The Greek's Virgin Bride

There didn't seem to be a particularly good reason not to, and Andrea found herself standing up as Nikos moved to draw back her chair. She walked beside him along the side of the vessel, and as they drew clear onto the foredeck she could see the long east-west land mass of Greece's largest island lying to the south of them. Mountains rose in the interior, almost all along the spine of the island, and Nikos pointed to the town of Heraklion on the coast in front of them.

'Knossos is only a few kilometres inland. Would you like to go and visit the Minotaur?' he asked genially.

The prospect tugged at her. Then, sinkingly, she realised she must ask for the yacht to put about and return to Piraeus. She had a plane to catch.

As k reading her thoughts, Nikos touched her arm lightly. Though it was only the briefest gesture, she felt her skin tingle.

'Stay a little, Andrea mou. What harm will it do, afte

r all?'

His voice was light, but there was a cajoling beneath the lightness. 'Today we could just play tourists. It's been a strain, these last weeks—let us relax a little, ne?”

She tried to answer, but couldn't. If she answered him she would have to open that door that she had banged tightly shut this morning as she got out of bed. And she couldn't face that.

The alternative was to go on along this pam she was on now. It would be temptingly easy to do so.

She had never seen Knossos, and was unlikely ever to get the opportunity to do so again. Just as she had wanted to see Athens while she was there, now she wanted to see the famous site of the very first civilisation Europe could boast, the Minoans, whose vast, labyrinthine Bronze Age palace at Knossos made the Parthenon look modern.

And see it she did, joining the throng of tourists who poured over the massive remains of the excavated and partially re­stored site, amazed at the sheer size of a palace first built over four thousand years ago and destroyed so cataclysmically. She was both fascinated and awestruck—and saddened. The exqui­site murals, even if restored, caught at a world where militarism and armaments seemed quite absent—a world where nature and fertility were more valued than war and conquest.

'They did not need military might—all the Minoan palace sites lack ramparts,' Nikos reminded her when she found her­self remarking on it. 'Theirs was a maritime trading empire, a thalassocracy, linking Egypt, the Levant, Asia Minor and Greece. And, of course, the legend of the annual tribute of] seven youths and seven maidens to feed to the Minotaur, so central to the story of the gallant Theseus, more likely repre­sents the tribute the ancient mainland Greeks, the Myceneans, were required to pay the Minoans. It was more likely com­mercial rivalry that brought down the Minoan empire, not the death of a monster!'

'And the earthquakes and tidal waves,' added Andrea. 'How terrible it must have been!' She shuddered, remembering a tele­vision programme she had once watched which had recreated, with computer simulation, the terrifying volcanic explosion of the island of Thera, modern Santorini, which had blasted the atmosphere with dark, choking, poisonous dust and sent a wall of water hurtling south to crash devastatingly upon the low, defenceless Cretan shore.

She looked around her. All about had once been walls and rooms, stairs and chambers, courtyards and gardens, storerooms and towers, bustling with people carrying on their ordinary, everyday lives. All gone now. All silenced.

They were once as alive as you are now. Felt the warmth of the same sun upon their faces, felt the same earth beneath their feet as you do now.

As if he could read her thoughts on her face, she heard Nikos say quietly at her side, 'We must live while we can, Andrea. We have no other choice except to make the most of what is given to us. Our minds, our hearts—our bodies and our pas­sions.'

For a moment, the briefest moment, she met his eyes and read what was in them. Then, his message sent, he lightened his expression.

'Are you hungry? Let us eat.'

They lunched, at Andrea's instigation, at a small tourist res­taurant close to the palace of Knossos, which, though clearly catering for the masses, appealed to her with its vine-dappled terrace set back, overlooking the road. It was pretty, and quite unpretentious, and they both ate a typical tourist salad of feta cheese and tomatoes drizzled hi olive oil, followed by the ultimate Greek tourist dish of lamb kebabs.

If Nikos was taken aback by her choice, he hid it. Maybe after a lifetime of eating only in the most expensive restaurants it was amusing for her to eat such humble fare and mingle with ordinary folk whose grandfathers were not multimillionaires.

She looked quite natural in such a place, he suddenly realise. Her hair was drawn back into a simple plait, and if he did not know better he'd have said that her clothes—-jeans and & simple white T-shirt—could easily have come out of a chains-tore. She must be favouring a designer who charged a fortune to achieve that very effect.

Nor did she balk in the slightest at the taste of the robust but rough Domestica wine she drank. To Nikos it brought back memories from his early years, before his palate had become exposed only to the finest vintages. He wondered when it was that he had last drunk such table wine as now filled his glass.

Too long. The words echoed inside his head, and he put them aside with a frown.

'Where would you like to go this afternoon?' he asked, to change his thoughts. 'Shall we drive to a beach and sun our­selves?'

Immediately he cursed himself. In his head he heard her low words, filled with quiet, unemotional anguish, saying how she only swam very early in the morning, when no one could see her legs...

'Or perhaps you would like to see Heraklion?' he hurried on. 'Or we could drive further into the interior, perhaps? There is Mount Ida to see, where the god Zeus is said to have been bom, in a cavern there.'

'I'd like that,' Andrea replied. ‘I…I'm not sure I'm up to much more walking, I'm afraid. I'm rather feeling it in my legs after tramping around Knossos. Not that I'd have missed it for the world!' she added, lest she sound whining.

‘I’ll phone for the car,' said Nikos, and got out his mobile phone to summon the large, chauffeur-driven hire car that had brought them here from the yacht and which was now parked in the palace car park.

'Nikos—' She stayed his hand and he stopped, surprised. 'I—I don't suppose,' she found herself saying wistfully, would be possible—if not today, then perhaps tomorrow—if we are still here, of course,' she burbled, feeling awkward suddenly, 'to have a car like that one there to drive around in would it?'

She pointed down to where one of the legion of open-side four-by-fours, favoured by tourists as hire cars, was making its way along the road.