LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWO

      MONTHS later, Olivia discovered why Max Agathios had paid that sudden, unexpected visit to her father. One of her friends at school showed her a newspaper whose business pages carried a story about Max’s shipping company.

      ‘Your father sold this Greek guy some old ships, Loll, and now he’s been made a director of the Greek company, it says here. And just look at the photo of the Greek guy!’ Julie sighed noisily, gazing at the rather fuzzy picture of Max at the centre of the newsprint. ‘If you ever meet him, tell him I think he’s dead sexy.’

      Olivia took the paper and sat down on the grass beside the tennis court on which they would shortly be playing. Julie turned her attention to the game in progress.

      ‘Come on, you two! Speed it up! We’re booked in here in five minutes!’ she shouted at the girls playing, who yelled back rudely.

      Olivia was reading the story with intent concentration. Julie had given her the gist of it succinctly enough: Max had bought two freight ships and a car ferry from her father earlier this year, the story ran, and now her father had been appointed to the board of directors of Agathios Kera, the shipping line operated by Max.

      The story also told her something else—that Max and his brother Constantine had quite separate companies, and were in direct competition with each other, running ferries and freight ships between the Greek islands and mainland. The report claimed that both brothers had bid for Gerald Faulton’s ships, and that Constantine, the older brother, was furious at being outbid by his younger brother. So that explained her father’s phone call from Constantine! And Max’s odd smile when he heard about it.

      Olivia gazed at the picture of Max, her breathing quick. Julie was right. Even in the grey newsprint he looked sexy. Julie should see him in real life! Then her eye caught something she had missed in her first hurried reading of the story. Right there in the first sentence, immediately after Max’s name, they had his age in brackets. Twenty-nine. She had been close enough in her guesswork then. He wasn’t yet thirty.

      She was now two months short of her eighteenth birthday, which made her just eleven years younger. It wasn’t that big a gap, was it? she thought uncertainly, biting her lip.

      Julie came back and flung herself down beside Olivia on the grass, her white skirts flaring, showing long, tanned legs. ‘Are you going to stay at your father’s Greek villa again this year?’

      ‘I expect so,’ Olivia said, mentally crossing her fingers.

      Julie groaned. ‘You might meet this Greek guy—lucky you! Can I come too?’

      ‘Hands off,’ Olivia said. ‘He’s mine.’

      They both laughed, but secretly Olivia was serious. She felt sure she would see Max again that summer; it was a wild, irrational belief but a fixed one. She couldn’t wait to get to Corfu.

      A fortnight later she got a letter from her father telling her that he had sold his Corfu villa and was in the process of buying an apartment in Monaco. He suggested that this year they should stay at a hotel in the West Indies for their usual holiday together. She would probably find that more fun, he said; there would be plenty of young people of her own age around.

      ‘The West Indies!’ Julie said dreamily, reading the letter over Olivia’s shoulder. ‘I wish my dad would take me there, but he always goes back to Spain every year. As soon as I can afford to pay for my own holiday I am heading for the West Indies.’

      Olivia wasn’t really listening to her. She was staring at her father’s immaculate handwriting, her golden eyes fixed and over-bright. She was saying goodbye to a dream. She had been living all year long on the hope that next summer there would be a re-run of the day she had spent with Max, and that this time there would be no abrupt ending, this time they would spend the whole summer together.

      Now she knew it wasn’t going to happen. She even had the feeling that her father had sold his villa to make sure it never happened. He might do business with him, sit on Max’s board of directors, but she had picked up antagonism in him towards the younger man.

      Olivia didn’t know why her father felt that way, yet somehow she had felt it from the beginning. She had seen the coldness in his eyes whenever he looked at Max. Gerald Faulton did not like him. Why? she wondered, frowning. Was it just one of those indefinable dislikes, a mere clash of personalities?

      Or was it because Max was twenty years younger, and already running his own company, being very successful? Business was all her father had ever really cared about—she could easily believe that he would resent a younger man coming along and successfully building up a business which might one day out-perform Gerald Faulton’s company.

      Of course, she could be imagining all this! Her father might have forgotten all about the day she spent with Max. He might have sold his villa for personal reasons of his own. No doubt he was buying a place in Monaco because it was a tax haven, whereas Corfu wasn’t.

      None of that mattered. All she cared about was that she wouldn’t now be seeing Max.

      Julie gave her a sideways look, her face curious. ‘Why are you looking as if your pet rabbit just died? Don’t you want to go to the West Indies?’

      ‘Not much,’ Olivia said truthfully.

      In fact she didn’t go anyway, because her mother had an accident the day before Olivia was due to leave. Another car pulled out of a crossroads, crashing into the side of Ann Faulton’s car. When Olivia rushed to the hospital she found that her mother had serious injuries and would be kept in hospital for weeks, possibly months.

      Olivia cabled her father the news, adding that she would not now be joining him in the West Indies. He sent her mother flowers and wrote to Olivia saying she was quite right to stay with her mother, and as soon as he had moved into his apartment in Monaco she must come to stay with him there.

      Ann Faulton’s recovery was slow and painful, even after she left hospital. Instead of going to college that autumn, Olivia stayed at home to nurse her mother. It was another six months before Ann Faulton was well enough to resume a normal life.

      After that, Olivia took a part-time job working as a receptionist in the casualty department of the local hospital. Her mother didn’t need her so much any more and Olivia would have been bored doing nothing all day while she waited to start her course in public relations and media studies at college in the following

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