Deadly Rivals

It was a deep relief when he helped her on to the pillion and swung in front of her. ‘Hold on to my waist!’ he ordered over his shoulder, and she tentatively slid her arms round him as he kick-started the powerful machine. His waist was slim, in spite of the leather jacket. Her fingers met on the other side.

A moment later they were riding up the stony private road to the public road running past the villa. It was only when they were out on the highway that Max let the throttle out and the motorbike really put on speed.

The ride was exhilarating. Olivia clung to Max’s strong body, feeling as if they were moulded together, letting herself move with him, leaning this way and then that as he took the corners, the wind blowing her short hair up into golden filaments, her thighs forced against his, his blue jeans rubbing against her bare skin.

They drove past the lush olive groves which grew all over the island, past whitewashed houses set back from the road among orange and lemon trees, the dark tongues of cypress trees curling up against the blue sky. The air was full of the scent of flowers. The heat of the day was beginning to intensify now that the sun was riding higher in the sky, and Olivia felt perspiration trickling down her back, her thin yellow top sticking to her hot skin under the over-large leather jacket.

Corfu was a fascinating town, the architecture an international muddle of styles: a Byzantine church here, an elegant French ironwork balcony there, a Venetian subtlety down near the harbour, and elsewhere neoclassical Greek columns to be glimpsed beside plain modern villas. They even passed a flat green space where you could see English cricket being played, with men in white clothes running between the two wickets and people in straw hats sitting in deckchairs to watch, lazily clapping.

Corfu’s history was complex; many races had come here over the centuries and left their mark behind them without making much impression on the Corfiots themselves, who continued to live as they always had, in the sun, growing their olives, looking after their sheep and goats on the herb-scented hills, where thyme and rosemary and basil grew wild, fishing in the rich blue sea, cooking in the tavernas and hotels, cheerfully accepting the tourists who flocked there.

As they rode down towards the harbour they passed a horse-drawn carriage slowly plodding along, under the fluttering awning a dreamy couple gazing out at the shops and tavernas they passed. The noise of Max’s motorbike made the horse start in alarm, tossing its head, and plunging sideways across the road. The driver swore in Greek and reined his horse back tightly, soothing it with clicking tongue and murmured reassurance, then, as Max roared past, shouted angrily at him in Greek.

Max shouted back in the same language, grinning at him.

The driver waved a fist at him, but was laughing now.

‘What did you say to him?’ Olivia asked.

‘You don’t want to know!’ Max turned his head to look at her, his dark eyes teasing. ‘You must learn to speak Greek.’

‘I am learning,’ she said, then admitted, smiling, ‘Slowly.’

‘Well, I shouldn’t learn what he just said!’ Max said and laughed, slowing as they arrived down at the harbour.

His yacht was bigger than she had expected, and very impressive: white, sleek, fast and amazingly compact both in the two cabins and in the engine-room. It had been designed to be sailed by one person, but obviously it could hold several comfortably. It had sails too, which meant that Max could choose the form of power he preferred in whatever weather he found.

‘She’s wonderful,’ Olivia said after the short tour of the vessel. ‘I envy you. I’ve only got a dinghy.’

‘Have you ever sailed around here?’

She shook her head.

‘Would you like to?’

Her golden eyes glowed eagerly. ‘I’d love to!’

He smiled at her, charm in the curl of his mouth. ‘OK, give me a chance to check my radio, then we’ll get under sail. There’s enough wind today. Why don’t you go and buy some food? Just bread, some cheese, a little salad— tomatoes and onions, a lettuce—and some fruit for a dessert. We’ll fish on our way, catch our lunch and cook it in the frying-pan. How does that sound?’

‘Blissful,’ she breathed, and his dark eyes glimmered.

‘I can see you and I have the same tastes. Do you know Paki? Why don’t we head that way? Have you been there?’

She turned her head out to sea, remembering the little islet which wasn’t far from the coast of Corfu. ‘Once, some years ago, by motorboat from the harbour here. I have a vague memory of a very green place, very peaceful.’

‘When I was a boy we spent our holidays on Corfu— we had relatives here—and we always sailed over to Paki, every time we came. There are underwater caves therefascinating places. If we have time I’ll show you. I stayed on Paki for weeks a few years back, did nothing but catch lobsters and fish for mullet and snapper all day. When I wasn’t fishing, I sunbathed and slept.’

‘It sounds wonderful.’ It sounded like the perfect holiday—she could imagine how it must have been. Paki was a tiny island covered in olive trees and vines and the maquis, that tangle of grass, herbs and spiky shrubs which in the sun gave out such an astounding scent, a scent which travelled for miles and met you long before you reached the island and which was the very essence of the Mediterranean coasts.

He watched her sensitive, revealing face intently, then said in a gentle voice, ‘Off you go and do the shopping— have you got any money on you?’

She shook her head anxiously.

He laughed and produced some notes from a pocket in the leather jacket. ‘This should be enough. Don’t go too far, and don’t be long. I won’t take more than ten minutes to check out my radio. Oh, yes…wait a second…’ He dived out of sight and came back a moment later with a red string bag. ‘Take this, you’ll need it.’

Olivia set off along the busy harbour, watching gulls chasing their shadows across the blue sky, fishermen mending nets or loading lobster-pots on to their boats, behind her the rattle of mast wires, the flap of the wind through sails, the slap of the water against the harbour walls. She felt almost light-headed with happiness and excitement. She couldn’t wait to set out for Paki.

She had been here on Corfu for ten days and nothing had happened until today—she had relaxed in the sun, swum, eaten delicious Greek food, read one of the paperbacks she had brought with her. She had barely spoken to her father, or he to her; there had not, this year, been any other visitors. Olivia had enjoyed herself, but it had not been an exciting experience, merely a peaceful one.

Since she met Max on the beach this morning everything had changed. She felt as if she had been asleep for years, and suddenly woken up. She felt so alive. She could almost feel the blood rushing round her body, the air pumping in and out of her lungs…

She had never felt like this before; she was scared of making too much of it. Max was probably only being pleasant to the daughter of a man he was doing business with; or maybe he was just bored and wanted someone to help him pass the time. It couldn’t mean more than that. Not with a man like Max Agathios. And a girl like her.

She made a rueful face. They were miles apart. Why try to deny it? He was a lot older, for one thing, and, for another…well, she wasn’t naïve; he was far too attractive not to have had a lot of other women, beautiful women, much more exciting women.

In fact, it was surprising he wasn’t married.

She stopped in her tracks, standing still in the middle of the bustling street. What made her think he wasn’t?

She hadn’t thought about it before, but, now that she did, of course it was possible—no, probable—that he was married, a man of his age.

‘Beautiful peaches,’ a voice murmured coaxingly in English at her elbow and she started, realising only then that she had stopped right outside a greengrocer’s shop.

She pulled a polite smile on to her face, answered in Greek, and saw the man’s lined face break into surprised smiles.

A few minutes later she walked back to the boat with her net bag full of food and saw Max waiting for her on deck, the sun glittering on his raven-black hair, striking blue lights out of the thick strands of it. He had taken off his leather jacket, and the wind blew his Tshirt up and showed the tanned, flat planes of his stomach. Olivia felt her own stomach cramp in overwhelming attraction and her legs begin to tremble oddly.

She had to stop this happening! She mustn’t lose her head over him. What did she know about him, after all?

He leaned on the polished wood rail and grinned down at her as she came aboard. ‘Did you get everything?’

She held out the string bag, and his change. ‘Yes. That was the first time I’ve ever shopped for food here—it was fun. I even managed to make myself understood in my pathetic Greek some of the time.’

He looked surprised. ‘You do speak some Greek, then?’

‘Anna teaches me while I’m here, and I have a tape I listen to every night while I’m here. Just tourist phrases—please, thank you, where is the bank? That sort of thing.’

‘Well, good for you—very few visitors bother to learn Greek, but it makes a big difference to us to have people trying to speak our language instead of expecting us to speak English.’ He smiled, handing back the string bag. ‘Will you put all this away in the galley and come back up to help me? We’ll leave at once. We can’t be away too long or your father might get worried.’

The galley was tiny and very compact—a place for everything and everything in its place—the fittings all in golden pine. Olivia put away the domed Greek bread, the salad and fruit and cheese, then hurried back up on deck to help Max set sail.

Minutes later they were moving out of the harbour with a stiffish breeze filling the sails, the water creaming past the sides of the boat. Max watched Olivia moving around, nodding approval of her deft handling of the ropes as they met the stronger waters of the sea outside the harbour.

They took a couple of hours to sail to Paki, and anchored off the coast just around eleven-thirty. Max fished over the side, rapidly catching a small squid, which he threw back, then some sardines, which he kept, and a couple of red mullet.

They filleted the mullet, left the sardines whole, unfilleted, then fried them all together, and served them with salad, which Olivia had tossed together while Max was fishing. She had squeezed a fresh lemon over the contents of the wooden salad bowl and sliced the crusty Greek bread, which smelt so good that her stomach clenched in sudden hunger at the scent of it.

They ate their lunch on deck, the boat riding underneath them. The fish was better than anything Olivia had ever eaten—she had never realised how good sardines could taste. There was almost nothing left for the screaming gulls which had gathered around at the smell of cooking fish.

After their white Greek cheese they turned their attention to the peaches Olivia had bought—big, yellow-fleshed, spurting with juice. Max made coffee in his battered old coffee-pot—not the usual Greek coffee, tiny cups of muddy black liquid syrup with sugar, but French coffee, served black, without sugar.

Olivia drank hers, then leaned back against the cushions propping her up and closed her eyes in the shadow of a canvas canopy Max had run out to give them some protection from the fierce afternoon sun.

‘You aren’t going to sleep, are you?’ Max murmured, and she smiled lazily.

‘Sounds wonderful to me.’

He laughed softly, his fingertip tracing the outline of her profile, his fleeting touch cool on her sun-flushed cheek.

‘We shall have to sail back in an hour or so, or we’ll find your father has raised an alarm for us. If you take a siesta, we won’t have time to land on Paki.’

She yawned, hardly able to take in what he was saying. ‘What?’

‘I suppose we can always come back tomorrow,’ he murmured. ‘We could make an earlier start, get here by ten, land and eat ashore at one of the tavernas on Paki.’

Her lashes gold against her cheeks, Olivia dreamily said, ‘That would be fun.’

She drifted off into blissful sleep and woke up with a start at the cry of a gull to find herself lying with her head on Max’s shoulder, his arm around her.

As she shifted he looked down at her, their eyes very close; she saw the dark glaze of his pupils, tiny, almost imperceptible flecks of gold around them.

‘Time to go back, I’m afraid,’ he said, and she couldn’t hold back a sigh of reluctance.

‘I suppose we have to…’

‘I don’t want this afternoon to end either,’ Max said softly and her heart turned over.

He slowly bent his head and Olivia lifted her own to meet his; their mouths touched, clung, in a slow, sweet, gentle kiss that set off a chain reaction through her whole body. Then she felt Max’s hand slide up from her waist to her breast and gasped, quivering.

His mouth lifted; he looked at her, smiled. ‘Am I going too fast for you? Don’t worry, we’ll take it at your pace, as slow as you like.’ He paused, then said in an odd, wry voice, ‘Olivia, am I crazy, or would I be…? No, not in this day and age, I don’t believe it…’

Bewildered, she asked, ‘What?’ and he watched her in that strange, almost incredulous way.

‘You’re very lovely, you know that, Olivia—and I can’t be the first man to notice the way you look, yet I get the feeling you haven’t actually slept with anyone yet… Tell me I’m crazy! Not that it would make any difference, but you’re so different from most girls I meet… So, are you?’

Very flushed now, she said, ‘Yes…No…I mean… I haven’t…’ She was so embarrassed that she jumped and started brushing down her hair, pulling down her top. ‘Shall we start back now?’

He got to his feet and started clearing the deck, a push of an electronic button sending the canopy back inside the top of the wheelhouse, the cushions all put away below. The anchor lifted, they set sail again, the breeze even stiffer now and blowing inshore so that they made good time back to Corfu.

While they sailed Olivia did the washing up and put things away in their accustomed places, relieved to be out of sight and out of his presence for a while. She was still getting over what he had said…the question he had asked. Had he really expected her to have slept with someone already? Admittedly, some girls she knew had already begun experimenting with boyfriends, but these days most people of her age were less likely to jump into bed at the first opportunity. AIDS had made that much of a difference.

They moored at Corfu harbour again, with the Judas trees which grew alongside casting their black afternoon shadows on them as they walked underneath to collect the motorbike from a nearby garage where Max had left it to be serviced while they were sailing.

They drove back to the villa as the heat of the day was dying down. Over his shoulder, Max shouted to her, ‘I’m afraid we’re quite late. I hope your father won’t be too annoyed.’

Her arms holding on to him tightly because he was driving fast, Olivia said huskily, ‘I hope not too.’ Her father didn’t normally mind what she did during the days she spent here; she wasn’t thinking much about him and his reactions. She was more disturbed by the pleasure it gave her to feel Max’s thighs against her bare inner legs, to press against his slim back, feel the motion of his body with hers as they swerved and swooped round corners with all the grace of a swallow in flight.

Ten minutes later they walked from the garage to the villa terrace, and met Gerald Faulton. Olivia’s nerves jumped at the icy expression on his face.

‘Where have you been?’ he bit out, looking at her wind-blown hair and flushed face with distaste.

It was Max who replied. ‘We left a message with your housekeeper—didn’t you get it?’

Gerald Faulton turned his bleak eyes on Max. ‘You’ve been gone since breakfast time. Do you know what time it is now?’

‘I told Anna we might take my boat out—didn’t she tell you that? We thought we would go over to Paki, fish, have lunch there. We’ve had a wonderful day.’

Her father did not look any happier. He stared at Olivia again, frowning. ‘You have been on his boat with him all day?’ he asked with ice on every syllable.

Max frowned too. ‘I’m a good sailor, Gerald, I know what I’m doing. She was perfectly safe with me.’

‘I sincerely hope she has been,’ her father said through tight lips. ‘I know some men find schoolgirls irresistible, but I didn’t think you were one of them.’

Max stiffened, staring at him. ‘Schoolgirls?’ He repeated the word in a terse, hard intonation that made a shiver run down Olivia’s back. He slowly turned his head to look down at her. ‘What does he mean, schoolgirls? How old are you?’

All the colour had left her face. She had thought he knew. It hadn’t occurred to her that he didn’t. She hadn’t pretended to be older than her age, she didn’t wear makeup, she hadn’t tried to fool him. Why was he looking at her like that? She couldn’t get a word out.

‘She was seventeen a couple of weeks ago,’ Gerald Faulton told him. ‘She has another year of school ahead of her, and I don’t want her distracted before her final exams. I want her to do well enough to go on to university. I deliberately sent her to a single-sex school—I don’t believe girls do as well if there are boys around. They are afraid to compete in case boys think they’re bluestockings.’

Olivia turned and ran into the villa, straight up the stairs to her bedroom. She knew there would be no trip to Paki tomorrow, no more rides on the back of Max’s bike.

She didn’t go down to dinner; Anna without comment brought her a crab salad on a tray an hour later, but she didn’t eat any of it. She went to bed early and didn’t sleep much.

She got up at dawn and went down to the beach as usual in the first primrose light of day, half hoping that Max might be there, half nervous in case he came. If they could talk, surely he would see—realise—that the years between them didn’t matter that much. He had thought she was older, hadn’t he? The essential person she was hadn’t changed just because he now knew she was only seventeen. How old was he? she wondered, as she had wondered all night, during her waking hours of darkness. Late twenties? Thirty? Not much more than that.

OK, it was a big gap, but when she was twenty-five he would still be in his thirties, so it wasn’t so terrible, was it? Men often married girls who were much younger than themselves. A lot of the businessmen who visited her father here brought much younger wives along with them.

If she could only talk to Max—but time passed, and he didn’t show up; the beach was as empty as usual. She sunbathed and swam, sat staring out to sea feeling depressed. It would have been such fun to sail that beautiful white bird of a boat again today, to feel the sea swell under their feet and the wind in their hair, the maquis scent drifting out to meet them from Paki, to go diving maybe, when they arrived, and investigate the underwater caves. Olivia was a trained diver; she loved to explore the depths of the lake she lived beside, or the clear blue seas around Corfu.

She sighed, remembering the feel of Max’s waist in her arms, the feel of his thighs pressing against hers as they rode along on the bike.

She should have known it couldn’t be real—that exciting feeling in the pit of her stomach, the quiver of awareness every time he looked at her. She had been kidding herself. She was crazy.

Or was she?

Hadn’t Max felt something too? He wouldn’t have been so angry otherwise, would he, if he hadn’t been attracted to her? She thought of the way his eyes had smiled at her, the way he had watched her on the beach early that morning, the way he had kissed her, his hands lingering as they touched her cheek, her throat, that soft brush of his fingers over her breast.

Colour crept up her face at the mere memory. She had been so deeply aware of him as a man, how could he not have been aware of her in the same way? Maybe she had imagined it. After all, she had never had a real boyfriend—only danced with boys at discos and had the odd kiss in a dark corner at a party. But could she have imagined everything that happened? The looks, the smiles, the tone of his deep, inviting voice?

Oh, what was the use of fooling herself? He had probably been nice to her for her father’s sake! And now he knew that, far from pleasing her father, he had annoyed him, he would probably be distantly polite to her for the rest of his stay.

She walked back up to the villa and showered and changed for breakfast. As she was coming downstairs again she met her father, who gave her a hard, frowning glance.

‘I want a word with you. Come into my study.’

Like a schoolgirl in front of the headmaster she stood while her father leaned against his desk, his arms folded. His gaze flicked down over her in that cold distaste he had shown when she returned with Max the previous day.

In a remote voice Gerald Faulton said, ‘You should not have gone off all day with Max Agathios. You know that, don’t you? It was reckless and foolhardy. You know nothing about the man.’

Flushed and upset, she burst out, ‘We sailed to Paki, he caught some fish and we cooked it and ate it on board, then sailed back. Nothing else happened.’ That wasn’t the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but she wasn’t telling him about the tenderness of that kiss, the brief brush of Max’s hand on her breast. Her father wouldn’t understand; he would leap to all the wrong conclusions.

‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ her father said, still distantly, then added in a dry voice, ‘But he has something of a reputation with women. I might trust him as a businessman, but not with a woman, and he knew very well that he shouldn’t take you out without getting my permission first.’ Gerald’s mouth twisted sardonically. ‘Believe me, if he were your father, Max Agathios would never trust you with a man like himself!’

Red-cheeked, Olivia muttered, ‘You’re making too much fuss about nothing. In this day and age it is ridiculous…’

‘I assure you, most Greek men would be just as protective towards their young daughters. They wouldn’t allow them to go off sailing alone, especially with someone like Max Agathios. They have more sense, and they understand their own sex. Left alone with an attractive woman, any man is tempted and, believe me, Max would never try this on with the daughter of one of his Greek friends.’

That wounded her. She knew it was true; she had far more freedom than many of the daughters of her father’s local business friends. It hurt to think that Max had treated her with less respect than he would treat a Greek girl.

‘What am I to do when I see him, then?’ she asked miserably. ‘Ignore him? After all, he is your guest…’

‘Not any more,’ her father said curtly. ‘He has left and he won’t be coming back.’

Olivia had been nerving herself to see Max again; she had sat on the beach and tried to work out what to say to him, how to thaw that hard, angry face back into human warmth. Now she felt as if a trapdoor had opened under her feet and she had dropped through into black, empty space.

He had gone, without even saying goodbye. She would probably never see him again.

Her father watched her pale face. ‘And I shall have to be leaving tomorrow too, I’m afraid. Urgent business in Athens. There is no point in coming back either, my holiday is more or less over. So I’ve booked you on a flight tomorrow too, back to England.’

CHAPTER TWO

MONTHS later, Olivia discovered why Max Agathios had paid that sudden, unexpected visit to her father. One of her friends at school showed her a newspaper whose business pages carried a story about Max’s shipping company.

‘Your father sold this Greek guy some old ships, Loll, and now he’s been made a director of the Greek company, it says here. And just look at the photo of the Greek guy!’ Julie sighed noisily, gazing at the rather fuzzy picture of Max at the centre of the newsprint. ‘If you ever meet him, tell him I think he’s dead sexy.’