all jumped as someone knocked on the back door.
‘Maybe it’s the donkey,’ Stella whispered, making them all laugh as Winnie crossed the kitchen and pulled the door wide.
It wasn’t the donkey. It was a man, and by the looks of his scowl, an unimpressed one. He looked dressed for farming in breeches, braces and a loose cheesecloth shirt, and if he wasn’t scowling he’d probably be quite attractive.
‘Kalimera,’ Winnie said, hesitantly trying out her rudimentary Greek.
He let forth a torrent of fast, unintelligible Greek. When he’d finished, she frowned and shook her head regretfully.
‘Err … signomi … my Greek is awful.’
He stared at her in irate silence.
‘Signomi …’
Winnie glanced over her shoulder for help from the others, but found them both wide-eyed and tongue-tied by the arrival of the stranger in their midst.
‘Help me out here?’ she muttered.
‘Feliz navidad?’ Stella tried from her seat at the table, and the stranger lifted his eyebrows and sighed heavily.
‘You just wished me Merry Christmas in Spanish. It’s early May, and this is Greece.’
‘You speak English,’ Winnie said, thinking that he might have made that clear right away rather than let her struggle for his own amusement.
‘Better than you speak Greek, evidently,’ he said. ‘I take it you’re the new owners?’
Frankie came to stand beside Winnie. ‘We are. I’m Frankie, and this is Winnie. And you are …?’ Winnie admired her friend’s polite, cool tone.
‘I’m the guy who rescued your bloody donkey. Poor darn thing would have died in this heat without any water.’ There was an unmissable hint of an Australian twang to his pronunciation. ‘He’s in my olive grove with Chachi when you can be arsed to fetch him.’
Oh, right. Winnie felt her fists ball until her fingernails dug into her palms. ‘Look, Mr … I don’t know your name because you didn’t bother to tell us … we only arrived half an hour ago and I’ve already been out to look for the donkey. It isn’t our fault that Ajax didn’t make proper arrangements for him.’
The guy looked bored. ‘Typical women. Blame someone else and it’ll all be all right.’
Winnie drew in a sharp breath. She’d had enough of men pissing her off back home, there was no way some stranger was going to rain on her parade on the first morning of their brand-new life.
‘Typical man, shooting your mouth off without knowing the facts.’ She stuck her chin out at him and crossed her arms across her chest as Stella came to stand on her other side.
He looked at all three of them for a second, and then seemed to lose interest and turned to leave.
‘I won’t charge you for the olives he’s eaten. Consider it a neighbourly welcome-to-the-island gift.’
He didn’t even turn around as he spoke, and Stella said ‘Rude bastard,’ more than loud enough for him to hear as she closed the door with a pointed slam.
‘He’s our new neighbour?’ Frankie said, pulling three wine glasses out of the wall cupboard.
‘Sounds that way.’ Winnie reached to get the chilled bottle of white out of the fridge.
Stella rooted around in the cutlery drawer until she pulled out a corkscrew and waved it in the air in triumph. Flopping back at the kitchen table, she cracked the wine and filled their glasses. After a pause for them all to take a much-needed first sip, she held her glass out between them in a toast.
‘To our first day on Skelidos.’
‘And the fact that our donkey isn’t dead,’ Frankie said, touching her glass to the others.
‘And the fact that we have a grotty ass of an Australian neighbour,’ Winnie added. ‘Bloody man and his generalisations.’
Stella eyed Winnie slyly over her wine glass. ‘He was quite hot though. In a grotty-ass kind of way.’
‘Was he?’ Winnie took a good gulp of wine. ‘I didn’t notice.’
‘You so did,’ Frankie laughed. ‘All that red-faced, stuttery Greek and Lady Diana eye flutters.’
Winnie rolled her eyes. ‘All right, so maybe I thought he was OK until he opened his mouth. Now I just think he’s an arrogant gobshite who’s kidnapped my donkey.’ She shot a look at Stella. ‘At least I didn’t wish him Merry Christmas. In Spanish.’
Stella shrugged. ‘Pity I didn’t know how to say piss off instead.’
‘I’m going to learn before I go and get The Fonz back.’
Frankie started to laugh. ‘His donkey’s name is Chachi. Fonzy and Chachi?’
‘Someone around here was clearly a Happy Days fan.’ Stella grinned. ‘I wonder where Joanie is?’
Winnie reached for the bottle and topped up their glasses. ‘She probably upped and left because she couldn’t stand living with a misogynistic pig.’
Stella and Frankie both looked at her levelly across the table. They didn’t say as much, but Winnie knew from their eyes that they were hoping that she wasn’t going to stay angry for ever.
‘Shall we go and burn our bras in his olive orchard?’ Stella said.
Frankie nodded. ‘Or chain ourselves to his trees until he apologises?’
Winnie shook her head, laughing softly into her wine glass. She might not have much time for men at the moment, but these two crazy, fabulous women restored her faith in the world every damn day.
Pushing her chair back with a satisfying scrape against the stone flags, she stood up and rolled her shoulders.
‘Hold my coat, girls. I’m going to get our donkey.’
Winnie marched out of the villa, buoyed up by a mixture of wine, lingering first-day euphoria and indignation. What happened to welcoming new neighbours with a cup of sugar and a smile? What happened to the famed Greek hospitality? But then he wasn’t Greek by the sound of it, and there probably wasn’t any sugar in his cupboards either; he didn’t strike Winnie as a man with an ounce of sweetness about him. From their first meeting she’d already deduced that he had no manners and even less in the way of small talk. His only redeemable feature seemed to be the fact that he was passably attractive, and if she was pushed, she’d acknowledge that he must have a shred of decency because he’d taken The Fonz in when he wasn’t obliged to.
Meandering through the tables out front on the beach-bar terrace, she paused to get
