grabbed her arm roughly and pulled her back.

‘I would have stood by you through thick and
thin. But not for another man. I will not stand for deception in a
woman. I won’t have excuses. And I demand absolute loyalty. To me
loyalty is the most important thing.’

‘Oh, it is, is it?’ Melanie seethed. ‘Well,
let me tell you something. You don’t know the meaning of the word.
Loyalty is keeping a promise and standing by it no matter your
personal loss. Loyalty is not going back on your word even when it
costs you months of your life and everything you hold dear.’ As she
spoke her anger faded and tears came in to her eyes. ‘Perhaps you
and I never really knew each other,’ she said sadly.

She stepped away from him and he let her go.
At the foot of the steps to the villa she turned to look at him. He
was staring after her, a look of profound regret on his face. The
next morning he had gone.

Anna delivered the news grim faced as if she knew it
was Melanie’s fault. ‘Mr Nicos no stay,’ she said accusingly. ‘You
no have nice dinner last night? You no wear something pretty?’
Melanie, who was feeding Electra her breakfast yoghurt, stopped the
spoon half way to her daughter’s baby mouth. She was not expecting
this. A sense of loss assailed her, startling her with its
intensity. ‘But he say you stay here,’ Anna went on, sounding
mollified. ‘Maybe he come back soon.’

Melanie doubted it. Nicos, she thought,
would stay away until Gabby was back to look after Electra and she,
Melanie, was safely off the island.

Anna’s next announcement bewildered Melanie.
‘Mr Nicos got baby sitter for Electra.’

‘What for?’ she blurted.

‘He say he show you island again when he
comes back and he take you out on boat. That one he like to sail.
Need good girl to sit with baby. We get Maria, granddaughter
Andreas. Very good girl’

Melanie was bewildered. When Nicos had told
her the evening before at dinner that he would show her over the
island again she had presumed it was for Electra’s sake, so that
she would know where to safely take the baby.

But take her on his boat? She knew it was
his pride and joy. Not the glossy super yacht so often moored in
the world’s pleasure spots from the French Riviera and the Greek
isles in summer, to the Caribbean in winter. This was a sloop
rigged sailing boat fast under wind and bare of anything that
impeded its swift progress through the waves.

He would teach her to sail it, he had
promised in their happy days, warning her not to expect luxury
below. ‘It’s very basic,’ he explained. ‘Built for ocean racing. I
usually don’t take people sailing with me. They expect carpets and
power showers,’ he had said dismissively. ‘You will not be like
that.’ Melanie had wondered if by “people” he meant other women and
had to suppress her jealousy. He was a man in his thirties. Of
course, there had been other women before her.

But here was Anna telling her that Nicos had
intended to take her sailing with him when he was back on the
island again.

‘Well,’ she sighed to herself, ‘we certainly
sailed into rough waters last night.’

Electra, her mother distracted, had upturned
the yoghurt pot on the table of her high chair and was drawing
patterns in the mess with her spoon. Melanie mentally chastised
herself for allowing thoughts of Nicos to take her mind away from
her baby.

She determined to put the enigma of Nicos
out of her mind. The most important thing in her life now was
Electra. Whatever he thought about her now after last night’s
outburst she knew one thing for certain. Nicos had said she could
stay with Electra and she knew him well enough to know that he
would not go back on his word.

Two weeks passed and Nicos did not return to
the island. For Melanie, immersed in the delight of caring for her
daughter, the time flew by. She could not imagine that she would
have any use for a baby sitter but Maria proved to be a sweet girl
and Melanie, to give her something to do, took to leaving her to
watch Electra during the baby’s afternoon nap. While Electra slept
Melanie swam in the cool, clear waters around the island or
sunbathed on the island’s many remote beaches.

It seemed to her that every day Electra
showed some new grasp of the world around her. She was growing fast
and when sometimes Melanie found herself wishing she could share
these moments with her baby’s father she quickly put it out of her
mind.

Nicos had been very clear that once her job
for the summer was over she was never to see Electra again. The
thought overwhelmed her and sickened her heart. At her lowest ebb
she even thought she hated him for it. She could not help it.
‘There are times when I want to kill him,’ she thought savagely,
telling herself that with any luck Gabby would be back, broken arm
mended, and she , Melanie, could be off the island and never set
eyes on Nicos again.

But she had these few precious weeks with
her daughter and she meant to make the most of them. Together she
and her daughter explored the island. Electra loved to go down to
the small harbor where the gaily-colored fishing boats clustered.
The brown skinned fishermen waved and called out to her in Greek
and delightedly she would wave her chubby little hand in
return.

On days like this Melanie conceded to
herself that she had been right to give her daughter up even if she
had never fully calculated the pain the loss of her child would
bring her.

‘’These are her people, her heritage,’ she
acknowledged to herself. ‘This island will one day belong to her
and its inhabitants will be her family. I have no right to keep her
from that.’

Melanie tried not to count the days she had
left with Electra. On a bright island morning she strapped her
daughter into her buggy and adjusting the gaily patterned cotton
canopy to shield her from the hot sun, set off down to the harbor.
She was concentrating on easing the buggy over the bumps in the
rutted track and it was not until she reached the smooth tarmac of
the harbor walk that she looked up and out to sea.

Nicos’s deep keeled sailing boat was moored
out in the bay as usual, its sails furled. But beyond it, further
out in the deeper waters of the bay the “Athena”, Nicos’s 200 ft
motor yacht stood at anchor, its steep white sides gleaming in the
morning sun. Melanie’s heart lurched. Electra was pointing
excitedly at it and chortling with excitement.

‘Yes, Daddy’s boat,’ she said absently her
mind in a whirl, hoping against hope that only the captain and crew
were aboard and not Nicos. But as she looked she could see a motor
launch speeding away from the yacht towards the harbor's landing
stage, a familiar figure at the wheel. Nicos was back.

She was dimly aware before she turned
hurriedly away that he had a passenger beside him. She began to
wheel the buggy as quickly as she could back to the path that led
up to the villa. Electra, her morning’s fun curtailed, set up an
indignant wail.

But the buggy encumbered Melanie’s haste and
her speed was no match for Nicos’s long stride. Suddenly, he was
beside her, a restraining hand on the buggy. With barely greeting
for Melanie he unfastened the straps that held Electra and lifting
her high in the air swung her round and round as she squealed with
joy. Laughing, he carried her back to where the motor launch was
tied up, leaving Melanie to trail awkwardly behind him.