The Greek Tycoon's Achilles Heel

CHAPTER NINE

AT LAST he began to speak.

‘It started in my childhood with my mother’s fantasies about Achilles and his hidden vulnerability. I understood the point about keeping your secrets to yourself, but in those days it was only theory, little more than a game. I was young, I had more money than was good for me, I felt I could rule the world. I fancied myself strong and armoured, but in truth I was wide open to a shrewd manipulator.’

‘Is that what she was?’ Petra asked.

‘Yes, although it wasn’t so much her as the men behind her. Her name was Brigitta. She was a great-niece of Homer, not that I knew that until later. We met by chance-or so I thought-on a skiing holiday. In fact she was an excellent skier, but she concealed that, just kept falling over, so I began to teach her and somehow we fell over a lot together.

‘Then we abandoned skiing and went away to be by ourselves. I was in heaven. I didn’t know any girl could be so lovely, so sweet, so honest-’

He drew a ragged breath and dropped his head down onto his chest. He was shaking, and she wondered with dismay if this was only memory. After all these years, did some part of his love still survive to torment him?

She reached out to touch him but stopped at the last minute and let her hand fall away. He didn’t seem to notice.

After a while he began to speak again.

‘Of course I was deceiving myself. It had all been a clever trap. She was thrown into my path on purpose so that I could make a fool of myself over her. Even when I discovered who she was I didn’t have the wit to see the plot. I believed her when she said she’d concealed her background because she was truly in love with me and didn’t want me to be suspicious. Can you imagine anything so stupid?’

‘It’s not stupid,’ Petra protested. ‘If you really loved her, of course you wanted to think well of her. And you must have been so young-’

‘Twenty-one, and I thought I knew it all,’ he said bitterly.

‘How old was she?’

‘Nineteen. So young; how could I possibly suspect her? Even when I found out she was using a false name, that she’d engineered our meeting-even then I believed that she was basically innocent. I had to believe it. She was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me.’

She could have wept for the boy he’d been then. To cling to his trust in the face of the evidence suggested a naïvety that nobody meeting him now would ever believe.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘We planned to marry. Everyone went wild-the two foes putting their enmity aside to join forces and present a united front to the world. My father advised me to delay; he was uneasy. I wouldn’t listen. We came here to be alone together and spent the summer living in this house. I wouldn’t have thought that anyone could be as happy as I was in those weeks.’

His mouth twisted in a wry smile.

‘And I’d have been right not to believe it. It was all an illusion, created by my own cowardly refusal to face the fact that she was a spy. She didn’t learn much, but enough for the Lukas family to pip us to the post on a lucrative contract. It was obvious that the information must have come from her, and that she’d listened in to a telephone conversation I’d had and managed to see some papers. She denied it at first, but there was simply no other way. I turned on her.’

‘Well, naturally, if you felt betrayed-’

‘No, it was worse than that. I was cruel, brutal. I said such things-she begged my forgiveness, said she’d started as a spy but regretted it in the end because she came to love me truly.’

‘Did you believe her?’ Petra asked.

‘I didn’t dare. I sneered at her. If she truly regretted what she’d done, why hadn’t she warned me? She said she tried to back out but Nikator threatened to tell me everything. But he promised to let her off if she did one last job, so that’s what she did.’

‘But Nikator must have been little more than an child in those days,’ Petra protested.

‘He was twenty. Old enough to be vicious.’

‘But could he have organised it? Would he have known enough?’

‘No. There was another man, a distant cousin called Cronos, who hadn’t been in the firm more than a couple of years and was still trying to make his mark. Apparently he was a nasty piece of work, and he and Nikator hit it off well, right from the start. People who knew them said they moved in the same slime. Cronos set it up and used Nikator as front man.’

‘Cronos set it up?’ she echoed. ‘Not Homer?’

‘No, to do him justice, he’s a fairly decent man, a lot better than many in this business. The story is that after the whole thing exploded Homer tore a strip off Cronos and told him to get out if he knew what was good for him. At any rate Cronos vanished.

‘Obviously, I don’t know the details of any family rows, but my impression is that Homer was shocked by Nikator’s behaviour. Being ruthless in business is one thing, but you don’t involve innocent young girls. But Nikator had come down hard on Brigitta when she tried to get free. He bullied her into “one last effort”, and she thought if she did that it would be over.’

‘No way,’ Petra said at once. ‘Once he had a blackmail hold over her he’d never have let it go.’

‘That’s what I think too. She was in his power; I should have seen that and helped her. Instead, I turned on her. You can’t imagine how cruelly I treated her.’

But she could, Petra thought. Raised with suspicion as his constant companion, thinking he’d found the love and trust that could make his life beautiful, he’d been plunged back into despair and it had almost destroyed him. He’d lashed out with all the vigour of a young man, and in the process he’d hurt the one person he still loved.

‘I said such things,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t tell you the things I said, or what they did to her-’

‘She’d deceived you.’

‘She was a child.’

‘So were you,’ she said firmly. ‘Whatever happened to her, they were responsible, the people who manipulated her. Not you.’

‘But I should have saved her from them,’ he said bleakly. ‘And I didn’t. We had a terrible scene. I stormed out of the house, saying I hated the sight of her and when I returned she’d vanished. She left me a letter in which she said that she loved me and begged my forgiveness, but there was nothing to tell me where she’d gone.’

Petra made no sound, but her clasp on him tightened.

‘I couldn’t-wouldn’t believe it at first,’ he went on in a voice that was low and hoarse. ‘I went through the house calling her name. I was sure she had to be hiding somewhere, waiting for a sign from me. I cried out that we would find our way somehow, our love was worth fighting for.’

And after each call he’d stood and listened in the silence. Petra could see it as clearly as if she’d walked the house with that devastated young man. She heard him cry, ‘Brigitta!’ again and again, waited while he realised that there would be no answering call, and felt her heart break with his as the truth was forced on him.

And she saw something else that he would never speak of-the moment when the boy collapsed in sobs of despair.

‘What did you do after that?’ she asked, stroking his hair.

‘I believed I could find her and still make it right. I set detectives on her trail. They were the best, but even they couldn’t find her. She’d covered her tracks too well. I tried the few who remained of her family in another country, but they weren’t close and she hadn’t been in touch with them. I tried Nikator. There was just a chance that he knew something, but I’m convinced he didn’t. I scared him so badly that he’d have told me if he could.

‘In the end I faced facts. A woman who could escape so completely must have been very, very determined to get well away from me. But I didn’t stop. Months passed, but I told them to keep looking because I couldn’t face the prospect of never seeing or talking to her again. I had to ask her forgiveness, do what I could to make it right.

‘At last I got a message from a man who said he thought he might have found her, but it was hard to be sure because she couldn’t talk and just sat staring into space all the time. I went to see her and found-’ He shuddered.

Petra didn’t make the mistake of speaking. She simply sat with him in her arms, praying that her love would reach him and make it possible for him to confront the monster.

‘I found her in a shabby room in a back street, miles away,’ he managed to say at last. ‘The door was locked. The last time anyone had gone in there she’d been so frightened that she’d locked it after them. I kicked it open and went in.

‘She was sitting up on a bed in the corner, clutching something in her arms as though she had to protect it. She screamed at the sight of me and backed away as though I was an enemy. Maybe that’s how I looked to her then. Or maybe she just didn’t know me.’

Another silence, in which she felt his fingers tighten on her arm, release her and tighten again.

‘At last all the fight seemed to go out of her. She sagged against the wall and I managed to get close and look at what she was holding.’

His grip was agonisingly tight. Petra closed her eyes, guessing what the bundle had been, and praying to be wrong.

‘It was a dead baby,’ Lysandros said at last.

‘Oh, no,’ Petra whispered, dropping her head so that her lips lay against his hair.

‘It was premature. She’d hidden her pregnancy and had no proper medical attention, so she gave birth alone. Then she just sat clutching the child and not letting anyone near her. She’d been like that for days, shivering, starving, weeping.

‘I begged her to calm down, told her it was me, that I loved her, I’d never harm her, but she told me to go away because she had to feed the baby. By that time he must have been dead for days. He was cold in her arms.

‘The people who owned the house were decent and kindly, but they couldn’t cope. I had her moved to hospital, ordered the best attention for her, said I’d pay for everything-whatever money could buy, I’d give her.’ He said the last words with bitter self-condemnation.

‘I went to see her every day in the hospital, always thinking that the care she was receiving would soon take effect, she would become herself again, and we could talk. But it didn’t happen. As she became physically stronger her mind seemed to retreat further into a place where I couldn’t follow, and I understood that she wanted it that way. But still I waited, hoping she’d recover and we could find each other again.

‘Then she had a heart attack, apparently an adverse reaction to a drug she’d been given, but the doctors told me that she wasn’t fighting for life. Her will had gone, and it was only a matter of time. I sat beside her, holding her hand, praying for her to awaken. When she did I told her that I loved her and begged her forgiveness.’

‘Did she forgive you?’ Petra asked quietly.

‘I don’t know. She only said one thing. By that time she’d accepted that the child was dead and she begged me to make sure he was buried with her. I gave her my word and, when the time came, I kept it. She’s buried with our baby in her arms.’

‘She must have recognised you to ask such a thing,’ Petra said.

‘I’ve told myself that a thousand times, but the truth is that she might have said it to anyone she thought had the power to ensure that it happened. I’ve tried to believe that she forgave me, but why should I? What right do I have after what I did? I terrified her into running away and hiding from the world when she desperately needed help.

‘What kind of life did she have? The doctors told me she was severely undernourished, which had damaged the child, hence the premature birth-and death-of my son.’

‘You have no doubt that-?’

‘That he was mine? None. She must have been about a month pregnant when we parted. They were very tactful. They offered me a test, to be sure, but I refused. Such a test implied a doubt that dishonoured her. She was carrying my son when I abandoned her.’

‘But you didn’t throw her out,’ Petra protested.

‘No, I wanted her to stay here until I could arrange our breakup to look civilised in the eyes of the world,’ he said savagely. ‘And then, fool that I was, I was surprised when I came back and found her gone. Of course she fled. She looked into the future I’d mapped out and shuddered. I didn’t throw her out, but I drove her out with coldness and cruelty.

‘If I’d known-everything would have been different, but I made her feel that she had no choice but to run away from me. So there was nobody to help her when she knew about her condition. She faced everything alone, and they both died.

‘I was with her to the last. She died in my arms, while I prayed for a word or a look to suggest that she knew me. But there was nothing. She’d gone beyond my reach and all I could do was hold her while she slipped away, never knowing that I was begging her forgiveness. I destroyed her life, I destroyed her last moment, I destroyed our child-’

‘But it wasn’t-’

‘It’s my fault-don’t you understand? I killed them, both of them. I killed them as surely as if I’d-’

‘No,’ she said fiercely. ‘You mustn’t be so hard on yourself.’

‘But I must,’ he said bleakly. ‘If I’m not hard on myself, who will be? How many times since then have I gone to her tomb and stood there, watching and waiting for something that’s never going to happen?’

‘Where is her tomb?’

‘Here, in the garden. I had the ground consecrated and got the priest to come and bury them both at the dead of night. Then I covered the place so that nobody can find it by accident.

‘Then I had to decide what to do with myself. I looked at what this kind of life had made of me, and I hated it. I told my father I was finished with it all, and took the next plane out of Greece, trying to escape what I’d done, what I’d turned into.

‘When you and I met, I’d been on the run for two years.’ He gave a brief bark of laughter. ‘On the run. Like a criminal. That’s how I felt. I went to Monte Carlo, to New York, Los Angeles, London, Las Vegas-anywhere I could live what they call “the high life”, which is another way of saying I indulged myself in every despicable way. I drank too much, gambled too much, slept around too much, all because I was trying to escape myself. But at the end, there was always a menacing figure waiting for me at the end of the road. And it was me.

‘Then, one night in Las Vegas-well, you know the rest. You showed me to myself in a light I couldn’t bear, and I returned to Greece the next day.’

‘It wasn’t just me,’ Petra said. ‘You were ready to see things differently or I couldn’t have had any effect.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ He gave her a faint smile. ‘Part of me prefers to give you the credit-my good angel, who stopped me going even further astray the first time and now-’

‘Now?’ she asked cautiously.

‘I’m not blind, Petra. I know about myself. I’m not a man anyone in their right mind could want to meet. I scare people, and that’s been fine up to now. It suited me. But you showed me the truth then, and somehow you’ve done it again. For years I’ve sheltered deep inside myself because that way I felt safer. I keep people at a distance because if you don’t let yourself need anyone, nobody can hurt you.

‘But I can’t keep you at a distance because you’ve been in there-’ he touched his heart ‘-for a long time. I’ve never told anyone else what I’ve told you tonight, and I never will. Now you know all my secrets and I’m glad of it, for a burden is gone from me.’

He rested his face against her and she dropped her head, while her tears fell on him.

They slept for a while and awoke in each others’ arms, to find daylight flooding into the room. Anxiously, Petra looked at his face but was reassured. He was smiling, relaxed.

‘No regrets?’ she asked softly.

He shook his head. ‘None with you. Never. Come with me.’

They dressed and he took her hand, leading her downstairs and out of the house.

She’d briefly glimpsed the garden from an upstairs window and seen that it was mainly a wilderness. Everything was overgrown, and now she thought she knew why.

He led her to a distant place under the trees and removed some branches and leaves. Beneath them was a stone in which were carved a few simple words and dates. He had hidden Brigitta and her child away from the world, protecting them as best he could. Without asking, Petra knew that nobody else had ever seen this place.

‘So many times I’ve stood here and begged her forgiveness,’ he said. ‘What should I tell her about you?’

Her grandfather had once told her that no true Greek was ever completely free of the past. Now Lysandros, this modern man, at home in the harsh world of multibillion dollar business, spoke like an ancient Greek who felt the River Styx swirl around his feet and, beyond it, Hades, the other world, where souls still suffered and communicated with the living.

Could it be true? Was Brigitta there now, gazing at him across the waters, drawing him back, crying that he was hers alone and they should be together for all eternity?

No! She wouldn’t allow it.

‘You don’t have to tell her anything about me,’ she said. ‘She knows that I love you, just as she does. And, because of that love, she forgives you. Don’t forget that where she is now, she understands everything she didn’t understand before and she wants your suffering to end.’

It touched her heart to see the relief that came into his face, as though anything said by herself could be trusted, however strange or outrageous it might sound to anyone else.

They walked slowly back into the house and upstairs. Now he kissed her softly, almost tentatively, letting her know that this was different from any other time. They had crossed a boundary of love and trust, and the way ahead was changed for ever.

‘Mine,’ he whispered, ‘all mine.’

‘Yours as long as you want me,’ she whispered back.

‘That will be for ever.’

‘And are you mine?’ she asked.

‘I think I’ve been yours since the first moment. In my heart I always knew. It just took this long to admit it.’

They lay down, holding each other, touching gently, eager to explore yet unwilling to hurry. Taking their time was a tribute that they owed to each other and they paid it in full. He sought the places where her bruises had been worst, laying his lips over them in care and comfort.

‘I’m fine now,’ she said. ‘You’ve looked after me so well.’

‘And I always will,’ he vowed.

His fingers played in a leisurely way over her breasts, first one, then the other, almost as if he were discovering them for the first time, wondering at their beauty. At last he laid his face against them and she felt his tongue, softly caressing. Tremors went through her. New life invaded her body.

She began to run her own hands over him, exploring and teasing him, rejoicing at the suppressed groan that came from him.

‘You do your magic,’ he breathed. ‘Where does it come from? Are you one of the sirens?’

‘Do you want me to be?’

‘Only for me. No other man must hear that siren-song. And I must hear it for ever.’

She turned, pressing him gently onto his back and lying across him so that her peaked nipples brushed him lightly.

‘But they did hear it for ever,’ she said, inviting him further into the fantasy. ‘Those doomed sailors knew it would be the last sound they ever heard. Did they follow it willingly?’

This was the question he’d asked himself many times but always in solitude. Now, in her arms, he knew the answer.

‘Willingly,’ he agreed, ‘because at the last nothing else mattered. Nothing else-ever-but to follow that song wherever it led.’

She smiled down at him. ‘An adventurous man,’ she mused. ‘That’s what I like. I’m going to take you to such places-where no one’s ever been before-’

‘Wherever it leads,’ he murmured. ‘As long as it leads us together.’

When he turned again to bring her beneath him she went gladly, opening for him in warmth and welcome, feeling herself become complete, and then complete again as they climaxed together.

‘No,’ she begged as it ended. ‘Don’t leave me.’

‘I shall never leave you,’ he said, changing her meaning. ‘My body will never leave you and nor will my heart. I’m yours. Do you understand that? Yours for always.’

‘My darling-’

‘I wish I could find the words to tell you what it means to me to have found someone I need never doubt. It’s more than happiness. It’s like being set free.’

‘Dearest, be careful,’ she said worriedly. ‘I’m human, not perfect.’

‘Rubbish, you are perfect,’ he said, laughing.

‘I’ll never knowingly betray you, but I might make some silly human mistake. Please, please don’t think me better than I am, in case you end up thinking me worse than I am.’

‘It wouldn’t be possible to think you better than you are,’ he said. ‘You are perfect. You are honest and true, and divinely inspired to be the one person on earth who can keep me safe and happy.’

There was no middle way with this man, she realised. It was all or nothing, with no reservations. The heartfelt simplicity with which he placed himself and his fate in her hands made her want to weep. And silently she prayed that he might never be disappointed in her, for she knew it would destroy him.