Island Of The Dawn. PENNY JORDAN

‘I expect he’s gone into breakfast without me. I’ll go and look for him.’

      To her surprise the boy frowned, shaking his head from side to side vehemently, which she already knew in Greece signified a negative response.

      ‘The kyrios has left,’ he informed an astounded Chloe. ‘He went this morning. I have here his key.’ As though challenging her to disbelieve him he produced a key from the cubbyholes behind him. It was Derek’s, but Chloe felt sure the boy must have made a mistake. Derek had probably just gone out for a walk as she had done herself.

      ‘He can’t have left,’ she insisted calmly. ‘We only arrived yesterday. Perhaps you misunderstood.’

      ‘No misunderstand,’ the boy insisted stubbornly. ‘He come down this morning early and ask for the documents he place in safe keeping. I give them to him and he asks what time the boat goes to Piraeus. I tell him, and he say to have his bags collected from his room.’

      A cold, sinking feeling had taken possession of Chloe’s stomach. Surely Derek would never go to such lengths simply because of their quarrel? He was not like that. Or was he? Did she really know him at all? A man who coolly expected a girl to sleep with him simply because they were on holiday together—and Chloe had paid for her own holiday—and then spent the entire evening sulking because she refused. But to forfeit his own holiday….

      Stop panicking, Chloe told herself. There was a simple explanation for all of this. There had to be. Derek simply could not leave—for one thing, her passport had been in that envelope in safe keeping, and her travellers’ cheques. She started to shake as the consequences of Derek’s actions began to reach her. The young Greek boy, alarmed by her pale face and bemused expression, retreated to an office off the reception and returned accompanied by a plump middle-aged man.

      ‘Kyria, I am the manager. Stephanos tells me that you are concerned that your friend has left….’

      ‘You mean that he has left?’ Chloe demanded, only half aware that she was being dexterously escorted through the busy foyer to a small private room, luxuriously furnished as an office with cool floor tiles and heavy masculine furniture. For some reason the office filled her with a sense of atavistic dread, but she pushed the sensation aside. She must get to the bottom of Derek’s outrageous behaviour.

      ‘I regret that this is so,’ the manager told her, eyeing her curiously. ‘Please sit down, kyria. Would you like something to drink? Our sun can have ill effects on those not used to it. Have you had breakfast?’

      ‘Did he leave anything for me? A package? A note?’ Chloe asked, without any real hope of an affirmative answer. She knew already by some extra sense that Derek, in the same mood of spiteful bitterness which had prompted him to leave, had taken with him her passport and travellers’ cheques.

      ‘If you will excuse me I shall check,’ the manager said formally.

      He was gone just long enough for Chloe to study her surroundings a little more closely. They were both elegant and expensive, and there was no reason for her to experience this fear that in some way they threatened her, and yet she did.

      She knew the moment the manager opened the door that Derek had left her nothing, and the full enormity of her situation dawned. She had no money to speak of, and far more important, no passport. Oh why, oh why had she so blithely agreed to Derek’s suggestion that they simply share the envelope to be placed in safe keeping? Why had she allowed him to persuade her into handing over her passport at all? Why hadn’t she kept it? Because she had simply not thought. Derek had suggested that placing it in safe keeping was the sensible thing to do, and she had agreed.

      She glanced down at her hands folded loosely together, right over left, the fingers of her right hand holding her ring finger. It was a defensive pose she remembered well from those first bleak months when the pain in her heart was as raw as the tender skin where her wedding ring had once been. Now the defensive movement was a symbolic one only, for there was no band of pale skin to betray the fact that she had once worn a man’s ring on that finger. A band of gold linking together two hearts and two bodies, or so she had romantically thought on the day it was placed there. She should have learned her lesson then. No man was to be trusted. Not a single, solitary one. Well, she was well served by her own stupidity now—trapped on a tiny Greek island with something like ten pounds in her bag and no passport. What did one do in such circumstances? Vague thoughts of approaching the British Consul flitted through her mind, only to be instantly dismissed as she acknowledged that somewhere as tiny as Thos which didn’t even run to a tourist information office was hardly likely to possess anything as grand as a British Consul. It wasn’t even as though she were on the type of package holiday where one could appeal to the representative of the tour operators; Thos and the hotel were too small for that kind of thing. What on earth was she to do?

      The first and most sensible course of action seemed to be to confide in the manager, which Chloe did, skirting lightly round the reason for Derek’s sudden departure with her passport and travellers’ cheques, but she suspected from the sudden gleam in his eyes that he knew there was more to the story than she was telling him.

      ‘The kyrios was not affianced to you?’ he asked smoothly when Chloe had finished. ‘There was no….’

      ‘He was a friend—nothing more,’ Chloe retorted more sharply than she had intended. ‘And a very poor friend, as it now turns out!’

      ‘A bad friend is more dangerous than a thousand enemies,’ the hotel manager remarked sapiently. ‘Although it might be possible for you to leave Thos without your passport the authorities in Athens would not let you leave the country. I shall speak to my head office in Athens, to see what is to be done, and meanwhile I suggest you fill in a form I will give you—for the authorities, you understand.’

      The form was long and detailed and the manager explained that it was one normally used if tourists lost any item of luggage or other personal belongings. The amount of detail seemed incredible to Chloe, but knowing how sensitive Greeks could be to criticism she refrained from saying anything, hesitating only when it come to ‘Married Status’ before writing quickly with a grimace of distaste ‘Separated’ and then hurriedly folding the paper.

      When he returned the manager suggested that she might care to go and have a belated breakfast, but Chloe had no appetite for food. Instead she returned to the beach, avoiding the convivial crowds already gathering round the huge, Olympic-sized swimming pool.

      Only when she had reached the far end of the curving bay, almost out of sight of the hotel, did she stop, sitting with her knees drawn up under her chin as she stared out to sea, memories which had been pursuing her for two years suddenly breaking past the barriers she had erected against them to come flooding into her mind with their bitter legacy of pain and anguish. She should never have come back to Greece, she acknowledged. It acted as too powerful a stimulant on her mind. True, Thos was not Rhodes, and Derek not Leon, but when Derek had tried to kiss her last night, forcing the unpleasant moistness of his mouth on hers, it had triggered off the memories, especially of that last awful quarrel when Leon had practically tried to rape her and then accused her…. She shivered suddenly despite the heat of the sun.

      She had been twenty when she had met Leon Stephanides, and a very young twenty at that. Although she had been working in Paris for three years as a model, her life had been almost as cloistered as that of a young novice. She lived with a family known to her employer—a family who guarded her as strictly as they might have done one of their own daughters—and after the exhaustion of a ten-hour day of modelling she had wanted to do nothing more in the evening that simply kick off her shoes and relax. Until Leon came into her life. Everything had changed then. She had responded to him like a tender young plant to the sun, expanding and unfurling in the warmth of his presence. How fatally easy she had made it all for him!

      She had been delirious with joy when he proposed to her. Her parents had flown to Paris for the wedding—a huge affair, for Leon was the head of a Greek shipping empire. Her mother had suggested then that they might be rushing things, but Chloe had pushed her gentle warning aside. She loved Leon and he loved her. What a gullible