Aphrodite's Tears

by Hannah Fielding

  Oriel could feel undercurrents of tension vibrating in the air. Damian had the look of a nervous racehorse as his cousin’s bright and suspicious gaze fastened upon him.

  ‘Helena,’ he warned, his tone charged with irritation. ‘It’s getting late, we can discuss this in the morning.’

  It was Oriel’s turn to interrupt. Cousin or not, this woman was taking liberties. ‘I can assure you, Kyria, that I am perfectly capable of holding down this job. I have worked on considerably more taxing sites in Norway and Ireland. While fascinating, this project doesn’t seem too difficult.’

  Helena’s large grey eyes flickered from Oriel to Damian and flashed like diamonds – it was clear that she was furious. Though there was an arrogant disdain in her whole poise, her voice was cool as she stated: ‘I don’t suppose that Despinis Anderson knows that the site is near a wall of reef that is known to be frequented by sharks.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Helena! Sharks are very rare in the Mediterranean, as you well know,’ Damian answered, clenching his jaw.

  A sneer crossed Helena’s beautiful face, distorting her features into an almost ugly mask as she glared back at him. ‘Danger is everywhere, haven’t you learnt that by now?’

  ‘Really, Helena,’ Damian muttered, ‘let’s not have a scene, shall we?’ Something in his tone had changed, stiffened even – or so it sounded to Oriel – although there was a fleeting shade of sad resignation at his cousin’s seemingly nonsensical remark. Then, having delivered her parting shot, the beautiful Greek goddess turned her wheelchair round, leaving Oriel staring after her in bewilderment as Helena swept back through the terrace doors, the creaking murmur of the wheelchair fading as she disappeared. Was every inhabitant of Helios so keen to encourage Oriel to leave?

  The ocean whispered and a night bird called from the cliffs. Damian shook his head and sighed. ‘I must apologize for my cousin’s behaviour, she likes to shock.’

  ‘I think it might be a trait that runs in your family.’

  He quirked a jagged, distorted eyebrow, a touch of humour returning to his expression. ‘Ah yes, I forgot that you think so highly of me.’ His teeth glinted in a smile. ‘Come, I think you’ve had enough excitement for one night, eh?’

  They went back inside and walked through the salόni to the bedroom next door. Like all the other rooms in the house, this one was huge – a study in beauty and luxury. An iridescent eight-light opaline chandelier hung delicately from a lofty ceiling, on which a mural showed sketches of birds flying in a pale-blue sky. The walls were panel paintings with vignettes of seashells against a backdrop of sugared whiteness to represent a sandy beach, or fish swimming in a turquoise sea. As in the salόni, the curtains were of pale, airy voile, softening the vastness of the space.

  The room was furnished with turn-of-the century furniture: a pedestal table and a couple of curvy Thonet chairs, plus a rocking chair. Oriel was pleased to see that there was a small escritoire where she could write her letters or read her notes. Facing the tall windows, a high-beamed recess with a stone platform had been created to accommodate an old brass four-poster bed, from where you could gaze out at the Ionian Sea and the surrounding landscape. Instinctively, Oriel moved further into the room towards the window, and only then did she notice the golden cage hanging from a beam in the far corner. Inside, a canary suddenly chirped and fluttered nervously as she approached.

  Oriel gasped and froze for a second. Ever since childhood, when she had seen a bald eagle snatch a goat, its talons ripping into the kid’s back while it bleated a desperate call, she had been wary of birds of any kind. It hadn’t helped that her nanny used the event as a warped cautionary tale: ‘The eagle will snatch you up if you don’t do it now …’. And now, anything about birds – their fluttering wings, gleaming eyes, hard beaks and ugly, curved claws – filled her with dread.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ Damian asked.

  ‘Everything is so beautiful, it takes my breath away!’ An innocent white lie, she thought, to save her pride. She wasn’t going to admit her fears to him. It was just a canary, she’d get a grip on herself and live with this little creature if she had to.

  To distract herself, Oriel crossed quickly to the adjoining dressing room. It had a huge walk-in cupboard with mirrored doors which, when opened, revealed all her clothes neatly put away and her cases stored overhead. Behind her, in a corner alcove, she spied a bentwood vanity table with a small matching chair, positioned to benefit from the sunlight.

  Next door, the bathroom was beautiful in its minimalistic simplicity: just pink iridescent marble with mosaics adorning the floor and walls. A sunken bathtub set in the middle took up most of the area, leaving enough space for a separate shower. The only adornment was a plaster cast of a goddess’s head, hidden in a shallow niche.

  Damian was leaning against the doorframe with folded arms, awaiting her verdict. His slate eyes danced under dark brows. ‘You like the apartment?’

  ‘Like’ was hardly the word, Oriel thought: awe-inspiring was a more appropriate description of its effect on her at this moment. ‘It’s magnificent, like the rest of your house.’

  Damian moved closer and placed his wide hand on her shoulder. ‘So you’ll stay?’ His eyes were bright with expectation and there was a subtle quirk to his lips. ‘After all, from your comments to my cousin, you seem to have made up your mind. Am I right?’

  Oriel knew it was useless to deny: she didn’t want to leave. True, this job was too good an opportunity to pass up and she was competitive enough to want to prove her worth; also, there was Damian himself. The effect he had on her was intoxicating.

  She nodded. ‘If it’s not working after two weeks, though, I reserve the right to hand in my notice.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Damian’s mouth widened into a heart-stopping smile that made Oriel give in to a quiver of excitement in the pit of her stomach. His eyes then glinted wickedly. ‘Two weeks … A lot can happen in that time. You said it yourself, tomorrow will be a new beginning, eh?’

  Oriel could read his intention in those eyes. He wanted to prove how weak she was, how firmly caught by his masculine power over her. And he was right: if he touched her, she would be lost. She was overwhelmed by his aura of sensual virility. God! If he could see inside her right now, he’d realize that her heart was hammering like a pounding machine, her blood near to vaporizing with the heat of her desire.

  She moved past him quickly and went back into the salóni.

  ‘Oh good, my diving gear has arrived too.’ Oriel went over to a round table under which sat a large canvas holdall. She crouched down to unzip it quickly, satisfying herself that everything was there, and rose to find Damian standing next to her.

  ‘And here, Hassan has left you something in case you get hungry. You should try one of these,’ he told her as he took a sweetmeat from the plate on the table. He unwrapped the paper foil around it and held out his hand. ‘Medjool dáctulos, what some on the island call mikrés fantasiόseis, small fantasies. Have you ever had one?’

  Now why did she feel this was a loaded question? She shook her head.

  ‘Dates dipped in rich milk chocolate are a powerful aphrodisiac, given to young brides on their wedding night to arouse and intensify their sexual desire.’ Damian moved nearer to her, almost closing the gap between them. ‘Here, take a bite,’ he said, his voice suddenly low, his eyes turning into piercing beams of intensity.

  Oriel’s pulse was racing at an extraordinary pace, and she was dimly conscious of an overpowering contrast: her female vulnerability against iron-hard male muscle. She knew this was foolhardy; still, staring into his cruelly scarred face and feeling the warmth that emanated from him, her resistance weakened. As she opened her mouth, he placed the cylindrical fruit between her parted lips, grazing them with his fingertips. She bit off a piece and he put the remainder in his own mouth, savouring it slowly, his gaze never faltering, caressing each one of her features.

  Kiss me, Damian, she willed him silently, althou
gh another voice, the voice of reason, told her she might regret it. An electric current shivered through her. She could feel his inner tension. He was a coiled spring: motionless but ready to quiver into life at the faintest touch. She sensed the power of those eyes, boring into her, flooding her veins with tingling heat. Her skin burned where his fingers had touched her mouth.

  Oriel breathed an unsteady sigh, aware of that familiar dampness between her thighs. The peaks of her breasts were so taut she could feel them pushing against the fine material of her dress. Her heart was beating quickly, half with the fear of where this moment was leading, and half with panic that he would sense her acute reaction to his physical closeness.

  Damian gave her a dazzling white smile. ‘Good, eh?’

  ‘Yes, it’s good.’ Her voice was inadvertently husky. She had to fight the urge to fling her arms around his neck once again, to give herself up to that delicious, treacherous sweetness and let tomorrow take care of itself.

  Damian lifted his hand and smoothed a wisp of hair away from Oriel’s cheek then took a deep breath, seeming to gather himself in some way. He stepped away from her and helped himself to another date, which he placed in his pocket. Oriel stared at him nonplussed as she felt a stabbing thrust in her breast. Having toyed with her emotions and her senses, he was now letting her go. The warm quivering in the pit of her stomach had spread over her body and she tightened all her muscles in an effort to deny it, to stop herself from betraying her disappointment.

  ‘It’s late, I should be going. You need your sleep.’ His voice was neutral now and that wide, sensual mouth seemed to firm in resolution. ‘Goodnight, Despinis Anderson. We shall speak at nine-thirty tomorrow morning.’

  Oriel watched Damian’s tall lithe frame move towards the door, while curiosity and desire still skittered through her blood. There was a rigid finality in the stiffness of his back. Perhaps he regretted his impulsive action of kissing her earlier on the terrace, after promising to be a gentleman, and now thought she would leave if he tried it again? Yet she felt weak at the thought of how much she wanted him.

  As he was closing the door, Oriel was almost tempted to call him back. But to what end? she thought. This wasn’t a man you could tangle with and come away unscathed – he had made love to her once, six years ago, and had taught her more about pleasure in a few hours than most women experience in a lifetime; and she had realized tonight that she had never recovered from that one night in paradise.

  This man had the power to hurt her. Oriel knew she should feel relieved that he had left her alone just now. Remaining on the island was one thing, but entering into an affair with Damian Lekkas was out of the question. The job she’d been offered was a dream come true, the reason why she’d gone through so many years of studying – an opportunity of a lifetime. She would not throw it away just because she couldn’t keep a grip on her hormones.

  Oriel’s eyes scanned the room. There was nothing but comfort, spaciousness and beauty around her, yet beneath it all there remained that sinister, intangible atmosphere: the same feeling that had hit her as soon as she had arrived on the island, and to which she could give no name. Maybe it was the quietness after the bustle of London, or perhaps merely the odds-and-ends of words, sentences and hints dropped by Yorgos Christodoulou and Irini, the maid, and of course there was the obvious animosity of Damian’s cousin … but probably, she decided, all these misgivings were just a reaction to tiredness.

  Still, as Oriel moved to one of the windows, a shiver ran through her from head to toe, partly fearful but shot with excited anticipation. She gazed out into the night, made luminous by the moon. The velvet warmth, the exotic scents, the shape of the far-off mountain, a shadow just discernible against the sky. Despite herself, she was gripped again by the enchantment of Helios: this alien, mysterious island to where she had been spirited by fate, like a figure on a chessboard. Was it really destiny? Damian seemed to think so. Perhaps he was right. The compelling feeling she had was that, in a certain sense, this was a journey she had to make. Even if this job hadn’t been there, she would have had to come here … which was absurd, of course.

  Moira, Damian had said, the hidden forces that are at work behind the scenes, arranging our lives ahead of our own decisions. Could it be that her fate, whatever it might prove, lay here on Helios?

  Am I going to love it or hate it? Oriel didn’t know. She only knew that she stood ready and waiting for what lay in store.

  Before preparing for bed, she thoroughly checked each item of her diving gear. It was unlikely that they would be diving immediately the next day but she wanted to be prepared for anything.

  * * *

  On the half-lit terrace, the dogs paced and sniffed around Damian’s heels as he tried to examine Heracles’ paw one last time. He patted their sides and straightened up. The hounds were restless, as was he. They must have picked up on his mood tonight, he thought.

  He left them lying in their usual spot at the side of the house and strode back along the terrace to his apartment, slamming the door behind him. His head was full of Oriel and his body was frustrated beyond belief.

  As Damian had walked across Oriel’s room to leave, he’d felt her fiery green eyes dwell on him and he had been tempted to look back. But that would have been fatal. He wouldn’t have been able to control his libido and he knew that if he set his mind to it, he would be able to destroy all the misgivings that kept her from him. He could have walked back into the room and told her there and then why he had disappeared that night, tasted those soft rosy lips, and she would surely have given in to the desire that he’d seen glowing in her eyes. But when Oriel came to him – if she came to him – it must be of her own free will, not because he had seduced her.

  He pulled off his clothes and walked into the bathroom. As he went in, the tall mirror showed a reflection that, since his accident, never ceased to shock him. Still, he refused to turn away from the unsightly image that stared back at him; it was part of him now and somehow he was proud of it, proud of how he had acquired it. Tonight was different: he was viewing it through Oriel’s candid gaze. He shuddered as he took in the damage the shark had done and swore quietly.

  The incident was still live in his mind and he often relived the nightmare, as he did now. The piercing pain as the cruel jaws sunk into the flesh of his chest, almost tearing a chunk out of it; the sickening lurch in his stomach when he’d become aware that the water around him was stained with ugly rust-like streaks of blood. At first, his panic had surpassed the pain of his lacerated body. His lungs were tight and dry and hot, and he could only hear the splash of the water as he churned it, the clamour of his heart and the thudding beat of blood in his head. The water had become a live thing, the sea and the shark one great amalgamated beast holding him back, and when finally he’d killed it, his body had jerked but the impulsive instinct for survival had carried him on towards the coral reef and his cheek ripped against its razor-sharp edge as he slumped, exhausted, hearing shouts from the boat and feeling arms coming up around him as he lost consciousness.

  It had taken three operations to perform the small miracle of repairing his savaged torso; the shark’s vicious teeth had ripped the skin off Damian’s chest, including a nipple and a part of his stomach. The gory wound had run deep, very close to the heart, and despite the ability to minimize the mutilation, the surgeons had not been able to reconstruct the nipple. Damian was left with a scar in the form of a cross that went down from the middle of his abdomen to his groin.

  How had Oriel felt when she’d seen his face? Surely any woman would be repelled by his disfigurement, even if they didn’t show it. There had been a flash of something in her eyes when he’d stepped out of the moonlight and had appeared to her with his scarred face, but she hadn’t shrunk from him in distaste as Cassandra had, and he’d read no pity in her eyes – he was an expert at detecting that sort of compassionate response. It made him flinch inwardly even more than he did when he sensed repulsion. But how might s
he feel if she saw the rest of him?

  Damian showered but, before turning out the light, he went to his cupboard and took out a yellow-and-orange silk scarf he had jealously stowed away. The fragrance Oriel wore, mixed with the scent of her own skin, made him dizzy; it always had and he had never forgotten it. She still smelled the same, and it made his senses run wild. After that night in Aegina, when he left her sleeping at dawn, he’d taken her scarf – a token of the woman who had shown him a paradise he’d never dreamt existed. Since then, he had searched for Oriel in every woman he had met, and in each woman he’d bedded, but he had never found in them the blend of innocence and carnal instinct that she embodied in her lovemaking: a mesmerizing quality that had excited and confounded him in equal measure.

  He pressed the cherished scarf to his lips and breathed in its scent, faint but still detectable. The sexual response in his body was instant. He shouldn’t be doing this, he knew, it would only lead to fresh tortured urges. He knew he would dream of her tonight and would find release in her arms as he had so many times before.

  Damian turned off the light and threw himself on the bed, physically and mentally exhausted. Through the huge window that ran from wall to wall, the night sky showed stars but mostly the moon – a moon as bright as it had been on Aegina.

  Memories flooded back of that night of madness, as he knew they would: those shadows that walked beside him, mocking shadows of the past. He had been travelling for so many months on his own, before returning home to Helios and to a life of responsibility. The island of Aegina was where he had sailed to spend a few hours before moving on the next morning to Athens; and there she was, looking like the water nymph, Undine, sitting on a rock with the sea at her feet, her ashen silk hair shining under the silver light like spun moonbeams. Her smile had revealed a deep dent at the left side of her soft, pink mouth that made him lose his senses. She was lovely and desirable, a warm-blooded, intoxicating woman, full of fire and passion. Almost like wine she had gone to his head at first glance and, like wine, he had become drunk on her.