‘What’s a mistress?’ Billie asked her mother.
‘You’d never understand,’ Lauren replied, already tiring of the subject.
School became a little less unbearable for her after that night. Everyone started calling her Billie. The boys stopped teasing her and Damon’s sister, Marika, spoke to her in passing. But nobody was ever allowed to come and play at her house and she was never invited into anyone else’s home. Her mother’s boyfriends came in a continual stream from the resort where Lauren often made extra money working as a waitress. Usually backpackers, some only stayed for a night or two, while others ended up living with Lauren and her daughter for weeks on end. By the time she was eleven years old, Billie, who had abandoned her birth name entirely to avoid the sniggers it invited, understood that it was Lauren’s free and easy lifestyle with her lovers that scandalised the locals and that had led to her own exclusion from island life. Other mothers were afraid that she would grow up to live like Lauren and act as a bad influence on their daughters.
Two days after her eleventh birthday, Billie met Alexei Drakos for the second time. She was out exploring when a sudden thunderstorm sent her running along the harbour road for the shelter of home. Alexei stopped his beach buggy to give her a lift and insisted on going right to the door with her.
‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked, scanning the empty silent little house.
‘In Athens,’ she told him innocently. ‘She got the ferry on Friday—’
‘That’s four days ago,’ Alexei incised harshly. ‘Where is she staying in Athens?’
‘She has friends there.’
‘Do you have their name or phone number?’ Alexei pressed while the thunder boomed out in loud cracks beyond the house walls and made her pale and flinch.
‘No. Why would I need it?’ she asked. ‘There’s nothing wrong. I can manage fine on my own.’
‘When will she be back?’
‘She said this Friday.’
With a bitten-off exclamation, Alexei strode across the room to the refrigerator and flung the door open to study the bare shelves within. ‘What are you eating?’
‘There are tins in the cupboard,’ she answered stiffly, feeling threatened by his mood and his behaviour. ‘Not that it’s any of your business.’
‘You will have to come home with me.’
‘No, of course I won’t—why would I? I’m perfectly happy here in my own home,’ she protested.
And Alexei being Alexei, and having no patience whatsoever, simply lifted her off her feet and dropped her back in the buggy before speeding back to his home. Ignoring her protests, he dragged her inside and explained the situation to his parents in rapid Greek. His father shrugged and went back into his office, complaining at the interruption. His glamorous mother studied Billie as if she were something the cat had brought in and had asked if there were any neighbours prepared to help out. As assured and decisive as any adult, even at the age of sixteen, Alexei handed Billie over to the housekeeper and she spent that night and the two that followed housed in staff accommodation. There she was well fed and well looked after for the first time in more years than she could recall. Lauren had always lacked the maternal gene. Before that day only Billie’s aunt, Hilary, had ever paid that much heed to the little girl’s comfort.
Of course, had she been a more normal girl perhaps she would have formed a crush on Alexei as she grew up. After all, he was the island pin-up, worshipped by every girl between ten and twenty-five on Speros. From his film-star looks to his growing bad-boy reputation and the sexual exploits diligently reported by the gossip magazines, Alexei made headlines almost from the moment he hit puberty and followed faithfully in the lusty footsteps of his father and his grandfather. But after the terrible row Billie had with her mother because she’d admitted to others that she’d been left alone for a week, and a subsequent, very embarrassing visit from the island priest, who had been tasked with the challenge of telling Lauren that leaving her daughter for so long was unacceptable, Billie’s main impression of Alexei was of a frighteningly dominant and interfering personality who did exactly as he liked at all times, regardless of the damage he might do to anyone else.
While Billie boarded in Athens during the week and attended secondary school, it was Damon Marios she fell for while they travelled back and forth on the ferries at weekends, he to his private school, she to her far less fancy state institution. By then she was seventeen years old and, for quite a few weeks, believed her feelings were reciprocated for she and Damon met secretly for coffee, going for walks, talking a mile-a-minute to each other and discovering similar interests.
Of course, she should have known better than to believe that dreams came true or that she could ever be seen as anything other than shameless Lauren’s illegitimate daughter, a murky step below the other girls on the island. She still remembered the cold hard fear that gripped her one evening at the ferry terminal when Damon suddenly dropped her hand and turned away from her. Looking up, she saw Alexei strolling towards them. Already a qualified pilot, Alexei had had to ditch his plane in the sea the previous month and the shock of his son’s near-death experience had traumatised his father, who had grounded him. Now in his last year at university, Alexei was very much an adult. For the rest of the journey, Damon ignored Billie as studiously as if she had been a stranger.
‘I’ll drop you off,’ Alexei declared at the harbour while Damon hurried off homeward with a down-bent head.
‘I don’t need a lift.’ Sixth sense warned her and she didn’t want to get into the sports car but she did anyway.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Alexei said drily. ‘I’m only trying to protect you from making a big mistake. Your mother won’t bother.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’
‘Damon, the leading light of the Marios family. He’ll screw you but he’ll never take you seriously or take you home with him. Didn’t you get that message today when he acted like he didn’t know you around me?’
Like a knife cutting through tender flesh, his blunt forecast tore through Billie and she looked back at him, focusing on the lean bronzed beauty of his features with furious condemnation. ‘You don’t know him!’
‘I know Damon very well. His family will never accept you and he hasn’t got the backbone to fight for you. He’s a nice guy but he does as he’s told. Cut your losses and ditch him now before you get in any deeper—’
‘I don’t want your advice!’ she shrieked at him in Greek.
‘Suit yourself,’ Alexei drawled silkily. ‘But whatever you do, keep your knickers on. All Greek men fantasise about having a virgin in the marriage bed.’
‘That is a disgusting thing to say!’ Billie launched back at him in a positive rage. ‘I love Damon—’
‘You’re seventeen. You’re not old enough to love anyone,’ Alexei derided, stopping outside her house and leaning across her to throw open the door as if he couldn’t wait to be rid of her. The male scent of his skin tinged by some expensive cologne wafted across her. She froze, rigid at that first taste of intimacy with a man, a fleeting intimacy that had the miraculous power to make her body prickle all over with uneasy awareness. That response shook her up because she had never reacted that way to Damon.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever disliked anyone quite so much,’ Billie snapped in as cold and controlled a voice as she could manage.
‘I’m always knee deep in women who are crazy about me,’ Alexei countered with amusement. ‘I doubt if I’ll notice the absence of one little girl from my hordes of fans—’
‘You’re so incredibly bigheaded!’ Billie flung, stepping out of the car in one electrified movement of rejection, her cheeks still burning hotly from that crack about keeping her underwear