works—’ if she works, he thought to himself‘—her friends …’ his jaw hardened ‘…boyfriends. Report back to me in twenty-four hours.’
It was past midnight when Louise arrived back at her apartment in the Châtelet-Les-Halles area of Paris. Ideally located close enough to the Musée du Louvre that she could walk to work, it had been her home for the past four years, and she let out a heartfelt sigh as she walked through the front door. Her flat was on the sixth floor, in the eaves of the building. The sloping ceilings made the compact interior seem even smaller, but the view over the city from the tiny balcony was wonderful.
The view was the last thing on her mind, however, as she dumped her suitcase in the hall and kicked off her shoes. The past forty-eight hours—in which she had flown to Athens and back again, and had that tense meeting with Dimitri—had been tiring, not to mention fraught with emotions.
As she entered the living room Madeleine, her Siamese cat, stretched elegantly before springing down from a cushion on the wide windowsill.
‘Don’t give me that look,’ Louise murmured as she lifted the cat into her arms and Madeleine fixed her with a reproachful stare from slanting eyes the colour of lapis-lazuli. ‘You weren’t abandoned. Benoit promised he would feed you twice a day, and I bet he made a fuss of you.’
Her neighbour, who lived in the flat below, had been a great help recently, offering to feed Madeleine while Louise spent time with Tina at the hospital. She would visit her mother after work tomorrow. For now, she knew she should eat something, but her appetite was as depleted as the interior of her fridge. A quick shower followed by bed beckoned, and half an hour later she slid between crisp white sheets and did not bother to make even a token protest when Madeleine sprang up onto the counterpane and curled up in the crook of her knees.
Sleep should have come quickly, but it eluded her as thoughts chased round inside her head. Seeing Dimitri again had been so much more painful than she had been prepared for. It had been seven years, she reminded herself angrily. She should be over him by now—was over him. And what was there to be over, anyway? The brief time they had spent together had hardly constituted a relationship.
But as she lay in bed, watching silver moonbeams slant through the gap in the curtains, she could not hold back her memories.
She had gone to Eirenne for the Easter holidays. Her friends at university had tried to persuade her to stay in Sheffield, but she’d had exams coming up and had guessed she wouldn’t get any studying done if her flatmates planned to hold parties every night. Besides, she had planned to spend her nineteenth birthday with her mother.
But when she had arrived at the island she’d found Tina and Kostas about to leave for a holiday in Dubai. It wasn’t the first time Tina had forgotten her birthday, and Louise hadn’t bothered to remind her. All her life she had taken second place to her mother’s lovers. At least she would be able to get her assignment finished, she’d consoled herself. But she had been lonely on Eirenne with only the villa’s staff for company, and she had missed her new university friends.
One afternoon, bored with her studies, she had decided to ride around the island on her pushbike. Eirenne was a small island, but on previous visits she had never strayed far from the grounds of the opulent villa that Kostas had built for his mistress.
The road that ran around the island was little more than a bumpy track and Louise had been carefully avoiding the potholes when a motorbike had suddenly shot round the bend and swerved to avoid hitting her. In panic she had lost her balance and fallen, scraping her arm on the rough ground as she landed.
‘Theos, why weren’t you looking where you were going?’
She had recognised the angry voice, even though she had only met Kostas’s son Dimitri a handful of times when he had happened to visit his father at the same time as she had been staying on Eirenne. She had never really spoken to him before, although she had overheard the arguments he’d had with Kostas about his relationship with Tina.
‘You nearly crashed into me,’ she’d defended herself, her temper rising when he grabbed her arm none too gently and hauled her to her feet. ‘Road hog! Some birthday this is turning out to be,’ she had added grumpily. ‘I wish I’d stayed in England.’
For a moment his unusual olive-green eyes darkened. But then he threw back his head and laughed.
‘So you do speak? You’ve always seemed to be struck dumb whenever I’ve met you.’
‘I suppose you think I’m over-awed by you,’ she said, flushing. Not for the world would she allow him to know that since she was sixteen she’d had a massive crush on him.
He stared down at her, his eyes glinting with amusement in his handsome face. ‘And are you over-awed, Loulou?’
‘Of course not. I’m annoyed. My bike’s got a puncture, thanks to you. And I’m going to have a lovely bruise on my shoulder.’
‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, noticing where she had scraped her arm. ‘Come back to the house and I’ll clean that graze and fix your tyre.’
‘But the Villa Aphrodite is that way,’ she said in a puzzled voice when he turned in the opposite direction. ‘Where are you staying, anyway? I haven’t seen you around. I thought Kostas had banned you from the villa after your last row with him.’
‘It suits me never to set foot inside that tasteless monstrosity my father has built for his tart.’ The anger returned to Dimitri’s voice. ‘I’m staying at the old house my grandfather built many years ago. He named the house Iremia, which means tranquillity. But the island is no longer a tranquil place since your mother came here.’
Leaving his motorbike by the side of the track, he pushed Louise’s bicycle. She followed him in silence, daunted by the rigid set of his shoulders. But his temper had cooled by the time they arrived at the house, and he was a polite host, inviting her in and instructing his butler to serve them drinks on the terrace.
The house was nestled in a dip in the land, surrounded by pine trees and olive groves so that it was hidden from view. It was not surprising that Louise had never seen it before. Unlike the ultra-modern and to Louise’s mind unattractive Villa Aphrodite, Iremia was a beautiful old house built in a classical style, with coral-pink walls and cream-coloured wooden shutters at the windows. The gardens were well-established, and through the trees the cobalt-blue sea sparkled in the distance.
‘Hold still while I put some antiseptic on your arm,’ Dimitri instructed after he had led her out to the terrace and indicated that she should sit on one of the sun-loungers.
His touch was light, yet a tiny tremor ran through Louise at the feel of his hands on her skin. His dark head was bent close to hers, and she was fiercely aware of the tang of his aftershave mingled with another subtly masculine scent that caused her heart to race.
He glanced up and met her gaze. ‘I hardly recognised you,’ he said, his smile doing strange things to her insides. ‘The last time I saw you, you were the proverbial ugly duckling.’
‘Thanks,’ she muttered sarcastically, flushing as she remembered the thick braces she’d worn on her teeth for years. Thankfully she’d had them removed now, and her teeth were perfectly straight and white.
As a teenager she had been slow to develop, and had despaired about her boyish figure, but in the last year or so she had finally gained the womanly curves she had longed for. However, she still lacked self-confidence, and
