The Greek Tycoon's Achilles Heel

life surrounded her, but her.

And perhaps that was why a young man’s agony and desperation had pierced her heart on a roof in Las Vegas fifteen years ago.

‘But your grandparents died,’ Lysandros said. ‘Who do you have now?’

She pulled herself together. ‘Are you kidding? My life is crowded with people. It’s like living with a flock of geese.’

‘Including your mother’s husbands?’

‘Well, she didn’t bother to marry them all. She said there wasn’t enough time.’

‘Boyfriends?’ he asked carefully.

‘Some. But half of them were simply trying to get close to my mother, which didn’t do my self-confidence any good. I learnt to keep my feelings to myself until I’d sized them up.’ She gave a soft chuckle. ‘I got a reputation for being frigid.’

They were mad, he thought. No woman who was frigid had that warmth and resonance in her voice, or that glow on her skin.

‘And then I met Derek,’ she recalled. ‘Estelle was making a film with a winter sports background and he was one of the advisors. He was so handsome, I fell for him hook, line and sinker. I thought it had happened at last. We were happy enough for a couple of years, but then-’ she shrugged ‘-I guess he got bored with me.’

‘He got bored with you?’ he asked with an involuntary emphasis.

She chuckled as though her husband’s betrayal was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her. He was becoming familiar with that defensive note in her laughter. It touched an echo in himself.

‘I don’t think I was ever the attraction,’ she said. ‘He needed money and he thought Estelle Radnor’s daughter would have plenty. Anyway, he started sleeping around, I lost my temper and I think it scared him a little.’

‘You? A temper?’

‘Most people think I don’t have one because I only lose it once in a blue moon. Now and then I really let fly. I try not to because what’s the point? But it’s there, and it can make me say things I wish I hadn’t. Anyway, that was five years ago. It’s all over. Why are you smiling?’

When had anyone last asked him that? When had anyone had cause to? How often did he smile?

‘I didn’t know I was smiling,’ he said hastily.

‘You looked like you’d seen some private joke. Come on. Share.’

Private joke! If his board of directors, his bank manager, his underlings heard that they’d think she was delusional.

But the smile was there, growing larger, happier, being drawn forth by her teasing demand.

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What did I say that was so funny?’

‘It’s not-it’s just the way you said “It’s all over”, as though you’d airbrushed the entire male sex out of your life.’

‘Or out of the universe,’ she agreed. ‘Best thing for them.’

‘For them, or for you?’

‘Definitely for me. Men no longer exist. Now my world is this country, my work, my investigations.’

‘But the ancient Greeks had members of the male sex,’ he pointed out. ‘Unfortunate, but true.’

‘Yes, but I can afford to be tolerant about them. They helped start my career. I wrote a book about Greek heroes just before I left university, and actually got it published. Later I was asked to revise it into a less academic version, for schools, and the royalties have been nice. So I feel fairly charitable about the legendary Greek men.’

‘Especially since they’re safely dead?’

‘You’re getting the idea.’

‘Let’s eat,’ he said hastily.

The waiter produced chicken and onion pie, washed down with sparkling wine, and for a while there was no more talking. Watching her eat, relishing every mouthful, he wondered about her assertion that men no longer existed for her. With any other woman he would have said it was a front, a pretence to fool the world while she carried on a life of sensual indulgence. But this woman was different. She inhabited her own universe, one he’d never encountered before.

‘So that’s how you came to know so much that night in Las Vegas,’ he said at last. ‘You gave me a shock, lecturing me about Achilles.’

She gave a rueful laugh. ‘Lecturing. That just about says it all. I’m afraid I do, and people get fed up. I can’t blame them. I remember I made you very cross.’

‘I wasn’t thrilled to be told I was sulking,’ he admitted, ‘but I was only twenty-three. And besides-’

‘And besides, you were very unhappy, weren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Because of her.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’

Her gentle eyes said that she didn’t believe him.

‘She made you trust her, but then you found you couldn’t trust her,’ she encouraged. ‘You don’t forget something like that.’

‘Would you like some more wine?’ he asked politely.

So he wasn’t ready to tell her the things she yearned to know, about the catastrophe that had smashed his life. She let it go, knowing that hurrying him would be fatal.

‘So your grandfather taught you Greek,’ he said, clearly determined to change the subject.

‘Inside me, I feel as much Greek as English. He made sure of that.’

‘That’s how you knew about Achilles? I thought you’d been learning about him at school.’

‘Much more than that. I read about him in Homer’s Iliad, how he was a hero of the Trojan war. I thought that story was so romantic. There was Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and all those men fighting over her. She’s married to Menelaus but she falls in love with Paris, who takes her to Troy. But Menelaus won’t give up and the Greek troops besiege Troy for ten years, trying to get her back.

‘And there were all those handsome Greek heroes, especially Achilles,’ she went on, giving him a cheeky smile. ‘What made your mother admire Achilles rather than any of the others?’

‘She came from Corfu where, as you probably know, his influence is very strong. Her own mother used to take her to the Achilleion Palace, although that was chiefly because she was fascinated by Sisi.’

Petra nodded. ‘Sisi’ had been Elizabeth of Bavaria, a romantic heroine of the nineteenth century, and reputedly the loveliest woman of her day. Her beauty had caused Franz Joseph, the young Emperor of Austria, to fall madly in love with her and sweep her into marriage when she was only sixteen.

But the marriage had faltered. For years she’d roamed the world, isolated, wandering from place to place, until she’d bought a palace on the island of Corfu.

The greatest tragedy of her life was the death of her son Rudolph, at Mayerling, in an apparent suicide pact with his mistress. A year later Sisi had begun to transform the Palace into a tribute to Achilles, but soon she too was dead, at the hands of an assassin. The Palace had subsequently been sold and turned into a museum, dedicated to honouring Achilles.

‘The bravest and the most handsome of them all, yet hiding a secret weakness,’ Petra mused.

She was referring to the legend of Achilles’ mother, who’d sought to protect her baby son by dipping him in the River Styx, that ran between earth and the underworld. Where the waters of the Styx touched they were held to make a man immortal. But she’d held him by the heel, leaving him mortal in the one place where the waters had not touched him. Down the centuries that story resonated so that the term ‘Achilles heel’ still meant the place where a strong person was unexpectedly vulnerable.

Of all the statues in the Achilleon, the most notable was the one showing him on the ground, vainly trying to pull the arrow from his heel as his life ebbed away.

‘In the end it was the thing that killed him,’ Lysandros said. ‘His weakness wasn’t so well-hidden after all. His assassin knew exactly where to aim an arrow, and to cover the tip with poison so that it would be fatal.’

‘Nobody is as safe as they believe they are,’ she mused.

‘My father’s motto was-never let anyone know what you’re thinking. That’s the real weakness.’

‘But that’s not true,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you’re stronger because other people understand you.’