Olivia had chosen a college two hours away from home so that she could visit her mother quite often. During her first year there, she lived on the campus, in a narrow little room as bare as a monk’s cell, made a lot of new friends and learnt to live on very little, worked hard and went to a lot of parties.
She spent a fortnight with her father that summer in his elegant Monaco apartment with a view of the palace gardens, dark with cypress and brilliant with bougainvillaea. Gerald Faulton never mentioned either of the Agathios brothers, so eventually Olivia very casually asked over breakfast one day, ‘Are you still on the board of Max Agathios’s company?’
‘Yes, why?’ he asked, as if she might be an industrial spy, and she shrugged, still trying to look and sound totally offhand.
‘You always say you want me to be interested in your business affairs. I read in the newspapers that you had joined the board of Agathios Kera, that’s all…’ She paused, then asked, ‘Why Kera, by the way? What does that mean?’
‘Leon Kera is a sleeping partner who put up some of the money for the company—he’s a financier,’ her father said flatly. ‘The rumour is that Max Agathios is going to marry his daughter, which will keep the company in the family.’
Olivia’s skin turned cold. ‘Oh?’ She took a painful breath. ‘What’s her name?’ She had to know; she needed to know to believe it, to accept that Max was out of reach for her, that it was time to forget him.
‘Daphne,’ her father clipped out. ‘She’s Greek, a beautiful girl, typical Greek colouring—black hair, olive skin, dark eyes. She’s clever too, a good head on her shoulders. She works with Max. I usually see her at board meetings, sitting beside him. More coffee?’
She shook her head, too stunned to speak, and her father got up from the table, putting his newspaper under his arm.
‘Well, I have work to do,’ he said, walking away without looking at her, to her relief, because she hated to think he might read her expression and guess at her feelings.
The last remnants of her dream had just died. She hadn’t admitted it to herself, but she did now; for the past year she had gone on hoping that one day she would meet Max again and…
She broke off, biting down on her lower lip angrily. How stupid! She met a man once, spent a day with him, got kissed, and that was that. Why had she made such a big thing of it? He had probably forgotten her within a week.
Well, there were plenty of attractive guys around at her college. She had been keeping them all at a distance, turning down dates, refusing to get involved—but not any more. When she got back to college, she was going to have fun and forget Max Agathios.
* * *
The following two years were busy and enjoyable ones for Olivia. She did well in her course, and managed to get a good final result, and she was the centre of a lively social circle at her college. She went out with some of the best-looking men, but didn’t fall in love with any of them, although several claimed they had fallen in love with her.
One guy asked her to live with him; another asked her to marry him. She turned them both down. Kindly. But firmly.
From time to time she read about Max in the newspapers. His company seemed to be growing rapidly—he was now running a cruise line around the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. She saw advertisements for his cruises all the time. He still seemed to run ferries in the Aegean, and had ships carrying freight from island to island there too, she gathered, but cruise ships were now the major part of his business.
From the sound of it, Max’s company was now bigger than his brother’s, or her father’s. How did they like that? she wondered. They were both so competitive, and neither of them had much love for Max. It must be burning them up to see him forging ahead like this!
The summer of the year she left college she was invited to America for the whole summer by a guy she had been dating for months, but who was now returning for good to his Florida home after a year spent working in Britain.
His family had a beach house on the Keys in Florida; Gerry talked lovingly about brown pelicans and giant sea turtles, conch chowder and Key lime pie, mangrove swamps and glass-bottomed boats.
‘I want you to meet my folks,’ he said. ‘And they’re dying to meet you, they’ve heard so much about you. Oh, come on, Loll—if you don’t visit with us this year we may never see each other again!’
Her mother persuaded her to join her father though. After all, she pointed out, it was the only time they saw each other during a year.
‘OK, he isn’t a loving father, but by his own rather weird standards he’s always tried to act like a father, kept in touch, remembered your birthday and so on. I think you should go.’ Ann Faulton gave her a wry look. ‘And from what you’ve told me about this Gerry, he’s getting far too serious about you, but you’re not that way about him. If you spend the summer with him and his family he’ll be entitled to think you like him more than you do, Olivia.’
It was true, and, not for the first time, Olivia took her mother’s advice, told Gerry she was sorry but she couldn’t come to Florida, and went to Monaco instead.
The year since she last saw him showed her that her father was beginning to show his age. Gerald Faulton was now in his mid-fifties, and his hair was entirely silver, his skin lined from years of sun-worshipping. His regimen of diet and exercise had kept time at bay for a long time, and he was still very slim and upright, but Olivia felt a real pang of sadness as she realised that he was beginning to lose the battle. His neck was wrinkling, his jawline was no longer taut and firm, his eyes were set deeper in his tanned skin and he no longer moved with the same spring in his step.
His nature hadn’t softened with time either; he was as remote and cold of heart as ever. Within a couple of days, Olivia was wondering why on earth she had taken her mother’s advice and come. Why did her father go on inviting her when they had nothing in common, nothing to talk about, and there wasn’t a shred of warmth or affection between them?
At least the weather was good though; she could swim and sunbathe, and her father’s small apartment was comfortable, indeed elegant.
One night Gerald suggested that they visit the Casino at Monte Carlo, the old Palais Casino on the main square, with its baroque décor, ornate, gilded, elegant. Olivia felt no excitement around the tables. She didn’t want to play cards herself, or gamble on roulette; she soon grew bored with watching her father play baccarat, and instead began to wander around, looking at the salles privées, the silken brocade upholstery of chairs, the long swagged curtains, the paintings on the walls. She drank a glass of chilled white wine, a cup of coffee, nibbled nuts and crisps, watched over the bare white shoulders of a woman in black who was losing heavily at roulette, wondering how she could bear to throw her money away without a change of expression, and kept looking at her watch, hoping her father would show signs of getting bored.
Suddenly she realised that her father was no longer at the baccarat table.
He was standing near the main door of the big salon, talking to some people Olivia had never seen before— two men and a woman.
The older man was broad-set, wearing what she recognised as expensively tailored evening dress, his rather bull-like head set on heavy shoulders, his hair black, with a flash of silver at the temples. Olivia was not attracted by the ruthless force she read in his face and body, but she had read somewhere that power was an aphrodisiac, and she could believe it; some women might find him exciting.
Looking from him to the other, younger, man, Olivia saw such a strong likeness that it was obvious they were related; possibly brothers? No, the age gap was too great. They must be father and son.
The woman with them looked the right