seemingly bottomless blue crater, the dark looming cliffs of ancient volcanic ash with their white buildings around the crater’s rim like icing on a cake. Along with the famous sunsets.
Athena loved it for all those reasons and more, for its rich ancient history and for the elemental power of the weather, the wind so wild at times, it threatened to hurl you from the crater’s edge. As she felt now. Tossed by the winds of fortune.
She’d been so right to come.
She felt real here. Humbled.
Besides, where else would she go?
Back to Melbourne where she’d grown up after her parents had divorced, where all her school friends were, or to the tiny dot of a village from where her father had come, that she remembered only one time visiting as a child? She could go to either, but she would be known. Friends in Melbourne. Family in the village to welcome their long-lost relative. Her aunts and uncles and cousins many times removed. There would be hugs and tears and concern for how she was coping, and that would be lovely, but there would be no room to think.
And after this morning’s revelations, more than ever, she needed to think.
Whereas she could breathe here, on this magical island in the midst of the Aegean. She could think. And right now she desperately needed to do both.
‘May I?’
It was the voice that compelled her to look up, rather than just wave her agreement to share her table as she usually would, the voice that punctuated the hubbub of the chatter around her. Rich and thick, like the grounds in the bottom of her tiny coffee cup, and so deep she could almost feel its vibrations. A voice that suited him, she discovered a moment later. Immaculate was the word that sprang first into her mind. Tall and dark, with chiselled jaw and thick dark hair closely swept back at the sides, longer and sculpted in waves at the top.
But it was his eyes that hers had to return to for a second look. Dark and long-lashed, they held too much to be the eyes of someone simply looking for a place to sip their coffee, and an electric jolt zapped down her spine.
His lips turned up into a smile and her brain kicked back in.
‘Oh, yes, of course.’
He curled his long frame onto the stool alongside her, the outside of his leg brushing hers, a kiss of sudden heat that made her jump. She pulled her legs away, took a calming breath.
‘You like your coffee strong.’
It wasn’t a question.
She nodded without looking up, her fingers cradling the tiny cup. ‘It helps me think.’
‘Thinking is good,’ he said, taking a sip of his own coffee before adding, ‘But you also need to find something that makes you smile.’
She looked across at him quizzically. ‘Excuse me, but do I know you?’
‘Do I need to know you to know you look sad? Pensive? Like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders?’
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t believe anyone was talking to her this way, let alone a stranger.
‘No,’ he said into the silence between them, swirling his own coffee in his big hand. Long tapered fingers, she noticed, dusted with tiny dark hairs and finished with neatly trimmed nails. ‘We’ve never met,’ he said, without taking his dark eyes from hers. ‘There is no way I would have forgotten, if we had.’
His eyes and words combined so it felt like a velvet glove stroking its way down her spine, and it was so long since she’d felt anything close to a spark of attraction, an eternity it seemed, that she could almost forgive him for initiating a conversation no stranger had a right to.
And for all she knew there should be no reason to stay and talk, her coffee finished, for some reason she was tempted to linger, and experience these foreign feelings just that bit longer.
‘My name is Alexios,’ he offered, and she knew he was in no rush to go anywhere in a hurry either.
‘Athena,’ she said.
‘Ah. Goddess of wisdom and craft.’
She smiled. ‘Not to mention goddess of war.’
He conceded her point with a tilt of his head, his dark hair glossy under the sun’s light. ‘True enough, yet possessing a calm temperament and moving slowly to anger, and then only to fight for just causes.’
‘You know your ancient Greek mythology,’ she said, impressed.
He shrugged. ‘I am Greek,’ he said, confirming what she’d suspected, even though they’d been speaking in English. ‘It would be ignorant of me to be unaware of my heritage.’
‘And so, Alexios—’ She thought for a moment. ‘That would make you a defender of mankind, am I right?’
He smiled, and again she was taken aback by how good-looking he was when he smiled, his lips framed by his shadowed face, darker in the cleft of his jaw, while the unbuttoned neck of his shirt shifted softly in the breeze, drawing her eyes further south, the stark white linen contrasting with the slice of olive skin of his throat and chest.
‘The goddess of war and the defender of mankind,’ he said. ‘The world would be a safer place in our joint hands, don’t you think?’
And suddenly she realised she’d been staring at him and she looked hastily away, knowing he was flirting with her, and finding herself enjoying it, even if she wasn’t sure how to respond. She didn’t do flirting. It felt like for ever since she’d felt carefree enough and interested enough to make a first move, let alone a second. ‘I don’t know about that.’
A couple squeezed past then, an American and his wife, fresh from a cruise ship and full of excited chatter at the view, and she took advantage of the distraction to shift her chair and turn her attention out over the caldera again, feigning interest in the sideways sway of the cruise ships at anchor, and the steady movement of tenders to and fro. She was nothing more than a temporary diversion in her visitor’s day. He’d soon finish his coffee and move on.
‘I have a problem,’ he said, refusing to cooperate with her expectations. ‘Maybe the woman named for the goddess of wisdom could help me.’
She looked back at him, setting her eyes to narrow, suddenly suspicious. ‘I don’t see how.’
‘You see, soon the sun will set on the most romantic island in the world, and I am eating alone.’
‘And what does that have to do with me?’
‘You could help me, very much, if you would agree to dine with me.’
She sighed, taking one last look over the sparkling waters of the caldera, feeling disappointed now. Conversation with a stranger who made her skin tingle over a shared table was one thing, dinner was another. She’d heard stories about the men who preyed on lonely women promising them all kinds of romance, and attraction was just the kind of thing that would tempt a woman to let down her guard.
And after this morning’s stunning revelations, she had more reason than ever to be wary. He couldn’t know. Nobody
