THE VOICE IN THE THUNDER

Elizabeth Hunter

Tansy Drummond would have done anything for her beloved brother Fergus - even to the extent of virtually writing his archaeological books for him and letting him take all the credit! In fact this was what she was doing in Crete now, while Fergus himself had disappeared on another expedition somewhere in Peru. But Fergus's brother-in-law, that stern Cretan Titos Michalakis, didn't have such a high opinion of him. He considered that Fergus had treated his sister Elena disgracefully - and his disapproval spilled over on to Tansy, who couldn't do anything right in Titos' eyes. Should she ignore him or fight him?

CHAPTER ONE

IT was a day of cloud and sun and sudden gusts of wind that danced across the tops of the trees and tore at Tansy Drummond's hair, whipping up her skirts against her legs as she slowly mounted the Magnificent Stairway of the ruined palace. She looked up at the sky, sure now that she was going to get wet and not knowing what to do about it. She stood, poised for flight, still looking upwards, when she felt strong arms around her waist, lifting her down to the lower level of the central court and enclosing her in the folds of a plastic cloak, hard against the chest of a total stranger.

'Oh, please, there's no need!' she protested. 'I don't mind a little rain.'

The stranger laughed. The sound of it was lost in a peal of thunder that crashed about their ears. Annoyed by the feeling of helplessness that afflicted her, Tansy renewed her efforts to stand away from him.

'So, you are not Greek, but English,' the stranger commented, holding her closer still and taking the full force of the damp, gusty wind on the back of his broad shoulders. 'An English beauty in distress.'

Tansy was unaccustomed to receiving male admiration and his choice of compliment, far from pleasing her, struck her as ridiculous. She was not beautiful and she knew it, and so, she suspected, did he. But he had a deep, confident voice that told her instinctively that people seldom questioned what he said. That irritated her still further. She liked her conclusions to be neatly based on what her brain told her rather than her emotions and, for the moment, her brain seemed to have abdicated its responsibilities as far as this man was concerned. She was used to being in complete command of herself and she resented the easy way he controlled her struggles against him simply by holding her tighter against him. She froze.

'Certainly not in distress, kyrie. Be so good as to let me go!'

'And let you get wet?'

'I shan't melt because of a little rain!'

She was tempted to renew her efforts to get free, but the uncomfortable conviction that he would actually enjoy the ensuing battle prevented her. Why he should want to coerce her in this way was beyond her. Even less did she understand the warm sensation of excitement that was creeping over her. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the frigid dignity that was her only defence against him. It was a physical reaction she had never experienced before and she didn't like it at all.

'Come,' he said, 'the rain is less now and we can find better cover before the next shower if we move quickly.'

He tightened his hold on her waist, hurrying her forward to a nearby chamber which had been covered by a roofing of corrugated plastic to preserve the mud interior from the weather. Her handbag, which she had slung over her shoulder to leave her hands free, bumped uncomfortably against her ribs, echoing the acrobatic excesses of her heart. How dared he handle her in such a way? Yet once he had her safely under cover from the rain, he let her go with a speed that smacked of relief, stepping away from her and looking her up and down as though he had gained some kind of right to have a proprietorial interest in her. She wished she could look back at him with the same nonchalant arrogance, but her natural reticence prevented her. She veiled her eyes with her long lashes instead and scrutinised him covertly from behind them. It was difficult not to like what she saw. He was not much taller than she, but his strength of muscle showed in every movement and gesture. He had black hair that curled round his head like a Greek statue, and a long, straight nose above a mobile, sensuous mouth. His eyes were too dark to be easily read; they were set at an angle that lent a sadness to his

expression that was instantly belied by the mocking laughter in their depths.

Her eyes met his and, try as she would, she could not drag her own away. She frowned and the mockery in his eyes became more obvious.

'If you are not now in distress, certainly you are a beauty,' he admired her on a faintly sardonic note. 'What are you doing at Mallia alone? Where are your friends?'

Tansy shrugged. 'I came alone to Crete. Why not? I prefer to look at archaeological sites by myself.' She drew herself up with dignity. 'I do know something about it, you know. I am not a stranger to the Minoan civilisation.'

His eyebrows rose. 'You came alone to Crete? Was that wise? Crete consists of more than a few ruined Minoan palaces, and we are not accustomed to young women travelling on their own. You may receive attentions that will be unwelcome to you, have you thought of that?'

'Like yours?' Tansy suggested.

'No, not like mine! I have done nothing to you that I wouldn't have done for any child caught in a thunderstorm. Other men may not be so kindly disposed towards you. Where are you living?'

She opened her mouth to tell him in a natural response to his confident expectation that she would confide in him, but something in the way he looked at her made her more cautious. What did she know of him, after all?

'I don't think that's any of your business!' she said sharply.

'As you wish. I can find out. There are not many tourists here now at the end of October. Meanwhile you would do better to follow my advice and join a group of other people for your excursions into the island's past.' He turned his back on her, looking out at the sky. 'The rain is over,' he announced, 'and I must go. May I take you back to your hotel?'

She shook her head in silence, determined not to thank him for his unwanted gallantry. Why should she? She hadn't asked him to barge in on her solitude.

'I haven't finished looking at the palace,' she told him. 'And I'm not at all afraid of being on my own. I can look after myself—most girls can these days, you know!'

His eyes lit with a challenge that she knew boded her no good. If she could have recalled her words she would have done so, but having said it, she would stand by her declaration of faith in herself come what may. Her mouth set in a stubborn line and she raised her gaze to his with a wary dignity.

'In Crete,' he said, very softly, 'you should be more circumspect, koritsi mou. You are asking for trouble.'

He put his hands beneath her elbows and compelled her to come up close against him. His lips met hers in a light kiss that barely dented her belief that she could control the situation with a tolerant, relaxed rebuff. It was not, she reminded herself, the first time Tansy Drummond had been kissed. But never before had she felt panic at the touch of a man—indeed, never before had she felt anything at all! His arm came round her, like an iron bar behind her back, and his other hand tangled in her hair, making it impossible for her to move. And then she didn't want to. His lips moved against hers, exploring her mouth with an easy mastery that brooked no opposition, and she offered none. She was caught up in a whirlpool of emotion that she

couldn't begin to analyse, even when he finally released her. All she knew was that nothing like that had ever happened to her before.

'I didn't ask for that!' she breathed. 'I didn't! It's ridiculous to go around kissing people you don't know! I don't like you and you probably don't like me either!'

His eyes were dark and brilliant. 'Any Greek would think you had asked for it,' he answered with a touch of humour. 'And it saved you having to thank me—'

'Thank you? Never!'

He laughed. It was a thunderous sound which she belatedly realised had a lot to do with the pounding of her blood in her ears, and she blinked, making a desperate effort to pull herself together.

'Actions speak louder than words,' he drawled.

She was humiliated that he should have felt her involuntary response. It was a strange puzzle to her that it should have happened in the first place. She had better things to do with her time than play at love with the members of the opposite sex she had come up against in the past. It simply wasn't possible to have a professional relationship of the kind she valued and a flirtation at the same time, and her work came first. Her work—and Fergus! Whatever would Fergus have had to say if he could have seen his sister now, scarlet in the face and more than half hoping that the Greek stranger would stay to dally with her further?

Tansy made herself look him full in the face. 'But wasn't that the reaction you were expecting?' she asked him with a wide-eyed innocence.

He eyed her thoughtfully. 'As a matter of fact it wasn't,' he said.

'Oh? I hope you weren't disappointed?'

His lips twitched. 'It depends what I may have been disappointed in, thespinis. As a kiss it was adequate, but that you should share it so easily with a stranger makes me a little disappointed in you. If you were in my charge as a member of my family you would not be running loose in Crete, a prey to any man who cares to take advantage of you. You are too attractive to be safe on your own. You would be better married to someone who would look after you properly.'

Tansy gaped at him. 'Indeed?' she began furiously. 'I happen to prefer my freedom—'

He spread his hands in an uncomprehending gesture. 'What freedom?'

'The freedom to do the work I like, to be myself!'

His laughter rang in her ears. 'For a woman to be herself she needs a man,' he said with a smiling certainty. 'What is your name, thespinis?

'Tansy—' Tansy broke off, stamping her foot. 'Oh, go away!'

'Tansy,' he repeated. 'I have heard this name before. Is it common in your country?'

'No,' she admitted. 'It's a small herb. My mother thought it a pretty name.'

'So it is,' the Greek stranger assured her. 'My name is Titos Michalakis. Titus, as you call him, was the first bishop and the patron saint of Crete. You know about him, perhaps?'

Tansy wrinkled her nose. 'To the pure all things are pure,' she murmured. 'As St. Paul said, of course.'

'To Titus? Did he?'

Titos Michalakis. Michalakis. Where had she heard that name before? Hadn't Elena's name been Michalakis, or something like it, before she had married Fergus? Greek surnames were such funny things. Akis, she thought, meant the son of, and was a typically Cretan ending. It could only be a coincidence that it sounded familiar to her. This man couldn't be her brother's brother-in-law—could he?

'Kyrie, have you—have you a sister?'

He looked surprised. 'I have two. Does it matter to you?'

'No, of course not,' she denied. 'It was just a thought.' She held out her hand to him. 'Goodbye, kyrie.'

'Goodbye;' Tansy mou? I think I shall be seeing you again, don't you?' He touched her cheek with his finger, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. 'I shall find out then why my name means something to you, which I think it does, and we can talk again about what you are doing here on your own. Meanwhile, take care what you do, yes?'

Tansy nodded her head. All the fight had gone out of her now that she thought she knew who he was. She could remember every word her brother had said about him and it all added up to something she doubted her own ability to cope with. Elena, Fergus had said, had been afraid of her brother. He had tried to deprive her of her traditional dowry for no better reason than that she had wanted to marry an Englishman, but Elena had refused to be cheated out of what she considered to be rightfully hers and she had insisted that her brother hand over the title deeds of the villa to her new husband.

And that had been no more than the start of the stormy relationship between them. Fergus had thought he ought to ask his brother-in-law to be best man at his wedding, not knowing that in Crete that office

had all sorts of responsibilities and rights not even dreamed of by his English counterpart. The koumbaros did a great deal more than hold the wreath of flowers over the couple's head during the marriage service. He was carefully chosen as a patron for the whole family and expected to have a say in everything they did from then on. More often than not he would become the godfather of the first-born child, and few decisions could be made without him. One way and another, Tansy was determined not to get involved with him. He might, just might, consider that he had some responsibility for her too, seeing that Fergus was not there to look after her, and Tansy didn't relish having any restraints put on her activities. She was used to looking after herself and that was the way she was going to keep it. Life was quite complicated enough at the moment without going looking for trouble.

She watched him walk away from her, making his way along the ruined processional way of the palace with a swinging walk that was as easy as it was assured. She turned her back on him and began to walk round the other way, giving herself a little mental shake to restore her equanimity. She was somehow disappointed that he had gone, and that surprised her. When had she ever minded being on her own before?

There was another covered area, she saw, nearer the sea, that she had not yet explored. From a distance it looked interesting, or so she told herself, but her enthusiasm for the whole Minoan civilisation seemed daunted after the thunderstorm. It was lonely by herself. As if to mock her a long, low rumble of thunder sounded over the hills behind her, and she shivered. It was Zeus having the final word, she told herself. Cretan Zeus, god of the thunder and storm, who had been born on the island and had made it, in a very special way, his own domain. Some said he had also died there, but that had been heresy to the mainland Greeks. Tansy shut her eyes and imagined she could see him, three times the size of any ordinary man, with dark, glowering,

classical features, letting loose his thunderbolts at all that annoyed him. He looked in her imagination, she recognised, very much like Titos Michalakis, and the recollection of his kiss brought the thunder back to her heart and ears as she remembered that, far from rejecting him, she had given him back kiss for kiss and, worse still, she had enjoyed every moment of it. Heaven help her, she thought, if she didn't pull herself together and put the whole incident out of her mind. But heaven was hardly likely to be on her side in the matter, for Zeus was the leader of the gods and she was less than nothing in his eyes.

Oh well, she thought, she need never see him again. She didn't want to. She wanted to be by herself to get on with her work, for nothing would make her admit that it was unlikely she \yould ever see her brother again. She had promised she would have his book on Crete ready for him when he got back from South America, and she couldn't allow anything to interfere with that. The notes he had left her were scrappy and incomplete, but she was used to that. Often most of the script of his books, popularising the various eras of the past, had been more hers than his, but she had never minded that. It was Fergus's name and reputation that mattered and it was her pride and pleasure to work for him. He was a brother in a million and brilliant with it! Tansy sighed to herself. His marriage to the Cretan girl, Elena, had been a blow to her, there was no denying that, especially as he had not thought to tell her until after the wedding, but she would have died sooner than let him see the hurt he had dealt her. Things wouldn't be much different, she had comforted herself. But they had been different. Very different. Fergus had gone to South America without her, taking his bride with him in her stead, leaving her some taped instructions to go immediately to Crete to finish his book for him. And now he was missing, and everyone else had practically given up hope of ever seeing him again. Only Tansy went on hoping, for, without Fergus, she didn't know what she was going to do. It wouldn't be only her brother who would be lost to her, but her livelihood and everything that made life worth living. He had to be

found sooner or later—he, and Elena too, who had disappeared with him, lost somewhere in some unexplored region of Peru.

Trying to subdue the quickening pace of her blood as the thunder rolled across the sky, Tansy determined to give her mind something else to think about. Always before she had been successful in using her wits to freeze out any emotions or demands her body made on her, and she saw no reason to suppose that she would not be successful this time. It came as something of a shock to find that Titos Michalakis refused to be neatly tidied away but insisted on occupying her thoughts, defying her to interest herself in the Minoan remains all about her.

Very well then, she told herself, if she had to be so silly, think of him she would. He was only a man, and she had always found herself to be more than a match for any man! She turned away from the pile of stones she was looking at and returned to the main rooms of the palace. Walking through the main court, she came across an almost perfect kernos, or offering table, and paused to admire it, glad of the diversion it gave her. About a metre in diameter, there was- a deep depression in the centre, and thirty-four concave circles carved round the rim of the circular stone, one of them slightly bigger than the others. It is probable that the table was used to make offerings for continued fertility and that each hollow was filled with one of the different seeds or crops that were produced on Crete. Perhaps wine and oil were poured into the middle as a gift to the gods. Or perhaps it was not used for that at all, but was used as the board for a complicated game, but Tansy didn't think so. It was only one of the things that she disagreed with her brother about in the notes he had left her, and that worried her too.

A drop of rain splashed on to the table and Tansy resigned herself to getting wet after all, but most of the shower passed her by and only

the thunder continued to rumble round the leaden and blue-patched sky.

'I wield the flail of the lashing tail, And water the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.'

Which brought her back in some incomprehensible way to Titos Michalakis. Her sense of outrage mounted as she realised she had spoken the verse aloud, knowing that she would connect it with a certain dark Greek for as long as she lived. How dared he possess her thoughts with such arrogant ease, especially when he had probably forgotten all about her already.

'You wi]J get wet, thespinis. Come this way and I will show you a quick way back to the villa.'

Startled, Tansy turned on her heel with such force that she nearly sent the small boy who had spoken to her flying.

'I'm so sorry!' she exclaimed. 'Have I hurt you?'

He gave her a scornful look. 'How could you hurt me?' he demanded. He knitted his brow, reminding her inexpressibly of Titos Michalakis. He had the same dark good looks, and his hair, only a little lighter than the man's, curled round his head in exactly the same way.

'Who are you?' she asked.

'My name is Minos.' The boy grinned suddenly. 'I have heard you are Tansy Drummond, the sister of the Kyrios Fergus. I worked for him when he was here because I speak very good English. Now I will work for you.'

'But, Minos, you ought to be at school.'

He shook his head. 'I have my mother to look after,' he explained. 'She wishes to go to America and I must earn the fare for her.'

'What about your father?'

The boy shrugged. 'There is only my mother.' Tansy sensed his withdrawal and her curiosity was aroused. 'Come, thespinis, it will rain again soon and the Kyrios Titos has already gone.'

Tansy wondered if the boy had seen the whole of her encounter with Titos Michalakis and her colour heightened at the thought.

'I'm very glad he has gone! A more impossible man I've never met!'

Minos' face crumpled into a smile. 'You are very pretty,' he told her, 'and your brother is not here to protect you. It is natural that the Kyrios Titos should kiss you. I would myself if I were old enough!'

Tansy could only stare at him. 'How old are you?'

The boy gave her a look of naked regret, shaking his head sadly. 'Not old enough for you, thespinis, but I shall do my best to protect you from other men if you do not like their attentions. I shall be very useful to you, we? It will cost you very little to employ me—a few drachmas that will be well spent!'

'Do you think you can protect me from Titos Michalakis?' she asked him dryly.

Some of his certainty left him. 'The Kyrios Titos was koumbaros at your brother's wedding. He has the right to look after you himself.'

'Indeed,' said Tansy, even more dryly. 'We'll see about that.'

Minos nodded solemnly. 'The Kyrios Titos would not have kissed you if he had known who you were. He will be angry when he discovers his mistake. It would be better if you made it easy for him to tell you not to wander about by yourself or he will forbid you to leave the villa—'

'Titos Michalakis has no jurisdiction over me!' Tansy claimed.

Minos touched her sleeve and pointed towards the path they should follow back to the villa. It led beneath some tamarisk trees a short way from the sea. 'His anger will hurt you, thespinis, if you don't do as he says. He knows many women and your brother is far away.'

The boy walked ahead of her with the sure-footed speed of one who walks constantly. Tansy felt slow and clumsy following behind him. She thought ruefully that she had grown too used to having a car at her disposal, but at least, while she was in Crete, she would re-find the use of her legs and walk as much as possible. That was one of the advantages of coming so late in the year. Today, for instance, was relatively cool and the rain had taken the worst of the heat out of the sun, heralding the short Mediterranean winter that was to come.

The villa was only a little more than a mile away. It stood between the mountains and the sea, a graceful building that had been built long enough ago to have a settled appearance, wedded to- the garden that surrounded it. Inside the floors were paved with mosaics and copies of the Minoan frescoes from Knossos covered the walls of the living rooms, larger than life, in strident colours that were a far cry from the originals. Tansy did not like them much and certainly would not have chosen them, but she was growing used to them and they no longer surprised her every time she went from one room to another.

'I expect you'd like a Coke,' she said to Minos who had followed her into the kitchen.

'I prefer coffee,' he answered with dignity. 'Soon I shall drink ouzo, but my mother will not allow it yet.' He dismissed her attempt to fill the kettle with water from the sink, determined to make his own coffee, which he did with a fierce concentration that made Tansy smile.

'Where does your mother live?' she asked him.

'Nearby.' He cast a look round the kitchen. 'You will need someone to clean for you and make your meals,' he pronounced sternly. 'I will tell my mother to come and see you. Her name is Anna.'

'Does she speak English?' Tansy countered faintly.

'Enough. If she goes to America she will need to learn good English. It will be little trouble to you to teach her what she doesn't know. She is a very good cook and you will have no more trouble in your kitchen.'

Tansy wasn't conscious of having had any 'trouble' previously, but she had to admit that neither the kitchen nor the room where she had been working were as clean and tidy as when she had arrived two nights before. If Anna was not too expensive it would be a relief to have someone to do the household chores while she worked on her brother's book.

Minos put two tiny glass cups on a small round tray, together with two glasses filled with cold water, and filled the cups with the strong, black coffee he had prepared.

'Sit down, thespinis,' he bade her.

Tansy, taking the line of least resistance, sat. 'Why don't you call me Miss Drummond, or Tansy, if you like it better?' she suggested.

'I would call you Kyria Tansy, but you are not a married lady. Miss Drummond is not easy to say.'

'You'd better make it Tansy, then. I don't like thespinis. He called me that!'

The boy looked at her in some surprise. 'He must haveknown you were not married. If you wish it, I shall call you Kyria Tansy. I will tell my mother that it is how you like to» be addressed.'

Acknowledging the rebuke, Tansy made a face at him and they both burst out laughing. They were still laughing when there was a sound at the back door and Tansy jumped to her feet to see who was there. Before she had time to open the door it was flung open and Titos Michalakis stood in the doorway, his face grim.

'So you are Tansy Drummond!' he said bitterly.

'Yes.' She cast a swift look over her shoulder to reassure herself that Minos was still there. 'What of it?'

'It's only now that I remembered where I had heard the name Tansy before. Why didn't you tell me?'

'Would it have made any difference?' she asked steadily.

His face darkened with anger. 'Had I known who you were I would have seen you home myself and made sure you had no trouble from anyone. I did not know that you had a right to my protection.'

Tansy raised her eyebrows. 'Your protection? Am I to understand that it would have made a difference to your behaviour if you had known you would be answerable to some other man?'

'It would have made a difference, yes,' he admitted.

'So what I felt—and feel—doesn't make any difference to you at all?' she demanded, suddenly very cross indeed.

The stiffness went out of his stance and he looked amused. 'How you felt would have protected you from nothing—'

'I have never heard anything so abominable!' Tansy cut in.

'But what is abominable about that? Why should you resent being a vulnerable young girl? In Crete, it is something we treasure in our women before they marry. There can be no fire before she is safely wed, but we like to know that the possibility is there. It is the business of her father and brothers to ensure that no one anticipates her husband's right to be the only one to ignite her passions.'

'Having chosen him for her, I suppose?' Tansy retorted.

'Sometimes. Would you object to that?'

'Of course I should!'

'Then you should not have come to Crete, koritsi mou. You're not very like your brother to look at. I hope you are not like him in nature?'

'Why shouldn't I be?' She was shocked. Everyone liked and admired Fergus. He was someone very special. She had always known that and she didn't like anyone casting aspersions on his character now.

But Kyrios Michalakis didn't answer her. He stared at her for a long moment, his dark eyes brooding over her appearance. She lifted her chin and gave him back look for look. It was true that she was not much like Fergus to look at. He was sandy-haired and had pale blue eyes, whereas her own eyes were a deep hazel and her hair was an ordinary brown that she scraped back from her face and fastened at

the back of her neck in what was meant to be a chignon, but which was more often a single plait because it was easier to keep that way. It was plaited now, and she knew she was looking as plain as it was possible for her to look and, for once, she found herself resenting her own lack of beauty and wondered at it.

Kyrios Michalakis jerked his head. 'Why are you staying here? Do you consider the villa to be yours now?'

She shook her head. 'But it does belong to my brother,' she reminded him.

'To your brother's wife. In any case you cannot stay here on your own. I shall arrange for you to stay with my mother—'

Tansy drew herself up, favouring him with an unblinking stare. 'I shall do as I think best, kyrie. You may have been your sister's keeper, but you are not mine!'

His lips twitched with wry amusement. 'The idea doesn't appeal to you?' he challenged her. 'Very well, then I shall send my other sister, Rhea, to stay here with you. You will be kind to her, if you please, because she has missed Elena very much and will be delighted to have your company. I will not have her upset because you are as indifferent to the customs of others as was your brother. Is it understood?'

Tansy licked her lips, wondering why she didn't dislike him more. Then she shrugged her shoulders, turning away from him. 'I shall be happy to have your sister here,' she said.

CHAPTER TWO

MINOS made another cup of coffee and silently put it on the table, gesturing to Titos to help himself to sugar.

'What are you doing here?' Titos asked him.

'I am working for Kyria Tansy. It is a bad thing for her to visit the places she has to for her brother's book alone.'

Looking at the two of them together, both of them taking the measure of the other, Tansy thought them so alike as to be ridiculous.

'His mother, Anna, is coming to work for me too,' she said mendaciously. 'I expect you know her?'

'Yes, I know Anna,' Titos agreed.

'I'm sure you do!'

His mouth tightened ominously. He took a sip of burning hot coffee, swallowed it easily, and followed it with a chaser of cool, clear water. He bit out a sentence in Greek to the boy and Minos grinned at him.

'I told her that, Kyrie Titos. I told her also you were koumbaros at her brother's wedding. She was not pleased to find herself in your care.'

Titos turned lazy eyes in Tansy's direction. Too bad,' he said.

Tansy glared at him. 'I don't agree that I am in your care,' she told him flatly. 'If I need any protection, and it seems that in Crete I do, Minos is quite man enough for me!'

The beginnings of a frown at the back of his dark eyes undermined her indignation and she wished she hadn't chosen to cross swords with him. For two pins she would have retracted and asked him to tell

her about his sister, Rhea, but then the frown gave way to open amusement and she was doubly glad she had done nothing of the kind.

'Why do you wear your hair like that?' he asked her.She put up a defensive hand to her plait. 'It suits me—'

'It doesn't suit you at all,' he contradicted.

'I meant it's convenient to wear it that way. Why not?'

'I don't like it. You should wear it free. It would soften the harsh expression you hide behind whenever I come near you.'

Outraged, Tansy took a sip of her own coffee. She didn't like it very much when she got a mouthful of dregs, but she swallowed nobly, gagging on the sugary sweetness that lingered on her tongue.

'You flatter yourself, kyrie. I don't keep a special expression for you, or for anyone else!'

'I see, it is a barrier against all mankind! But when you are alone, koritsi, you are as gentle as a young fawn. I have seen you like that, remember, and that is the way I want to see you again!'

'I'm afraid you're doomed to disappointment,' she retorted. 'I have far too much to do to arrange my facial expressions to please anyone! I never have, and I don't intend to start now!'

He folded his arms across his chest, his eyes black and mysterious. 'We'll see,' he said, dismissing the subject from his mind. 'What is this about your brother's book? What has it to do with you?'

'I always put his books into shape for him,' she answered, wondering what he would make of that. 'I have his notes—'

'You write them for him?'

'Not exactly. The idea of his books is to popularise the various ancient civilisations he's interested in, but his style is too pedantic and scholarly for it to sell well, and so I finish them for him. His notes on Crete aren't complete, though, so this time I shall have to do more than usual.'

'Fergus wrote off all our legends as having been the invention of the mainland Hellenes,' Titos remarked.

'Perhaps some of them were, but you have so many that couldn't possibly have been—' She broke off, aware that she had fallen into the trap Titos had laid for her. 'Fergus may well be right! He's very clever!'

'And are you clever?' Titos Michalakis asked.

'Not really. I studied archaeology so that I could help Fergus, but I've never done anything on my own.'

'You've always worked under his guidance?'

'Yes, of course.'

'What happened?' he mocked her. 'Did you fail your exams?'

Temper brought two spots of colour to her cheeks. 'My results were better than his, if you must know! Only I owed it all to him that I ever went up to university in the first place. He's the best brother anyone could have had!'

Titos snorted down his nostrils, his contempt for the pair of them plain to see. 'So you ended up writing his books for him? What will you do now he has disappeared?'

Tansy sat up very straight. 'I haven't given up hope that he will be found—and Elena too,' she added as an afterthought. 'He couldn't have disappeared for ever. People don't in these days! He was so flattered and pleased when they asked him to go to Peru to look at what they had found there. He has this theory, you see, that the Red Indians came from the eastern Mediterranean originally and spoke a type of Semitic language. He thought that these finds would prove his point once and for all.'

Titos sat down on the chair opposite her. 'He wanted to take you with him. Did you know that?' The expression on her face told him clearly that she had not. 'Poor Elena!'

'Why?' she burst out. 'I think she's very lucky! Fergus is a marvellous person and he obviously loves her very much.'

'So much that he wanted to leave her behind and take you instead. Elena kept assuring him that she was a trained secretary and couldn't understand why he wasn't better pleased. He sulked for days when she went on insisting that he took her and wouldn't listen to his pathetic excuses as to why he should not. She didn't know that she was expected to write his book as well as blow his nose for him!'

'That isn't fair!' Tansy blinked back the tears that suddenly afflicted her. 'Fergus is brilliant in his field. They wouldn't have asked him 'to Peru if he hadn't been the best man in the field. Elena will find out!'

'I hope so,' the Greek said with a sardonic smile. 'All he's done so far is to lose her and himself up some mountain where the chances of being rescued seem to be remarkably small.'

'That wasn't his fault!'

'You think not? We'll have to agree to differ about that. But, if you'll take my advice, Tansy Drummond, you'll write your own book and

stand on your own two feet for a change! If you want to be some man's shadow, find your own man and give your brother his freedom to be Elena's husband.'

'I beg your pardon! I happen to earn my living by working for my brother. What's wrong with that?'

He leaned forward. 'You don't need me to tell you that. You've known Fergus Drummond all your life. Think about it some time!'

Unable to break free of his compelling glance, she said, 'I don't like you at all!'

His eyebrows shot up. 'No? How do you know?'

'It isn't very difficult. I prefer people who mind their own business and allow me to get on with mine!'

Far from quelling as she had hoped, he only looked amused. 'Doesn't Fergus allow you any followers?' he drawled. 'Or is it your idea that they will get in the way of your devotion for him? Either way, you're not as committed as you imagine, Tansy mou—'

'You,--naturally, know all there is to know about me on such a short acquaintance,' she said sweetly. 'And I'm not yours, and I don't wish to be!'

'No?' His glance burned her. 'Afraid?'

'I'm not afraid of anything!' she declared with a heightened colour. 'I'm certainly not afraid of you.'

He smiled. 'Perhaps you should be. You can't hang on to Fergus for the rest of your life. Where are your parents, Tansy?'

Tansy resolved not to tell him. Up to a point she was afraid of him, she acknowledged to herself. Nor did she dislike hira, though she couldn't understand why she didn't. When he had kissed her, she had not disliked him at all, she remembered uncomfortably. She had been astonished, diverted, and a little shocked, the more so because no man had ever disturbed her calm control of herself before, but she had not disliked it at all. In fact, despite the slighting way he had spoken of Fergus, he presented a challenge to her femininity that was completely new to her and not nearly as unwelcome as she was busy pretending to herself. Perhaps he should know about her parents, she thought, to show him that she was not alone in the world although Fergus was missing and might never come home again.

'My father's in the States,' she said slowly. 'My mother lives in New Zealand. They're both married again, so I don't see much of them, but I'm always welcome in both establishments.'

'I see,' he said and, oddly, she thought perhaps he did. 'Hence your fierce loyalty to Fergus. You should find a man of your own to love and to love you, someone who wouldn't care that your degree was better than his!'

Tansy stiffened at the mockery in his voice. 'I worked jolly hard for it,' she claimed, 'and I had fewer distractions than Fergus did.'

'That is as plain as the nose on your face,' Titos told her, standing up and carrying his empty cup over to the sink.

She was hurt but determined that he shouldn't know it. 'You kissed me just the same!' she hit back, ashamed that she should sound complacent about it, but not knowing how else to win the battle of words between them.

'What if I did?' he said over his shoulder. 'You can only start feeling pleased with yourself when a man comes back for second helpings.'

Tansy blenched. 'I have better things to do with my time than encourage men to play silly games with me,' she said" in the no-nonsense way that had served her well in the past.

Titos laughed out loud. 'You can say that because you know yourself to be quite safe now that I know who you are,' he mocked her. 'But if you weren't Fergus's sister, Tansy Drummond, I'd take the starch out of you and you'd love every minute of it! As it is, you can please me by loosening your hair and keeping a guard over your tongue, and I'll send Rhea over to you as soon as I get home.'

'To please you?' she repeated.

'Don't I make a good enough substitute for Fergus for you? Or wasn't he interested in your personal appearance? Well, I like my women to look pretty. I don't suppose Fergus cared one way or the other?'

Tansy finally lost her temper. 'Fergus told me all about you!' she almost shouted at him. 'I didn't like you before I'd met you! You terrorised Elena and tried to deprive her of her dowry, and you were beastly to Fergus who'd never done you any harm! You tried to prevent their marriage, didn't you? You can't deny it!'

'Why should I deny it? Marriage is a big step in a woman's life. She has to be sure the man of her choice will protect and look after her and her children for the rest of her life, not just until some other attraction passes under his nose. That is the way we do things in Greece. The family is very important to us, as it is not to Fergus. He was not what I wanted for Elena, a man who would change his wife with as little thought as he would change his car!'

'How do you know I don't think the same way?' Tansy countered, guiltily aware that that was exactly how Fergus would think about the responsibilities of marriage.

Titos Michalakis shrugged his shoulders. 'It's different for a woman,' he said quietly. 'My wife will know who has the ordering of her life. She will be in no position to change me for another at some whim of her own. It will be my business to see that she is too busy loving me and bringing up my children to have such fancies. If you are wise, you will marry a man who will think enough of you to insist on being the centre of your life too. That is the only way a woman can be truly happy in marriage.'

'And, of course, you know all about women?' she taunted him.

He was not at all put out. 'Enough,' he answered. He stood over her, making her spine prickle with pleasurable fear. 'Enough to know when I'm being encouraged to dally with one. What a pity that you may never discover whether you really dislike me or not because I was koumbaros at your brother's wedding. Think what would have been lost to Crete if Europa had never attracted Zeus, or had been better protected from him!'

'It would have been better for Europa!' Tansy protested.

'You don't think that Zeus made her happy?'

'I don't know,' she admitted. 'I wouldn't want to attract a married man, or a married god either!'

'But you wouldn't mind being carried oS on the back of a bull—'

'Yes, I should! I'm very easily put out by such things!' Tansy assured him. 'I don't like the unusual.'

The boy, Minos, lifted his head, his attention caught by the reference to a story he knew well. 'Minos was one of Europa's sons,' he declared. 'His father was Zeus, the king of the gods. Sometimes I

think my father was Zeus too, because my mother has never had a husband. I should like my father to have been a god.'

Tansy could have wept at the hurt the boy's words tried to hide. She cast Titos a speaking look, her ire against him once more kindled in Minos' cause.

'Zeus is no favourite of mine!' she exclaimed. 'He treated his wife, Hera, abominably. Europa wasn't the only diversion that took him away from her. I can think of half a dozen other hapless victims of his. And,' she finished grandly, carried away by her own burning indignation at what she was increasingly sure had been Anna's fate at the hands of Titos," 'fancy seducing anyone by turning oneself into a cuckoo! I'm surprised Hera had anything to do with him!'

Titos exploded into laughter. 'A cuckoo? My dear Tansy, are you sure? I can't imagine Zeus as a cuckoo.'

'Can't you?' she said dryly. 'I can. Cuckoos are the great supplanters in the bird world, and Zeus was certainly that!'

Titos' amusement lit up his eyes as they dwelt on her indignant face. 'I think you take these stories too seriously,' he told her. 'They are symbolic only.'

'Exactly,' she agreed. 'They tell one something about real people, if one thinks about it. Take Europa's story, for instance. I daresay she was brought to Crete as a captive, for the symbol of Crete was the bull, and the ship that carried her away very likely had a bull as its figurehead. Then Zeus, in the form of the bull, turned into an eagle before he raped her—'

'What a waste!' said Titos.

'What?' Tansy was as embarrassed as she was outraged.

7 wouldn't waste my time turning myself into an eagle—- or a cuckoo either—if I had been chasing someone like Europa.'

'But you're not Zeus,' Tansy reminded him.

'No. Remember that,' he advised. 'My morals have been formed in another school and Zeus and I wouldn't see eye to ' eye on a great many things. Remember that too, and don't jump to ill-advised conclusions. You could be wrong, you know.'

But, looking at Minos, a miniature edition of the man standing beside her. Tansy couldn't believe that she was wrong about their relationship. 'You mean you intend to be faithful to your Hera?' she murmured.

'It depends whom you've cast in the part. My wife will have nothing to complain about, I can promise you that.'

'But that says nothing about before you're married! What about—what about the others you might betray?'

Titos gave her a long, level look. 'What about minding your own business?' he said at last.

She flushed. 'Minos says she wants to go to America,' she said without thought.

'It might be arranged, but not because of anything I have done!'

Tansy envied him his arrogant delivery of such remarks. She, even while she knew herself to be right, felt timid in the face of his disapproval. It took courage to withstand him.

'What about Minos?' she insisted.

'Me?' the boy interrupted. 'I am a man, Kyria Tansy. I don't need anyone to care for me.' A puzzled frown formed between his eyes. 'Are you talking about ws? I thought you were talking about the old gods.'

'So we were, pedhi,' said Titos, annoying him by calling him a child. He ruffled the boy's hair with his hand and smiled down at him. 'You have to make allowances for women, they get emotional about the least little thing, and Tansy is a bit confused anyway.' The amusement in his eyes grew even more pronounced. 'I think she sees me as a latter-day Zeus, because if she thought of me as a man she would be even more confused.'

'Is that true, Kyria Tansy?' the boy asked, laughing up at her.

'Don't be ridiculous!' she rebuked him.

'But you prefer the company of the gods?' Titos taunted her. 'They're much safer company for a girl like you.'

She pursed her lips, not liking the element of truth in his thrust. 'They're my work and I'm interested in them, that's all!'

Titos stared at her prim mouth and then made an exclamation of impatience that somehow hurt her even more than his words had done. 'You live in your work and that fine intellectual world you've created for yourself far too much!' he told her. 'You may think being ravished by an eagle, anda god at that, to be a pretty idea, but a man will do much better by you.' He looked deep into her eyes. 'Ime oandras' yineka mou!'

'I don't understand Greek,' she complained, 'and I don't like your conversation! Minos is too young—'

'Minos is a Greek, and a Cretan, and he knows much more about life than you do, Tansy Drummond. Fight your own battles, koritsil Fergus isn't here to keep up the pretence that you don't share the good, red-blooded emotions of the human race, and Minos is too young for you to hide behind. It's time someone gave a jolt to your complacency!'

Tansy sat there, hating him, but she could think of no answer that would do justice to her feelings. 'Please go away!' she said.

'I'm going!' He walked over to the door. 'But you won't always get rid of me so easily, I can promise you that!'

For a long time after he had departed and the door had slammed shut behind him, Tansy brooded in silence over the extraordinary things he had said. She felt breathless and uncertain and not quite herself, and she resented that quite as much as she had minded his implication that she used her work for Fergus as an escape from real life. After a while she became aware of Minos' concerned gaze as he fiddled with the coffee-cup Titos had left on the table.

'He's the most aggravating man I've ever met!' she said on an hysterical note. 'The less I see of him the better!'

Minos nodded his head slowly. 'You are confused. Kyria Tansy, as he said. He thinks you very pretty. He would like to kiss you again!'

Tansy lowered her eyes to the table, seeing nothing but her own trembling hands that clung to one another in front of her. 'Is that what he said when he spoke in Greek?' she demanded. She cleared her throat and attempted a smile. 'He shouldn't" have said any such thing in front of a boy like you!'

But Minos did not smile back at her. He blinked once or twice, his eyes round and staring. 'No, he did not say that,' he said. 'He said he

was the man, and he called you his woman. I think he was angry with you.'

'With me?' Really, it was all too much. The man must be touched in the head if he had said any such thing. 'I have far more reason to be angry with him!'

Minos nodded his head again. 'But women seldom follow reason,' he pronounced, sounding just like Titos, as well as looking like him. 'You must not mind liking him, Kyria Tansy. All the girls in Crete like him and hope he will look at them. My mother often says so, and then she laughs because they are jealous of her when he comes to our house and talks to her, and she likes that very much. I can tell, for she stands a long time at the door when he departs, holding the light, so, so that all can see her.'

'Oh?' Tansy said coldly. 'Does he visit your mother often?'

'When he has business with her. His father was koumbaros at my grandparents' wedding and was the godfather of my mother. The Kyrios Titos does much for her in the name of his father.'

'He would!' Tansy muttered. She reminded herself that it could never matter to her what he did. If she didn't want to be annoyed by him, all she had to do was avoid his company in the future and that shouldn't be too difficult. She had her work to get on with and that had always been more than enough for her. So why wasn't it enough for her now?

She shook herself free of her thoughts and rushed into a great bustle of activity to keep herself busy. She made up the bed in the second bedroom and swept out the whole house until her arms ached with the unaccustomed motion of using the stiff-bristled broom on the mosaic floors.

'Why do you not wait until I bring my mother?' Minos asked her, nervous of her in this mood.

'Because she isn't here now and I don't know what time Rhea will be coming,' she snapped back. 'Oh dear, I do hope she's easier to get along with than her brother!'

Minos disappeared soon after that, taking Tansy by surprise when he reappeared in the kitchen with a rathef blowsy woman, dressed inevitably in the black of widowhood, behind him. Tansy liked Anna at once. She liked her warm, honey-coloured skin, and her dark, laughing eyes, and the easygoing way she took everything in her stride, her plump body quivering in sympathy with the giggles that caught in her throat no matter what disaster overtook her.

'I am Anna,' she announced from the middle of the kitchen.

'My mother,' Minos added unnecessarily, glaring at his parent for speaking first. Anna giggled happily, quite unconcerned by her son's displeasure. 'She has come to prepare the dinner for you,' Minos went on. 'Tomorrow, she will do the housework too.'

Anna nodded her consent to this plan. 'Until I go to America. When I go there I marry an American citizen and have no more trouble.' She giggled again. 'Will you help me go to America?'

Tansy was doubtful that she would find America to be the El Dorado she imagined, but now hardly seemed the time to tell her so.

'Of course, if I can,' she said instead.

Anna looked pleased. 'Your brother is in America, nel You can write to him and arrange for me to work for the Kyria Elena—'

Tansy bit her lip. 'My brother and his wife may be dead, Anna. Besides, they are in Peru, and you want to go to the States, don't you?'

'But ydu do not believe your brother is dead!' Anna pointed out, undismayed. 'You do not mourn for him. Soon you will hear from him and then you can tell him about me. Until then, I will work for you here.'

Oddly-comforted by the Greek woman's certainty that her brother lived, Tansy meekly agreed to her taking charge of the kitchen then and there, going herself into the living room where the oppressive copied frescoes overpowered her resolution to read through Fergus's notes on the palace of Mallia while the place was still in her mind.

It seemed she could think of nothing and no one but Titos Michalakis! A fine fool she was making of herself, she berated herself soundly, but she still couldn't ignore him. He might have been in the room with her, so conscious was she of the way he had looked at her and the angry way his words of condemnation of her had tumbled out of his strong, well- moulded mouth.

She stood up and went and looked at herself in the looking-glass that stood between two of the frescoes on the wall. It was a spinster's face that looked back at her, she admitted, and she didn't like it any more than he did. She put up a hand to the plait at the back of her head and loosened her hair, tossing it over her shoulders and pulling it forward over her forehead. It made her look very different—younger and more vulnerable, and much, much less sure of herself. It would never do for him to see her like that!

'Kyria Tansy! Kyria Tansy! There is a car coming! What shall I bring for you to offer to your guests?'

Tansy whirled round, looking at Anna with comic dismay as she stood in the doorway, obviously delighted that Tansy was to have visitors.

'Keep them out of here while I do up my hair!' she breathed. 'Please, Anna! I can't let anyone see me like this!'

Anna's giggle made her more flustered than ever. She turned back to the mirror and smoothed her hair flat over her head, flustered by the sounds of arrival that came from the hall. She could see the door in the glass and watched helplessly as Anna, far from discouraging the visitors, greeted them with a breathless pleasure and hurried them into Tansy's presence. Tansy's eyes met those of Titos Michalakis in the looking-glass and she choked.

'I have brought Rhea to you,' he said formally. He looked amused. 'Rhea, come and meet Elena's sister-in-law, Tansy Drummond. Tansy, my sister Rhea.'

The Greek girl was small and delicate, with her brother's hair, but with none of his strength of feature. Smudges of tiredness showed dark beneath her eyes, and she carried her hands in an awkward way by her sides as if she didn't know what to do with them.

'How d'you do?' Tansy said faintly.

'Hero poli,' the girl murmured.

Tansy let go of her hair long enough to gesture towards the sofa and sat down herself quickly on the nearest chair. 'I'm sorry to be so disorganised,' she said. 'I hadn't realised how late it is.'

'Were you working?' Rhea inquired.

'Not exactly.' Tansy summoned up a smile. 'Anna had only just got here and I was hoping she would be able to wring some hot water out of the stove that's supposed to heat it. I was just getting ready for a bath.'

Rhea smiled back. 'But you are pretty when you are disorganised! Far prettier than Titos told me you were. He said you dressed like a schoolmistress and worked all the time! I was afraid I would have nothing to say to you, but now I am glad I have come.' She hesitated and then went on shyly, 'I thought you might be like Fergus, but you're not! He—'

'Tansy is writing Fergus's book,' Titos' voice cut across his sister's impetuous speech.

'About Crete?' Rhea collapsed with laughter. 'It was so funny,' she gasped, 'the way he pretended to know all about us. He would spend hours telling us what we are like, and why. But he never bothered to get to know us at all, did he, Titos?' -

'That's enough,' her brother warned her. 'Tansy thinks she knows all about the old legends too.' '

'I know that Cretans are liars,' Tansy put in, anxious to turn the .conversation away from her brother. 'They , always have been! One of the ancients said, And the Cretans, who are liars, relate that Zeus is born every year in the same cave with flashing fire and a stream of blood; and that every year he dies and is buried.'

'No wonder you disapprove of us, belittling your hero like that,' Titos teased her. 'And with your hair running free, he might well have cast an eye in your direction!'

Tansy tossed her head, half-laughing back at him. 'At one year old he would have had to be very precocious!' she retorted.

His eyes were twin lights of laughter and her own dropped before them. 'At one, or one hundred, Cretan Zeus would have marked you out,' he answered, his voice gentle and unbearably intimate. 'Didn't you hear his thunder this morning? You won't escape, Tansy mou, any more than Europa did.'

'The old gods are dead and gone,' she said, and was annoyed that anyone she distrusted as much as she did Titos Michalakis could disturb her so easily. 'And you are liars, every one!' She turned and looked straight at Titos. 'Liars and deceivers! But I don't intend to be taken in by your nonsense!'

Rhea gave a delighted laugh. 'Now you sound like the schoolmistress!' she declared. 'But you will never frighten Titos that way. Titos never minds what names one calls him, but he will have his revenge when you are least expecting it, so beware!'

CHAPTER THREE

RHEA seemed to enjoy staying at the villa. She lost the tired look that had been so much a feature of her expression when Tansy had first seen her and her somewhat awkward movements became slowly more controlled.

'Titos says I need to regain my confidence,' she said to Tansy, twisting her mouth into a wry smile. 'I was in an accident, you see. It's done me good to be here with you. Mama fusses over me. especially now that Elena has gone.'

'I expect she does,' Tansy acknowledged. 'Were you badly hurt?'

The Greek girl nodded, her eyes sliding way from Tansy's. 'I didn't think I'd like you,' she burst out inconsequentially, 'but I do! One of these days I'll take you to our house and introduce you to my mother. When she gets to know you, she'll be as pleased as I am that you've come here.'

'It was kind of her to allow you to come and stay with me,' Tansy said, bewildered by the conclusion she had met in Crete that she was unlikeable. Why should they all expect to dislike her? Was it because they hadn't liked Fergus? But that was ridiculous! Everyone liked Fergus!

'Titos insisted,' Rhea told her. 'Mama was furious.' The girl looked embarrassed, as though she wished she had said nothing about her mother. 'She was afraid for me,' she added. 'I was a little afraid too, but I hadn't met you then.'

'Afraid? Of me?'

Rhea burst out laughing. 'I thought perhaps all English people were the same!'

Tansy took a grip on herself, determined to get to the bottom of the girl's fears. 'Have you known many?' she asked.

'No. Titos said he had many English friends and we were not to be prejudiced, but it was hard not to be. Elena meant so much to us. It was terrible!'

Tansy jumped up from her chair and put her arms round the Greek girl. 'But, darling, you mustn't give up hope yet! I'm sure she and Fergus will be found soon and then everything will be all right. You'll see!'

'You don't understand!' Rhea gulped.

'Then explain it to me.'

'I can't! I thought you might have known—that Fergus would have told you—but it's a family matter and, if you don't know, I can't tell you. Only Titos has the right to do that, and he won't, though he might have done if you had been Fergus's brother and not his sister.'

'Oh dear,' said Tansy. 'I don't understand at all.'

'No,' Rhea agreed. 'If I tell my mother that, she may agree to meeting you. I'll ask Titos. Only, if you do meet her, please don't mention Fergus, or that your parents don't live together, or anything like that, will you?'

Tansy hesitated. 'I'm not ashamed of my family,' she said.

'No, you wouldn't be,' Rhea sighed. 'Titos says the English think it is quite all right to be divorced and marry again. He says it may sometimes be better than everybody being miserable, even the children, but my mother doesn't think that at all. She may think you plan to run away from your husband too, as your mother did!'

'But I haven't got a husband!' Tansy protested.

'No, but if you did run away, it would be better if you hadn't married a Cretan,' Rhea retorted unanswerably. 'He would never forgive you! And nor would his family!'

'Well, she needn't worry,' Tansy muttered, rather put out. 'I don't suppose I shall ever marry and, if I did, I wouldn't marry a Greek of any sort! I didn't think Fergus would either,' she added on a reflective note. 'He's never really liked foreigners before.'

Rhea immediately looked concerned. 'He won't ever leave Elena, will he? Titos will kill him if he does!'

'Then let's hope he doesn't,' Tansy said lightly.

But the conversation disturbed her long after she had watched Rhea walk up the path to her mother's house and had settled down in the living room to do some work on Fergus' book. She sorted the scraps of paper Fergus had left her into some kind of order. They were at best a meagre collection. Whatever else he had been doing during those weeks he had spent on Crete, he had done very little work, and what he had done bore little relation to his usual immaculate research.

Tansy stared round the room, trying to make up her mind to scrap the notes and write her own book. The idea had tempted her ever since Titos had first suggested it. She had thought at first that it would be disloyal to her brother to strike out on her own, but his notes were so skimpy that she could make little of them, and she had often longed to have a free hand when she had worked on his prose, rewriting his theories of the various ancient civilisations for the mass market as his publishers required before they would accept the finished manuscript. Supposing, this time, she were to choose her own material as well as treating it in her own inimical way. Supposing she should strike out completely on her own, could Fergus object to her sudden

independence? Wryly she admitted to herself that he probably would. But it would be a marvellous venture all the same!

Her eyes fell on the most gaudy-of the reproductions of the frescoes on the wall and she frowned at it. She could not live with them a minute longer, she decided. If they had been more like the originals, she would have been glad to have them on"'the walls, but they were lifeless and their colouring was brash and not a bit like the ones that had been found at Knossos and other Minoan sites, and were now hanging on the walls of the upstairs gallery in the museum at Heraklion.

Anna -was horrified when she told her that she intended to get rid of the frescoes at once.

'Kyria Elena agreed to their being brought here,' the Greek woman said grimly.

'Kyria Elena isn't here,' Tansy pointed out. 'And neither is Fergus. I can't work with those dreadful things on the walls. If you won't help me, I'll take them down by myself!'

'The Kyrios Titos will be angry,' Anna warned her.

'Let him be! It's none of his business anyway!'

'So you say! Isn't he the owner of the villa? Don't you live here because he says you may?'

'No, I do not!' Tansy retorted. 'The villa belongs to my brother—'

But the Greek woman only laughed. 'The Kyrios Titos never intended him to have it. He will be angry, Kyria Tansy, and he will know how to deal with the sister of Fergus Drummond! Take my advice and ask

him first before you make any changes in the villa. I know the Kyrios and you do not!'

Tansy was angrier than she had ever been in her life before. 'I don't want to know him!' she declared. 'Much good it did you!' She immediately repented of that unwise remark. 'Oh, Anna, you don't have to do everything he says just because he's a man—an attractive man, I grant you, but nothing special.'

'To you he is special,' Anna retorted.

Tansy drew herself up, her eyes bright with anger. 'What makes you think that?' she demanded.

But Anna only laughed. 'My son, he tell me much about the Kyrios and yourself at Mallia.' She laughed again. 'No longer do you scrape your hair back from your face and work all the time! But many girls have tried to please the Kyrios Titos Michalakis and he is not married yet!'

Tansy was speechless with rage. 'You're impossible! Titos and I don't even like each other—'

'You will say that once too often,' a man's voice interrupted her. 'Why be angry with Anna? It is quite true that you have been wearing your hair in a prettier style—'

'But not to please you!' Tansy's fury fed eagerly on the sight of her tormentor, leaning against the jamb of the door, his arms crossed over his chest, and a look of interested amusement in his eyes.

'Of course not,' he agreed too promptly. 'You're on Fergus's side.'

'I'm not on any side!' she contradicted. 'Why should I be? Why should there be any sides?' She raised her chin and glared at him. 'What have you all got against Fergus?'

His lips twisted into a wry smile. 'Why should we have anything against him?'

'I don't know, but you obviously have something that you blame him for. I wish you'd tell me about it, because it isn't very nice not knowing.'

Titos stood up straight, dismissing Anna back to the kitchen with a gesture. 'Didn't Fergus tell you anything about his stay here?' he asked her. His voice was so gentle that her anger melted within her and she was left with nothing but her bewilderment that anyone should dislike Fergus. Only it wasn't fair that Titos should like her too, because she was Fergus's sister, for there wasn't any other reason she could think of. And she wanted him to like her—She took a deep breath, her eyes widening. She was being ridiculous! What could it possibly matter to her whether any of them liked her or not?

'Fergus's letters are always about work. He doesn't approve of gossip!'

'And what were you doing while he was here?'

'I had—other things to do.' But she hadn't, she remembered. She had had nothing to do. Again and again she had written to Fergus, begging him to allow her to join him in Crete, but she had received no reply from him. The first she had heard he had written to tell her he was married to a Cretan girl and was off to Peru on the first available flight. He had sent her some money and her air ticket to Crete, and there had followed two pages of instructions about the book he claimed he had already begun. He hadn't even sent his love.

'Working?' Titos asked her.

'I do sometimes do something else!' She realised she was making a fool of herself and shrugged her shoulders. 'I have friends in England, surprising as that may be to you!'

'An attractive girl usually has friends,' he answered. 'I cannot think it suitable for you to be on your own, though, even in England. I suppose you have an aunt, or some other relation, to keep an eye on you?'

Tansy gaped at him. 'Whatever for?'

'I imagine that some of your friends are men and you have remarkably little idea of how to look after yourself—'

'You mean you think I'm flighty?'

'Inexperienced is how I would describe you. There is nothing to be ashamed of in that. In Crete, we take great care to protect our sisters and daughters, but they often learn more than we care that they should about the marriageable men who come to court them. In many ways even Rhea, who is not yet eighteen, is already older than you are, don't you think?'

'Good gracious, no!' Tansy denied hotly. 'I'd have you know that 1 haven't been a teenager for a long time now!'

He reached out a hand, pulling her hair further forward and pushing it into its natural wave. 'A few years only,' he scoffed. 'You are still a schoolgirl, koritsi, in the ways that count!'

'Thank you very much!' she said stiffly. She backed away from him, for his touch on her hair disturbed her and she was very much afraid that he might guess as much. 'Did you come only to abuse me, or did you have something else unpleasant to say to me?'

He spread out his hands, looking injured. 'How have I abused you?'

'You may not find me attractive, but not everyone thinks the same way!' she informed him roundly. 'I'm not as inexperienced as you think!'

'I should be sorry if you were not.' There was something in his voice that made her look at him and she wished she hadn't because she knew she ought to resent his arrogant air of authority and somehow she could not. 'I came only to see that you and Rhea are comfortable and have everything you want. Don't let me interrupt you. What were you doing that neither Anna nor you heard me knocking on the door?'

Tansy sat down in front of her typewriter and pretended she hadn't heard him. 'If that was all,' she said, 'I have a lot of work to do, so perhaps you won't mind seeing yourself out?'

'I mind very much. If you wish me to go you will have to see me to the door and say goodbye to me properly, as I should if you came to visit me.'

'I'm not very likely to visit you as your mother won't receive me!' Tansy shot back at him.

'Who told you that?' Titos asked quickly.

'Rhea did. She thinks your mother will hold my parents' divorce against me. And Fergus, of course! Though what poor Fergus has to do with your mother ignoring my existence is beyond me. You're free enough with your criticism of me, but I don't dislike people I've never even met, and I don't judge people by their relations either! I like Rhea!'

'Meaning that you don't like me?'

'If you like to interpret it that way.' She set her mouth in a mutinous line. 'I'd appreciate it if you would explain to Anna that this villa is Fergus's property and not yours if you can spare the time on the way out. She seems to think that your permission is necessary for every little change I want to make here. If this is what Fergus had to put up with, I'm not surprised he was rude to you all!'

Titos surveyed her thoughtfully. 'Fergus was not rude,' he said slowly. 'He knew which side his bread was buttered better than that. I am sorry you feel yourself to have been slighted by my family, though. My mother is old-fashioned and the things that Fergus told her about his family held little appeal for her, but I think her reaction to you may be quite different.' The amusement crept back into his eyes. She will not make the mistake of thinking you flighty!'

'No, she'll think I plan to run away from my husband—'

Titos' laughter made her wonder if she were not being rather ridiculous, and a smile curved round her own lips.

'Rhea again, I presume? He would be a stupid man if he allowed you to run away from him,' he remarked.

'He might have no choice in the matter,' Tansy pointed out with some asperity.

'If he had no choice he would be a fool. A man makes or breaks his own marriage and it is his responsibility to protect his wife from doing anything foolish. If she is bored and unhappy, he should do something to make her less so, not turn her out into an unfriendly world.'

Tansy's smile widened. 'Not many women would agree with you,' she said. 'We are able to make our own decisions and take responsibility for ourselves!'

'Sometimes.' he admitted.

'I'm afraid you hold an impossibly romantic view of marriage,' she told him. 'It isn't really like that at all.'

'But you would like it to be?' he prompted her.

'I suppose T would,' she admitted.

'It is like that here in Crete. I cannot think of any Cretan wife who has run away from her husband.' He looked at her, his amusement written large on his face. 'You had better follow your brother's example and marry a Cretan yourself,' he said.

Tansy laughed. The idea had its attractions, especially when he came close up beside her and she could feel the warmth of his body and was terribly aware of his strength and agility, and would have liked to have been closer still to him—as close as they had been when he had kissed her in the thunderstorm.

'I haven't a dowry to tempt anyone here into marriage with me. Don't you expect your wives to bring a house, or something similar, with them? Elena gave Fergus this villa, didn't she?'

'It was agreed they should live here,' he compromised. 'It remains to be seen whether they stay on here—always supposing they come back from Peru alive.'

'They will,' Tansy said steadily. 'They must!'

'I hope so,' he agreed.

'Though,' Tansy went on, remembering the frescoes that she wanted to remove from the walls, 'I find the villa as it stands a bit

overpowering myself. I can't think why Fergus didn't throw out these terrible reproductions long ago!'

Titos glanced round the room at them. 'He brought them here, why should he want to throw them out?'

But that Tansy could not believe. 'Fergus had them put up? He must have done it to please Elena. He couldn't like them. They're so crude, not at all like the originals!'

'I take it that you've already visited the museum at Heraklion. How did you get there? On the bus?'

'Yes, of course,' Tansy said.

'Elena used to go often also,' he remarked. 'She first met Fergus in one of the galleries there and they got talking. These copies of the frescoes are as false as her love affair with your brother. She hated them quite as much as you do!'

Tansy's stomach cramped with something very like cold fright at the grim tone in his voice. 'I don't believe you,' she said.

His eyes came back to her face and she was relieved to see the customary amusement in their depths. 'You know very little about your brother, Tansy Drummond. Let's hope you never find out about him the hard way.' His mouth relaxed into a slow smile. 'I'll send a man over to take the offending objects down and put a clean coat of distemper over the walls. Will that please my lady?'

She nodded, mollified despite herself. Titos couldn't help it if he had gained a bad impression of Fergus. He hadn't lived with him all his life as she had. He didn't know how kind he frequently was, and the care he had taken of her when their parents' marriage had broken off and they had been left almost entirely to their own devices thereafter.

'If you can spare a moment, we could take them down between us,' she suggested. 'I don't want to be a nuisance—'

'That you are not,' he assured her, 'but you and I are going to call on my mother right now. Her name is Melissa, called after the famous gold bee of Crete which you may have seen in the museum.' He grinned suddenly. 'She stings like a bee sometimes too, but you need not fear her tongue, Tansy mou. She is not your enemy.'

'I wish I could be as sure of that,' Tansy answered, making a face. 'Shouldn't you warn her that I'm coming?'

He shook his head. 'Since my father died she has lived in my house and you come as my guest. We are an hospitable people, koritsi, and are always kind to the strangers within our gate. Isn't it better to get it over? You have to meet some time.'

'I don't see why,' Tansy maintained stubbornly. 'She holds a grudge against Fergus too!'

'But she will like you for my sake, that I promise you—'

'I ought to change out of my trousers!'

'And escape out the back door?' he mocked her. 'You're coming now, Tansy Drummond! My mother has seen a girl in trousers before, I assure you, and thinks nothing of it. She will probably agree with me that you look cute in them!' He held out his hand to her. 'Now, Tansy!'

It seemed she had no choice. She put her hand in his and allowed him to draw her out of the room into the narrow hallway. She had to admit she was curious to know what Titos' mother was like. It had never occurred to her to wonder about any of the family Fergus had married into. She was ashamed to realise that she had been far more concerned about herself, and how the marriage would affect her. That

it would also affect others outside the two main parties to the match had been of no interest to her at all.

'Is Elena younger than you?' she asked Titos, retrieving her hand from his firm grip.

'Both the girls are. I was born just after the end of the war, but my father had had a bad time and had to go away to Athens when things had settled down there to be put together again. When he came back in the early nineteen- fifties, first Elena appeared and then Rhea. My mother called a halt after that because my father could only work intermittently and money was tight. I think she regretted that afterwards, but it was too late then. My father died ten years ago.'

'Leaving you to support his family?'

'Why not? I was old enough, and I am strong and healthy. My father's family is also mine!'

'But when you marry—'

'I shall still have my mother to support and Rhea to look after until I can find a husband for her who will take her off my hands. But we shall have enough for our needs. I earn a great deal more than my father did.'

Tansy was on the point of asking how much, when she realised that such a question was not permitted to an acquaintance such as herself. She coloured a little, wondering at the bad effect Titos seemed destined to have on her manners, when he surprised her by asking her very much the same question.

'Do Fergus's books make much money? If you were to write this Cretan one on your own could you support yourself for a while, or would you have to go on receiving money from your brother?'

'I've supported myself ever since I came down from university,' she told him. 'I work only sometimes for Fergus, but I teach as well, and I have worked on one or two digs on my gwn account.'

'I see. But just now you are working for him ?'

Tansy followed him up a rough patch in the path, glad of his support as one of the rocks slipped beneath her feet and went rolling down to the level below her.

'I haven't decided yet. I'd like to do one of those super story books for children as a sideline to the other, but I'd have to find somebody to illustrate it.' She pointed back the way they had come, to the ink-dark sea below, almost hidden by the curve of the thyme-covered hill. The soil was a deep, rich red, grading to a sandy colour as it neared the beach. What grass there had been had long ago been dried out by the heat of the sun, emphasising the brilliance of colour in the sea that not even the cloudless sky could do more than palely reflect. 'Isn't that beautiful? People in England wouldn't believe it unless they had seen it for themselves!'

Titos opened a gate at the head of the path and stood aside for her to precede him through it.

'You must ask Rhea to show you some of her work,' he suggested.

'Oh,' Tansy said. 'I don't think she would want to show me anything she'd done,' she went on reluctantly. 'She doesn't like me either.'

He hardly seemed to be listening to her at all. 'It won't hurt her if you look at her stuff,' he said. 'Welcome to my house, Tansy.'

'Thank you,' she murmured. She veiled her eyes with her lashes, belatedly wondering if there had been any significance in the slight stress he had given to the 'my' before the 'house'. But when she did

look up at him he had already turned towards the house and was walking purposefully up the paved path towards it.

The house was much grander than she had expected. It was built in a modern style, with a lot of wrought-iron work round the windows, and a beautiful converted carriage light beside the door. The garden too spoke silently of money and care, with huge patches of bougainvillea adding their colour to the groups of exotic flowers that crowded the well-tilled beds. Tansy bent and rescued a battered hibiscus from being trodden on by mistake and, when she looked up, found that she was being silently studied by a tiny, plump, incredibly well-groomed woman who had come out of the house to greet them.

'Kyria Melissa?' she asked uncertainly.

The small hands moved so quickly that Tansy was irresistibly reminded of the bumble-bee Titos' mother had been called after. The sleek black of her dress and cardigan added to the illusion. Her large, pansy-soft eyes turned towards her son in silent reproach.

'You should have told me we had visitors,' she rebuked him.

'We have only just arrived. We came up the path from the villa. This is Tansy Drummond, Mama.'

The slight stiffening round the mouth was the only sign the older woman gave that Tansy's visit was unwelcome to her.

'Tansy? It is not a common name, but pretty.'

'My mother thought so,' said Tansy. 'It's a small herb with yellow flowers, sometimes used in cookery and medicine.'

Kyria Melissa favoured Tansy with a curious look. 'Athanasia,' she commented briefly. 'You are called to be immortal in our language. A—not, and thanatos—death.'

'So now you know,' Titos drawled.

Kyria Melissa's hand found the gold bee brooch she wore at her neck. It was exactly like the one in the museum, Tansy noticed, with little circlets of gold hanging from the bee's body and its two wings. The hands trembled slightly, betraying the older woman's nervousness, and Tansy felt a sudden sympathy for her.

'It's very kind of you to allow Rhea to sleep down at the villa with me,' she said awkwardly.

'I did not allow it. My son insisted that it should be so. I was afraid for her to be with you after—after that other time.'

'Tansy is not to be blamed for that!' Titos rasped at his mother. 'She is my guest here.'

'She is not like her brother, I'll say that for her,' Kyria Melissa responded. 'Why have you come to Crete, Miss Drummond?'

Tansy could think of no answer. 'Won't you call me Tansy?' she suggested.

The pansy eyes were turned on her. 'I should prefer it if you are to come to the house often. With Fergus gone, you are alone in the world, I understand, and, as Titos was koum- baros at the wedding, it is natural he should feel responsible for you.'

'There is no need for him to concern himself about me,' Tansy retorted stiffly. 'I have my parents if I can't manage by myself.

Besides, I don't believe Fergus is dead. Sooner or later he'll be found and he'll prove you're all wrong about him! He's a marvellous person!'

Kyria Melissa uttered a dry laugh. 'It is better if we don't argue about that,' she said, amused, 'though I might have thought better of him if he had shown any of the loyalty you seem to feel towards him. No, no, don't get cross all over again. If Titos and Rhea like you, I should like you to be my friend also. It won't do for us to fight with one another, or Titos will bang our heads together! He is as impatient of female quarrels as his father was before him.' She sighed heavily. 'Rhea tells me you are employing Anna as your maid. Do you find her satisfactory?'

'Very,' Tansy said. Her eyes twinkled with laughter at this sudden change of front on her hostess's part. 'But I'm afraid she's only temporary. She wants to go to America.'

'She should have gone long ago!' Kyria Melissa said with a touch of malice. 'And that boy of hers should be in school, not helping you to get into mischief by going hither and thither on your own. I wish she'd let me have the handling of him, but she won't allow me anywhere near him.'

'Perhaps she doesn't want you to be hurt,' Tansy said gently.

Mother and son both stared at her in a frightening silence.

'Has she talked to you about his father?' Kyria Melissa asked then.

'No,' Tansy admitted.

Titos put his hand on Tansy's shoulder, drawing her to him and pushing her hair forward over her forehead with his other hand. 'Tansy is as impulsive as Fergus was cautious,' he said in an aside to his mother. 'She is constantly walking where angels fear to tread, and

jumping to impossible conclusions, but she means no harm, do you, agapi mou.'

Tansy gasped. 'But the likeness!'

'Is in the eye of the beholder!'

Tansy dropped her eyes to the floor. 'If you say so,' she said. 'But you must feel something for Minos, Titos! He's a lovely child!'

Surprisingly, it was Kyria Melissa who answered. 'It is I who should see to his welfare,' she said slowly. 'I should have done so from the beginning. Come inside the house, Tansy, and I shall make coffee for us all and you shall tell me all about the work you do with your brother.'

Tansy opened her mouth to say she thought his father ought to do something for Minos, rather than his grandmother, but one look at Titos' face prevented her. The less she saw of him the better, she told herself, for he was beginning to be far too important to her in a strange kind of way. It was more than silly, of course, because she didn't like him at all—any more than he liked her!

CHAPTER FOUR

'WE have another visitor,' Kyria Melissa said over her shoulder as they went into the house. 'You may know him, Tansy. He says he is a friend of your brother.'

Tansy cast a look of enquiry towards Titos but, apart from a taut look about the eyes, he showed no sign of having heard his mother.

'Go in and talk to him,' Kyria Melissa commanded urgently. 'I had forgotten him for the moment and I have nothing to say to him. Titos, you must tell him that Fergus is no longer in Crete. He will not believe me] Though perhaps he will content himself with Tansy to tell him what he wants to know?'

'Who is he?' Tansy inquired. The words came out abruptly, betraying her defensive reaction to any mention of her brother.

Kyria Melissa shrugged expressively. 'He had a name. He is an Englishman like Fergus. Ross, yes, he said his name is Ross. Do you know him?'

Tansy shook her head. 'I don't think so.'

'Let's go and find out,' Titos suggested. He put his hand on Tansy's elbow and steered her into the sitting room with a touch of possessiveness that set her pulse racing.

The man sitting on the edge of the sofa could only have been an Englishman. His face was bony and intelligent, his eyes hidden behind thick-lensed, totally round spectacles that curled round his ears like a small boy's. His movements held a gangly, adolescent charm, though he had not been a teenager for the past twenty years. He looked up eagerly at their entrance, his eye falling with appreciation on Tansy.

'I say, how marvellous! You must be Tansy Drummond,' he said with a funny, nervous smile. 'I'm Dick Ross. You'll be able to tell me where Fergus is if anyone can. Mrs. Michalou—Michalakou—oh hell, I never get these names - right—'

'Kyria Melissa?' Tansy prompted him hopefully.

'Well, yes. She didn't seem to understand what I wanted. She went off into a trance as soon as I mentioned Fergus's name. She was quite polite until then—'

'This is her son, Titos Michalakis,' Tansy put in hurriedly. 'Fergus's brother-in-law,' she added for good measure.

Dick Ross's mouth fell open. 'Fergus is married'}' He sat down hard on the sofa. 'Since when? He's the last person—'

'He's in Peru.' Tansy went on firmly. 'They're digging up some very interesting things there at the moment and they asked him to go over and take a look. You know his theory that some Indian tribes are of Semitic origin?'

'Of course. Pre-Phoenician and all that.'

Tansy blinked. 'Yes, well, some of the pieces they've dug up seem to go a long way towards proving that.'

'I see,' murmured Dick Ross. 'Then Fergus isn't here? What's his address in Peru?'

Tansy's eyes sought Titos' face in a look of mute appeal.

'Why do you want to know?' the Greek man asked. The two men provided a complete contrast one to the other; Titos, strong and sure

of himself; and Dick Ross, willowy, and with a nervous tic working in his face. 'Fergus can't be got at at the moment.'

'Oh.' The tic contorted his face worse than ever. 'That isn't like Fergus. He's seldom in the thick of it himself. Never mind. Tansy will do instead.' He looked across at Tansy and. winked. 'Better, actually. I mean, who wouldn't prefer a pretty girl to her brother?'

'It depends what for,' Titos said dryly.

Dick Ross made a strangled sound that turned out to be his brand of laughter. 'What do you think for, old man? Fergus always kept her well out of sight, but while the cat's away and all that! Eh, Tansy?'

Tansy, who normally could have coped with a dozen Dick Rosses and remained friends with all of them, was frozen to the spot, her awareness of Titos' disapproval inhibiting her from defending herself by any of her usual means. To her dismay, she felt a deep blush creep up her face and she turned away before Titos should see it and wonder what had caused her embarrassment.

'Have you ever worked with Fergus?' she asked, plunging into the silence that stretched between them.

'Good lord, no! I work for his publishers, don't you know? He's gone over his deadline by a couple of months and—' He cleared his throat with a diffident cough—'as the advance was paid nearly a year ago, we're beginning to get a little concerned about it. I was coming here anyway and so I thought I'd look the fellow up. Didn't know I'd have the luck to find his sister instead! Fergus told me you always type his books for him and that you'd got a bit behind on this one on Crete. Not to worry, my dear! I'll hold you up still further by getting you to

-

show me round the island while I'm here. A few weeks won't make much difference one way or the other!'

'I am sorry, but Tansy will not be available to act as guide in the next few days,' said Titos, his voice as hard as granite.

'But—' Tansy began.

'She has other engagements from which she cannot be released,' Titos went on curtly.

'Like what?' Tansy demanded.

Titos was saved from having to answer by his mother coming into the room with the coffee-tray in her hands. Kyria Melissa put it down on the table in front of one of the easy- chairs and sat down beside it, her hands fluttering over the cups with the helpless air she specialised in but which, Tansy suspected, meant nothing at all.

'What engagements?' Tansy repeated as Titos stood up to pass the cups for his mother. 'If Mr. Ross wants to see the island—''You may not go with him alone and Rhea cannot be spared to go with you,' Titos answered her.

Tansy lifted her chin. 'I'll make my own arrangements, thank you very much! I'd like to go with Mr. Ross. I haven't seen much of Crete myself yet.'

'Quite right, my dear,' Kyria Melissa encouraged her with a smile. 'It will be nice for you to have a compatriot to go about with you. Where will you go first?'

'To Knossos,' Tansy decided.

Titos handed her her cup of coffee. 'Minos must go with you. I will speak to the boy.'

'I'll speak to him myself!'

'If you like,' he agreed indifferently.

Tansy blenched, feeling his withdrawal of interest as intensely as if he had slapped her. 'I have looked after myself for a long time,' she reminded him.

His eyes met hers and she was afraid. 'You won't come to any harm at Knossos if you have Minos with you,' he said finally. 'It's a disappointing site if you want to see a Minoan palace in all its purity. Sir Arthur Evans had none of the tools of modern archaeologists and he was quite arbitrary in deciding which chamber was which. I shall take you to Phaestos myself some other time.'

Tansy stared up at him. 'Alone?' she demanded.

'But of course alone! You won't need Minos with you when you are with me!'

She had no answer to that. The blood sang in her ears as she wrenched her eyes away from his. 'I don't understand you,' she muttered.

He bent his head, the ghost of a smile round his lips. 'On the contrary, you're afraid you understand me all too well!'

'Titos, you are not behaving well!' his mother reproved him. 'Tansy must do as she likes. She is old enough to make her own decisions, and English society is very permissive these days. We mustn't impose our Cretan ideas on her.'

'No, no, indeed not!' Dick Ross echoed her. 'My speciality is in abstruse non-fiction and I don't often have a lovely girl crossing my path in the line of work. I hope you're going to invite me back, Tansy, to tell me why you've fallen so far behind with your typing. You'll find me very understanding— much more than Fergus is, I dare say!'

Tansy frowned. 'I didn't realise there was any hurry,' she said, biting her lip.

'No hurry? But, my dear, Fergus must have told you that we wanted it for the Christmas market! He wrote a few weeks ago and said he had it all in hand. He was expecting you any day, and he promised he'd keep your nose to the grindstone until it was done.'

Tansy's discomfiture increased. 'I'm afraid there's no chance of your having it for the Christmas market. Fergus left a few notes, that's all—not even his usual guidelines as to how he wants me to work out the script.' She flushed, very conscious of Titos watching her every movement. 'As a matter of fact, I was thinking of branching out on my own this time—'

Dick Ross shook his head. 'I'm sorry, Tansy. We couldn't let you loose on your brother's kind of thing. He's a specialist in the field. I know you always type his books, but it's rather a different thing to actually write one yourself.'

'I suppose it is,' Tansy admitted.

'Never mind, love, I'll make it up to you in other ways!' The nervous tic in his cheek disturbed her, diverting her attention from his enormous eyes, magnified as they were by his spectacles. 'Meanwhile, can you show me his manuscript? I may be able to get you some help with the typing.'

'I'd rather not,' Tansy said abruptly.

Titos' laughter broke across the room.

'What's funny?' Dick Ross asked him, not bothering to hide his dislike for the other man. Tansy wondered if they ever would have got on together, or whether it was because Titos was a Greek and a foreigner that Dick Ross, and she too, found him so disturbing.

Tansy's been writing Fergus's books for years!'

Dick Ross put his cup down on the occasional table beside him with pedantic care. 'I think you must allow me to know more about the work of one of our authors than you do, Mr. Michalakis. Fergus has been a friend of mine for a number of years. We have met frequently, I may say, and he has never once mentioned that his sister helped him with his books in any other way except by typing them. Indeed, we should have been very worried if we had thought otherwise. Fergus Drummond is a well known name in popular achaeology. We couldn't allow his work to be diluted by the theories of an amateur in the field.'

'But that's exactly what you have done!' Titos said triumphantly.

'Except I'm not an amateur,' Tansy reminded him.

'This is dreadful!' Dick Ross exclaimed. 'Are you claiming that this man is right, Tansy?'

She rubbed the palms of her hands down the creases of her trousers. 'Fergus didn't want it known. I wouldn't have told you now, only I think you ought to know, Mr. Ross, that my brother and his wife are missing in Peru.' Her voice shook with unshed tears. 'It's becoming less and less likely that they'll ever be found alive.'

'And what will happen to the Cretan book?' he demanded.

'I'll send it to you as soon as I have it finished.'

'But that won't do, my dear! I've already explained that we need your brother's name. There has been all the advance publicity—We can't not publish now! We work to a pretty tight budget with all such books as his, and the advance he received went to the very limits of what he could expect to make out of it.' He pursed his lips together. 'We'll have to write it off as a total loss. Nobody is going to be pleased about this, oh dear me, no!'

The thought of the money her brother had received worried Tansy too. She leaned forward eagerly. 'Won't you believe me, Mr. Ross, that I'll make the book as good as any of the others were. If you'll come down to the villa with me, I'll show you the notes I have, and explain what I hope to do. Please, Mr. Ross. You won't lose anything by hearing me out, will you?'

The tic worked furiously. 'I didn't realise you weren't living here,' he said. 'You've got a place of your own, have you?'

'I'm staying at Fergus's villa.'

Dick Ross licked his lips, his eyes looking more enormous than ever. 'Why not? We can talk better on our own. I'm surprised at Fergus for burdening such a pretty girl with such dull work as his can be! I can think of a much better way to occupy your time!'

Tansy looked at him kindly. 'I'm an archaeologist too,' she said. 'I don't find the subject dull.'

Dick Ross grinned. 'Helping on a few digs doesn't make one an archaeologist, my dear. Still, we mustn't quarrel! If you'll tell me your address, I'll call on you this evening, if that's convenient?'

'Quite convenient!' Tansy said sourly. She explained to him how he got to the villa, wishing as she did so that Fergus's notes hadn't been quite so meagre. She was surprised when he took her hand in his, and

further surprised when he bent over it and kissed her fingers in an awkward movement that made her want to laugh.

'I'll see you later,' he promised. 'Fergus should have told me what a pretty sister he has! I'd have made it my business to meet you long ago if I'd known!'

'I don't think Fergus thought of me as pretty,' Tansy replied. She bent her head over her coffee cup and took a quick sip of the thick liquid, getting a mouthful of grounds for her pains. Titos put a hand on his shoulder and she looked up enquiringly.

'Fergus never thought about you at all,' he mocked her, 'but our Mr. Ross thinks too much. If I send Rhea down to you early will you share your supper with her?'

'I want Rhea up here this evening,' Kyria Melissa told him.

Titos gave his mother an impatient look. 'You will have to do without her, Mama.'

Kyria Melissa shrugged. 'If you say so, yes, but don't expect Tansy to be grateful to you. Mr. Ross is a friend of her brother's and she will know better than you how to deal with him.'

Dick Ross stood awkwardly by the door. 'I don't know that I've ever been thought of as much of a danger to females.' His tic worked furiously. 'I suppose it's rather flattering—in a way!'

Titos looked at him with contempt. 'You are not in England now, kyrie, and Tansy is in my care. I will not have her entertaining men by herself when she is on her own down at the villa. Such a thing would not be contemplated if she were a Cretan girl, and I think we owe it to her to take an equal care of her.'

'But I'm not a Cretan girl,' Tansy said weakly. 'I wish you'd believe that I'm quite accustomed to looking after myself. You don't have to worry about me!'

'Don't I?' His glance was bright with laughter. 'How foolish you are, Tansy mou. You are blind to the dangers you run, thinking yourself something which you are not—an image only, that has been held up to you. One day you'll find out the truth about yourself, and you will find you are not like that image at all.'

He didn't wait for her to answer, but went to the door with Dick Ross, shaking hands with him and clapping him on the shoulder. 'You will have a care for Tansy, kyrie? Remember, my family here is also hers, and Cretans are renowned for the way they protect their women!'

'You don't have to worry about me,' the Englishman said quickly. 'I'm only interested in her brother's book.' He stepped out the door and then turned and went on pettishly, 'He was never above having a bit of fun. How d'you know his sister isn't like him?'

Tansy sat frozen to her seat, waiting for Titos' answer. Her mouth felt dry and her throat constricted. Why should it matter to her what he thought? But it did!

'I know.' The words were uttered softly, but the threat in them made both Tansy and Kyria Melissa blink. 'I know,' Titos repeated, and shut the door with a sharp click.

Tansy looked up and saw that Kyria Melissa was studying her covertly. She felt faintly embarrassed by her scrutiny and sought for something to say that would lessen the tension between them. It was the older woman who spoke first, however.

'The Englishman speaks the truth. What do we know about you, Tansy Drummond?'

'There isn't much to know,' Tansy answered. She made to stand up. 'I think I'd beter go, kyria. Thank you for the coffee.'

Kyria Melissa gestured her back into her seat, 'Tell me about this little there is to know,' she commanded. 'I think we have the right to know about Fergus's sister, if we are to include you in our family circle. Don't you agree?'

'I suppose so,' Tansy admitted. She wondered where she should begin. 'I was still at school when my parents parted company. After that, there was only Fergus. He made arrangements for me to go to university—'

Kyria Melissa made a little sound of disapproval. 'I think you must know that I am not interested in the details of your school reports! I wish to hear about you, what kind of person you are!'

'I see,' said Tansy, swallowing hard. 'Well, I'm very ordinary—'

Titos came back into the room and flung himself into the chair next to his mother's. 'My mother wishes to know about the men you have known,' he told Tansy. 'But you don't have to tell her unless you wish to.'

'Oh!' Tansy's eyes widened. 'Oh!' A little devil within her tempted her to confess to the most lurid past that she could think up on the spur of the moment, but she was almost sure that Titos wouldn't believe a word of it and would demolish her there and then, making his mother despise her even more than she did already. 'Fergus always said I was too cold a person to appeal to men,' she blurted out. 'I'm really only interested in my work. It's harder for a girl to be accepted as being serious in what is still largely a man's field. Romantic attachments don't help, and anyway, there was nobody who—who thought about me in that way.'

Titos and his mother exchanged glances. 'What did your parents think about your career?' Kyria Melissa asked, her face softening into a smile. 'Weren't they afraid for you to have to make your own way in such a world?'

'I don't think so.'

'They have other children, perhaps?'

This seemed a much safer subject and Tansy seized on it with relief. 'Yes, they have. My mother lives in New Zealand so I've never seen her children, but my father is often in England and I went to the christening of one of his. His wife doesn't like to be reminded that he was married before, though, so Fergus and I don't see much of him. He has his own family to consider.'

'And you are not part of that family?'

Too late, Tansy saw she had fallen into the trap the Greek woman had set for her. Kyria Melissa would never believe that she believed in a stable family background quite as much as any Cretan could do, not now she knew that Tansy had never known such a state in her own life.

'I had Fergus,' she said.

To her great surprise, the little Greek woman leaped to her feet, tears pouring down her cheeks, and Tansy found herself enveloped in the black fragrance of a maternal embrace that was soft and comforting in a way she would not have suspected it could be.

'Fergus!' Kyria Melissa wailed. 'What good to you was a brother like Fergus? It is a scandal that you should have suffered for your parents! But now you will have us to look after you. Titos will tell you what you must do—'

Tansy wiped her cheek and found it damp from the other woman's tears. 'But I don't want to be told what to do!' she protested.

Kyria Melissa stroked her hair, her hands hovering over the pins that held it into place ... 'So you say, kori mou, but you cannot mean it. It will be our care to find a good husband for you as if you were my own daughter. Titos will arrange it all. You hear me, yos? It isn't suitable that Tansy should have no one to take care of her!'

'No, Mama,' Titos agreed with the glimmer of a smile.

'Oh no, you won't!' Tansy gasped.

'Hush, dear,' Kyria Melissa soothed her. 'Rhea shall walk down the hill with you. You won't be lonely again—'

'I've never been lonely!!'

'What else can you have been with your parents spread all over the world? Rhea must go with you now.'

'I will take her, Mama,' Titos interposed.

'Yes, yes, Titos shall take you!' Kyria Melissa buzzed happily, looking more like an excited bee by the minute. 'I have never heard of such a thing to happen to a young girl! Have you no uncles or aunts, child?'

'I had Fergus,' Tansy insisted. 'I wasn't so badly off.'

Kyria Melissa exclaimed to herself in Greek, throwing up her hands in horror at intervals. Her son quelled her at length by the simple expedient of removing Tansy from her grasp and breaking into Greek himself, saying Tansy knew not what.

'Are you ready?' he asked her at length.

She nodded her head silently. Kyria Melissa was weeping silently, her head bowed over her lap. 'I think you should stay with your mother,' she said. 'She's very upset.'

His fingers closed round her arm, forcing her out of the room ahead of him. Tansy tried to lever his fingers away from her flesh one by one, but he ignored her efforts and she found herself suddenly breathless and knew it was because of his closeness to her.

'You're not kind!' she declared.

'And you are a little fool!' he responded.

It would be better to be angry with him, she thought, than to give in to the weakness he inspired in her. 'There's no need to be impolite as well as everything else!' she berated him.

His eyebrows rose. 'Everything else?'

'You should have stayed with your mother!'

'And let you walk home by yourself? Rhea has gone to the shops and has probably met one of her friends. Who knows when she will be back?'

Tansy pulled at her arm, almost falling over with the violence of her bid to be free. 'What could possibly happen to me between here and the villa?' she demanded. 'Why can't you leave me alone?'

He came to an abrupt halt, turning her to face him. 'I think you know the answer to that very well.' His grasp on her arm relaxed and finally fell away. She rubbed herself defiantly, her head held high. There was

no amusement in his face now, only his eyes blazing with some unguessed-at emotion.

'How can I know?'

She felt his fingers at the nape of her neck and her hair swung free as he held the crown of her head, slipping his other hand behind her back. The weakness in her knees made any thought of flight impossible. 'Titos, you can't!' she murmured. But he only smiled gently at her.

'Why not?' he asked.

It was impossible to tell what she might have answered. He held her close against him, examining every detail of her upraised face. Then slowly, savouring the moment, he took her lips with his, kissing her with a gentleness that brought only despair, to her heart. She put her arms up round his neck and strained closer to him, no longer caring what he might think of her. His response was all she could have hoped for and more. He held her tightly against him and kissed her again, refusing to allow her any freedom of movement while he took an unhurried toll of her lips. At last he put her from him, forcibly unclasping her hands from around his neck, and standing back from her.

'You see what happens to a young girl on her own?' he said with a touch of humour.

Fierce disappointment that that was all he could find to say to her lent a wry note to her reply. 'Only with you!'

'Tansy, karthia mou, how is it you know so little about yourself? It could happen any time—'

'It never has! Can you imagine Dick Ross kissing any girl? Well, can you?'

'More easily than you can,' he answered. 'My mother is right, you should have a husband to look after you—'

'Oh, not that again! I don't want to marry anyone. It wouldn't suit me to be married!'

He put his hand flat on the small of her back, sending a shiver of excitement through her. 'Suppose you were to marry me?' he said.

She licked her lips, her muscles tightening as she fought against the temptation to fling herself into his arms, begging him to pay no attention to the difficulties she felt morally bound to point out to him. He didn't know her, he didn't even like her, and he certainly didn't like her brother!

'But you don't want to marry me,' she said aloud. 'Why should you? You would be disappointed in me because I haven't got the fire of—of Anna, for example!'

Anna! Tansy pushed his hand away and rushed headlong down the path away from him as though her life depended on it. How could she even consider taking him away from Anna?

He caught her with the greatest of ease, hooking an arm round her waist and pushing her down on to the ground, standing over her with a look in his eyes that sent her heart spinning into a new and unaccustomed dance of delightful anticipation that he might take it into his head to kiss her again, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that she could do about it if he did.

'Anna!' he said in disgust. 'Anna is nothing to me, and nothing to you either. Would you have me believe you jealous of her, Tansy mou?'

He tapped her cheek with his fingers. 'Who told you you are a cold person, agapi mou! Were you cold with me just now?'

She flushed painfully. 'That was a flash in the pan—

'Oh, Tansy! You have been living in that mind of yours for too long, ignoring the fact you have emotions too, as well as a brain! It's time you lived in your delectable body as well and realised that it, too, will make its own demands on you.'

Her eyes flashed. 'You think I'm immature!' she accused him.

'Untried,' he corrected.

'It means the same thing.' Her eyes filled with tears. 'I suppose it's something that you admit I have a mind!'

'I suppose it is,' he agreed, 'seeing you have such a beautiful body, and I am a man, and a Greek at that!'

Tansy considered that in silence. 'I can't believe you really want to make love to me. You don't like what you know about me!'

He grinned. 'I kissed you before I knew you,' he reminded her, enjoying her discomfiture at the memory.

'But you don't—you can't love me?'

He picked a piece of dry thyme and tickled her nose with it, making her sneeze. 'Love often comes after marriage. I want sons to come after me and a woman in my house to build up my family with me—'

'There's Minos!'

'Minos will receive his share, as Rhea and Elena have, but no more than that!'

Tansy peered at him through her lashes, wishing she knew what to do for the best. It was not at all the proposal of her imaginings, but she knew, despite everything, she wanted to accept him. Coming to Crete must have turned her mad! It was something in the air—

'I don't know! Oh, Titos, I don't know what to say!'

He put his arms right round her and lifted her bodily to her feet, holding her close against him so that she could feel the rumble of his laughter against her ribs.

'That is as it should be, Tansy mou. You are my woman, and it's right I should decide your life for you and that you should give me that right.' He tipped up her face to his and kissed her mouth. 'Isn't that what you want?'

She hid her face in his neck. 'It may not last,' she whispered. 'It may be as brief as the storm the other day. Thunder is exciting, but it doesn't last!'

He laughed, putting his hand on her breast until her heart rocketed against her ribs. 'I command the thunder,' he teased her. 'When you hear it, it is my voice you hear, as you hear it now!'

And, for the moment, she was too bemused to do other than believe him.

CHAPTER FIVE

'WHAT?' said Tansy.

Rhea stifled a giggle. 'You haven't been listening to anything I said, Tansy. I was saying how clever you had been with Mama. You won't be able to do any wrong in her eyes now, though she might not like it if you get involved with Titos. She wants him to marry a Greek girl.'

'Does she? I would have said Titos will always do as he pleases without seeking anyone's consent.'

Rhea looked at her curiously. 'Most men do. My father always did! It made Mama very unhappy. That's why Titos was so angry when Elena—' The girl broke off with a guilty laugh. 'Titos would make a good husband, don't you think?'

'I haven't thought about it,' Tansy said primly. 'My work is far more important to me than any man!'

'That isn't what Titos says about you,' Rhea answered immediately. 'Besides, it isn't your work, it's Fergus's. He gets all the credit for it.'

Tansy would have liked to have heard what Titos had said about her. but her pride wouldn't permit her to ask anything at all about him. It was strange, too, how none of Titos' family paid any attention to her protestations that she lived for her work, and yet it had been true—

'I'd never marry a Greek!' she burst out. 'Titos' wife wouldn't be able to call her soul her own!'

'Why should she want to?' Rhea countered. 'When I marry, I'd like to know my husband thought enough of me to care for me like that. While he is interested in what I am doing, he is not interested in any other girl!'

'Titos would find some way of having his cake and eating it too!' Tansy exclaimed in despair. 'I know he would!'

'No, you are wrong,' Rhea contradicted her. 'Not Titos!

He has too much respect for the life of the family. His wife will be one of the lucky ones.'

'He doesn't do much for Anna,' Tansy scoffed.

'He didn't have to do anything at all,' Rhea said quietly. 'I don't think you can know how much Anna hurt my mother—hurt us all! It was only Titos who said she had not done it alone and made proper provision for Minos. Mama would have denied any knowledge of his existence if it had been left to her.'

'But he's Titos' flesh and blood—'

Rhea sighed. 'You sound just like Titos when you say that. We heard it again and again when Elena married Fergus. It was Fergus who denied that he had any responsibility where you were concerned and wouldn't have you brought to Crete for the wedding. We thought it very peculiar that he should shut his own sister out of such an occasion. In Crete it could never be like that! Even Minos! Both Elena and I have done what we could for him. It was less than Titos could do, of course, but we have always remembered that he shares our blood also!'

Tansy was scarcely listening. She was remembering again the hurt that Fergus had dealt her by not inviting her to his wedding.

'You can't accuse Fergus of not doing his best for me— always! If it hadn't been for him—'

Rhea gave her a sympathetic glance. 'Titos says that you are clever and got to university on your own merits. He says in England one gets a grant from the government if one's parents can't pay, and that the most Fergus could have done for you was to provide a few luxuries, but he doesn't believe there were many. He thinks you spent your vacations doing your brother's work on various sites and getting none of the credit. He says you are too grateful for much too little! That you should wake up and live your own life! You are very pretty, but—now, what was the word he used?-—unaware!'

Tansy only wished she were. She was shocked by the vivid picture of her Titos seemed to have given his family. And, although she had never admitted it, his guess as to how she had spent her vacations was uncannily accurate, but there had been no other way she could repay Fergus for his interest in her, an interest she had hugged to her the harder the more distant her parents had become. It wasn't Fergus's fault that she had cast herself in the role of his professional slave. It had been her own choice, because that had been the only way she could keep his interest in her alive. When she had arrived in Crete, perhaps she had been unaware that there were other people in the world, and even more unaware that she might make any lasting impression on them, but Titos Michalakis had changed all that! She was very much aware of him. He had only to touch her for her blood to thunder in her ears and he had told her that he, like Zeus, could command the storm and shoot his thunderbolts in terrible retribution on those who stood against him. But she wanted more of marriage than that. She wanted the warmth and comfort of his love as much as the electric excitement of his physical attraction for her, and that was the demarcation line he had refused to cross. They were, they had to be, two quite separate things, she kept telling herself, but he had been unable to see them as such. However, he certainly couldn't describe her as unaware any longer. She was aware of every breath he drew. Marriage with him would never be dull. But marriage was out of the question. Tansy stirred uncomfortably, wondering how she knew

with such certainty that if she married Titos Fergus would never, ever forgive her.

She recalled herself to the present, refusing to allow herself to dwell on what had passed between Titos and herself on the path between his house and the villa a moment longer. She looked across at Rhea, annoyed by her smug expression, and cleared her throat. Rhea's dark eyes danced with amusement and, for a moment, she looked very like her elder brother.

'In England, you say a woman has the last word,' she teased Tansy gently; 'in Crete, we know it is the man. We all do as Titos wants in the end—even Mama!'

'Not me!' Tansy declared. 'The Drummonds are an independent lot and won't be dictated to by anyone!'

Rhea's amusement brimmed over into a broad smile. 'Even Fergus did as Titos wanted in the end!'

Tansy clenched her fists. 'He did not! He took Elena to Peru, and Fergus didn't want that!'

'He didn't like the idea,' Rhea admitted, 'but he recognised that as Elena's husband he had the right to decide whether Elena should go with him, or wait here with her family. Titos is always fair!'

Tansy felt as though she were in a lift which had gone down too fast. 'But what else did they fight about?' she asked.

'The marriage, of course. Did you suppose that Fergus wanted to marry Elena? He fought it every step of the way!'

'Then why—?' Tansy breathed.

Rhea's amusement turned to concern. 'I'm sorry, Tansy, I shouldn't have said anything. If you want to know, you'll have to ask Titos. But please, don't worry about it! He'll be furious with me if I've upset you!'

Tansy, however, had no time to be upset or otherwise, for at that moment Anna announced the arrival of Dick Ross to see her on business. The slight shrug of the shoulders betold his total lack of interest for the maid, and Tansy, while amused that he should be summed up and found wanting in such a summary manner, was glad that he also presented no challenge to herself except to her mind, and that was a challenge she felt more than able to cope with.

She rose to her feet with a smile. 'Come in, Mr. Ross. Rhea, this is a friend of Fergus's, Mr. Ross, and this is the Thespinis Michalou, who is staying with me.'

Mr. Ross ignored Rhea. His tic began to twitch urgently. 'Won't you call me Dick?' He sat down on the sofa beside to Tansy, far too close to her in her opinion, and she pulled a cushion down between them, pretending to use it as an armrest. 'Fergus always called you Tansy and I'm afraid I. always think of you by that name.'

Tansy flashed a brief smile, that could have meant consent or not, just as he chose. 'I'll fetch the notes for you to look at,' she offered.

'Oh, gracious, there's no hurry for that! Did you think me beastly earlier when I told you you couldn't do the book yourself? Don't take it to heart, my dear. There are many other things that you can do, and I shall be here for a week or two yet and will be charmed to do some of them with you!'

Tansy almost giggled at Rhea's outraged expression. 'I'd prefer to get on with Fergus's book,' she said dryly.

'My bosses wouldn't consider it. Put it out of your mind, Tansy.' He patted her hand beside him. 'You're far too pretty to have to worry your head about the kind of things Fergus writes about!' He lowered his voice so that only she could hear. 'We could have a nice time together, seeing that you have this villa to yourself.'

'Rhea is living here with me.'

'Send her back to her brother! Didn't you say this villa belonged to Fergus? Then what has it got to do with his wife's family what you do with yourself here?'

Tansy was about to tell him not to be so silly when she did a double-take. Could Dick Ross actually be propositioning her? She was torn between being angry that he should think she would consent to any such proposal, and an awed astonishment that he should be looking at her, Fergus's sister, as a desirable woman and not as a hack for turning out the book he wanted. That's what came of allowing one's hair to fly free and relaxing into bad habits instead of maintaining one's guard against one's male colleagues!

'I will call Anna and tell her to bring you something to drink, ne?' Rhea suggested, her face tight with disapproval at the exchange between the other two. 'Shall I fetch your notes at the same time, Tansy?'

'No, I'll get them myself,' Tansy answered. It would give her an opportunity to disappear into her room and change back into her usual self. She would drag her hair back from her face and restrain it in her usual plait, and that would give her the confidence to give Mr. Ross the set-down she felt he thoroughly deserved.

But when she came to look at herself in the looking-glass, she thought there was a new, vulnerable look to her mouth that had not been there before and, no matter what she did to her hair, she couldn't change the

sparkle in her eyes that came and went whenever she remembered how Titos had kissed her. Hadn't he said that one could start feeling pleased with oneself when a man came back for second helpings? Well, he had done that, no matter how much he might deny it, and she would never be the same again.

She went back to the sitting room and found Rhea hovering in the hall, looking furious and very young, like a small kitten who had met a large dog in the park.

'I am telephoning to my mother!' she declared, casting a speaking look in the direction of the closed sitting room door.

'Oh?' said Tansy, hoping she didn't sound as bewildered as she felt.

'I am ashamed to tell you about that man!' Rhea added darkly. 'My mother will tell him you are not like that at all and make him go away!' Her eyes burned with hot, unshed tears. 'He is not to say such things!'

Tansy put a hand on the girl's shoulder. She noticed that in Rhea's agitation, her movements were more agitated and awkward than usual and that she could hardly hold the receiver in her left hand.

'What did he say?' she asked gently. 'Did he frighten you, or what?'

'He made me very angry! He says you are like Fergus and like to have a good time and that you won't thank me if I get in your way!'

Tansy sighed. 'And what do you think your mother can do about that? Oh, Rhea, don't take on so! I'll have a few words with Mr. Dick Ross myself. It's only a silly misunderstanding!'

Rhea shook her head. 'Do be careful, Tansy! If anything were to happen, Titos won't rest until he has avenged the insult to you—and Dick Ross is not a nice man to have to be married to him!'

'I've never heard anything so ridiculous!' Tansy declared, now thoroughly roused herself. 'Titos doesn't frighten me!'

She took Rhea's hand in hers and returned the telephone receiver to its cradle, giving the girl a reassuring squeeze as she did so, before sailing into the sitting room, her head held high, to cope with Mr. Dick Ross.

'I got rid of that spastic girl,' he began, without bothering to rise from his seat.

Tansy's colour heightened with temper. 'Rhea is not a spastic, though I fail to see why you should think any the less of her if she were. Nor have you "got rid of her", as you put it. She happens to be staying here as my guest and, far from leaving, she was telephoning her mother to come at once because she seems to think you have been insulting me behind my back!'

He stood up then, his tic making his smile grotesque and rather frightening.

'I didn't mean to insult you, my dear. Nor do I think you were insulted, were you? I presume she told you exactly what I had said? Thank God, we both live in the world and not a prudish backwater like this place! I've heard stories that one only has to look at a Cretan girl to have her father and brothers on your back, forcing you into marriage with her, but, even if Fergus has married into the family, they can hardly expect you to live by the same standards! Ignore the lot of them, that's my advice to you! You'll have a far better time with me!'

'I am not interested in a good time! Sit down, Mr. Ross, and I'll show you Fergus's notes and the start I've made on his book. If you don't want me to go on with it I shall quite understand, but I think you might pay me the courtesy of at least reading the bit I've done— She trailed off as Anna came into the room and put a tray down beside the sofa, her bosom heaving with emotion. Rhea crept in after her, throwing an apologetic look in Tansy's direction. 'What is it, Anna?' Tansy asked weakly.

'Ti ipate?' It was obvious that the Greek woman had no intention of understanding anything that was said to her in English at that moment. 'Protimate Ioorkikon kafe i Neskafe?' she barked out to Dick Ross.

'Perhaps you would prefer some ouzo?' Tansy put in hastily. 'You don't have to have coffee.'

Anna turned on her with a frown, muttering tinder her breath. Tansy looked to Rhea for a translation.

'She says she is going out for a few minutes,' Rhea said reluctantly. 'It's getting dark and Minos hasn't come home yet. She says it is the fault of Mr. Ross.'

'Minos?' Tansy started to her feet. 'Where can he be? Shall we come and help her look?'

Rhea jerked her head in Dick Ross's direction. 'She says he paid him money to go away. She intends to get it from the boy and make him give it back. You could not bribe his father, and she will not have it said that Minos can be bribed either!'

Tansy bit her lip at the reference to the child's father. 'Perhaps Titos should be told he's missing?'

But Anna, remembering her English enough to understand what Tansy was saying, rejected this idea firmly.

'The Kyrios Titos is not to be worried by so small an affair. He will be more concerned at what his woman does when his back is turned!' The maid slapped Tansy's hand as it hovered over the tray, pouring out the coffee herself. 'If I see him, I will soon tell him he is needed here!'

Tansy ventured to pass the full cup to Dick Ross and was surprised by the malevolent look on his face. 'Sugar?' she asked him.

'If it's that boy who was hanging round the gate she's worried about, I sent him into the village to find a taxi to collect me in an hour or so. I gave him a few drachmas to buy himself some sweets with. What's wrong with that?'

'He has been told not to accept money from foreign strangers,' Anna replied wearily. 'The Kyrios Titos has said he must not. It was that way that the Kyria Elena—'

'Anna!' Rhea interrupted on a breathless gasp.

Anna gave Tansy a tolerant smile and shrugged her shoulders. 'Kyria Tansy will know the ways of her own brother.'

Tansy thought it more than time that she asserted herself as hostess. 'Anna,' she began, 'will you bring in the ouzo and some cognac? I'm sure the Kyrios Ross would like some with his coffee.'

Anna took up a belligerent stance in the doorway. 'The Kyrios Titos said such drinks were only to be served in this house by him. He has the key to the cupboard where they are kept. So, we serve coffee, ne?'

'When did he take the key?' Tansy demanded, trying in vain to keep the tremble out of her voice. 'It's absolutely intolerable that he should walk in and out of here as if he owned the place!'

'But he does, Tansy,' Rhea put in nervously. 'He wouldn't let Elena have the title to the house in case Fergus used it against her. He thinks a man should keep his own wife. It doesn't matter that we can't serve Mr. Ross ouzo. Most English people don't like it.'

'Look,' said Tansy, 'I know the villa belongs to Fergus because he wrote and told me so, and I will not have Titos locking -up anything on Drummond property. I've a good mind to telephone to him and tell him to bring the key down now, at once!'

The other girl's hushed silence made her pause. Perhaps, after all, it wouldn't be easy to persuade Titos to hand over the key if he didn't want to do so. But how infuriating it was to look such a fool in front of Dick Ross, even if she did dislike the man!

'I told you you'd do better to get shot of the lot of them,' Dick Ross said now. 'Send the maid up to the house to get the key from him, or better still, send his sister, if she's not too afraid of him to move!'

'Oh, do shut up!' Tansy begged him, appalled by her own helplessness to deal with the situation. 'I'll speak to him about it the next time I see him.'

'And when will that be? It seems to me you practically live in his pocket. What does he mean to you, Tansy?'

'Nothing! He happens to be Fergus's brother-in-law, that's all!'

'He was koumbaros at Fergus's wedding,' Rhea added, as if that explained everything.

'It's a kind of best man,' Tansy explained in dispirited tones. 'He takes a long-term interest in the family that's been created by the marriage, and so on.'

Dick Ross put up a hand to hide the tic that contorted his face. 'You come under "and so on", I suppose.'

'I seem to,' Tansy agreed.

'These possessive men are all the same,' he told her. 'Give them an inch and they think they can rule your whole life for you. You'll have to stand up for yourself, my dear, if you want to call your soul your own!'

The words sounded like a portent of disaster to Tansy. Hadn't she said exactly the same thing to Rhea not an hour before? If she gave in to Titos over the least little thing, he would take over completely. She had only had to look at him to know that!

She went over to the table and gathered up Fergus's notes and the few pages of script she had already typed. 'If you won't let me go on working on Fergus's book, I may as well go back to England,' she said over her shoulder. 'I can always get a job teaching until the new season begins.'

'Teaching? I thought you were a typist?' Dick Ross looked quite genuinely concerned.

'No, I have all my teaching qualifications. I did try to tell you before—'

'You'd better let me have that stuff to read quietly by myself,' he broke in. 'Fergus never mentioned that you were a trained archaeologist. I can't really believe it, I must say. Not a pretty girl like yourself!'

'Why not?' Tansy returned with a smile.

'I guess I prefer to have your attention fixed on me, not on some long-dead individual with an unpronounceable name.' The tic began working in his cheek again. 'Sit down again, Tansy. I'll take all that stuff away with me so you needn't bother your pretty head with it all now. I'll let you know in a few days what I think about your going on with the book—perhaps when you come with me to Knossos. What do you say to that?'

Tansy seated herself on the very edge of the sofa. 'I haven't much choice, have I?'

He gave her a familiar look that she didn't much like. 'You can't blame me if I try to prolong our acquaintance into friendship, can you? It's your fault for making my mind wander from books to much pleasanter things whenever I look at you. I'm surprised they allow you anywhere near a dig, my love. You must distract the professionals in a way that no self-respecting director can like!'

'The director is frequently a woman too,' Tansy said dryly.

'Or that--brother of yours, I suppose?'

Tansy shook her head. 'Fergus hates the actual labour of digging. That's why he started writing these books.'

A noise out in the kitchen was followed by a beaming Anna appearing at the door of the sitting room.

'Minos has brought the taxi back from Mallia, just as the gentleman said,' she announced. 'I give the driver coffee in the kitchen while he waits, yes?'

Tansy secretly hoped that Dick Ross would decide to go home, but he showed no signs of doing so.

'I'll stay another half-hour,' he said. 'That boy was quicker walking to the village than I expected.'

Anna threw him a reproachful look. 'It is raining,' she said. 'For seven months we have not one drop of rain and now, when we have too much too quickly, Minos is out walking in it!'

Rhea, who had all of the Mediterranean dislike of getting wet, made a sympathetic clucking noise with her tongue. 'Has he a change of clothes here?' she asked the maid in Greek.

'Not here—'

'Then he must wear something of mine!' The girl stumbled as she got up quickly, recovered herself, and hurried out of the room, calling to Anna to go with her to choose the most suitable garments for Minos from her wardrobe.

Dick Ross grinned openly at Tansy. 'I thought they'd never go!' he murmured.

Tansy put a repressive expression on her face. 'More coffee, Mr. Ross?' she asked him.

'And waste this God-given opportunity?' he teased her. 'Come on, Tansy, you know your way around better than that! What else did you invite me here for? Why else do you live on your own here?'

He rose slowly and stood over her, his tic working more furiously than ever. 'Be nice to me and I'll be nice to you,' he said thickly. 'You want to go on working on the book, don't you?'

Tansy swallowed, her throat dry, cross with herself that she hadn't seen this coming, but somehow she had been quite unable to visualise Dick Ross making a pass at anyone, let alone her! He reached down for her and she tried to dodge under his arm and away. But she was not quite quick enough and he pulled her against his chest, trying to prevent her from butting his chin with her head.

The sound of someone clearing his throat in the open doorway gave Tansy the opportunity she needed and, with a single lithe movement, she broke his grasp on her arms and had moved away round to the other side of the sofa, her eyes sparkling with temper.

Titos walked across the room and picked up the pile of notes that had fallen to the floor, handing them to Dick Ross. 'Is that your taxi outside?' he asked in an expressionless voice.

The notes were snatched from him without a word. 'I'll let you know,' Mr. Ross said to Tansy. 'We may be able to come to some agreement at Knossos—without all these interruptions!'

'Yes,' said Tansy. She wasn't looking forward to it much. She felt Titos' eyes on her face and blushed. 'I wasn't able to offer Mr. Ross a drink,' she shot at him, 'because I understand you have the key to the cupboard! May I have it, please?'

Titos raised his eyebrows in a mocking look. He held the door open for Dick Ross to precede him into the hall and escorted him to the front door. When he came back, he shut the door firmly behind him and stood beside it for a long moment, watching Tansy's every movement.

'Which one sent for you?' she stormed at him, when she could bear the silence no longer. 'It's too bad, the way you walk in and out of here without waiting for an invitation or anything! You ought to stay away unless I ask you to come!'

To her consternation, he looked amused rather than angry. 'I never thought to see you in such a pickle,' he laughed at her. 'What happened to put you in such a rage that you have to pretend you're not pleased to see me, Tansy mou? Can it be that you have a guilty conscience?'

'I have nothing to feel guilty about!'

His dark eyes flashed and she began to wonder if she had chosen the best tactics to deal with him. 'No?' he asked softly. 'You don't feel guilty that you allowed this Englishman to be alone with you when I had already warned you that he is not as easy as you think, to put you on your guard against him. Did you think that pigtail would protect you from his attentions? How heedless you are—and a little stupid too! You know I don't like it when you scrape your hair back like that! Or do you think it will protect you from me too?'

He came towards her across the room, his eyes holding hers, hypnotised. She opened her mouth to defend herself and shut it again in case she should make matters worse still. He put a hand behind her back and snapped the elastic band that held her plait, shaking her hair free over her shoulders, and combing it out with his fingers until he was satisfied that the plait was completely undone. 'That's better!' he mocked her. 'An ounce of discretion will serve you better in the future than trying to turn yourself back into a plain Jane. You'll never succeed in that again! Not now your eyes show you are awake and your mouth is soft and inviting a man to kiss you. A blind man would enjoy the challenge you present, koritsi mou, but you already belong to me!'

'I do not!' She sounded breathless and uncertain.

'Not yet, perhaps, but when you are my wife I will leave you in no doubt about it. Now explain to me, if you can, what my fiancee was doing in the arms of another man just now when I came in?'

She put her hands together in an agitated movement. 'But, Titos, I haven't said I'll marry you.' She lowered her lashes to hide her own doubts from him. 'I'm going back to England if Mr. Ross won't let me go on with Fergus's book.'

'Is that what you were discussing just now?' he asked. His voice was warm and held the hint of laughter in it, and her faltering resolve took a dive as a result. He had no right to be able to confuse her just by the tone of his voice!

She nodded, not daring to speak.

'Tansy, shall I speak to Mr. Ross about the book on your behalf? I don't like you having anything to do with him.'

'But you can't! I have to stand on my own feet, or what good is it?'

'His terms may be a price I won't allow you to pay,' he warned her grimly. 'As I am your betrothed it is perfectly proper for me to speak, to him for you.'

But she went on shaking her head. 'I've always managed before on my own, and I'll have to go on managing, because I can't marry you! I won't marry anyone unless I love him.'

His arms closed round her in the most satisfactory way. 'Argue all you want, yineka mou, it will all be the same in the end.' He traced her mouth with his forefinger and smiled at her. 'Did you ever hear of Zeus taking no for an answer?'

CHAPTER SIX

SHE should have told him that he was not Zeus, that he never would be, but by the time he had moved away from her the moment had come and gone and she knew that it would never now be said.

'Why did you come?' she asked him.

To see you. Isn't that reason enough?'

'Titos, tell me why you really came!'

The laughter fell away from his face and she wished she hadn't asked him. She didn't like it when he looked at her in that grim, foreboding manner, and she knew, without his having to tell her, that it was something to do with Fergus.

'Have they found him? Is he all right?' she demanded.

'A passing aeroplane has spotted something up on the mountain. It was flying several miles off course and nobody seems to know how far off its usual route it was. They think they saw a man up there.'

'A man by himself?'

'So they say.'

Tansy looked at him, her eyes wide. 'But what about Elena?'

'We don't know, my dear. We'll have to hope for the best. There are a hundred different reasons as to why she shouldn't have been with him. They may have made some kind of a shelter which hid her from the pilot's view. Anything might have happened!'

Tansy sighed. 'I wish we knew. It may not have been Fergus. Do you think it was, Titos?'

He nodded gravely. 'Yes, I do. Cheer up, Tansy. It's better than no news at all. I must get back to my mother because she's a bit upset, as you can imagine. Will you tell Rhea, agapi? Don't mention that Elena wasn't with Fergus though. There will be time enough for her to worry when we know what's happened to her.' He gave her a rather weary smile, his eyes crinkling into a smile. 'Are you going to kiss me goodnight?'

'No! No, I'm not!'

His smile mocked her, but at least he no longer looked so desperately tired. 'As long as you don't kiss anyone else while my back is turned. Your Mr. Ross can find his own girl to flirt with!'

'When it comes to kisses, I can say yes or no for myself!' she declared. 'I'm not your girl either!'

He laughed out loud. 'Beware lest a thunderbolt doesn't strike you down where you stand. Your days of independence are numbered.' His face softened as he looked at her. 'Good night, Tansy mou, sleep well, and don't worry about that brother of yours. He'll be back with you in no time at all!'

And, rather to her surprise, Tansy did sleep well. She was the last one down to breakfast the next morning and she could hear Anna and Rhea laughing and talking together in the kitchen as she went down the stairs. Rhea had been particularly excited to hear that Fergus had been seen and she looked pretty and vivacious, her face flushed with excitement, as she broke off from what she had been saying and turned to greet Tansy.

'With Fergus coming back, you will be able to write your own book, won't you, Tansy? I'm going to bring some of my drawings down for you to look at when I come down this evening. Titos says it can be published locally and he'll put 't on sale in his hotels!'

Tansy poured herself out some coffee. Fergus would expect her to be nard at work on his book, not her own.

'What hotels?'

Rhea giggled. 'Titos' hotels! That's how he makes his money. Didn't you know? He has two hotels in Aghios Nikolaos and another one close to Hersonissos, just the other side of Mallia. The family has owned the land for generations but it was only when it came to Titos that he borrowed the money and started building for the new tourist industry. He has some shops too, selling local goods from all over Crete. Before—before the accident, I used to work in the one at Knossos sometimes. Titos is a rich man now, but when my father was alive we were always poor and worried about money. Titos is very good to all of us!'

So that was how he made his money! Tansy wondered why she hadn't thought to enquire before as to what he did for a living. Was it possible that she had been so involved with herself and her own problems that she hadn't had time to be interested in the doings of anyone else? It didn't speak very well of her, she thought, and she was ashamed of herself.

'I didn't know—' she began, biting her lip.

'Didn't you?' Rhea was far from upset at Tansy's lack of curiosity. 'Well, you do now, and that's why Titos suggested that you should write this book. He says that most tourists would like to be able to buy a brief account of the Greek myths and legends as they apply to Crete, together with a history of the island, stuff on the Minoan civilisation and all that. You could do it easily! And I could illustrate it for you —that is, if you like my drawings well enough. Titos would get it published locally in Iraklion, and I'd translate it into Greek, and he would put it into German and French. Wouldn't it be splendid? A complete family effort! And it would be bound to be a success!'

'But I'm not family!' Tansy said sharply.

Rhea smiled at her in a friendly way. 'Of course you are! Your brother married my sister and that makes you family. Besides—' her smile deepened into a grin that was so like her brother at his most obnoxious that Tansy could only stare at her—'you can't pretend to be a stranger when you allow Titos to tell you how to wear your hair—'

'He does not!'

'Oh, Tansy, he does too! And he got rid of Dick Ross for you. If you ask me, he wants you for himself!'

'Don't be ridiculous!' Tansy said repressively, bitterly aware that she must be looking as embarrassed as she felt. 'Titos doesn't know anything about me and, when I marry, it certainly won't be to a Greek—'

'Well, a Cretan isn't exactly a Greek,' Rhea interrupted cheerfully.

'No, it's one stage worse!' Tansy snapped back.

Rhea's eyes danced with laughter. 'That's exactly what Mama says about the English! It's a good thing Titos won't listen to either of you, isn't it?'

'Why shouldn't he listen?' Tansy demanded.

Rhea broke into delighted laughter. 'Yesterday you said Titos would always do as he pleased, without consulting anyone,' she reminded Tansy smugly, 'so why should he listen to you?'

Tansy cast her a smouldering look. 'I'm going out,' she said abruptly. 'And don't ask me where I'm going, because I don't know!'

Rhea nodded wisely. 'Good idea. Take Minos with you. But you won't get far on foot, Tansy. Come up to the house with me and we'll ask Mama if you can use the car that Elena always drives when she's home. Minos likes going in a car!'

Kyria Melissa was only too glad that Tansy should have the car. 'Of course you must have it! Titos always drives his own car and I have never learned—it was too late for me after my husband died.'

'Doesn't Rhea use the car?' Tansy asked her.

Kyria Melissa shook her head. 'She was too young, and then there was the accident. She is nervous of going in cars now, and she only drives happily with Titos.'

Minos was overjoyed when Tansy drove the small Seat 850 carefully down the hill with him perched in the passenger seat beside her. There were many cars in Crete that had been made in Spain, possibly because both countries have a mountainous terrain and a great many rutted, unmade-up roads which would be death to a less well-sprung car. The Seat, made under licence from the Fiat company, was built to cope with almost anything.

'Where do we go?' Minos enquired as they reached the main road.

Tansy consulted the map, choosing a place at random. 'What about Mochlos?' she suggested.

'Sure,' said Minos. 'We can sit and look at the island and drink lemonade, ne?'

'It says here there are some archaeological remains there,' said Tansy.

'There are tombs on the island, but we may not see them unless we have a boat. Sometimes there is a boat in Aghios Nikolaos, but there

is nothing there now. All the gold and copper knives, the sacred axe, and a beautiful ring, are in the museum now.'

Tansy was disappointed. 'Perhaps we should go somewhere else?' she began.

'But it is pretty there, Kyria Tansy, and you can watch the sea. It is very hot today, and a nice lemonade will be better than looking at ancient tombs. Even the ghosts have gone from Mochlos!'

'All right,' she agreed. She would treat the day as a holiday, she decided. There was no work she could do on Fergus's book while Dick Ross had his notes and, although she was tempted to allow Tito and Rhea to persuade her into working on a project of her own for them, she knew that Fergus's work would have to come first. It always had.

The new road went as far as Aghios Nikolaos. It was strange to Tansy at first to be driving on the right, but by the time they had reached the place where the road returned to the narrower, less well-graded one that had traversed the north side of the island for a generation, she felt quite at home with both her driving and the strange car.

Further on, the road climbed steeply between crumbling cliffs from which falls of stone cluttered the edges of the tarmac and in one place, near one of the little chapels that had been built for the benefit of travellers along the way, the stones practically covered the whole thoroughfare, and Tansy had to slow almost to a crawl to navigate her way through the boulders and muddy ditches that marred what was left of the surfacing.

The scenery was the most beautiful that she had seen so far on the island. The hills, a faded pink under the hot sun, stood silent and massive above a navy-blue sea. The dried-up thyme bushes provided cover for the flocks of goats who wandered up and down their

meaningless tracks that went nowhere, their bells sounding a pleasant note as they leaped from boulder to boulder. Elsewhere, there was only the sound of the occasional bird marking out its territory, and the constant buzz of insects from the undergrowth. There was no sign of the rain of the day before. The sky was a pale, cloudless blue, lit by the burning gold of the sun. It was hard to believe that the winter would soon be with them.

At Sfaka, Minos told her to turn off the road down a narrow track where she doubted a car had ever been been before. An old man on a donkey was the sole passer-by and he was so surprised to see them, his mouth gaped and he almost fell off the patient animal beneath him.

'Are you sure this is the right way?' Tansy asked, as the track grew narrower still and the boulders larger.

But the boy was quite certain. 'Look, you can see that another car has come this way!' he pointed out excitedly, turning in his seat to get a better look at the skid marks he had seen in the dust. 'I came here once before, and I know this is the way! I recognise that chapel!'

It was possible, Tansy supposed. She allowed the car to creep a little further down the hill, pausing to admire the sight of the island just off shore against the dark vivid blue of the sea. At the bottom of the hill were some tamarisk trees and a small ford which they crossed in a shower of water. Almost immediately a house appeared on the left, the commercial refrigerator on the verandah betraying the fact that whoever lived there also tried to eke out a trade in soft drinks.

'Is that where you want to stop for a lemonade?' Tansy teased Minos.

He was very serious. 'There is a better place further on. I will show you when we get to the village.'

'Okay. What do the people do down here?'

'They're fishermen.' The boy frowned with concentration as they navigated their way round some carpentry tools that had been left in the middle of the road, and went on down the crumbling street between a few shabby houses. 'Turn right here, Kyria Tansy! Look, there's the best place! Right by the sea.' He grinned at her with satisfaction. 'Do you like it?'

She did. She parked the car in the shade under a tamarisk tree, leaving the doors open so that whatever breeze there was could get inside and keep it as cool as possible.

A rickety table, shaded from the sun by a lightly thatched roof, was surrounded by high wooden seats. Tansy sat down on one of them and looked about her. There was another table further on, and yet another cafe on the other side of the tamarisk tree which also had a ramp leading down to a few brightly coloured boats. Minos sat down beside her, drawing a deep breath of satisfaction.

'In a minute, when the flies begin to bite, someone will come out to see what we want!' he told her, laughing at his own joke.

But before that could happen, a party of men drew up in another car and sat down at the far table, courteously muttering a greeting as they went past Tansy and Minos. Soon after that a woman came out of the house and Minos asked her to bring them the promised lemonade. He tried to listen to what the men were talking about, edging closer and closer to them until, at last, one of them noticed him and addressed a laughing remark in his direction. In a flash he had gone over to them, his face shining as he exchanged stories of shooting up in the hills with them.

Tansy watched him with a slight smile, not minding his desertion of her for more interesting company. She was glad not have to make

conversation and to allow her thoughts to wander along forbidden paths that always took her back to Titos and Fergus. She was not, when she thought about it, surprised that the two men didn't like each other. Fergus, sure that he would always be- the centre of any academic circle, despised anything that smacked of the physical. It wouldn't matter to him if Titos had a good mind or not. It would have been enough that he was a magnificent male animal for Fergus to have automatically despised him. But why had Titos disliked Fergus? Tansy didn't think he was nearly as prejudiced in his views as her brother and that he might well have found much to admire about Fergus's professional life. She suspected that the Greek thought Fergus lacked warmth, that perhaps he lacked the magnetic virility that they considered to be so important to a man. Without that quality, Titos might well have discounted Fergus's ability to make Elena happy, and his sister's welfare would count heavily with Titos, as did all his family.

The woman of the house, having served the men and opened the two bottles of lemonade for Tansy and Minos, came back with a few freshly picked grapes which she put on the table in front of Tansy as a gesture of hospitality. She sat down on a nearby seat, her crochet work in her hand, and listened to the men's banter with a half-smile on her face, keeping Tansy company in what was otherwise an all-male group. It didn't worry her that Tansy spoke little Greek and could understand even less. She asked her about her family, and whether Minos was her son, and if she was enjoying Crete as much as she had expected to.

Tansy, answering most of these questions with the few simple words she had at her command, began to realise that no question was considered impertinent or too personal by the Greeks, andjhought again how disinterested and stand-offish the Michalakis family must have considered her when she had asked them none of these questions.—Indeed had quite obviously not wanted to!

To make amends, she asked the woman what she was making and the woman rewarded her by fetching a hideous but beautifully made cushion cover that she was busy decorating with multi-coloured crocheted roses that would eventually cluster in the four corners and make a pattern in the centre of the black background. She accepted Tansy's congratulations with aplomb, as if it were her due, and called Minos over to her side so that he could translate the next batch of questions for her, to be quite sure she got the answers right.

Minos was only too pleased to tell her everything she wanted to know. She had heard of Titos Michalakis; she had even heard that his sister had married an Englishman about whom very little was known, and the fact that Tansy was his sister was a matter for great rejoicing. Even the men paused in their conversation long enough to exclaim over the stranger in their midst who had turned out not to be quite a stranger after all.

'It was a sad time for Elena Michalou,' the woman said suddenly. She clicked her tongue against her teeth. 'It was the sister who was hurt, of course, but it was the elder sister's punishment she bore for her.'

Minos translated this last with a small wriggle of embarrassment. 'She is only repeating gossip,' he said to Tansy. 'She can't know what really happened. Only the Kyrios Titos knew that!'

'But she must have meant something,' Tansy protested.

Minos shook his head. 'Kyria Elena used to go miles in the car to be with your brother. Thespinis Rhea went with her at first, but the Kyria wanted to go alone. I used to hear them quarrelling about it.'

'Was Elena driving when Rhea was hurt?' Tansy asked him.

He opened his eyes very wide. 'You must ask the Kyrios Titos. He has said I am not to discuss it with you.'

The woman of the house broke in with a rapid fire of Greek which Minos answered in the same passionate tones.

'It's time to go home, Kyria Tansy,' he said in English. 'Unless you wish to have something else?' he added, his hospitable instincts getting the better of his fear at what he would be asked next. 'My mother will have the lunch ready and she won't like it if you are late.'

Tansy smiled at his grave tone. She paid for the lemonade, adding a few drachmas to the total for the cost of the grapes which were pressed into her hand as a small present from her hostess.

Minos held the door for her as she climbed into her seat behind the steering-wheel, getting in on his side with such blatant relief that Tansy wondered what else the woman could have said to him. It was obvious that Titos had not known that his sister had been seeing Fergus; alone, and she could well imagine his furious reaction to find that it was common gossip on the island. How could Fergus have been so stupid as to allow it? He must have known how Titos would feel about anything that would besmirch the name of his family! Titos had probably been furious with Rhea, too, who had been the one who had been chosen to chaperon her elder sister. Poor Rhea! Had it been during a quarrel with Elena that she had been hurt?

Tansy would have liked to have asked Minos to tell her the whole story, but she recognised that Titos had got there before her, plugging any source of information that might give her a different version of the story from his own.

'Kyria Tansy, the—the stafilia are good, don't you think?'

She accepted the grape he held out to her, catching his eye and laughing with him. 'Very good. They're called grapes in English.'

Minos forgot his worries easily. 'Grapes,' he repeated. 'Now you must say the Greek word, kyria. It will please the Kyrios Titos to know that you are learning Greek!' It was obvious that pleasing Titos was something he felt to be very worthwhile.

'I have you to translate for me,' Tansy reminded him. 'Why should I bother?'

For an instant he looked much older than his twelve or thirteen years. 'Sometimes one wishes to say something private to someone like the Kyrios Titos!'

'Then I'll say it in English!'

He chuckled. 'It's not the same, kyria. Greek is a much better language for the intimacies of life.'

'I can't imagine that I shall ever have anything of that nature to say to Titos!' Tansy averred, stony-faced. To be routed by a mere child was almost too much for her equilibrium, especially as she was woman enough to be curious as to whether he was right. Two days before, she would have been shocked by such a remark coming out of the mouth of anyone as young as Minos, but she was no longer the prim young woman she had been then. Now she was prepared to accept that Minos was almost a man and a Greek at that, and it no longer surprised her that he was already far more conscious of feminine beauty and the delights of beguiling away an hour in the company of someone of the opposite sex than most of the men she had known in England. It was something in the air and in the zest for life that they breathed in with their mothers' milk.

Minos's eyes flashed. 'But what of the things he finds to say to you?' he said slyly.

Tansy manoeuvred the car round a tight corner before answering. 'He hasn't anything like that to say to me,' she claimed.

'No?' Minos popped another grape into her mouth and took one himself, savouring the juice as it ran out over his tongue. 'Ime oandras\ When he said that you wanted to know what he had said!'

Tansy thought him a great deal too knowing. 'And you were there to translate for me,' she snubbed him.

Minos only laughed. 'The Kyrios Titos wouldn't thank me if I were always there!' He gave her a final grin and turned his attention to the road ahead of them, cheering her on as she threw the car round the steep corners as though they were back in the horse and cart days with she as apprentice whip and he, of course, as master.

On the way back, Tansy was intrigued to see the whole of the ancient Minoan cit%.Gournia from the road. She had seen it when they had been going the other way, but it had looked quite dull from the signpost which had invited them to stop and visit the three to four-thousand-year-old town. Now she would have liked to stop, to see for herself the jumble of little houses, the narrow stepped streets, and the public places of worship and recreation that crowned the brow of the hill away from the huddled hurly-burly that straggled upwards towards them.

'We don't have time now,' said Minos, reading her thoughts. He glanced up at her out of the corner of his eye. 'The Kyrios Titos comes here often. You could come with him.'

'I'll come with Fergus!' Tansy retorted. 'It's more interesting visiting these places with an expert, and Fergus is certainly that!'

'Does he know more than you?' Minos countered.

Tansy didn't know how to answer him. 'I've only just begun looking at Minoan sites,' she compromised.

'Then the Kyrios Titos must know more than your brother,' the boy reasoned. 'He has been looking at them all his life.'

Tansy drove on without giving in to the temptation to look over her shoulder. She didn't need Minos' partisan arguments to know that she, too, would much rather visit almost anywhere with Titos than with her brother. She couldn't understand it! Sbe thought of the years she had hung on Fergus's every word and when it would have been the last word in blissful happenings for him actually to take her with him on one of his field excursions, even after she had come down from university and had as much right as he to venture an opinion on the objects that had been found, as to break her back in digging them up. Would she really jeopardise her hard-won approval from Fergus, for what? For anything with Titos! Then a thought came to her that was so strange that she very nearly drove the car straight off the road into the soft, sandy edge. Was it possible that she was falling in love with Titos Michalakis?

She drove the rest of the way home in a dream. She tried to think calmly and rationally through the situation, recalling every minute of the few brief exchanges she had had with him. But, far from finding such an exercise soothing, all she could remember was the excitement that had lain beneath every word he had said to her and how her blood had thundered in her ears and how he had claimed to command that thunder. She could hear the thunder now and he was nowhere near—

She turned into the drive in front of the villa and there he was. He was standing with his hands behind his back, his curly hair wet and glistening from a recent swim, and he was smiling almost as though he knew she had been thinking of him. If she had not been a sane, sober sort of person, the sort who always had a reasonable answer for

everything, she might have wondered if he couldn't, like Zeus, send his thunderbolts raining down on his hapless victim's head.

She climbed out of the car, trying not to look at him again because the sight of him gave her so much joy, and she was afraid he would be able to read it in her eyes as easily as he had snapped the elastic band that had held her hair the night before.

'What are you doing here?' she asked him.

His eyes travelled over her, taking in her flushed cheeks and the wide velvet bow she had tied round her hair to keep it out of her eyes.

'Do you want me to go away?' he drawled.

'No, of course not.' She made a valiant effort to be normal, cool, and friendly, just as she would be with any other man. 'Are you coming in?'

He looked askance and she saw that he was not bluffed for one moment by her careful front of indifference. The thunder rang in her ears again and it was she who looked away.

'I brought back your brother's notes.' He brought a thick brown envelope from behind his back and held it out to her. 'I told Mr. Ross that we think Fergus has been found and as soon as he comes back to Crete he can write his own book, that you are no longer interested—'

'But that isn't true!'

He smiled, saying nothing. Minos came running round the car and stood beside him, looking so like him that Tansy turned her back on them both and pretended to search inside the front of the car for her map. When she turned round again, he was standing close beside her, his hand held out to her.

'Are you going to be his shadow for the rest of your life?' he asked softly.

'I don't know what you mean!' The words came out in a whisper and she put up a hand and wiped her brow, suddenly aware of the heat of the day.

'Yes, you do, Tansy. You're not asleep any more. Let Fergus write his own book and get on with something of your own for a change.'

'But I can't desert Fergus—can I?'

'You have to make the choice some time. Why not now?'

'I've always chosen Fergus!' she exclaimed, more to herself than to him.

'That was when the choice involved only the two of you—'

'We've always only had each other!'

'Until he married Elena,' Titos reminded her dryly. 'Do you want these notes, or shall I give them to him myself?'

She held out a shaking hand and took them from him. 'You've interfered enough! Fergus may have married Elena, but she can't help him with his work and I can! Mr. Ross is taking me to Knossos, and I'm glad he is, because I'll talk to him myself about the book—'

'What makes you think it's the book he wants to talk to you about?' He made a quick gesture of impatience. 'Look, Tansy, I know it's hard to transfer one's loyalties after a long time, but you will have to make the change in the end. A woman must follow her man's judgement, not her brother's!'

'I don't follow anyone,' Tansy cried out. 'I make my own decisions. I always have!'

'Do you?' he mocked her. 'What decision have you ever made for yourself? Fergus has made them all for you, hasn't he? All you have done is blindly follow wherever he has led. But that is Elena's destiny now, karthia mou. Yours is to find your own place in the world without him. Haven't you the courage to do that?'

'I have to see Mr. Ross for myself,' she said doggedly.

'And what about Rhea?'

'What about her?' she asked, bewildered.

'She has an interest in your decision too,' he reminded her. 'That is what I meant when I said it doesn't only concern you and Fergus. You haven't only got yourself any longer. You have Rhea and, in a way, my mother. And you have me!'

She looked up at him with a new timidity. 'But none of you need me,' she said. 'You don't even know me!'

He took her hands in his and drew her to her feet. 'I know you very well, Tansy Drummond. How well do you know yourself?'

That was a question to which she had no answer, but she was not yet ready to give up her long, familiar allegiance to her brother's interests, not even to please Titos.

'I don't believe you need me,' she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT was with mixed feelings that Tansy heard Titos tell Anna that he had decided to stay for lunch. She felt he could have waited to be asked but, on the other hand, nothing could quell the wild delight she felt as she sat down at the table, not at the head, for he had taken that seat for himself, but on his right hand, as if she were his guest rather than the other way round.

'When are you going to Knossos?' Titos asked, breaking the silence with a calm show of interest that Tansy envied so much that it was like a physical pain in her middle.

'I don't know,' she muttered. She could see his raised eyebrows without even looking at him. 'Mr. Ross is going to let me know,' she added.

He gave her a thoughtful look. 'Tansy, if I asked you not to go-'

'Don't!'

'And if Fergus were to ask you?' he rapped back.

'He wouldn't. He knows I can look after myself! I'd be in a fine mess by now if I couldn't!'

'And aren't you?'

Her mouth was dry and her voice felt like somebody else's in her throat. 'What do you mean?'

He sat back in his chair, eyeing her lazily with such a masculine look that she nearly choked over her soup and could feel the colour rushing up into her cheeks.

'You don't know Fergus at all, do you?' he countered. 'Your image of him is as false as the one you have of yourself. He's an ordinary man, without very much imagination, and with very little sense of responsibility as far as either you or Elena art concerned. He's no more the white knight of your imagination than you are cold and unemotional, committed only to your work and your gratitude to Fergus because he occasionally tossed you a kind word and didn't go away and leave you too! He would have done, you know, if it had suited him to do so.'

She may have been wrong about herself, but she wouldn't hear a word against Fergus! 'I know you think I'm a fool, but I'm not!' she cried out. 'If you can prove to me that Fergus wasn't responsible as far as Elena is concerned, I'll be the first to admit you are right about him!' She took another spoonful of soup. 'Why won't you tell me what Fergus is supposed to have done?'

'I don't make bargains,' Titos answered her. 'There is no need for you to know the circumstances of Fergus's marriage. It's for him to tell you if he wants you to know about it.'

He poured himself a glass of iced water and addressed himself to his soup without taking any further notice of her. The gesture of rejection hurt and the tears came rushing into her eyes—she, who never cried, who never, never let her emotions get out of control!

'I'm not such a fool as to accept that!' she muttered defiantly. 'I can tell the difference between right and wrong and can decide for myself. I don't have to be told what to think!'

'You haven't thought at all. All you've done is blindly take your brother's part because you're too frightened to do anything else. You're not a fool, and I don't think you one, nor am I going to force you to step over the line you've drawn between us.' He finished his soup and put down his spoon with an audible sigh. 'Think, Tansy! Do

you think I'd allow Fergus's affairs to come between us if I could help it?'

'No,' she admitted. 'But I don't know anything about you—- I've never met anyone like you before. I don't know what you want of me!'

He smiled at that. 'I mean to marry you, Tansy mou.''

'Without love? It's—it's ridiculous!'

He took a sip of water, his face an arrogant mask, concealing—what? 'You think so?' he mocked her. 'It's you who are being ridiculous. How long are you going to go on pretending that you can pick and choose your own way in defiance of the way your heart has chosen for you?'

'One's heart isn't a very reliable guide. I prefer to use my head!'

'By burying it in the sand?' he smiled. 'Grow up, agapi mou, and face facts. Thfe woman in you has already decided on your master. You are my woman and I won't have you distressing yourself by setting yourself up against me out of a mistaken sense of loyalty to that brother of yours!'

She could only stare at him, all thought of tears forgotten. 'I believe you really mean it!' she gasped.

'I do,' he said grimly.

The entrance of Minos to remove! their plates, and Anna to bring in the mixed meat and hard white cheese salad, effectively silenced Tansy for the next few minutes. Titos rose and unlocked the cupboard, pouring them both out a glass of ouzo, offering one to Anna who shook her head with a quick flirtatious smile.

'Stin iyassou!' he toasted Tansy as he sat down again.

'Iss iyia?' she responded automatically.

Minos' eyes lit with mischief. 'The Kyria Tansy is learning Greek to please you,' he told Titos.

'Is that so?' Titos gave the boy an affectionate tap on the head, watching him with an amused smile as he left the room, giggling to himself. 'Do you want to please me, Tansy?' he asked as Anna followed her son to the kitchen, shutting the door behind her.

She shrugged her shoulders. 'No more than anyone else!'

'That's what I thought,' he said dryly. 'My mother said family feeling would make you take Fergus's side—'

'So it does! How can I do anything else when you won't tell me any of the facts?'

He looked sad, as though she had disappointed him. 'You could trustee,' he said. 'I did as I thought best. Won't you give me the benefit of the doubt that I might have been right?'

Oh, how much she wanted to! 'Would you trust my judgement?' she asked him passionately.

He laughed, and she thought she would never forgive him for that. 'Not in your present muddleheaded state,' he said at once. 'But I can think of some circumstances in which I would.' He smiled across the table at her angry face. 'Mostly, I think you'd prefer it if I make the decisions that matter for both of us. Am I right?'

'Why should I?' She tried to force herself to meet his eyes, but, when she did so, she found she had no defence against the amused affection

she saw in his. It was unfair that he could make her go soft inside for no other reason than that he was a man and prepared to use every particle of his masculinity to undermine the fragile security she had built up for herself over the last few years. 'Why should I prefer it?' she asked again.

'Because a Greek is always the master in his own house; and because you are you, and I am I, and neither of us would want it any other way.'

'That's no answer!' she retorted.

His eyes crinkled with laughter. 'I am still waiting for you to say you trust me. Is that asking too much?'

'No.' The single syllable was forced out of her. 'Titos, I don't want to have to choose between you and Fergus!'

'One day you may have to,' he warned her gently. 'You can't tear yourself in two, agapi.''

She was silent for a long moment. 'You don't have to tell me about Fergus,' she said at last. 'I think I know. Elena was expecting a baby, wasn't she? And Fergus was the father.'

Titos looked up sharply. 'And what brought you to that conclusion?'

'Why else would you force Fergus into marriage, when you didn't think he was nearly good enough for her? It was the only answer that made sense.'

'In Crete, we put a great value on our women and we guard them well.' Titos' expression was as arrogant as she had ever seen it. 'We received him as a friend and he repaid us by seducing my sister. Do you expect me to commend such an action?'

She shook her head. 'But if it had been anyone else but Elena involved, I think you might have understood it. The girls Fergus knows say yes or no for themselves—and, perhaps Elena wasn't altogether* unwilling if she was in love with him.'

He gave her an intrigued look, as if he were unaccustomed to such plain speaking from a woman. The tenseness left his face and the familiar mockery came back into his eyes. 'Do you say yes or no for yourself?' he asked her.

'Of course,' she said with dignity.

'In Crete, it could never be so! There would be no virtuous women left!' He leaned across the table towards her. 'I am tempted to discover how you would answer me!' he said. 'Could I make you say yes?'

Perhaps that would be the answer, she thought. A brief affair, and he would be out of her heart and mind for ever. She almost wished she could bring herself to agree to that, but she could not. She looked down at her practically un- tasted food and remembered Anna, and her resolve stiffened.

'I would say no,' she brought out with a rush. 'And, seeing that you've been in much the same situation as Fergus yourself, I don't see why you should condemn him for what he did!' She put her knife and fork down on her plate, unable to force down another mouthful. 'It's a great pity more women didn't say no to you both!' she added with asperity.

'Little cat,' he said, but without heat. He stood up, standing over her chair with a suddenness that made a little prickle of anticipation run down her spine. He put his hand beneath her chin and turned her face up to meet the laughter in his. 'A little still she strove, and much repented. And whispering "I will ne'er consent"—consented!' he quoted, enjoying the outraged indignation with which she recognised Lord Byron at his most insufferable. How dare he quote an English

poet to her on such a subject? But then he would know Byron's verse, she supposed, as he was such a hero to the Greeks. But he was no hero to her!

'Never!' she denied in a fine rage.

He bent his head and kissed her lightly on the lips. 'Never?' He kissed her again, a soft, butterfly kiss that teased her hps into seeking something a great deal more substantial. 'You see,' he murmured, 'how easy it would be to say yes, my delectable Tansy? But that would put me in the same class as your brother and I have no mind to have it said that you had to marry me! My woman will come to the altar with me because she wants to, not because she has to!' He brushed a loose hair away from her face. 'Yineka mou, my woman! It has a good sound to it to me. Does it sound good to you?'

She broke away from him and took refuge on the other side of the table. 'Then I'm right about Fergus and Elena?' She began collecting up the plates, and despised herself because she couldn't stop her hands from trembling as she did so.

'Except that he blamed the whole thing on Elena. The last thing he wanted was to have to support a wife and child for the rest of his life. He thought I was going to do that for him. He even suggested the sum of money I should settle on Elena as her prika, or dowry. He fought me for every penny he could get out of me, once he saw I was determined he and Elena should be wed.'

'Is that how he came by the villa?'

Titos smiled wryly. 'I wouldn't let him have it. I allowed them to five here—'

The strong mercenary streak in Fergus was no stranger to Tansy. There had been times when she had willingly handed over to him

every penny she had sooner than have an argument with him over money. She was ashamed that he should have revealed this side of himself to Titos.

'He thought you were humiliating Elena by your refusal to give her a proper dowry,' she defended her brother. 'Were you?'

Titos' eyes narrowed. 'Will you be humiliated if I take you with no dowry at all?'

Tansy nearly dropped the plates she was carrying. 'English girls don't have dowries. Anyway, I'm not going to marry you!'

'When you say that to my face, with my arms about you and your lips fresh from the embrace of mine, I may believe you, Tansy mou,' he drawled. 'Till then, do me the courtesy of not arguing with me about it all the time. I don't let go easily, and I have no intention of letting you go at all!'

'Titos! I'm not a bit of property—'

'Is that how you suppose I think of you? Tansy, you fraud! You don't think anything of the sort! Is it that you want to be wooed and won in the English way? But I am not an Englishman and I'll woo you in my own way, or not at all!'

She swept out of the room, her head held high, and was glad of the diversion Anna caused by complaining that neither of them had eaten a bite of the good food she had provided for them.

'Never mind, when my brother gets home you'll be able to feed him up,' Tansy consoled her. 'Fergus always did have a very good appetite.'

'Kyria Elena may not like to have me in her kitchen,' Anna answered.

'Why ever not?'

Anna shrugged. 'There are reasons. Her mother will advise her to employ someone else here.'

'I shouldn't have said it was any of her business,' Tansy protested.

'Kyria Melissa has never been unkind by word or deed, but she must have felt much,' Anna replied. 'If I were she. I should not want my daughter to employ myself. She will only forget when I have departed for America.'

'But do you think you'll ever get to the States?' Tansy asked her. 'What will you do when you get there?'

'I have relations in America.'

Tansy picked up a cloth and prepared to dry the dishes as Anna washed them, but the Greek woman would have none of it. 'The Kyrios Titos is calling you,' she insisted.

'Let him call!' said Tansy.

'I heard that,' Titos told her from the doorway. He walked into the kitchen and took the cloth out of her hand. 'If it's wooing you want, Tansy mou, I'll take you to Phaestos this afternoon. Put on a pretty dress and I'll go up to the house and get my car. Will you come?'

'Shouldn't you wait for Fergus to come back?' she taunted him. 'Won't you require his consent? Especially as you won't allow me to know my own mind!'

'Does that rankle? But I have it on your own assurances that Fergus will expect you to say yes or no for yourself, and I have no objection to that—'

'As long as I don't argue with you about it!'

'Why, yes,' he grinned. 'When you argue, you look hard and determined and not nearly as beautiful as when you follow your better instincts and look all soft and dreamy and anxious to please!'

'I don't! I never—'

'You don't see yourself, I do!' He gave a little tug to her hair. 'Are you coming to Phaestos?'

'Titos, I don't look hard, do I?'

He gave another tug to her hair. 'Are you coming?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Shouldn't you be working?' she asked as she slid into the seat beside him, tucking her skirts under her knees so that they wouldn't catch in the door.

'I should, of course, but I don't suppose the hotels will fall down without me for one afternoon.' His eyes slid over her in a masculine assessment that made her breath catch in her throat. Determined not to appear coy, she gave him back a shy look and was struck anew by the warm, almost affectionate, mockery in his eyes. She tried to be glad that she amused him, though it was not the reaction she would have chosen to inspire in his breast. She would have liked him to have regarded her with even a tithe of the awed wonder that she felt whenever she considered his dark good looks that made him so very like her conception of Zeus, the leader of the gods of old. Glorious the thunder's roar! No, that would not do! She looked hastily away, but not before she had glimpsed the challenge that lit in his eyes and felt an answering leap of pure delight within her.

'That's a very pretty dress,' he complimented her.

'I'm glad you like it.'

'Oh, I do. I like what it clothes even better!'

She looked resolutely ahead of her, pretending that she hadn't heard him. She was unaccustomed to receiving compliments, unless it was about the quality of her work, both in the field and in her write-ups for Fergus, and those that she had received had been easily turned away with a humorous retort, or a shrug of the shoulders. Neither method would work with Titos, she thought in a panic. But then what would? She should never have come!

He covered her hands in her lap with his own. 'You're not as different from our Cretan girls as you like to pretend,' he smiled at her. 'I shan't eat you, Tansy mou, at least, not this afternoon!'

'I didn't think you would!' she denied with spirit, but the flickering of her eyelids betrayed her.

'Oh, Tansy,' he said. 'Don't you know that you're safe with me? I may want to kiss you—and a great deal more than that!—but I can wait until you're ready to admit you're mine. Won't you trust me to look after you till then?'

She did look at him then and her heart turned over within her at the gentleness of his expression. If only he loved her too, how perfect it would be!

'If I were a Cretan girl, I wouldn't be here at all,' she compromised.

'If you were a Cretan girl, you'd be wedded and bedded and the mother of a couple of sons by now, and I'd take you whenever I wished, as often as I liked!'

'But I might not have married you!'

'You wouldn't have had any choice in the matter. I'd have made such a nuisance of myself, your father would have been glad to give you to me to get a little peace! Don't you know how much I want you?'

The colour surged into her cheeks. 'And what of afterwards? Don't you want love as well?'

'We'd share a kind of love, in the end. We'd storm the citadel together, and bind up each other's wounds, and be comfortable together. Wouldn't that be enough for you?'

Would it? She didn't know. It sounded like heaven on earth and she knew it would be for a time, but loving him so much, wouldn't there come a time when she would want him to love her too?

'But I'm not a Cretan girl,' she said, as miserable as she had ever been in her whole life. 'I don't want to be subordinate to a man all my life. I'm used to being free and having my own way, things you wouldn't like at all in a wife! You don't see me as a person at all! You haven't even asked me if / want children!'

'Why should I when I already know the answer?'

'You can't know!' She clenched her hands together beneath his. 'Besides,' she added, 'I wouldn't only want a son, I'd want a daughter too!'

'Would you, agapi?' His mouth twitched into a winning smile. 'I can't promise to oblige, but I'd do my very best—'

'That isn't the point!' Tansy snapped, much agitated. 'The point is that I'm more than a pawn on a chessboard for you to move about at will—'

'Tell that to that brother of yours!' he said dryly.

'But Fergus doesn't think of women as—as things]' she retorted.

Titos pulled her roughly into his arms and kissed her mouth, putting her back in her seat almost immediately, and starting up the car.

'Doesn't he?' he said with a bitterness that shocked her. He turned on to the road for Iraklion in silence, putting his foot hard down on the accelerator. 'What freedom have you ever had?' he burst out. 'You haven't even had the freedom to be a woman! You're right, I don't see you as a person, Tansy Drummond! I see you as the woman I want for my wife, who'll come alive in my hands and start to enjoy being in the real world! You wouldn't be free to scrape back your hair and purse up your lips as though life was something nasty to be avoided at all costs; but you would be free to be yourself, to laugh and quarrel and make up again, and know you have a body as well as a mind!' He slowed to a more reasonable pace, casting her a fleeting glance that hurt all the more because there was no mockery or amusement in it. 'A Greek may command his wife. Tansy mou, but he doesn't neglect her and leave her to her own devices, to eke out her physical needs how she may!'

'That isn't what I meant,' Tansy said in a suffocated voice. 'Titos, I know you think I'm hard, but I don't think I'm hard enough. I don't want to get hurt!'

His quick interest was something tangible and added to her confusion. 'Could I hurt you, Tansy?' he asked in a low voice that somehow made her want to cry.

She nodded her head, not daring to speak, because then he would know how vulnerable she was.

'Then there's hope for us yet,' he said. 'And I still won't take no for an answer!'

They came to the end of the new road and made the rather awkward turning back on to the old road just before the airport. In doing so, he noticed the tears in her eyes and his own expression softened.

'Cheer up, Tansy agapi. I look after what is mine and you won't escape me easily.' He turned his head and smiled at her. 'It would serve you right if I settled your future right over your head and reminded Fergus that he is the only available man in your family and responsible for your happiness! He might even stand up on his own feet for once!'

'Is that why you want to marry me? Because it will annoy Fergus?' Tansy asked.

His angry laughter roared about her ears. 'If you make a crack like that after we're married,' he threatened her, 'I'll make you wish you'd never been born. I'm only surprised that nobody has tried to beat a little sense into you before!'

She more than half believed him. 'Then why?' she persisted.

'Why do you think?' he countered.

She thought it would be most improper to put any of the reasons she could think of into words. 'I prefer not to discuss it!' she said at last.

That brought the mockery back into his eyes with a vengeance. 'For an intelligent woman, you're remarkably stupid, my Tansy.' He turned the driving mirror towards her. 'Take a good, long look at yourself and then tell me you don't know why I want to have you for my own!'

But Tansy preferred to do nothing of the sort. She retreated into silence, telling herself that it was what any passenger would do when the driver had to concentrate on getting through a town with the chaotic traffic of Iraklion. Handcarts, buses, cars and taxis, all competed with the pedestrians for the middle of the road, missing each other by a hair's breadth. They left the town again by the Khania Gate, passing the statue of Captain Michael Korakis, one of the Cretan nineteenth-century revolutionary leaders, and set out along the Boulevard of the 62 Martyrs, commemorating the sixty- two citizens of Iraklion who had been murdered by the Germans in 1942. It was a silent reminder of the bloody history of the island, a history that she had never experienced, not even second-hand through her parents, whereas Tito's father had fought and suffered and had borne the marks of that experience for the rest of his life. It seemed to her to be yet one more dividing point between them, yet another place where they could never meet. She was more sure than ever that only love could cement a lasting relationship between them—his love as well as hers.

The fertile central basin of Crete was filled with vineyards, their bright green leaves only beginning to turn to gold as the winter approached.

'During the Middle Ages, the prized malvasia wine came from here,' Titos told her. 'Today, they grow rosaki grapes mostly. They do very well.'

'I didn't know you made wine locally,' said Tansy.

'Show me the Mediterranean man who doesn't make his own wine! Wine, olives, bread, and a mixed flock of sheep and goats, that's all the Cretan needs to make him happy.'

'I'd need more than that,' she murmured.

'You're a spoilt tourist!'

'Would you be truly content with so little?' she asked him.

'It's all my family had for generations. I think I'd be content, with a good woman and children thrown in, and the religion of my ancestors for my comfort.'

She wondered if he meant the Orthodox Church, whose priests with their stove-pipe headdresses she had seen out walking along the streets of Iraklion, or if he was talking about the old religion that lingered on, sometimes taking a Christian guise, and sometimes surviving in the customs and superstitions still practised in both town and country alike.

'Did your family really live like that? Your mother must have worked, very hard when you were all children and your father not well.'

'She did. Before she married my father she had never lived in the country and then when he went off to war, she had everything to do by yourself. But she loved my father and she was happy to do it for him.'

Tansy's heart hammered within her. 'I wouldn't make much of a goatherd,' she said. 'I don't like goats. We never had any animals when I was a child.'

'You'll soon get used to them,' he assured her. 'I used to share my bed with the orphaned kids and lambs, and bring home every stray dog in the neighbourhood. Pretty fierce some of them were too. I never had a whole skin for bites and grazes and the occasional bee-sting.'

'But you don't have goats now, do you?' Tansy asked nervously.

'I have my father's flock. They spend most of their time up in the hills. The only difference is that I employ a man to look after them these days. Anna's brother keeps my flock with his. But I go up myself every now and then to keep my hand in. I don't want my animals to .forget my voice.'

Tansy could imagine him sitting by an open fire after dark, playing the pipes of Pan, and exchanging yarns with the other men up on the hills.

'Wasn't your mother ever afraid?' she asked.

'She never told us if she was! She was fiercely proud of being the Kyrios Sterghios' wife and wouldn't have shamed him by admitting to being afraid of anything!'

'Oh,' said Tansy. 'I'm afraid all the time.'

'But you wouldn't be with me,' he answered, so certainly that for a moment she thought that perhaps she might not be. 'And I've grown out of having animals in my bed,' he added. 'I'd rather have you.'

'Titos!'

He lifted an eyebrow. 'Aren't you going to return the compliment?'

'Of course not!'

He gave her a sidelong smile that made her blush. 'The only thing you are afraid of, my foolish Tansy, is yourself—and the sound of the thunder!'

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE long climb over the Idha range of mountains went by in a flash. It seemed no time at all before they were driving through Ayii Dheka, which Titos translated as The Ten Martyrs, ten Cretans who had been decapitated in the days when the Romans had held the island because they had refused to give up their Christian faith and worship the gods of the state.

'The village is built on the remains of old Gortyna. It was the Roman centre of administration for Crete and all Libya, but it was old when the Romans came here. The first attempt at a code of law saw the light of day here. I'll show you on the way back.'

'I'd like that,' Tansy said with real pleasure.

'Ah,' he said, 'there is something else there I want to show you. It will be a surprise for you.'

She was intrigued, but she didn't press him. It was enough for her that once Titos had dealt with her probable fear over animals, writing her own book, and life in general, he had actually said he found her likeable. More, he had said it as though he meant it, as though it had nothing to do with the fact that she was female and an automatic challenge to his masculinity. He had said he liked her as an individual, that he liked talking to her. He had said it as if she mattered!

Not once, after that, had he said anything to remind her that no matter haw affable he was still the same person who had only'to touch her to rouse a storm in her senses and that she was as vulnerable as ever to his virile brand of charm.

'I should have been quite content to see Phaestos,' she smiled at him. 'The city of Rhadamanthus! I wonder why Minos wfc given all the

credit for being a great lawmaker. Rhadamanthus must have been quite as legally minded as his brother, for he, too, ended up as a judge in the underworld, judging the dead in the kingdom of Hades. Only the third son, Sarpendon, seems to have done nothing of note.'

'His city is at Mallia, if he had one at all. He is thought to have left Crete and gone to Asia Minor, the victor of a battle of love. After the birth of her three sons, Europa married the king of Crete, Asterius, but they had no children of their own and so the three boys were made joint heirs to their stepfather's throne. But the brothers quarrelled over one of Apollo's sons, a beautiful boy with whom they were all in love. The boy decided he loved Sarpendon best and they went away together, leaving the kingdom of Crete to be divided between the other two.'

'I thought Minos inherited the throne?'

'So he did, but Rhadamanthus stayed on in Crete and there is no doubt that the tablets of law were found in his territory. Minos seems to have had a dual personality. He is supposed to have been the founder of the first great naval power and, of course, his wife Pasiphae was the mother of the infamous Minotaur, who had to be caged away in the labyrinth, and who was eventually dealt with by Theseus, aided by Ariadne, one of Minos' daughters.'

'And the labyrinth was at Knossos?'

'According to the legend. It was built by Daedalus, an Athenian who was seeking his fortune in Crete. Pasiphae confessed to Daedalus her passion for a bull who had come up from the sea on Crete. It happened at the time when Minos was laying claim to the throne and he made the rather rash claim that the gods would grant him anything he asked. To prove his claim he called upon Poseidon to send him a bull from the sea that he could sacrifice. Poseidon, ruler of the sea. agreed, but the snowy white bull who emerged from the waves was

too dazzlingly beautiful to be sacrificed and Minos killed another animal in his place. It was the white bull that Pasiphae lusted after, at the instigation of Poseidon who felt slighted by Minos' refusal to sacrifice the bull he had sent him. Daedalus helped Pasiphae to mate with the bull and, when Minotaur was born, he constructed the labyrinth io which to hide it.'

'Wasn't Minos furious?'

'When he found out he was. He also discovered Daedalus' part in the affair and threw him and his young son Icarus into the labyrinth to be killed by Minotaur. But Daedalus, never at a loss, made them some wings on which they could fly away from Crete—'

'But Icarus flew too near the sun, and his wings melted and fell off, and he fell into the sea and was drowned.'

'That's the legend,' Titos agreed. 'The fact was somewhat different. The Minoans appear to have held some kind of bull-dances, perhaps a little like the modern bullfights in Portugal and the South of France. The bull isn't killed, but the young men danced round him and try to claim a disc he wears between his horns. There are frescoes that show the Minoans' both men and girls, grasping the bull's horns and somersaulting over his back. Rather different from the legend of Theseus.'

It occurred to Tansy that Titos knew quite as much about the old legends and history of Crete as her brother did, and the thought made her feel disloyal to Fergus and revived the guilt that she was constantly comparing the two men, and never in her brother's favour.

'When I was a little girl, I had a jointed wooden doll, just like the ones that Daedalus invented and used to make. Fergus gave it to me. It was as big as I was and it moved in quite a lifelike way.'

'Have you still got it?' Titos asked.

She shook her head. She had wanted to show him how good Fergus had been to her, forgetting the eventual fate of the doll. 'Fergus burned it,' she told him. 'He was trying to teach me the different shaped pots of the pre-Roman period in England and I wanted to play with the doll. He lost his temper and put it in the fire.'

'Poor Tansy! He sounds as though he was a spiteful little boy.'

'He thought I was too old to play with dolls,' Tansy excused him. 'I suppose I was, but I didn't think of it as a doll exactly. Fergus has always been more interested in battles, and how peoples gained ascendancy over other peoples, but I've always preferred the small, domestic things. I want to know how they lived, not how they fought and died!'

'Most women do,' Titos approved.

It was a novelty to Tansy for anyone to take her preferences seriously. 'Don't you mind?' she asked, unable to hide her astonishment.

'Why should I? I like women. I don't want them any different!' He threw her a wicked grin. 'It would be dull and not nearly as rewarding if they thought in exactly the same way as men!'

Tansy tried not to look as confused as she felt. 'Fergus says it makes women bad archaeologists,' she confided. 'He says they look at everything in a personal context instead of being properly objective, but I can't help imagining what it would be like to cook the way the women of those days did, or how it felt to wear a certain piece of jewellery. That's why I like working on digs. The objects one finds are so individual and form a direct link with whoever used it all the centuries ago.'

'But Fergus scorns the little things?' Titos' lip curled with derisive contempt. 'I expect he keeps his hands cleaner by concentrating on the broad sweeps of history.'

Tansy gave him a mute look of appeal. 'He's a better archaeologist than I am,' she said repressively. 'If you knew anything about it, you would agree with him rather than with me!'

Titos uttered a delighted laugh. 'Never, Tansy mou\ If I ever go digging with you, I promise you I'll be right beside you, sifting through the household rubbish and looking for beads and gold ornaments for you to try on and model to your heart's content!'

The picture he drew made her smile. 'I can't see Fergus ever allowing you to come anywhere near if you behaved like that!'

'Fergus has never been, and never will be, the arbiter of my destiny!' he said dryly.

'He's only done his best to look after me! Haven't you done the same by your sisters?'

'I've tried to protect their futures and to guard their happiness, but I wasn't very successful where Elena was concerned. Nor could I prevent Rhea's accident.'

Tansy heard the hurt in his voice and her heart went out to him. 'Oh, Titos, it wouldn't have helped for you to have been half killed in her place, and she is getting better, isn't she? She says she's not nearly as awkward as she was.'

His mouth closed in a bitter line. 'It was all so unnecessary!'

Tansy would have liked to have asked him exactly what had happened, but before she could do so, she remembered that while

Fergus had been seen on the mountain in Peru, there had been no sign of Elena, and she had no ambition to stir up his worries on his sister's account. She half-turned towards him, deliberately beguiling him with a smile.

'If I were to marry you, I suppose you'd expect me to herd your goats and not be an archaeologist at all!' she slanted up at him, looking at him out of the corner of her eye.

He kept a straight face, refusing to rise to the bait. 'When you marry me,' he said slowly, meaning every word of it, 'I'll provide for your needs and you'll have to be content with what I can give you. Archaeology will be a fine hobby for you, especially here in Crete, any time you can spare from keeping my house and bringing up the children. I expect you'll have us all there, supplying the hard labour while you bask in the glory, as soon as the youngest can stagger a few steps on his own!'

'If you shared the work, I'd share the glory!' she said impulsively. 'But wouldn't you mind—'

'Tansy, agapi mou, I wish I could persuade you that I shall be very proud of my clever wife! I like you the way you are!'

But he didn't love her! All the same, it was nice of him to pretend that it wasn't only her body he wanted. She almost wished he weren't so nice to her, for she was falling deeper and deeper in love with him every minute she spent with him, and she was more and more afraid that she wouldn't have the strength of mind to go back to England after all and, worse still, that she wouldn't regret it at all, even if he made her as unhappy as she secretly feared he would, because she didn't think he would ever love her as she wanted to be loved.

It was something of a relief when they arrived at Phaestos and she was able to put the temptation to give way to him to the back of her

mind for a little while. A man selling reed pipes demonstrated his flutes for their benefit in competition with the transistor radio at his feet. Titos exchanged a word with him and both men laughed, but before Tansy could feel left out, Titos had held out his hand to her and she put her own in his with an eagerness that brought the mocking smile back to his lips.

'Thirsty?' he asked her. 'We have to toil up that path, but I can promise you a grapefruit juice at the top. Will you have it before or after we take a look round?'

'After,' she said, and wondered why he laughed.

She was entranced by Phaestos. The site was almost perfect, perched on the top of a hill whose steep sides fell away to the fertile fields below. The ruined palace was edged about with pine trees whose scent lingered on the warm breeze. Tansy stood in the middle of the huge courtyard, her excitement vivid on her face. She was scarcely aware of Titos, perched on a rock in the shade, as he watched her find her bearings and begin to explore what once must have been a huge building by any standards, let alone those of the third millenium B.C.

Tansy followed the main procession ways, discovered the rooms that were thought to have belonged to the king, the queen, and the leading courtiers, and struggled through the numberless smaller rooms that the palace at Mallia had already made familiar to her. It was easy to see that the labyrinthine style was not unique to Knossos, but that all the palaces had been built to much the same plan. Here too the dance of the bulls had been carried out and, here too, the sacred double-headed axes that were such a feature of Minoan life had been discovered. Had they also been used in the dance, or had they had another use altogether?

It was about an hour later that Tansy remembered that she had not come to Phaestos alone. She ran across the open courtyard to Titos, a

breathless apology on her lips. 'Oh, but it's splendid! I wonder if it was an earthquake that destroyed it? It looks to me as though it was reoccupied for a bit even after that, by the Myceneans possibly. There are bits over there that look like their work. I can't wait to see Knossos, though it couldn't be any better than this!'

'They've done more reconstruction work there—and ruined it, in my opinion.'

'It depends who did it.' But she had learned to respect his opinion during the afternoon, even in her own subject. 'Sir Arthur Evans probably meant well, but he didn't have the tools we have at our disposal today—'

'He was better than that treasure-hunter, Schliemann,' Titos acknowledged, waving his hand in the general direction of mainland Greece, 'but we've suffered from having too many foreigners digging up our history for us, and taking our treasures back to their own museums. Thank God, they're not allowed to do it any longer. There wouldn't be anything left!'

'It's almost as bad to have everything taken to a huge museum in the capital city. I think every site should be allowed to keep its own treasures. We suffer badly from that in England!'

'Then you know how we Greeks feel when we think of the Elgin marbles residing in the British Museum!'

She looked suitably repentant. 'It was well meant—to protect them from vandals,' she offered hopefully. 'We didn't mean to vandalise them ourselves!'

He chuckled. 'Not even the British Museum can quite tame their massive glory, but how much better they would look out of doors, under a golden sun, where they were intended to be seen! Still, I have

it in mind to steal something equally precious from England, so who am I to complain!'

She sat down quickly on the nearest stone, suddenly breathless. 'Titos, please don't! I'm not—not what you think! You'll be disappointed—'

He exploded into Greek and she couldn't understand a single word he said, but she was miserably sure that he was furiously angry with her and that she couldn't bear. 'Titos, you don't know me! Fergus—' 'This has nothing to do with Fergus!' he shot at her. 'This is between you and me, and nobody else at all!' He calmed himself with an effort. 'Never mind, Tansy, come and have a drink. It'll keep.'

'But I do mind,' she said slowly. 'I mind very much when you're angry and—and I wish I could want what you want, but I can't! You don't understand how ordinary I am. You can't marry me! It would be much better—'

He stood over her, his face expressionless. 'Don't say it, Tansy,' he warned.

She turned her face away. 'I told you thunder doesn't last long,' she said sadly. 'Either the hot weather or the cold weather wins, and then it's gone.'

He squatted down on his haunches, turning her face to his with a gentle hand. 'You make too much of it, agapi. Do you think that I won't have your whole heart in the end? Haven't I told you that it is I who commands the thunder?'

'So did Zeus! But he wasn't satisfied with poor gold-shod Hera for very long!'

'I seem to remember that she wasn't entirely faithful to him either,' he answered. 'Those were different times. You aren't my sister, as Hera was the sister of Zeus.'

'I should hope not!' she exclaimed, shocked.

His eyes crinkled into a smile, the sun turning his olive skin to gold. 'You see, you can't compare the two!' He cupped her face in his hands, giving her a little shake. 'The thunder is mine, Tansy mou, but I make you a gift of the lightning. With such a weapon, how do you suppose that I could ever desert you? Or are you afraid you will tire of the thunder and will want something less demanding? Look up, little Tansy, and tell me to my face that you can go back to England and forget all about me! Well, can you?'

'You know I can't!' she breathed.

'Yes, I know it, but I want to be very sure that you know it too. My woman will look to me to give her a lead as to how and where she lives her life. Her allegiance will be due to me and to nobody else at all. Is that understood?'

Tansy tried to escape his searching eyes, but she could not. 'What about her? I can lay down conditions too! I won't share my husband with anyone—even with someone out of the past! I have my pride too!' She looked at his closed, arrogant expression and her hopes that he would tell her that she would always be first in his heart died within her.

'The mother of my children will naturally be the centre of my home, but she will have no say in how I deal with those outside my home who also depend on me. They are none of your concern, Tansy mou.'

'Then what is my concern?' The raw hurt in her voice found no answering softness in his face. 'It isn't enough! A woman needs more than a few kisses—'

'Oh, Tansy! A woman needs many things, but most of all she needs a man who will demand of her everything she has to give,' and what she has to give will grow with the years until there is no more giving or taking because they are one in every way that matters. A few kisses! How little you know of yourself, my love, if you think I couldn't bend you to my will by making love to you and intoxicating your senses with a few of the kisses you profess to despise! I'm beginning to think it would have been better for you if I had done exactly that, but I swore you would come to me of your own accord, because your mind as well as your body will have none other but me for your husband, lover and lord of your heart. Isn't that love of a kind? Isn't that enough for you?'

Her defences against him melted away, refusing to rally to the urgent pleas of her will to withstand the inducements of the future he held out to her. How could she want to agree tamely to be the woman of his house, to obey his orders, and to give him a free hand to do exactly as he liked in exchange? Was she really the kind of woman who wanted nothing more from life than to give herself into the keeping of some man? No, not some man. Only one man would do! What if he didn't love her in the way she had been brought up to expect, a romantic love that would breathe sweet nothings in her ear and be as fleeting as the dew on the grass? If she had to be, she could be just as practical as he about the emotional side of her life, even with the handicap of loving him in a way he would probably never love her.

'Titos, I haven't got your mother's courage to pretend I'm brave when I'm afraid. I don't speak Greek, and I don't understand—a great many things, but—'

'You're going to marry me?'

She nodded. Even if he didn't love her, nobody else was going to have what he was offering to her! Nobody else was going to get the opportunity of being his wife, bearing his children, sharing his bed and board, if she could help it!

'Say it, Tansy!'

'Yes, please, I want to marry you,' she said.

He was so calm and matter-of-fact that Tansy was aware of a nagging feeling of disappointment that nothing would dispel as they made their way up to the café-cum-souvenir shop and sat in the sun, drinking the fresh fruit juice that could be bought there.

It was the same when he suggested that, having come so far, she might as well see the smaller, richer summer palace of the Minoan prince who had once ruled at Phaestos. Her delight was tainted by the knowledge that he hadn't even kissed her. On the contrary, he had merely given her a satisfied nod as though he had known what the outcome would be all the time and, pulling her to-tier feet, had walked her firmly across the courtyard and up the stairway with as much feeling as if they had been total strangers.

The summer palace at Aghia Triada was only a few kilometres beyond Phaestos. Titos parked his car in the shade of a tree and got out without speaking to her at all. Another man, selling the same pipes as those at Phaestos, tried to engage their attention at the top of the steps that led steeply down to the ruined buildings below. Titos bought a pomegranate from him cut it into quarters with a knife from his pocket, and handed the pieces to Tansy, still without a word. She ate the glowing red seeds with a fierce concentration as she followed him down the steps, her eyes misted with tears. Wasn't he pleased that she had finally agreed to marry him?

At any other time she would have enthused over the palace the whole way back to Iraklion, but now she could barely bring herself to look at it. Titos, watching her, put a hand on her shoulder and fingered her cheek with a possessive touch that lingered long after he had let his hand fall again to his side.

'You can come back here another time,' he said roughly. 'Let's go on to Gortyna before the sun sets.'

She agreed readily enough, for anything would be better than the silence between them that played on her nerves and made her long for the boldness that Anna would have displayed in a like situation. Wasn't she entitled to put her arms about him and reach up for his kiss? Didn't Greek men consider their wives' sensibilities at all? But the ride back to Gortyna wap as silent as the short journey to Aghia Triada had been.

The sun's rays were already lengthening and adding an evening brilliance to the hills and grey-green olive trees when they came down to Gortyna, Tansy exclaimed over the ruined basilica dedicated to St. Titus, and even found her tongue for long enough to ask Titos if that was why he had brought her there.

'No, there is something else I want to show you.' There was something in his expression that made her wonder if he were not as shy as she was, but she dismissed it from her mind as an absurdity. She had never known Titos to be less than sure of himself.

She stood in one of the side chapels where the roof was still intact, watching the flickering candles shed their light on the cheap paper ikons that had been placed there as in every holy place by the devout Cretans. She lit a candle for herself, dropping a couple of drachmas into the tin provided. The wick caught and burst into a smoky orange flame that made her blink. Beyond it, she glimpsed Titos crossing

himself, touching his right shoulder before his left in the Orthodox way, and some of her fears dropped from her.

'Zeus would never light a candle to the Christian God,' she remarked.

'Nor Hera either!' he retorted dryly.

She looked up and smiled, taking a deep breath of relief. 'No. They haven't much to do with us really, have they?'

'Not really. They, and others like them, have only the significance you care to give them. You're committed to me, and while you remember that, no one can hurt you be they from the ancient world, or from the modern.'

He held out his hand to her and pulled her up the steep, broken step into what had once been the sanctuary. He tucked her hand into his arm and led the way to the entrance, turning left up a path she had not previously noticed which led up to the Roman Odeon.

It was strange to see a Roman building in such a Greek background. The Romans had made use of other buildings that had been there long before them, filling in with brickwork, which the Greeks had never used. The result was solid and practical, but lacking in the inspiration that blazed like a living spirit in the buildings created by the Greeks.

Behind the Roman 'chamber theatre' stood the famous Law Code, inscribed on stone blocks, placed one on top of another in a solid wall. The Dorian Cretans had used the Greek script in what is called the 'ox plough' manner, in which the eye travels from right to left and then, in the next line, from left to right, and so on, back and forth, until the end. Even the letters followed the same pattern, facing one way on one line, and the other, as if seen in a mirror, on the alternate line.

Considering that the Romans had used some of the blocks in their own building, leaving others to reinforce their brickwork, and that they had been long forgotten, submerged in the stream that drove the nearby Venetian mill in winter when the dry riverbed filled with water from the hills, they were remarkably complete. It was strange to think that this fifth- century legal code, the first attempted in Europe, were the regulations that had formed the basis of Greek law from which had flowered the Roman system of which much remained, throughout the world that they had once conquered and ruled, and beyond, to find their echo in the United States, in Canada, and throughout the civilised world of today.

Beyond the modern brick gallery that housed the inscribed blocks of stone was the path of the river over which the Romans had built a bridge to the Hellenistic theatre, where plays rather than musical pieces and recitals were performed, and on upwards to the Acropolis, the sacred high place above the city.

'This is what I wanted to show you,' Titos said to Tansy, helping her to climb the bank up to the mill. He pointed to a group of plane trees that were already beginning to lose their leaves and take on a wintry appearance, although the temperature still, registered high in the eighties. He ignored the trees, and led her instead to another, standing closer to the river bed. 'This is where Zeus brought Europa and made love to her.' He reached up and broke off a branch from the tree. 'This tree never loses its leaves. It replenishes them as they wither and die. Look, you can see the buds already appearing behind the leaves that are there now.'

'How do you know he brought her here?' Tansy asked.

'It has always been known that this was the spot where Europa conceived her three sons. The village girls come here on their wedding nights if they want to produce fine, lusty sons to please their husbands.' He put the leaves he had taken from the tree in the neckline

of her bodice, his eyes bright with the mockery she knew so well. 'Shall I bring you here, my Tansy?'

Her fingers clutched the leaves at her throat. The smell of mint made her look down at her feet at the crushed dittany below Titos' boots. Unbidden by her, her thoughts went off at a wild tangent, remembering how often Cretan dittany was mentioned in the classical texts of old and that it was still considered to be a comfort to women in childbirth. Was that why it grew here? She made a little sound at the back of her throat and felt Titos' arms close around her and his breath on her face.

'Titos, I need time—' she began. She put her hands up round his neck and strained closer to him. 'It's all so strange!'

'What is, agapi?'

'Everything!' The comprehensiveness of that made him smile. 'It isn't funny! I must have time to—'

His mouth came down on hers, cutting off the words, and the panic within her exploded into glory with the suddenness of an electric shock. She heard his laughter against her throat. 'Did you feel the lightning?' he asked her. 'Oh, Tansy, karthia mou, don't you know how much I want you?' There was a great deal more, all of it in Greek, but she didn't care that she didn't understand a word he said, not then, not with his arms close about her and the heat of his body warming the chill that had gathered about her heart.

She felt his fingers playing in her hair and buried her own in his. He bent his head slowly, deliberately, his mouth met hers in a kiss that began with a tenderness she had not known he possessed, but which hardened into something more, something she had never experienced before, that held a sweetness and touched them both with the enchantment of the moment.

'How much time do you want, Tansy?' he groaned against her lips. 'It's been bad enough this afternoon, trying not to frighten you, but I'm only a man and I want you very badly. Don't make me wait too long!' He kissed her again and then put her from him, brushing the crushed plane leaves away from her throat.

'I don't know when Fergus will come.' she said. 'I can't leave him with the book hardly begun. He may be ill—and we don't know if Elena will be with him! I must have time for Fergus, Titos!'

He sighed, once again in control of himself. 'Time you shall have, Tansy mou, but make the most of it! When it comes to an end, I shall decide, and there will be no argument then or thereafter! Fergus is a part of your childhood, but your womanhood belongs to me, and you are a child no longer!'

She reached up and kissed him of her own accord, plucking another leaf from the tree and holding it fast in her hand. 'And you'll be nice to Fergus?' she pleaded.

'I shall be polite to Fergus,' he compromised. 'As polite to Fergus as you are loving to me! So it's in your hands, Tansy Drummond!' He laughed at her surprised face, kissed her parted lips, and rushed her down through the approaching darkness back to the car.

CHAPTER NINE

THE first thing Tansy noticed about Fergus was how terribly tired he was looking: the second was the cold, relentless anger that seemed to have frozen all his emotions into the one of despairing dislike for everything about him.

'I didn't ask you to come to Crete to fall in love!' he bit out at Tansy. 'You were meant to get to work on that book of mine. Didn't you know that I've already been paid for it? I can't think what's got into you, playing the fool like this, and with Titos Michalakis of all people! I can't stand the way he looks at me!'

'He's upset about Elena—'

'Don't you believe it! He told her not to go with me, that I wouldn't look after her properly, and now he's been proved right, he can scarcely keep from gloating! Haven't you noticed?'

'No,' said Tansy, 'I haven't.'

'Then you must be blind! Dammit all, I didn't want to marry her in the first place, but he would have killed me if I hadn't! Nor did I want her tagging around after me in Peru, but the silly fool insisted that a wife's place is with her husband—'

'Couldn't you have put oS going to Peru until after she had had the baby?' Tansy asked him.

'Put it off? My dear girl, why on earth should I have done that? It was the opportunity of a lifetime. If I had any qualms about it, it was leaving you to get on with the book alone here. But I thought that at least you'd treat it as being of the first urgency! I thought better of you than that you'd make a fool of yourself with the first man who's ever looked twice at you!'

Tansy reminded herself that he was in mourning for his wife and bit back the retort that rose to her lips.

'It was lucky that you weren't killed too,' she murmured.

'It took them a damned long time to find me! The plane hit a rocky peak that the pilot didn't even see in the mist. They were all killed except me, and I would have died too if I hadn't been found by some Quechia Indians who took me home with them. You don't know what isolation is until you've seen those mountains in southern Peru. There aren't any roads, and even close neighbours are afraid to speak to one another. They had to get drunk on some kind of firewater made from maize before they'd come near the wreck of the plane. I thought they were going to leave me there.' He twisted his lips into a bitter smile. 'It would have served me right if they had!'

Tansy looked at him steadily, her eyes wide. 'Didn't you care about Elena at all?' she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. 'She was a pretty little thing and I liked her well enough, but I didn't want to marry her. I never dreamed the silly little thing wouldn't know what she was about!'

'But you knew, Fergus, so it was more your fault than hers.'

Fergus gave her a contemptuous look. 'It didn't take you long to get as priggish as Michalakis! Well, you're in for a shock, my innocent, when you marry him. He thinks he's the lord of all creation!'

Tansy's lips trembled. 'Like Zeus!'

'Oh, you can laugh now! But Greek women are little better than slaves to their husbands—'

'Like Elena?' she suggested.

'If you want to know, exactly like Elena! She'd never argue, never contradict anything I said to her, but she had her own way of making herself felt. She never let me alone! The days, she said, were mine to do as I liked, but oh, brother, the nights belonged to her! She couldn't understand that I wanted my own room and time to myself. She'd look at me with those great, reproachful eyes, looking hurt and brave, and ask me how she had offended me. Didn't I realise I was her husband! Could I ever forget it!'

'Poor Elena,' said Tansy.

Fergus turned his head away, but not before she had seen the open dislike in his eyes. 'If it weren't so inconvenient,' he muttered, 'I'd enjoy watching Michalakis getting his comeuppance from you. You can't make a raging fire with frostbitten wood. You'll be a sad disappointment to him with your cold ways and your dislike for having a bit of fun when it's offered to you. If he's anything like his sister, he won't appreciate your reticence!'

Tansy bit her lip, wondering if her brother knew what he was talking about. 'The Greeks may be more earthy—'

'Of the earth, earthy!' Fergus's pale eyes flickered with some unguessed-at emotion. 'However, you needn't think I'm going to rescue you from your intended, my dear. I wish you joy of each other! But you owe it to me to see my book through to the end first, don't you agree? I hoped you charmed Dick Ross into waiting a few more weeks?' He laughed nervously. 'And I hope you kept a still tongue in your head when you were talking to him! I don't want it known that I allow you to do more than type my books for me.'

'Why not?' Tansy asked and, even as she did so, she couldn't help thinking that she never would have dared ask Fergus such a question the last time she had seen him.

'I've built up my popular reputation on those books. It's my name that people know, not yours. D'you think they'd sell half as well as they do if my name wasn't on them as the author?'

'No,' Tansy admitted. 'But I'm afraid I had to tell Mr. Ross something. It's a bit of a mess. He invited me to go to Knossos with him and he said he'd tell me then if I could carry on with the Cretan book, but Titos got your notes back from him—'

'You gave my notes to Dick? Tansy, how could you? Coming to Crete hasn't done you any good at all, my girl! You've learned how to be disloyal as well as ungrateful and lazy. That's another black mark against Michalakis as far as I'm concerned. He's got at you! I thought I could trust you to show him where he got off, but oh no, you have to go and fancy yourself in love with him, knowing he's my enemy and that he hasn't got a good word to say for me!'

'I don't know anything of the sort!' Her indignation flared within her. It was odd, she thought, that while she hadn't liked the criticism she had heard of Fergus she had been able to shrug it off without much difficulty, but that Titos was sacrosanct as far as she was concerned. It was only with the greatest difficulty that she was able to stop herself from losing her temper completely. 'Why should Titos be your enemy?'

Fergus made a face. 'He is, that's all. Isn't that enough for you? I thought you'd be on my side—'

Tansy turned her back on him. The whole conversation had a deja vu quality about it that distressed her. Had Titos foreseen how Fergus would react to the thought of his sister marrying his wife's brother?

'I don't want to have to choose between you,' she said, as she had once said to Titos.

'Great Scot, Tansy, what do your wants matter? If I'd had any sense I would have turned my back on you long ago, following the example of our revered parents, and left you to find out that the world isn't the cosy place you imagine it to be! How well would you have got on without me? Are you going to throw all that away for the sake of your Cretan lover?'

'I told him your book had to come first,' she muttered.

'Did you though?' For the first time he showed some signs of gratification. 'Oh well, that's something! If I can put things right with Dick, you'll be able to get on with it. We'd bet'er see him together and you can tell him that you were just spinning him a yarn about doing the writing yourself—that you were afraid you'd never see me again and you knew how much I wanted to complete the book—you know the sort of thing!' He looked closely at his sister. 'Shouldn't be surprised if he doesn't think it a brave and sweet gesture for you to have made! You know, there's something different about you. I never would have believed that you could wow anyone, but now I'm not so sure.' He uttered a soft, grating laugh that made Tansy's hackles rise. 'Offer him a few kisses and he won't be able to resist you!' he advised.

Tansy clenched her fists. 'Never!' She reminded herself yet again of the awful ordeal that her brother had just come through and gritted her teeth. 'Fergus, I don't like Dick Ross. I'd rather not see him again. You can tell him what you like—'

'You'll tell him yourself! He'll believe you if you make it worth his while. Can't you see that? Or hasn't falling for Michalakis woken you up to the advantages a girl has when she wants to use them—especially with the Dick Rosses of this world!'

Tansy turned on him. 'I won't do it!' she exclaimed. 'And I won't discuss it either! You'll have to tell your own lies—' Fergus was out of his seat, his eyes glassy and cold with anger. He didn't touch her,

but he stood very near to her, breathing hard. 'I won't do it!' she repeated on a sob.

'You'll do it,' he assured her. 'You'll tell Dick exactly what I tell you to tell him, and you'll do it my way. If you don't, my dear, I'll foul things up for you with that mother-in-law of mine by telling her all about your lurid past and—' His lips curled into a smile—'she'd soon see that you never saw Michalakis again! I know how she carried on about Elena's little escapade with me, so don't think I can't do it!'

'But I haven't got a lurid past!' Tansy protested.

'I think I can invent a few casual affairs that you won't easily be able to refute—'

'Fergus, please don't! I know you're—unhappy, and that you feel guilty about Elena, but there's no excuse for behaving like this!'

'Guilty? My dear Tansy, why on earth should I feel guilty?'

She gave herself a little mental shake. She had never been afraid of Fergus before and she knew it would be fatal to let him see how sick at heart she was for him.

'I prefer to think that than that you've never cared for anyone but yourself!' she shot at him.

'Why should I care for you when you've betrayed me?' he countered.

Tansy could only stare at him. 'I won't listen to any more,' she said at last. 'I've said I'll write your book, and so I will, but you can't make me do any more than that. I'll always be grateful to you—for everything, but you can't expect me never to have any life of my own—'

His bitter laughter cut her off. 'What life of your own will you have with Michalakis?'

'The life I want,' she answered, and knew more certainly than ever that it was what she did want. 'I want to be his wife, and to have children, and to love him. Please don't spoil it for me, Fergus. I never thought anything so beautiful could happen to me, but it has, and I want to be with Titos so badly—'

'Then you'd better do as you're told, my devoted sister!' His face hardened into the frozen mask he had worn ever since his arrival from Peru. 'It has its ironic side. They put me through it over Elena, I can tell you, and now it's my turn! Is he as much in love with you as you are with him?'

The temptation to lie was very strong. 'I'm going out,' she said wildly. 'I'm going up to the house to see Kyria Melissa and tell her how sorry I am about Elena. Why don't you come with me?'

'Tansy, I asked you a question! How much does he love you?'

'Not very much,' she said in a small voice.

'What makes you think he's not getting at me through you?' Fergus pressed home.

She didn't know! 'Because he doesn't use people like that,' she said out loud.

Fergus's eyes glinted with a glittering excitement. 'Women aren't people to men like Titos Michalakis!'

Tansy blinked, not knowing how to answer that. 'Am I a person to you?' she asked him. 'Or do you make use of me too?'

'If I do, haven't I earned the right?' he demanded. 'You owe me something, Tansy, but you don't owe him a thing!'

But what did she owe herself? she wondered. If she allowed him to, Fergus would ruin her happiness, blighting the buds of joy that had pushed themselves into her consciousness ever since she had given way and agreed to marry Titos. She wished heartily that he had not come to Crete but had gone straight back to England. His coming wouldn't have mattered after her joy in Titos had flowered and matured, but now, when Titos might want her but knew next to nothing about her, it would be all too easy to make him think she had loved other men and while Titos had made no conditions about their marriage, she knew that that was the one thing he would not overlook. He would think her as permissive as her brother and he would reject her as a possible wife as firmly as he had rejected Anna, and that she could not, would not bear while she had breath in her body. If she lost Titos, she would lose all meaning in life! How could she have been so slow to make up her mind to have him? What if he didn't love her yet? As his wife, she would find the way to his heart if it took her all their years together, and at least she would be his wife!

It was a relief to get away from Fergus in his present mood. Tansy climbed the path up to the Michalakis house, pausing frequently to look back at the vivid blue of the sea and the groups of windmil's, looking rather as though they had been made from a Meccano set, their canvas sails furled against the steel arms that held them.

'Kalimera,' Tansy murmured, loath to disturb her. She were a never-ending delight to her.

Kyria Melissa was in the garden tending the plants that stood uncertainly on the path, plainly unsure of her welcome/ 'I'm terribly sorry, Kyria Melissa. I wish I'd known Elena, but even though I didn't, I mourn her for Fergus, and for you all.'

Kyria Melissa looked up, her face starkly tragic. 'I had not thought to see a child of mine in the grave so early in my life, but in a way, she had already died to me. However, this is not the moment for you to grieve, pedhi. I had thought to see you before this, to share your happiness with your new family.'

Tansy blushed at this rebuke. 'I would have come, kyria, but with Fergus coming home—='

'How is your brother?'

'I think it would be easier if he could accept that Elena is dead, but he keeps trying to pretend that everything is the same as it always was.' She sighed. 'It isn't easy for him to come to terms with what has happened.'

Kyria Melissa stood up, brushing her soiled hands together. 'He will never mourn my daughter, Tansy, we both know that. He will pretend it never happened and will forget all about her—and us—as quickly as he can. I expect it's a relief for him to know it's all over. He sees it only as that we laid the burden of marriage on him and made him look in the mirror of truth for once. Perhaps Elena is better dead. Who knows? Who shall ever know? We might have made Fergus marry Elena, but we couldn't prevent him from divorcing her and sending her back to us as soon as the baby was born. Divorce, in Crete, is still something which is disgraceful, especially for a woman. One is despised, and one despises oneself, if one cannot keep one's man!'

'You are too hard,' Tansy accused her.

'You will have to get used to it if you marry Titos and come and Jive amongst us!' The sharpness of her tone made Tansy start and the older woman's expression softened a little. 'Will you find it very strange? Perhaps you should have thought about that before you agreed to marry my son. He won't understand if you should ever want to walk

away from your marriage to him. He won't remember you're a foreigner then, but only that you are his wife, and he may hurt you because of it. Have you thought of that?'

Tansy nodded. 'I know you'd prefer him to marry a Cretan girl, but I'll do everything I can to make him happy.' She turned hopefully towards the older woman. 'I'd like you to help me, if you will. I'll do my best to learn to do the right things, but I'm bound to make mistakes and make a fool of myself—'

Kyria Melissa's hands fluttered aimlessly around a flowering shrub. 'Why are you marrying my son?' she asked, seizing on a loose tendril and tying it into the rest of the bush.

'I'm in love with him,' Tansy confessed.

The older woman frowned down at what she was doing. 'Have you told him so?'

Tansy shook her head. 'I couldn't in English, and I don't know how to in Greek!'

'Then I shall teach you. S'agape, I love you; poli, very much. S'agapo poli.''

Tansy repeated the words to please her, secretly convinced that she would never find the courage to actually say them to Titos. Kyria Melissa made her rehearse them again and again until she was satisfied that they fell naturally off the English girl's tongue.

'I had not expected to say as much, but I am pleased you are marrying Titos,' she said finally. 'It's hard to believe that you are that one's sister!' She laughed as Tansy bristled in Fergus's defence. 'No, no, I shall say nothing against him, but don't expect me to say anything for him either!!'

'He didn't mean Elena any harm,' Tansy put in carefully.

'Perhaps not, but the same can hardly be said about Rhea—'

'Rhea?'

Kyria Melissa shrugged, her hands fluttering about more than ever. 'Oh, don't imagine that Rhea was in love with him, but she was very fond of her sister. Still, she is delighted we are going to have you in the family—and so am I! She would like to go on staying down at the villa with you, but with Fergus there—' Her voice trailed away, her hand going to her mouth in a guilty gesture. 'Oh dear, Titos said I was to remove her tactfully from the villa!'

Tansy laughed out loud. 'But with Fergus there, I can't claim to be lonely and alone,' she finished for her. 'Wasn't that what you were going to say?'

Kyria Melissa turned back to her gardening. 'I'm afraid it wasn't. Titos won't allow Rhea to stay under the same roof as your brother. She wanted to stay with you. She's a sensitive child, and she thought the next few days might be rather difficult ones for you, but Titos thinks it better for her to come home. She's so much better these days and he doesn't want anything to put her back and start her having nightmares again, and she gets so clumsy when she's upset.'

Tansy's face was white. 'But Fergus wouldn't do anything to Rhea!'

Kyria Melissa smiled up at her, her eyes filled with compassion. 'I agree with you, my dear. If Fergus thinks of Rhea at all, it is as a rather tiresome young girl. Elena was vividly attractive and madly in love with him. Rhea is neither of those things, and it would probably never occur to him to seduce someone who is to him still a child. Nevertheless, it's better that Rhea should come home. Titos wishes it.'

'And Rhea? What does Rhea wish?'

'Rhea is fond of you,' Kyria Melissa said in soothing tones. 'She thinks., you will be as lonely with Fergus there as you were before, but she has been brought up to obey her brother and she won't make any objection to coming home now. Why don't you come with her?'

'Me? Oh, but I couldn't! Fergus needs me! He—he isn't at all well, and there's his book, and—I think you're all horrid to him! He's very upset too, you know. Elena was his wife, and yet none of you have said you're sorry for his loss!'

'No,' Kyria Melissa agreed. 'But, Tansy, do you think he would like it if I walked down the hill with you now and expressed my sympathy?'

No, Tansy did not. She was almost sure that Fergus would show his mother-in-law the door and get some kind of twisted satisfaction out of hurting her as much as he could.

'Couldn't you take the first step, kyria?' she pleaded with the Greek woman. 'Someone has to be the first to forgive, and Fergus is the only family I have. He's not himself at the moment, but he can be kind. He's always been kind to me!'

'Has he?' Kyria Melissa sighed. 'My dear, you must tell Titos how you feel. Even if I wanted to, there's nothing I can do unless he first agrees to it. I think the most you can hope for is that we exchange the occasional polite visit, though;'

'I suppose not,' Tansy agreed. "Kyria, what am I to do?'

'Kyria! Am I still a stranger to you that you must be so formal with me? What do you call your own mother?'

Tansy stirred uncomfortably. 'I used to call her Mummy, but now I mostly write to her as Dear Mother.'

'Then you had best call me Mama as Titos does. Unless you wish to call me Melissa? But not Kyria Melissa any longer—that is for acquaintances and people who don't matter to me.'

Tansy was flattered. Her face lit up in a smile, her troubles momentarily forgotten. 'You wouldn't think it impertinent for me to call you Mama?'

'Kori mou, my daughter. I am asking you to do so!'

'Then I'd like to very much, if Titos and Rhea don't mind.'

'Why should they?' Kyria Melissa put her arm about Tansy and hugged her close, letting her go almost immediately. 'They love you too!'

'But not Fergus,' Tansy said sadly.

'That would be too much to expect. You can't change what has happened in the past. Talk to Titos about it, mou. He will understand that you have to stay on good terms with your brother and that as your husband he will have to make this possible for you. But don't ask Titos to forgive your brother, not yet, though he is a fair man and if he thought Fergus had suffered enough through Elena's death he might agree that he has been punished enough—'

'But it isn't for Titos to punish my brother!'

'No, we make our own punishment. Haven't you thought that it's because Fergus won't forgive and forget that we can't?'

'Please, Mama, try to make Titos see that I owe Fergus so much that I can't not do what he asks me to. He relies on me, just as I've always relied on him!'

Kyria Melissa picked one of her precious roses and handed it to Tansy, pointing with a gentle, fluttery finger to the bee that was stumbling over the petals in search of the sweetness at the centre. 'We all depend on one another, like the rose and the bee, but both sides have to benefit from the exchange, and neither hurts the other. Between Elena and Fergus perhaps there was a fair exchange, who can say. But if Fergus were to hurt you, Titos would drive him out of Crete and you will never see him again. Perhaps you should make Fergus see that, Tansy. The hurt to his sister he may make allowances for, but if Fergus were to hurt his woman, he won't rest until he has had his revenge.' She brushed the bee off the rose and handed the single bloom to Tansy. 'You tell Fergus that and, between us, we shall arrange matters, we? Sometimes it's better for the women in a family to make things go their own way no matter what the men say!'

Tansy accepted the rose, stroking its petals and savouring the old-fashioned scent that reminded her of the wild roses of the hedgerows in England.

'Titos won't want to make a fuss because of me,' she said. 'He doesn't understand how Fergus felt about Elena. Fergus wouldn't deliberately hurt anyone, but he didn't want to marry her!' She hesitated, considering what Kyria Melissa had actually said. 'Why should he hurt me?' she wondered.

'Let's hope he won't,' Kyria Melissa returned easily. She changed the subject, pointing to the place where the goats had got into the garden the night before and had eaten some of her favourite flowers. 'I am too old to spend my nights chasing the livestock out of the garden!' she complained. 'I keep telling Titos that we have no need to keep a flock

any longer, that we can get our milk somewhere else, but I suppose I should be sorry to see them go!'

'Would you?' Tansy's admiration knew no bounds. 'Were you ever afraid of them? Well, not afraid exactly, but did you ever mind the way they looked at you?'

Kyria Melissa laughed, the air of tragedy falling away from her as her eyes snapped with genuine amusement. 'I was more afraid that Sterghios would laugh at me, so I never told him how frightened I was. In the dark any one of them could have been Pan, or the devil himself. I used to cross myself when I went out to milk them, and cross myself again when I heard them bleating in the dark of the early morning, but after a while I grew accustomed to their silly ways and I even came to like them. They are completely harmless animals and quite intelligent if they are allowed to be.'

Tansy remained unconvinced. 'I've never even milked a cow!' she confessed.

'You probably never will,' Kyria Melissa consoled her. 'Titos doesn't depend on his goats for a living as his father did.'

'No,' said Tansy.

'Get on with you, child, we don't expect you to learn our ways in a few days. Titos will be proud of you whatever you do! He won't care if you can milk a goat or not!'

It was nearly lunchtime when Tansy reluctantly left her future mother-in-law's garden. She had joined her in weeding one of the flower beds and had laughed over her stories of Titos' childhood, and they had talked of Elena too, a little, and Tansy had learned how close to one another the Michalakis family was. That she should be accepted by them as one of themselves was something she hugged to

herself all the way down the hill when at last she tore herself away from Kyria Melissa's company and went back to the villa to share Fergus's bitter mood at the lunch table.

'Remember that tomorrow I shall not be here,' Anna reminded her.

'Have you told my brother?' Tansy asked, wishing she could have stayed away from the villa for the whole day as its gloomy atmosphere engulfed her in the hallway.

'He has a visitor. I tell him nothing!'

Tansy knew even before she went into the sitting room whom it would be. She glanced at herself in the looking-glass, pushing her hair into some kind of order, knowing that she was putting off the moment when she would have to go in and join Mr. Ross and her brother.

Fergus looked up in surprise as she entered. Tansy held her head high, flicking her hair back behind her shoulders with her fingers. Quite suddenly she wanted to laugh at her brother's expression. Had she really changed so much in a few short days? If she had, it was all Titos' doing. He had brought her alive!

'Hullo, Mr. Ross,' she said.

He jumped to his feet. 'I thought we'd agreed you should call me Dick,' he said with an undisguised eagerness. 'Having your brother home suits you. You're looking beautiful! Fergus has been telling me how worried you were about trying to fulfil his contract with us for the Cretan book. You very nearly had me fooled about that! I came round this morning to tell you that you could try your hand at writing the book yourself. Fejrgus says it's just as well I found him instead of you, that you would have died of fright if you'd really had to make a go of it.' He took possession of her hand, sitting very close beside her

on the sofa. 'You should have told me, Tansy.' The tic in his cheek worked away in silence for a few seconds. 'We wouldn't have sued you for the money, you know.'

'I wasn't worried about that,' Tansy said awkwardly. She looked at Fergus and was glad to see he was looking better. He had slicked his, sandy hair down flat and the tired look had gone from his eyes. He looked his normal, suave, quietly confident self. 'Anyway, you can talk about it with the author himself now,' she added wryly.

'I have,' Dick Ross assured her. 'He's going to get down to work straight away! And he's promised me your company this afternoon to go to Knossos.' He edged a little closer to her. 'You want to come with me, don't you, Tansy?'

Her mouth felt dry and she didn't know what to say. 'If Fergus comes with us,' she said.

Fergus gave her one of his quiet, know-it-all smiles. 'I'll come—this time,' he agreed. 'Anything is better than to see you with Titos Michalakis!'

'Titos Michalakis?' Dick Ross enquired.

'My fiancé,' Tansy told him.

CHAPTER TEN

FERGUS drove them to Knossos in Elena's ancient Fiat. Tansy sat at the back, intent on her own thoughts and not really listening to the conversation of the two men in the front. Although it was she herself who had insisted on it, she wanted the time of waiting to be over. Fergus's book seemed unreal to her, as if for her there only was one reality, and that was Titos.

Dick Ross turned his head and smiled at her. 'What will Fergus do without you after you're married?'

Tansy didn't like the hot look in his eyes, nor the tic that seemed the worse whenever he tried to be charming.

'It won't be impossible for me to do some of his typing here,' she answered sweetly. 'Of course I won't be able to do any of the leg work as I have done in the past, but Fergus is much better at it anyway!' She was gratified to see her brother's neck turn a brick red colour. What was he going to do? It was funny, but it hadn't occurred to her to wonder about his future after the next few days.

'Someone in the hotel was telling me about the various caves that are dotted round the island,' Dick went on. 'They sound interesting. Are you putting any of them into your book?'

'They're too isolated to be of much interest,' Fergus said immediately. 'I might put in the one where Zeus was supposed to have been born, but the others are best left alone.' His voice sounded strained and upset. Tansy hoped he was not going to revert to the cold anger of earlier in the day.

'You can't leave out the Idha Cave,' she said. 'Zeus may have been born in the Dhiktaion Cave, but he was brought up by the Curetes in the Idha Cave. When Minos was king, he used to make a pilgrimage

there every nine years to consult with Zeus about the laws he was making. I'd like to go there one day.'

'You'd do better to stay away!' Fergus said sharply. 'It's very isolated and there's nothing much there to see.'

'You didn't tell me you'd been there?' Tansy exclaimed, her interest caught.

'I went there once with Elena,' he murmured. 'Believe me, Tansy, if you want to stay on the right side of Titos you'll stay away from the Idha Cave.'

'You can come with me,' Dick suggested maliciously. 'Why did Zeus have to hide in a cave? I thought he was the leader of the gods?'

'Yes, he was,' Tansy agreed. 'But Cronos was the leader before him. He had been told he would be supplanted by one of his own children, so every time his wife Rhea gave birth to a new baby he made her bring it to him and he swallowed it whole. Only Rhea grew tired of having all her babies treated in this fashion and, when Zeus was born, she served Cronos with a stone all wrapped up in swaddling clothes instead. Zeus was hidden in the Idha Cave and the Curetes, who were warriors and who were worshipped by their adherents in the cave, used to dance and clash their shields to drown out his cries in case his father, Cronos, should hear him. Later, when Zeus was grown up, he did take over his father's position amongst the gods and he made poor Cronos regurgitate all his brothers and sisters, which is why he was the eldest as well as being the youngest of all Cronos's children.'

'Is there anything to see in the cave now?' Dick asked.

'Nothing,' Fergus answered him. 'It takes a long time to get to it and it's dangerous when one's finally got there. Elena had been before, but

even she didn't know her way there. I'll never go back there. Never, ever!'

'Didn't Zeus like being disturbed?' Dick taunted him.

'No, it wasn't that. I daresay he would have been pleased to have been disturbed by Elena if she had come to visit him alone, but Elena wouldn't have noticed him if he had bellow-

ed in her ear. She—she was very happy to be alone with me for a while. I think she liked the fact that her family would have been furious if they had known—as they were! It was the only time I saw Elena really happy. I should have left her that way and she would be alive now!'

'But you fell for her?' Dick put in. 'I should imagine these Cretan girls are pretty hot stuff.'

'Elena was my wife,' Fergus retorted.

There was silence in the car after that. The road between Iraklion and Knossos was a busy one, coming abruptly up to the site past a few restaurants and souvenir shops. The dust from the traffic rose and fell as each heavy lorry hurried past to a more distant destination, leaving a film of sand on the plastic cloths that covered the tables. Fergus turned off the road and parked the car by the new buildings which contained the ticket office and the little shop which sold the official guides and postcards of Knossos. It was very hot.

The two men argued as to who should pay for the tickets and then found it was a free day and that there was nothing to stop them from walking through the barrier and along the paved path that led to the site of the ancient Minoan palace itself. Tansy alone paused to look at the bust of Sir Arthur Evans on its plinth on one side of the outside courtyard of the palace. She wondered what sort of an archaeologist

he would have made if he had been subject to modern disciplines. His flair for personal publicity would be at a discount now, no doubt, but not even the best aids to modern methods could take the place of the astonishing flair that these fathers of the science had shown. How was it that wherever they had toned the soil they had found such marvels? Schliemann in Troy and at Mycenae, and Sir Arthur Evans in Crete, had both succeeded in arousing the interest of the world and, although they had often been mistaken in their conclusions, and their motives had often been suspect, without them how much would be known 6f the ancient world today?

'Stop dreaming, Tansy,' her brother bade her. 'How on earth do you get into this place?'

Tansy consulted the map in her guide book. 'Through there,' she said, pointing at a restored and rather garish portico. 'Would you like to have the book?'

Fergus, as always, went off into a world of his own as soon as they had found their way into the huge interior of the ancient palace, brooding to himself as to how it must have looked when it had been newly built. His disapproval of the reconstructed parts of the building were shared by the other two, but Tansy's own displeasure was roused far more by the copies of the frescoes that hung on the reconstructed walls.

'They're as awful as the ones which were in the villa!' she pronounced. 'All the life and movement have been squashed out of them. And look at those flat colours! They can't even. have looked at the subtlety of the blues in the originals. They're dreadful!'

'They give one the general idea,' Fergus grunted. 'You expect too much.' He frowned at her. 'Do you have to chatter all the time? For heaven's sake, take Dick with you and tell him what he's supposed to

be looking at, instead of ruining my afternoon by talking to me all the time!'

She wasn't in the least offended. This was the Fergus she knew best and she was so relieved to have him back to normal that she was more than willing to take Dick off his hands, though she didn't like the man, and she liked even less the way he was looking at her as though she were something which she knew quite well she was not, a woman who was not averse to the attentions of any man who passed her way. The strange thing was that if she had met him in England, before she had come to Crete, he would not have looked twice in her direction. There had been a change, a blossoming, within herself, Tansy didn't doubt for a minute, but how to cope with the results was something of which she was still unsure. She would have liked Titos to have been there. She only really felt safe when she was in his company these days.

Despite the map, they soon grew confused finding their way about the complicated structure of the labyrinthine palace. Dick kept saying that he wanted to see the Labyrinth itself, where Theseus had slain the Minotaur and had found his way back with the help of the ball of string Ariadne had given him. In vain did Tansy explain that the whole palace was a maze of rooms, built on different levels, that was quite enough to confuse any invader for several days together.

'But Daedalus built the labyrinth to house the Minotaur,' Dick reminded her.

'In legend, yes,' Tansy replied patiently. 'But the Labyrinth in fact was the palace here. There is a pre-Hellenic word labrys, meaning "double-axe", and another pre-Hellenic ending -nthos, so Knossos was literally the House of the Double Axe. It came to mean something else because the Minoan palaces have such complicated designs. It was thought at first that they "just growed" like Topsy, but

there is a definite plan behind their construction. They're immensely sophisticated when you think of their age.'

'I'm not much interested in the finer points of their design,' Dick confessed. 'I was hoping to get lost in the labyrinth with you.'

Tansy stiffened. 'I'm sorry to disappoint you,' she said.

'Not to worry, my dear. I expect we can lose your brother with very little trouble—'

'Mr. Ross, you don't have to flirt with me, in fact I'd rather you didn't. I came with you because I wanted to see the palace, not for any other reason.' She spoke tartly, pursing up her mouth in the way that Titos had particularly disliked because she didn't want to give him any excuse for thinking that she was encouraging him.

'Fergus gave me the impression that you weren't so particular,' he complained, the tic pulling at his cheek.

'Then Fergus was wrong!'

'Because of your Cretan fiance?' he sneered. 'I'm surprised at an English girl like you falling for his particular brand of charm. He must have a very persuasive technique!'

Tansy's natural reticence was outraged. She disliked speaking of such things with a casual acquaintance. 'Is that any of your business?' she demanded.

He shrugged. 'Fergus thought it might be good for you to see what you were missing. These Latin types don't have a monopoly in romance, my dear.'

'Titos is Greek, not a Latin,' she corrected him coldly.

He put his hand on her shoulder. 'It wouldn't hurt you to compare our approaches, Tansy my sweet. You may like my kisses more than you like his. How do you know until you've tried?'

Tansy thought of Titos. 'I know it,' she said.

He put a hand on either side of her, pinning her against the rough wall of the room in which they found themselves. As he lunged forward, she ducked under his arm and ran lightly up the stairs to escape him. She heard him come lumbering after her and sped across the huge central courtyard to where she could see Fergus disappearing into the throne room.

'What's the matter with you?' he asked her when she had caught up with him.

She stared gloomily at the reproduction of the high-backed throne in the ante-room to the throne room itself. 'I'm going to take the bus home,' she said.

'Dick been annoying you?'

'Yes, and it's your fault. He seems to think you want him to play the fool with me. But you won't change my mind about Titos! Nothing can make me do that!'

Her brother looked at her flushed, angry face. 'I don't know what's the matter with you,' he said. 'You never had any difficulty keeping the wolves in order before—'

'They never bayed at me before!' she said angrily.

Fergus ran his hand round the back of his neck. 'I was hoping you'd keep Dick entertained for a while and keep him off my back. He can make himself pretty unpleasant if he forces me to stick to the letter of

our contract. They paid me a whacking great advance on the book on condition that I had it ready for the Christmas market, and here it is October already. I meant to send for you at once and we could have got ' going on it between us, but first there was Elena and then this Peruvian business. Don't you think you could give him what he wants, Tansy?'

'No,' said Tansy.

Her brother sighed. 'I don't come first with you any more, do I? Funny, I never thought you'd marry except on my say-so. I wouldn't mind if I thought he could make you happy, but he won't!'

Tansy managed a smile. 'I'd rather be unhappy with him than happy with anyone else,' she declared.

To her surprise his eyes filled with tears. 'Sort of damn silly thing Elena would say!' he excused himself. 'She was a pest when she was alive, but I rather miss being the object of such undivided admiration—especially as you have deserted me too.'

'Do you miss her very much?' Tansy asked gently.

'In a way. It started as a shabby little affair and it ended before we had much more than that. We could have ended up hating one another, but we didn't have time to do anything together. It seems such a waste.'

'I think you loved her,' Tansy told him.

'In a way,' he said again. 'I'm not capable of the grand passion and I don't want to be. I didn't think you were either, but now I'm not so sure. All right, go home, Tansy, and I'll see to Dick. I'll tell him you're otherwise engaged and to find himself another attraction. Will that do?'

She reached up and kissed his cheek. 'Thank you, Fergus. You were go cross this morning, I almost hated you. Welcome home!'

He jerked away from her, wiping her kiss away with a violent movement. 'I haven't changed my mind about Michalakis. If I can do him a bad turn, I will, and your marrying him won't make any difference to that!'

'Won't you try to like him a little?' she begged. 'For my sake, Fergus!'

'You don't know what you ask,' he returned dully. 'Titos Michalakis made himself my enemy and earned my hatred when he judged me and condemned me without even doing me the common courtesy of hearing my side of the affair. I can't forgive him for that!'

'Won't you ever change your mind?'

'Anyone else and I might have done, but for him, I can't!'

Tansy would have liked to argue further, but a shadow across the door told her that Dick had heard them talking and had come to find her. She turned to face him, her face set. 'Fergus, I'm going on the bus!'

that merited any consideration. 'Tansy can manage quite well without you, can't we, old man?'

Dick looked from one to the other of them, his tic pulling at his cheek with nervous regularity. 'If Tansy wants to go home, why don't we all go?' he suggested.

'Because I haven't finished here.' Fergus spoke as though it was self-evident that his own concerns were the only ones that merited any consideration. Tansy can manage quite well on the bus.'

'Yes, but—' Dick put a restraining hand on Tansy's arm. 'I can take you home and come back again for Fergus.' His fingers tightened on her flesh. 'Don't play too hard to get, Tansy! I could decide to cancel the book—or I could find another girl—'

'I should do that,' Fergus cut in, apparently much more interested in trying out the throne than in what the other two were saying.

Dick threw Tansy away from him. 'I will! You're a pretty pair of fools and I'll enjoy making things hot for you?'

Tansy didn't wait for him to finish. She rushed out into the courtyard, welcoming the feel of the hot sun on her face. She wanted only to get away from him and have nothing more to do with him! But Fergus had been kind, she thought; kinder than she had expected.

There was no sign of any bus when she gained the main road. The trees and the tourists drooped alike in the heat. Tansy crossed the road and peered in the showcases of the souvenir shops. Most of the things for sale were the same in all the shops, many of them pretty examples of the local crafts of the island,^such as plaques depicting the Prince of the Lilies, the Snake Goddess, or the Double Axe, all of them symbols of the great palace of Knossos. But in one of the shops the goods were somewhat different. They had not been mass-produced in Athens, or anywhere else. There were no bronze replicas of the ancient gods, or small statues of bulls on the point of charging some invisible antagonist. Instead, there were unglazed plates, painted on the premises, with original, free designs done to order, many of them with the Greek key motif round the edge.

Tansy pressed closer to the window to see what else they were selling. Some ikons, warped with age, were piled in one corner, the golds and colours muted into the shade of polished wood. On one or two the faces of the saints depicted were still visible, on others the paint had long since powdered and fallen away from the wooden

base. Behind the ikons she could only catch a glimpse into the comparative darkness of the shop inside. She wondered if she would have time to go in before the bus came and she was still trying to make up her mind when she realised that the man she was watching inside the shop was Titos.

He saw her at exactly the same moment and came to the door, a warm smile of welcome on his face.

'What are you doing here ?' he asked her.

'I came with Fergus and Dick Ross to see Knossos.' She stepped "forward, half expecting his kiss, but remembered in time that he was unlikely to exchange much more than a smile in public.

'Where are the others?' He took her hand in his, threading his fingefs through hers in a gesture which was somehow much more intimate than any kiss would have been. 'Won't they be wondering where you are?'

She shook her head. 'I said I'd go home on the bus.' She gave a little wriggle of pure pleasure at seeing him. 'Is this your shop, Titos? Rhea said you had one here and that she used to work in it sometimes. Those plates are absolutely gorgeous!'

'I'm glad you like them. Do you want one to take home with you?'

Her face shone. 'I haven't got enough money,' she said, just in case he hadn't thought of giving it to her. 'They look expensive.'

'They're not all that expensive. They're only made for decoration purposes. They won't wash or anything like that. But they look very pretty hanging on a wall.'

'May I really have one?' Tansy asked him.

'You may have half a dozen if you like. Now that you've taken down those frescoes the walls of the villa look pretty bare, don't you think? But not until you tell me why you decided to go home on your own. Is it anything Fergus has done?'

'Of course not! Fergus would never be unkind to me, not deliberately. He's thoughtless often enough, but nothing more than that! He hasn't been up to—-to see you and your mother yet because he doesn't think you want to see him. But, deep down, he's as unhappy about Elena as you are. He loved her too!'

'Maybe,' Titos said dryly. 'Maybe not. Well, if it isn't Fergus, it must have been Dick Ross. I can well imagine that travelling home by bus may be preferable to his company, but you must have known that before you came out with him.''

'I wanted to keep him out of Fergus's hair,' Tansy murmured. She peeped up at him through her lashes, her lips trembling into a smile. 'Only he wasn't as easy to cope with as I thought.'

'I'm not surprised. You look good enough to eat!' He smiled down at her.

'I think he thought so too,' she confessed. 'He wouldn't, have looked twice at me before—'

'Oh, Tansy!*

'It's true! No one ever did before—well, before I met you.' She creased up her forehead, genuinely bewildered. 'Not scraping back my hair couldn't have made all that difference, could it?'

'You were asleep before, karthia mou. Don't worry about it! If you have to, you'll find you're more than a match for Mr. Dick Ross! Shall

I take you home myself? Can you wait a few minutes while I order your plate and then we'll go?'

In the end, they waited until the plate was finished before Titos went and got his car, bringing it round to the front of the shop for her to get into. She held the plate on her lap, intent on keeping it from smudging until she was sure the paint was absolutely dry. Titos sat back in his seat and lit himself a cigarette, watching her as she fussed over the plate.

'How is the book going?' he asked.

'It isn't, not yet.' She shifted the plate a few inches, not looking at him. 'Fergus is still very tired.'

'I won't wait for ever,' he warned her.

Her heart turned over within her. 'But you do understand—'

'I want my wife, Tansy. I want her now, not at Fergus's convenience. But yes, I do understand. I have little reason not to, with Mama acting as your advocate every time I grumble to her about you!'

Tansy blinked. 'Do you grumble about me?' she asked. It seemed ridiculous to her when he must know that he, and he alone, had the ultimate say in her future.

'Sometimes. Don't you grumble about me?'

She shook her head, shocked by the very idea. 'I'm sorry, Titos,' she said unhappily.

The corner of his mouth kicked up into a smile. 'It isn't so bad when I have you close by and can touch you. It's when you're not there. Your

spirit haunts me! Even when I'm working, I can't get you out of my mind!'

She gave him a shaken look. 'Did you tell Mama that? She she must think very badly of me if you did!'

'Agapi, you are my betrothed wife!'

She knew that, but one did not, in her opinion, discuss such things with one's mother. It would be different if he were in love with her, though why she didn't know exactly. Perhaps his mother didn't know that it was lust that drove him and not love at all. Or perhaps she did, and thought that that was all it was as far as she herself was concerned. If she thought that, Tansy was sure she'd never be able to look her in the face again!

She clutched the plate to her. 'I have to finish the book!'

'Then you'd better get on with it!' He took the plate from her and put it on the back seat out of harm's way. 'Fergus will have to learn to do without you—the sooner the better!'

'Dick Ross has already paid him for it.'

'And he can't write it himself?'

She shook her head. 'No. I'm—I'm sorry, Titos.'

'Don't be. I'll survive somehow.' His eyes glinted with laughter. 'And I fully intend to take all the perks that are due to a fiance in the meantime—like now!'

Surely he wasn't going to kiss her there and! then, in the middle of the street, in public? It seemed not. He slipped the car into gear and drove fast and surely towards Iraklion. She tried to tell herself that she was

relieved, but she wasn't. She could have cried with disappointment. Titos, on the other hand, taking a quick glance at her face, exuded a confident, masculine triumph, that was all the more annoying because she simply could not imagine why he should be feeling so pleased with himself.

Her disappointment grew as they left Iraklion behind, including the dusty outskirts that stretched down to the modern docks, and took the new road back to Mallia and the villa. His silence made her wonder if he were not finding it a boring chore to drive her home, but to save her life, she could not think of anything bright and interesting to say to make things better. If she had opened her mouth, she knew she would have disgraced herself by telling him something that was much better left unsaid, that his spirit haunted her too—and not only her mind, but he^ heart as well! That she thought of nothing, touched nothing, heard nothing, that didn't remind her sharply of the bright image of him that had taken up permanent residence inside herself!

'Where's Anna?' Titos asked as they arrived at the deserted villa.

'She thinks your mother won't like her working for Fergus. She's not coming any more.'

'Does that mean you have all the cooking and cleaning to do as well as that tiresome book?' Titos demanded.

'I don't mind,' Tansy assured him.

'Well, I do! We'll go and see her now and change her mind for her! I suppose you haven't seen anything of Minos either since Fergus got back?'

'No, I haven't.'

Titos backed the car and turned it, the tyres squealing a protest. Tansy glanced anxiously at her plate and held on tight. She thought he ought to be kinder to Anna, but she hadn't the courage just then to tell him so. Anna was only doing what she thought would please him. She deserved his kindness, even if he had nothing more now to give her.

Minos came running out of the one-roomed house when he saw them coming. He led the way proudly into his home, pointing out the new bed they had recently bought to Tansy, and showing her the warm goatskin coverings that his mother had made to keep them warm in the winter.

Anna had none of the buoyant enthusiasm of her son. She bobbed a curtsey in Titos' direction and bade them sit down while she made them some coffee, or tea, if that was what they would prefer.

Titos spoke sharply to her in Greek. Tansy put out a hand and touched his arm, shaking her head at him. 'Anna doesn't want to hurt your mother. You can't quarrel with that!'

'Kyria Melissa has justice on her side,' Anna muttered, busying herself over the charcoal fire. 'The Kyrios Fergus betrayed her trust—' Her voice quivered and died. 'And now Kyria Elena is dead and the one who took her from her mother is still alive. I will not work in his house! Isn't it bad enough what happened before? I took from her something which was not mine to take! I swore to Sterghios that I would do nothing further to hurt her!' She was crying openly now. 'We never intended that it would end that way. Sterghios was a man of honour, but he needed the comfort of a woman and I was there!'

Tansy froze where she sat. 'Sterghios?' she whispered. Her eyes sought Titos' face. 'But he was your father! I thought—'

'Minos is my brother, not my son,' he said dryly. 'I thought you had guessed the truth. Why else should Mama have said that Minos' welfare was a responsibility she should have shouldered herself?'

'I thought she meant that every child should have the support of his grandmother.' She was silent for a long moment. 'Titos, will you forgive me?'

Anna broke in with a low laugh. 'If you thought the Kyrios was the father of my child, why try to persuade me not to go to America?'

Tansy licked her hps. 'I didn't think you'd be happy there—'

'And you were not jealous of my hold on the Kyrios Titos? It is incredible!' Anna exclaimed. 'Am I so unattractive that you could suppose that he might not still have some feeling forme?'

'No,' Tansy whispered, humiliated. 'I didn't want to be jealous—'

Titos put her hand into a warm grasp. 'Tansy is English and doesn't believe in giving in to her emotions,' he mocked her gently. 'She has yet to learn the Greek way of hating—

and loving because the pain is too great—to be borne!'

How little he knew! 'You have cause to be—disappointed in me,' she admitted, her cheeks burning. 'But Anna will be lonely in America—'

He bent his head, blotting out the others as though they were alone in the room*'And you? Will you be lonely in Crete?' he asked her.

'Of course not,' she denied. 'Titos, I'm terribly sorry. You told me not to jump to conclusions, but I thought it was so obvious! And I liked Minos, and I liked Anna too!'

He held her close. 'But you didn't like me for it, did you?' he insisted. 'It wasn't liking you felt for me?'

'No, I hated you!' she admitted, hiding her face in his shoulder. 'It hurt me to know you already had a son—'

He said something in Greek in her ear, and then kissed her cheek. 'Never mind, Tansy mou. Where hate is, between a man and a woman, love is never very far behind!'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FOR the next few days Tansy worked with a ruthlessness that left her exhausted but none the less determined to finish Fergus's book. She gave herself no time to think about Titos, Minos, or indeed anyone else. Fergus complained that she didn't care if he were getting better or not, but she barely noticed his complaints. Even Rhea, who had fallen into the habit of coming down to the villa for a cup of coffee in the middle of the morning, was chased away and told to come back some other time.

'But, Tansy, it's so boring if you're going to work all the time! I'm surprised Titos puts up with it.' She made an impertinent face at the English girl. 'I bet he doesn't put up with it! I bet you don't tell him that you haven't got time for him!'

Distressed, Tansy tried to explain the urgency of getting the book finished once and for all, but Rhea went on looking hurt and her movements were more awkward than usual when she went away. Tansy felt a brute, but she refused to give in. She had to be done with the book when she next saw Titos, she had to, because they couldn't go on like this, with her torn in two between her future and her past.

'How's it coming?' Fergus asked her one lunchtime.

'It's the best I can do,' Tansy told him. 'My brain feels like cotton-wool recently. You'll have to pick up the mistakes and check the proofs, when they come, yourself!'

'Will do.' he smiled at her. 'Do you want me to say thank you?'

She shook her head. 'Only this is the last time, Fergus. You do understand that? What are you going to do?'

'I thought I told you,' he said impatiently. 'I've been offered a professorship in archaeology in America. I shan't be coming back to Crete.'

'Not even to see me?' She was a little hurt that he hadn't even bothered to consult her about his plans.

'In a year or so, if you write and ask me to come. You won't want me around until you've found your feet as Mrs. Michalou, will you? Titos will want all your attention, my dear. He won't stomach you sparing a few crumbs from the marriage feast for me! Don't expect him to share you, because he won't do it. Between the two of us, you'd have a dog's life!'

Tansy's eyes misted with tears. 'You're not as indifferent to other people as you pretend to be,' she accused him. 'If Titos would only get to know you, I'm sure he'd like you, and you him!'

'It won't happen,' he grunted. 'You always were a fool where your affections are concerned. You've let me run you ragged for years! Oh, don't argue about it, love. Why else did you slave away at university, doing your own work and half mine as well? Why else are you writing my book for me now? But you can't serve two masters, certainly not Titos and me together!'

'Titos isn't my master,' she objected.

'Call it what you like,' he answered affably, 'it won't be he who dances to your tune!'

Tansy summoned up a smile. 'He says he commands the thunder. Do you think one can dance to that?'

'The thunder?' Fergus queried. 'What thunder?'

Tansy thought of the way her blood thundered in her veins when Titos touched her and was silent for a moment. 'We met in a thunderstorm,' she said as casually as she could. 'Do you want to go to America?' she added, before he could question about where and how she could have met Titos in a thunderstorm.

'Don't you think I'll make a success of it?' he countered.

'Yes, I do. I think you'll be world-famous before you're through!'

He gave her a sardonic smile 'I know I shall be. I remember telling our parents so a long time ago. Neither of them cared very much either way.'

'But I do!' Tansy claimed. 'I always shall, Fergus!'

He looked down at his plate. 'So did Elena,' he said.

Tansy went out into the kitchen after lunch. Anna had already started the washing up, but she looked up and smiled when she saw who it was.

'Kyria Melissa came to see you this morning,' she said in an expressionless voice. 'I told her you were busy and could not be disturbed.' 'She paused, letting her words sink in slowly. 'She wants Minos to live with her. I have said he will go to her when I go to America.'

'Oh, Anna, but you are his mother! Don't you want him with you?'

'Of course,' the Greek woman said simply. 'But while I am here in Crete, I do only harm to him and to the Kyria Melissa. After Sterghios had planted his child on me, there was no one who would marry me here. I was left with my shame, and none of us were able to forget!

But in America I shall find a man of my own and I shall have his children, and I shall hurt no one but will have pride in what I do!'

It was probable, Tansy thought, that Anna's neighbours had not always been kind to her. She put aside her own doubts about the flight to America and decided to help her as much as she could.

'My brother is going to America soon,' she told her. 'Will you go with him and look after him until you both get settled? He will need someone to cook and clean for him. He's pretty hopeless when he's left to himself. Then, when you get married, you could find someone else to be his housekeeper. You see, I've always kept an eye on him before. There should have been Elena—'

Anna flung her arms round Tansy's neck and gave her a damp hug. 'He shall be my brother too!' she promised. The tears poured down her cheeks, but she was laughing too. 'The Kyrios Titos will have a wife very soon, ne? He is impatient to have you in his house!' She sighed a deep, romantic sigh. 'You can be proud of loving him!'

Tansy retrieved herself from the other woman's embrace. 'I am,' she said. 'Only I wish he loved me too!'

Anna stared at her. 'A man's love comes with the years. He has chosen you for his wife. Isn't that a promise of his love? What is it you want that he hasn't given you?'

'He's never said that he loves me!'

Anna laughed the idea to scorn. 'Why should he?' she demanded. 'Isn't it enough for you to know that you love him? What more do you want?'

Tansy began to wonder herself. 'Nothing,' she said, and was even more surprised to find that she meant it.

It was hard to concentrate when she went back to work. The nervous energy which had kept her going had deserted her. All she could think of was Titos. He wouldn't be pleased to hear that both his sister and his mother had been turned away from her door! Would he understand? She hoped so, but when she thought of some of the incomprehensible things he had said recently, she doubted it. Why, for instance, had he been glad that she had hated him when she thought him to be Minos' father? It wasn't her experience that love and hate were the two sides of the same emotion, but as she had neither loved nor hated before she had met Titos, who was she to set herself up as an authority on the subject? Only, to have said such a thing, he must have known how she felt about him. Was that what he had been pleased about? Had she wanted to keep it secret? she berated herself. As if someone of Titos' experience wouldn't have known from the very beginning, probably before she had known it herself!

'Kyria Tansy! Kyria Tansy!' Tansy started at the anguished note in Anna's voice. 'Kyria, the Thespinis Rhea was here!'

Tansy went to the door. 'What of it?' she asked.

Anna was beside herself with the emotion of the moment. 'She insisted on coming in, and the Kyrios Ross was in the sitting room. They went away together in his car.' Anna wrung her hands together in despair. 'I should have fetched you to them at once!'

'But Rhea's too sensible—'

'Isn't that what they all said about Elena and your brother? Rhea is with her, they said! But they turned Rhea out of the car and she fell trying to get back into it and was terribly injured. The two of them never noticed what they had done. They went to the Idhean Cave—'

'So that's what happened!' Tansy exclaimed.

'They were alone at the cave. When they came back, Rhea was nearly dead, and Elena was a woman and not yet a wife! To think that Rhea should want to go back there!'

'To the Idha Cave? But she doesn't like Dick Ross! Surely she wouldn't be such a fool!'

'That is where he said he would take her," Anna insisted. 'He was in a mood for trouble—Where is your brother?'

'Fergus? I don't know,' Tansy admitted.

'Then you must go after them, kyria, and see that the little Rhea comes to no harm! If she is seen in the company of such a man, the tongues are bound to wag, after what happened to her sister!'

Tansy put a hand up to her head, wondering what to do. She couldn't believe that Rhea would want to go anywhere with Dick, but she had said herself that she was bored and the Englishman might well have been very persuasive. He had probably come to the villa seeking other company than the young Greek girl's, but she couldn't help remembering him saying, Don't play too hard to get, Tansy, or I might look out for another girl. Had he thought to pay her out by taking Rhea out with him? He would know what had happened at the Idhean Cave, Fergus had practically told them himself on the way to Knossos, and he might have persuaded Rhea that he meant her no harm if she went with him. Tansy had never liked Dick Ross, and she didn't trust him either.

'How do I get there?' she asked Anna. 'Are you absolutely sure that's where they've gone?'

'He told me so himself, kyria. I called to the Thespinis Rhea to come back, but he shut the door with a bang and shouted back at me. I'd ask you to make us up a picnic, he said, but you'd probably poison the

food if I did. What are you making such a fuss about, you old witch? I didn't understand the half of what he said. He was angry. I was angiy too, and I forgot to speak in English. It was terrible!'

'But Rhea would have understood what you said!'

'She said nothing!' Anna wailed. 'How could she say nothing? Little fool, doesn't she know that she will one day be as attractive as her sister? There is no need for her to be afraid that no man will want her. The Kyria Melissa has told her that often and often, but the little one could only see that she was awkward and sometimes in pain. You must go after her, kyria. It was your brother who did that to her!'

Tansy wiped the palms of her hands against her jeans. 'I'm going, Anna. Which way do I go?'

'You go to Anoghia—you will have heard of the village? During the war, they kidnapped the German commandant and hid him there. Every man in the village was killed and the houses were all put down on the ground. Now, it looks new again and the women earn their living by making handicrafts of all kinds. The Kyrios Titos sells many of their things in his shops—'

'But how do I get there?' Tansy insisted.

'Through Iraklion,' said Anna with a wave of her hand. 'You will see the way!'

Tansy had rather less confidence in her ability to read the signposts along the way. True, they were not only in the Greek script" but often repeated in Latin letters as well, but the spelling varied dramatically from one to another, as it did in the various guide books, and Tansy had no idea how to pronounce half the places she had already seen.

'I hope so,' she said. 'What kind of car has Mr. Ross got?'

Anna merely looked puzzled. 'A car. He has a car.' She shrugged her shoulders. 'Maybe he hire the car in Iraklion.'

'I daresay,' said Tansy. She imagined him hiring a fast Mercedes at the very least and despaired of ever catching up with him in Elena's little Fiat. 'I suppose Minos wouldn't like to come with me?' she added, her voice trembling a little as she thought of herself dashing across Crete all by herself.

Anna shook her head. 'Minos is with the Kyria Melissa. She has taken him to visit some of his relations.'

Tansy considered asking Anna to go with her in his stead, but she knew that such an idea had never crossed her mind and that she wouldn't want to be asked. Before the temptation to seek her company became overwhelming, she turned and hurried to her bedroom, grabbing her coat and her handbag in case she should need any money.

The car took a long time starting. When it finally flared into life, Tansy revved the engine, half hoping it would die again. She turned slowly out of the drive, looking up towards Titos' house, just in case she could see his car outside. There was no sign that anyone lived there at all, and she felt a new loneliness that ought to have been familiar, but which had a new edge to it. Hadn't she always done things on her own? What was so special about driving a car a hundred miles, or less, on her own?

She pulled in just the other side of Iraklion and filled up with petrol. It was more expensive than she had thought it would be and she began to worry whether she would have enough money if the cave was further away than she had been led to expect. However, she got out of Iraklion more easily than she had feared, going out the Khania gate for some distance, before turning left towards Tylissos and a place called on the signpost Anoyia, which she thought was probably the

same as Anoghia. At any other time she would have thought the road a pretty one and would have been tempted to stop at Tylissos and explore the three late Minoan villas that she had read as being three of the finest examples of country houses of that period that could be seen anywhere.

Further along the road she came across the ruin of another Minoan house, a collection of huge stones that must have, made very solid walls for the rooms inside. A little tired, she stopped for a few minutes and sat on the flattest of the stones, listening to the whirring noises of the insects and the flat, melodic sound of the goats' bells in the hills behind. It was tempting to stay there and drowse in the warmth of the sun, but she knew she would have to go on. What was she going to say to Rhea, though, when she found her? Suppose she was only meddling in something which didn't really concern her at all? Worst of all, supposing Titos was angry with her for setting out on such a mad adventure?

There was nothing to be gained by indulging in such gloomy thoughts, she reflected, and forced herself back into the car and on her way. It was getting late and she was afraid that it would be dark long before she reached the cave—and she didn't much like caves in daylight.

But she would not think about that! She gripped the wheel more securely and drove faster than she normally would have dreamed of going. Where was Anoghia?

When it came, she didn't recognise it. There was nothing to tell her the name of the village she had come to, only the chaos of roads being made up, and a collection of black-garbed women spinning by the side of the road. She stopped at the first house she came to and was lucky enough to find a man who spoke a few words of English.

'Ah, English!' he exclaimed, pumping her hand up and down. 'I was with English in war. Bang, bang, bang!'

Tansy smiled back at him. 'Which way do I go for the Idhean Cave?' she asked him.

'Bang, bang, bang!' He lifted his arms as if he were holding a gun. 'Bang, bang!'

'Idha,' Tansy repeated, less hopefully. She searched her mind for the name of people who made a hobby of exploring caves and came up with speleologists. 'Spelio,' she said in triumph. 'Idha!'

'Yes, yes,' he soothed her. 'I will show you the way after we have had a cup of coflee together. My wife will make it. We have a daughter in Canada. She is British now. Come inside! Welcome to my house!'

Tansy looked up at the sun. 'It will be dark soon,' she protested. 'I haven't time—' She saw the disappointment on his face and gave in. "Very well. Thank you very much.' A few minutes wouldn't make much difference anyway. 'Did another Englishman come here today?'

'But yes, he came!' the Cretan acknowledged. He imitated Dick's tic in his cheek. 'You know him?'

Tansy nodded her head slowly. 'How long ago was he here?'

'An hour. Maybe more.'

Tansy ducked her head and entered the dark interior of the man's house. A woman, working at a loom inside, stared at her in silence while the man explained her presence. The woman rose without a word. She made no effort to smile at Tansy, contenting herself with a brief nod of the head. The women seldom smiled, Tansy thought, and

they were always dignified. She rather envied them their simple confidence in their own way of life.

The man could have been Turkish, rather than Cretan. He wore the baggy Turkish trousers that still lingered on in the countryside of Greece although they had won their independence more than a hundred and forty years before, and he had wrapped a cloth about his head to protect it from the sun. He gestured to Tansy to be seated on the only chair in the room and produced a faded coloured photograph of his daughter for her to look at. It seemed strange to see a typical North American girl looking back at her, dressed in colours, and with all the trappings of the American way of life about her. What a contrast it presented with the village where she had been born and brought up!

'You must be very proud of her,' Tansy said.

He nodded eagerly, searching through some papers for a letter bearing a Canadian stamp. 'See, Canada! My daughter British now!'

Tansy thought she might prefer to be called Canadian, but she said nothing, fearing to take the edge off his pleasure in his daughter's achievements.

'Good money in Canada,' he commented. 'Good girl!'

He unwrapped several rugs and showed them to Tansy, plainly hoping that she would buy something from him. There were shawls and tablecloths as well, but the rugs were more appealing to her eye. The patterns were traditional and the goat's hair long-wearing.

'1 haven't the money to buy from you,' she told him. 'But one day I'll come back and I'll buy from you then.'

He shook his head. 'You go back to England, not come back!'

'Yes, I will. I am marrying a Cretan, the Kyrios Titos Michalakis, and he will bring me to see you.'

He caught the name at once, giving her an astonished look. But his pleasure in the news was obviously genuine as he rushed out of the house to spread the news round his neighbours. Tansy wished she had had the sense to keep quiet when she saw the crowd of villagers gathering to look her over and comment on her good fortune. There would be a further delay as they all vied with one another to offer her the hospitality for which the Greeks are so justly famous. Where else is the same word used for 'stranger' as for 'guest'? And she could not refuse the multitude of little gifts they pressed on her. To do so would have been churlish and would have reflected on Titos, and so she made the best of things, swallowing dpwn over-sweet coffee and the hundred-and-one sweets and small cakes that were eagerly put before her.

When, at last, she managed to get away, her host walked back with her through the village to the car. 'For the cave, you go up there,' he told her, pointing at a track that led sharply up from the village. Tansy's heart sank as she looked at it. It was narrow, rutted, and grey with the loose stone chips that covered the first few metres of its surface.

'But they're working on it now,' she said. 'Can I take the car up there?'

'Yes, yes,' he assured her. 'Soon they take buses up that way, but now only cars.'

Tansy climbed back into the Fiat. The dust rose in a cloud around her as she slammed the door shut and the old man laughed at her grimace and tried to disperse it with a large sun-tanned hand. In a panic, Tansy noticed the dust had turned to gold in the rays of the sun and she glanced at her watch, horrified by how late it was. Even if she found Rhea, how was she ever to drive home along such a road in the dark?

Yet they couldn't wait at the cave for the dawn to come, for then Rhea would be missed and everyone would know what had happened to her.

She thanked the old man for his kindness to her, shaking his proffered hand, and set off up the steep track. The road- makers had made no secret of their presence higher up in the mountains. Piles of stone chips lay on either side of the recently smoothed over trail, and there were deep imprints left by the huge tyres on which their heavy machinery was mounted over which the Fiat bounced with the occasional whining protest as the bottom scraped along a particularly high ridge.

After about a mile she turned a corner and came face to face with a giant grabber. The man operating the machine was as surprised to see her as she was him. With some difficulty he backed out of her way and waved her grandly past. The other men, a little further on, watched her go by with open mouths. Tansy refused to consider the fact that the road could only get worse from there on, and worried over the problem of how they got to and from work instead. In another half- hour they would be gone, beaten by the early dusk of late October, and she would be alone on the road, with nothing and no one between her and the distant Idhean Cave.

The road did get worse. Now there were no chips presenting a reasonable surface over the mud and huge rocks that had been roughly levelled out of the side of the mountain. Again and again the bottom of the car scraped against an una void- able boulder and she had cause to be thankful that the Fiat's engine was at the back and she had no need to worry about a crank shaft that would have had to be sturdy indeed to have stood up to these conditions.

The track led right over the mountains, getting worse and worse. The evening light slanted into her eyes and at times she had the feeling that she was running out of road altogether. To keep herself calm, and

to occupy that part of her brain which was not needed to drive, she began to quote to herself all the pieces in the classics she could remember that referred to Crete. She had had to go through them for Fergus's book, and odd, hauntingly beautiful bits stuck in her mind and came out easily now.

'The sea is a huge loom where Crete sits down and weaves; lucky those eyes who've seen her shuttling on the waves. If you're sick, you sprout wings, if sluggish, you grow wild, and if cares crush you, your dazed mind glows like the moon,'

(Would there be a moon tonight?)

'and you forget black pain and raise your arms on high and bless your happy parents who once gave you birth.'

She wondered where she had read it, and then remembered that it was not from Homer at all, but from another book, also called Thei Odyssey, by Kazantzakis, and translated by Kimon Friar. She repeated it again, stumbling over the words, and breathed a heavy sigh of relief as she rounded yet another corner and the road seemed wider and the going better.

But not for long! She came to a choice of ways: one broad and leading in what she thought was the right direction; the other narrow, sloping downwards into a valley she could only just glimpse below. She was surprised to notice a small, rusty signpost pointing downwards and bearing the legend 'Idhean.'

Looking at the track, as rough as a dried-out river bed, with crumbling edges beside a sheer drop, she could taste her fear on her tongue.

The sun had sunk still lower in the sky and the long purple shadows made the rough boulders look bigger than they really were. Other cars

must have passed that way, she comforted herself, but nothing could get over the fact that she had not been driving them.

With a courage born of desperation, she set the nose of the car down the narrower road, clenching her teeth as the wheels slowly mounted the rocks and fell with shattering force between them. There was no turning back now. There was scarcely room for the car at all and no way at all of turning round. She was thankful that, being on the left-hand side of the car, she could hug the mountainside, and could only see the precipice on the other side at rare and horrifying moments when she was tempted to shut her eyes and drive straight into the mountain.

Slowly, inch by inch, she crept downwards. Once, twice, a particularly large boulder caught the bottom of the car and she had to reverse and come at it again, choosing her way with even greater care.

And then it happened, as she had known it would. She was not even conscious of being surprised. She edged the off front wheel up a large, rounded rock, felt it slip, and tried to pull the car further over so that the tyre could regain its hazardous grip. For a long, perilous second, nothing happened at all, then the car shot forward, landing flat on top of the rock with a metallic groan. Stranded like a whale on the beach at low tide, Tansy revved the engine, heard the rear wheels spin in response, but there was no hope of moving either forwards or backwards. Hopelessly, she revved the engine again, trying to rock the car back on its wheels by pressing back in her seat and forward again. For an instant, the front wheels touched the road ahead, but without the drive from the rear they could not move forward. There was nothing for it, she decided, but to get out and push.

The sun had disappeared behind the mountains now. The. gold had gone from the day to be replaced by the grey the ancient Greeks had associated with the underworld, and the dreaded kingdom of Hades. Tansy could understand their fear as she felt the shadows close in

round her as she shoved and strained at the immovable car. She tried putting loose stones under the rear wheels, but the tyres spat them out with stinging force, refusing to grip on anything no matter how tightly she packed the mixture of earth and solid rock underneath them.

Half an hour later she admitted to herself that there was nothing more she could do. Her muscles ached and her mouth was dry with dust. She was afraid, too, of slipping down the cliff on the right-hand side of the road, afraid that if she got into the car her weight might tip it over, and afraid of other rocks falling on her head from the cutting above if she stayed on the road where she was. A few stars lit the purple sky, but there was no sign of any moon. If she walked back to where the two roads met, there was no knowing what she might encounter on the way. Eyes appeared out of nowhere, shining red and green, and all of them were watching her—perhaps because they meant her harm?

She scrambled up the road, lacerating her knees and hands as she tripped over the boulders in her hurry to be gone from that haunted spot. By the time she had gained the top and was back on the wider road, she could hear her breath sobbing in her throat and castigated herself for being such a cowardly idiot. She had to pull herself together and make a proper plan of how she was to spend the night. She could walk back to Anoghia, but she doubted she would find the way in the dark, or she could stay where she was and make herself a bed in amongst the bushes of thyme on the sides of the hill. It was not cold and the animals might stay away if she kept very quiet and-*thought hard about something, anything else but her fears of spending a night in the open.

The ground was more comfortable than she had expected. She covered herself with her coat and thought of Titos and the warm comfort of his arms. The clanking of a bell quite close to her brought

her back to the present. It was a goat! For one heart-stopping moment, she rose to her feet, preparing to run as fast as she could down the road. But the goat curled itself up beside her, bleating softly into the darkness. Tansy lay down again, her heart thudding, her eyes fixed firmly on the animal beside her. After a long while she realised that it was sleeping, and she lay down again herself. More goats arrived, and still more, until she was surrounded by them. Their strong, pungent odour was curiously reassuring. At least they were living creatures, at home there in the middle of nowhere, and they seemed to accept her almost as one of themselves, cuddling up to her and each other for warmth and security while they slept.

It was a long time before Tansy realised she was not afraid any more. She put her hand on the silky coat of the first goat which had found her, and eased her hip into the soft ground, and almost before she had shut her eyes, she also slept, oblivious to the dull music of the goats' bells and the distant pipes that sounded on the still night air, played by a distant shepherd, or perhaps by the great god Pan himself.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SHE was glad of the goats when the first light of dawn crept across the sky. The "Wind roared up and down the hillside, driving dark, pewter-coloured clouds towards the peaks of the Idhean range of mountains. A few minutes later she saw the first flash of lightning, followed by a crack of thunder that startled the goats to their feet and set them bleating into the gusty wind.

'Tansy! Tansy!'

There was only one person who spoke her name in exactly that way, a person she associated with the thunder in her half- waking state. Who else would call her at such a time?

'I'm here!' she cried out, half afraid that she might be still asleep and dreaming.

He climbed up from the road with an easy swinging gait and stood at her feet, looking down at her. To her indignation, she saw that he was smiling.

'Titos, it isn't funny!'

'No, darling, it's not. Whatever possessed you to go rushing off like that? What did you think you could do?'

A flash of lightning lit up the sky behind his head. Tansy shut her eyes, her love for him welling up inside her and threatening to undermine all else but the perfection of the moment. He had come, and with him the thunder, and what did it matter if it did rain and they both got soaking wet?

'I couldn't shift the car,' she said.

'So I saw,' he answered her. 'If you'd been in the car I would have throttled you there and then!'

Her eyes flew open. He was angry! 'Anna said Rhea had gone with Dick Ross. I had to come after her,' she began to explain.

'So Fergus told me. He, at least, had the sense to come to me! Why didn't you?'

'Your car wasn't there. I thought it would be too late if I didn't go at once.' She sat up, shivering as the thunder sounded overhead. 'Dick told Anna they were going to the Idhean Cave.' She turned her face away, shamed by the explanation she felt obliged to make him. 'I knew he wanted to pay me out because I wouldn't stay with him at Knossos, but went home with you.'

He sat down on the ground beside her. 'Didn't it occur to you, my ridiculous love, that nothing would induce Rhea to ever come along this road again. She said goodbye to your Mr. Ross when he deposited her at our cousin's home where she and Mama were due for tea—'

'Minos went too,' Tansy told him.

'What a pity you didn't join them too,' he said dryly. 'My mother went down to invite you, but found you weren't seeing anyone. Why not, Tansy?'

She shifted uncomfortably, putting a hand on the nearest goat's back for comfort. 'I was trying to get the book finished.'

He put his arm about her, drawing her close. She made no protest when he brushed her face with his fingers, tapping her on the cheek.

'And wearing yourself to a shadow, according to that brother of yours!'

'He seems to have had a lot to say,' she remarked.

'Very busy,' he agreed. 'But not half as busy as you have been, Tansy mou, arranging everyone's future for them, and getting yourself lost—'

'I'm not lost!' she interrupted him.

'Don't quibble, agapi, or I shall think you did it deliberately to see if I would come and find you!'

She threw him a startled look. 'Are you sure Rhea didn't go to the Idhean Cave with Dick? I shouldn't like to go there on my own!'

'He probably hoped you'd join him there after a while,' Titos suggested.

'But he knows I don't like him!'

Titos held her closer still as another rumble of thunder rolled its way across the sky. 'Fergus seemed to think that might be an added attraction,' he drawled.

'What does Fergus know about it?' she scoffed.

'Well,' Titos murmured, making an obvious effort to be just, 'he did point out that you had changed recently—for the better, he thought, and he thought that might have been my doing. He said he'd kept an eye on you for a long time now, but that he'd never had to warn off the Dick Rosses of this world before. If I hadn't come after you, he was going to follow you himself. As much as he can be fond of anyone,

he's fond of you, isn't he? I can't imagine him, any more than Rhea, willingly going to the Idha Cave again.'

Tansy relaxed against the warmth of his body. 'He said Elena was completely happy thait day. It was the only time she ever was. He was fond of her too, Titos.'

'Maybe. It was a day that had a terrible ending.'

'Because of Rhea?'

He nodded. 'She got out to make sure they were going the right way and they decided to go on alone. She saw the car start down the track where your car is now and ran after them, grabbing the door handle of the back door. The door came open and knocked her over. She fell down the precipice beside the road. Neither Elena nor Fergus realised what had happened, they just thought she had given up, and they drove on to the Cave. They only found her on the way back. She's better now, of course, but the memory of that day has not been erased with time.'

'But it wasn't Fergus's fault! He didn't know!'

'He didn't want to know!'

'Nor did Elena!'

Titos traced her lips with his forefinger. 'We are not going to quarrel about whose fault it was. It happened, and it is why Rhea wouldn't come here again of her own volition. Perhaps we should have told you the whole story before, but it was painful to us and, to be honest, I did not wish to remind myself that you are Fergus's sister. Perhaps I blamed him too much, but he hurt both my sisters that day, and I am .not a forgiving man.'

Tansy turned to face him. 'And yet you forgave me. Won't you forgive Fergus for my sake?'

'I forgave him quite a lot when he came and told me where you'd gone and suggested that I should go after you. He even said he'd break my neck if I didn't make you happier than he had made Elena.'

'Did he?' Tansy's voice was soft and very loving. 'And will you?'

'Yes, my Tansy, I will. I intend you make you the happiest woman in Crete!'

She laughed, burying her face in his neck. 'S'agapo poli,' she whispered to him, and wondered if he had heard, he was so still beside her.

A distant piping noise brought the goats to their feet, bleating to one another as they strained their ears to listen to the herdsman who was summoning them to his side. Their bells rang out as they leaped nimbly from one outcrop of rock to another, hurrying over the brow of the hill towards the boy who had charge over them.

'I'll never be frightened of them again,' said Tansy. 'I think I may learn to milk them after all.'

There was another long silence, then Titos said, 'What did you say?'

'I said I wouldn't be frightened of goats ever again.'

'No, before that!'

'I didn't think you'd heard me.' And then, as he still didn't say anything: 'I can't say it again!'

'Why not, sweetheart? You must know I want to hear it!'

'I think you already knew,' she told him.

'But not that you knew it! Nor that you had taken the trouble to learn how to tell me in Greek. Who taught you that particular sentence, Tansy mou?'

'Mama.' She bent her head, not looking at him. 'She asked me to call her that. You don't mind, do you?'

'I am glad you should think of her that way. Why didn't you tell me before, Tansy? Is it only the thunder which has made you say it now?'

She was too proud to misunderstand him. 'I've known it for a long time,' she said. 'S'agapo, I love you; poli, very much! Did I get it right?'

He kissed her lips, leaning up on his elbow to see the better what she was thinking. 'Quite right. Are you sure, darling? You didn't know it when we went to Phaestos. I don't want to rush you, before you're ready to be my wife, but do I have to wait much longer to make you mine?'

She clutched at the lapels of his coat. 'I haven't finished the book yet.'

'Damn the book! Are you ready to marry me, Tansy?' He gave her a little shake. 'If you know you love me—How long have you known?'

'I've always known,' she confessed. 'I knew when you first kissed me—no, perhaps the second time, when I felt the thunder in my blood for the first time in my life. I wanted so much for you to love me too, but in the end it doesn't matter that you don't. I want to marry you anyway!'

'But, Tansy, you said you couldn't marry me without love. If you already loved me—'

She put her hand over his lips, a little bemused that it was her privilege to touch him if she wished to do so. 'You said there would be a kind of loving between us in the end. It's enough for me, truly it is! I didn't understand at first, you see. I wanted you to think me something special, not just a woman for the taking, but I loved you so much I can't do without you.' She peeped up at him. 'Perhaps Cretans don't indulge in that sort of love with their wives? You probably think I'm childish to want a romantic gloss—' She broke off, hesitating, not knowing how to make him understand. 'Fergus says you're a very earthy people!'

To her dismay he laughed. 'Oh, Tansy, you're a delight to me!' he exclaimed. 'What foolish thoughts you do have! If it had been ordinary lust I felt for you, do you think I would have considered marrying Fergus Drummond's sister? I'd have made a quite different proposal to you and I think I might have persuaded you to accept in the end. Think how much easier it would have been to have kept you away from my family—and never to have seen Fergus again!'

'Fergus is going to America,' she said in a small voice. He still hadn't said that he loved her! Perhaps he never would.

'And Anna with him, thanks to your meddling!'

'He'll look after her, Titos! Think how lonely she would be by herself, knowing no one and having to speak a foreign language all the time! Besides, I shan't worry about Fergus half as much if I know he's being properly fed and has a change of shirt when he needs one.'

'So you arranged everything to your own satisfaction?' He stroked her face, trailing his fingers across her brows and just brushing her long lashes. 'I hope Fergus appreciates being saddled with a housekeeper who will be ever ready to remind him of Elena, and to blame him for Rhea's accident too! Fergus is a man who likes to have a good opinion of himself, and sackcloth and ashes don't sit well on him. In a few

months he will have persuaded himself he was the hero of the hour and reality, in the form of Anna, will hardly be appreciated.'

It was all true, she supposed. Fergus hated to be uncomfortable and, though she thought he had loved Elena more than he knew, he would put his memories of her out of his mind and his life as quickly as possible, if only because he couldn't bear to be unhappy. In the end he might even blame her for causing him the pain of having to forget.

'It will give Anna a start,' she said doggedly. 'She couldn't go to America all by herself!'

'We have connections in America,' he told her. 'I was thinking of sending her to them.'

'And I've spoilt it all?'

'No, agapi mou, your way may be better for her, for they , would have known something of her history and she would have found it harder to get herself a husband, which is the great ambition of her life.'

Tansy gave him an indignant look. 'Then why complain of my meddling?' she demanded.

He kissed her, very gently, teasing her lips into the response he sought. 'Because 1 don't want you to get any idea that you can run my life for me, no matter how good your intentions! I'm not your brother, and I don't need mothering by any woman! I don't care if you feed me well or badly, and if I haven't a clean shirt, I'll go out and buy a new one. If I have any complaints, I'll leave you in no doubt as to what I expect of the woman in my house and you'll conform to my standards, or I'll know the reason why not! But I'm not marrying you for your housewifely abilities, Tansy mou, nor for the children we'll have, nor yet because my heart melts inside when I look at you!. I'm marrying you because you're my woman and I can do no other.

You're my woman, Tansy Drummond, mine to love, mine to command, mine to protect from all harm to the best of my ability, and mine to share my life with!'

She strained closer to him. 'Is it love you're offering me?' she asked him.

'My kind of love. Is it enough for you?'

'Yes, it's enough,' she said. 'All I shall ever want is to be your wife, to love you, and—obey you as a woman does her husband. I love you very much.'

'As your man—and the master of your life?' he prompted her.

She nodded. 'Yes,' she said on a sigh. She wanted him to kiss her again and to hear the thunder rumbling in her ears while he did so, knowing herself safe in his arms. She said suddenly, 'Will you ask Fergus to be koumbaros at our wedding?'

'Fergus?'

'Why not? He's going to America and he won't interfere with us. It would show him that you understand about Elena, and don't blame him any more.'

'So much for your not meddling!' he exploded.

'Please, Titos,' she begged him, her eyes alight with laughter.

'If I do, there will be no more time for you to finish his book! No more dithering on the brink! You'll marry me when and where I say and come running as soon as I give the word?'

'Yes, of course. I've nearly finished the book anyway!'

'And I shall ask him. You'll stay out of it, Tansy?'

'Yes.'

His face broke into a smile and he kissed her hard. 'And don't go thinking you can twist me round your little finger whenever you want to! I won't always be as mellow and easy to manage as I am today!'

'I won't,' she promised. 'You can be as stem and unbending as you like! Besides, I think you might have asked Fergus anyway, for my sake. It will give me such happiness to have him there. It will mark the merging of my past into my future with you, and I'd like to have his blessing for that. You don't really mind, do you?'

'Not if you want it that way.'

Tansy scarcely felt the first drops of rain as they fell on them. She had a vivid impression of the strong line of his jaw and the curl of his hair that had tightened in the damp atmosphere.

'Oh, Titos,' she whispered, 'kiss me again!'

Was it a flash of lightning, or was it the fire of passion igniting between them? Was it the thunder rumbling in the sky, or the mad pounding of her own heart as he pulled her close against the hard length of his body? Tansy was never to know. Her hands explored the muscles of his neck and shoulders as she returned his kisses with enthusiasm. Her whole body glow-

ed with the warmth of his caress. The gentleness had gone from his embrace now to be replaced by a passionate demand . that drew from her a response that frightened her by its intensity.

'Titos, please—'

'Be quiet, and let me love you,' he whispered back.

'Oh yes, but not now! It's raining and—'

'And you're frightened that I'll ask too much?' He let her go and sat up, his face hard and unyielding.

She could have cried with frustration. 'I'm not afraid of you,' she told him. 'I never could be, not of you! But if you can wait, I don't want it to be in the rain, with me smelling like an old goat, and it won't be long before we're married now.' Her own longing for him was naked in her voice and it was he who soothed her.

'Do you smell of goat, agapi? I hadn't noticed!' He kissed her again, but with a gentleness that made her tremble. 'I love you very much, Tansy mou.'

So he had said it after all, and she believed him, for he put her away from him, smoothing the hair out of her eyes, and stood up, smiling down at her.

'S'agapo poli,' she answered him. 'I almost wish you would turn into a bull and carry me off to Europa's plane tree at Gortyna! Wouldn't it be bliss not to have to wait at all?'

'Mmm,' he acknowledged, 'but I prefer to be a man when I make you my own, not some fanciful bird.'

She laughed. 'To tell you the truth, I prefer it that way too!' she said.

Titos went down the hill to take a look at the Fiat. 'We'll never shift it by ourselves,' he pronounced. He glanced fleetingly down the precipice at the side of the car, his jaw tightening. 'Mr. Dick Ross had better stay out of my way if he wants to return from his holiday in one piece!'

'It doesn't matter,' said Tansy.

'Not matter?' The arrogance of his stance pleased her decidedly partial eye. 'Not matter, when you might have fallen down there as Rhea did? Not matter, when you spent the night out here alone, with only the goats for company? You must have been scared out of your wits!'

'No, I wasn't,' she denied. 'I told myself that if you liked them, goats couldn't be as awful as I had thought. Besides, I wanted to acquit myself at least as well as your mother, and if she could put up with them, I could too! It wouldn't do for you to have a timid, English wife, would it? I had to prove that I have as much courage as any Cretan!'

His eyes lit with laughter. 'And as earthy an approach to life?'

She pursed up her lips and refused to answer, leading the way back to the top of the slope. He did not look back again, she noticed, and she was glad she had diverted his attention from the place where Rhea had met her accident. When she thought he had quite forgotten, she came off her high horse and smiled at him.

'The thunder's gone, but the rain's getting harder. How are we going to get home?'

'My car is just round the corner. We'll drive back to Anoghia and arrange with the road men to tow your car back to the road. One of them can drive it into Iraklion to a garage there.'

'Have I broken it?' she asked, dismayed.

'I don't think so, but it's as well to have it checked. I don't want it falling apart the next time you take it out.'

She looked shyly at him. 'But it isn't my car,' she reminded him. 'Rhea is old enough to drive now. Don't you think she may be expecting to have it for her own use?'

He drew her arm through his own, hurrying her over the rough ground through the now driving rain. 'Rhea can wait. She will be married before she's well enough to drive and then it'll be her husband's business to provide her with a car. It'll be all yours—until I can provide you with something better. You'll want to explore the island, I daresay, and the Fiat should be good enough for that.'

She was surprised. 'Won't you mind? I thought you'd want me to be waiting at home for your return from your hotels, not gallivanting round the countryside without you?'

'When I want you at home, I'll tell you, and you'll be there,' he answered easily, 'but my house is your home, not your prison. You had better make the best of your freedom while you can,' he added, tongue in cheek. 'Once the children come you'll have less time to wander, with or without me!'

'I shan't want to go far without you', she confessed. 'Knossos was dust and ashes to me because you weren't there. Whereas I loved Phaestos, and Mallia—Mallia was best of all!'

'Was it, darling?' He looked amused. 'I have always liked to visit there. There is a magic in those ruins, placed as they are between the hills and the sea. And now, I can see, they are romantic enough even to appeal to a dreamy English girl who pretends to see them only with the eyes of a scientist!'

She smiled. 'They're special,' she agreed. 'How special I didn't know, but even before I saw you, I was entranced by the place, but afterwards, I could say with Shakespeare: I was with Hercules and, Cadmus once When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear With

hounds of Sparta: never did I hear So musical a discord, such sweet thunder! Only it wasn't a bear in my case, but a beautiful bull, straight from the hands of Zeus. No wonder I fell in love with you!'

'But this will be more than a Midsummer Night's Dream,' he promised her. 'This is enchantment to last a lifetime!'

Fergus had taken his duties as koumbaros with a seriousness he usually reserved only for the more academic side of his work. With a pale, earnest face he had held the wreath of flowers over his sister's and his brother-in-law's heads, repeating his part in the proceedings in his carefully learned Greek. Afterwards, when they had gone back to the house to dance and feast after the wedding, he had made a cool, witty speech that only Tansy could really appreciate, and he wished the happy couple well with an earnest sincerity that had won him a warm hug from Kyria Melissa and the passionate gratitude of his sister.

'I shall be leaving for America in the morning,' he told her when they were sitting out one of the strange syrtaki dances together. 'Will you do something for me, Tansy? Call the first girl after Elena!'

She was pleased with the suggestion. 'And you can be her godfather!' she exclaimed. 'That's part of the duties of the koumbaros, so don't pretend you can't get away from America to come to her christening. I shall be relying on you to be here!'

'If it's not too soon,' he agreed. He looked at her, for once genuinely interested in her as someone apart from himself. 'You are happy here, aren't you? I could have taken you to America with me.'

She shook her head, her cheeks flushed with the delight of watching her husband on the dance-floor. 'I shouldn't be alive apart from Titos,

you know that! But we shall always be pleased to see you.' She frowned at him, noting his pale skin and thinking how tired he still looked. 'Fergus, do try to remember that Anna will need you to look after her. She won't be able to trail after you and discuss the things that interest you, but she'll need you badly until she can find some friends of her own!'

'I have no doubt she'll bring herself to mind if I fall down on the job!' he said sardonically. 'I'll get her to write to you, if she can write. If she can't, I'll teach her. Will that satisfy my lady?'

Tansy put her hand on his sleeve. 'I'll always be grateful to you, Fergus,' she smiled at him. 'And I'll always love you, no matter what!'

He chuckled. 'That's quite something coming from one of the Michalakis clan, but you have Titos now!'

Her complacent look turned his chuckle into a roar of laughter. 'Yes,' she said softly. 'I have Titos.'

Sometimes, in these last few days, her night out in the mountains had seemed like a dream. It had been Rhea who had told her that Dick Ross had never had the slightest intention of going to the Idhean cave but had booked in at an hotel at Khania, going by the Anoghia route because he had wanted to look at their wares on the way.

'You must think me a fool if you thought I'd go with him!' the girl had said indignantly. 'Titos was out of his mind when he heard where you'd gone!'

'I know,' Tansy had sighed, 'he's told me all about what he thinks of my rushing in where angels fear to tread! I still think Dick Ross would have stirred it up if he could. I couldn't just let it happen—not

to you! And Titos wasn't half as angry as I'd expected, not even when I got a cold from sitting about in the rain!'

Rhea had given her a cheeky grin. 'I expect that was his fault as much as yours! Mama says she can't wait until you marry him and put him in a better temper, and nor can I!'

Well, she was married to him now and she had no idea how his temper was faring. Rhea had gone up with her to the room she was to share with Titos and had helped her out of her wedding dress and into the handmade, lacy garment that Kyria Melissa had made with her own hands for her wedding night. The electric light had been uncertain all day because of the flooding up in the hills after the first heavy storm of the winter, and candles had been brought and lit, casting unfamiliar shadows' round the room.

'Goodnight, athelfi mou,' Rhea had said, and had kissed her. 'Goodnight, my sister!'

When she had gone, Tansy got into bed, allowing her hair to fall in a eloud around her head on the pillow. She half wished it would thunder now, but there was only the steady drip of the rain that had come to stay. A step outside the door made her jump.

'Titos?'

He came in to her, his eyes black and shining in the candlelight. 'Who else did you expect it to be?'

She had no answer for him. His features were accentuated in the shadowed light and she had thought she had never seen him look more handsome. His hair was black and shiny as it curled about his head; his nose long and straight above his mouth; and his eyes dark and unreadable, but no longer mocking as they held hers.

'Did you have a happy wedding?' he asked her.

She nodded, still tongue-tied, and more than a little shy of him. 'Did you?' she whispered.

He smiled, his eyes on her mouth. 'Fergus made a good koumbaros. Have you said goodbye to him?'

She knew he was not referring to her brother going to America. He wanted to know that Fergus's interests no longer came first with her, that she had come to her husband with an undivided heart.

She opened her arms to him. 'I'm not a Drummond any more,' she said. 'Fergus put me in my place by calling me one of the Michalakis clan. Titos, you must know there's only you in my heart!'

He pulled her close. 'You'll have to tell me that often, my little English wife, because when a Greek marries he puts his heart and his honour into his woman's hands, as she puts her life into his, and you will often be lonely and afraid without your own people—'

'Your people are my people,' she answered him readily. 'I never had any people before. Before I knew you I was often lonely and afraid of life, but with you—oh, darling, I wish I could tell you how much I love you! But I do! I love you more than life itself! Please, love me!'

His lips took hers with the arrogant mastery she loved in him, and the familiar sensation of weakness and joyful sub-

mission cast out any fear she might have had of becoming one with him.

'Till death us do part!' he murmured against her lips. 'And beyond!'