LITMIR.BIZ

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to believe he had given her a reprieve, but for how long? She couldn’t hope to hold him off for more than a night or two at the most.

      ‘What would you like to eat?’ he asked, handing her the menu.

      She looked down at the items without reading a single word. ‘I don’t know…I’m not very hungry at the moment; why don’t you choose?’

      He took the menu back from her and reached for the phone by the king-size bed. ‘Do you still like seafood?’ he asked as he pressed the room service number.

      ‘Yes…I love it…’ she answered, privately amazed that he’d remembered that about her. What else had he remembered?

      He put an order through and replaced the receiver. ‘What about a drink?’ he asked. ‘The mini-bar is well stocked. Surely one glass of wine won’t compromise your driving record?’

      But it might compromise my resistance, Charlotte reminded herself. ‘No, I’m really happy with soda or mineral water,’ she said. ‘I have to start early in the morning now that Julian is in hospital.’

      ‘How is your boss, Mr Deverell?’

      ‘He’s doing well,’ she said. ‘I called his wife this afternoon. He came through the angioplasty well but it will be a week or two before he’s ready to return to work.’

      ‘He spoke very highly of you,’ Damon said, pouring himself a glass of red wine. ‘In all of my correspondence with him over the last few months, he has been glowing in his praise.’

      Charlotte decided that silence was her best armour.

      He turned to look at her. ‘I found it hard to believe we were speaking about the same person.’

      ‘I told you before I haven’t changed, Damon.’

      ‘No, that is something I am very sure of,’ he said, his gaze hardening with bitterness. ‘You are still the same person you were when you came to Santorini.’

      ‘I did not steal those sculptures or indeed anything else from your mother.’

      ‘So you keep saying, but you were the only one who could have done so,’ he said. ‘If you remember, you were given on that day and the ones preceding it, the total responsibility of the gallery. My mother trusted you implicitly. You betrayed that trust.’

      ‘I don’t know how that sculpture came to be in my bag, but I swear to God I didn’t put it there. As for the other things found in my room at the hostel…’ she gnawed at her lip as the memory of that shocking time returned ‘…I wasn’t responsible.’

      ‘Are you forgetting the surveillance cameras we had placed strategically in the gallery?’ he asked. ‘You were caught on film putting something in your bag on the day in question.’

      She blew out a breath of frustration. She had told him all this before. Why wouldn’t he believe her?

      ‘I was putting my mobile phone away! My mother had texted me and I heard the phone beeping. I checked my messages but then a customer came into the gallery and I had to wait to put my phone back. That’s what you saw on your stupid cameras. Why don’t you run a check on the customer? Maybe they did it.’

      ‘The customer in question was a tourist from Scotland. I have already done the necessary checks. She is a grandmother from Fife who attends church every Sunday. She didn’t steal the statue, Charlotte.’

      Charlotte felt her shoulders drop in defeat. There was no way of proving her innocence. It hurt unbearably that he thought her capable of such a betrayal of trust. She had loved working at the gallery; some of the items were so exquisite it had made her feel so privileged to have been left with the responsibility of looking after them. The collection of ancient and modern works Damon’s father had gathered over a lifetime had been a wonderful opportunity for her to complete her study of Minoan artefacts. The thought of stealing any item from such an amazing collection was against everything she believed in. She had no idea how and why such precious items had turned up in her bag and in her room. As far as she knew, she’d made no enemies while staying on Santorini; even the two young men at the hostel, although playful and boisterous at times, were the last people she would have expected to show that level of malice. Everyone had been so friendly and welcoming, especially Damon’s mother, whom Charlotte had considered a friend virtually from the word go.

      ‘I don’t care what you think, Damon. I honoured your mother’s trust in me. I would never have betrayed her or you. I was there to do some research for my degree. When I met you in that restaurant that night in Imerovigli I had no idea who you were. At first I thought you were one of the archaeologists working on the Akrotiri site. You seemed to know so much about Minoan artefacts.’

      ‘Which is why you set about charming me, was it not?’ he asked. ‘You were on a mission. You had a goal in sight and nothing was going to stop you from achieving it. You were systematically removing items from the collection to sell on the black market. It has been done before and much money made out of it. All you had to do was get into my family’s good books and your task was made all the easier.’

      ‘I can’t make you believe anything other than you want to believe,’ she said. ‘I know you think I’m guilty, but the only thing I’m guilty of is trusting you too much. I thought we had a solid relationship. I thought that even though we had met and developed strong feelings for each other in a very short time it would be enough to withstand anything. I was wrong.’

      He gave her a disgusted look. ‘You were not in love with me. You pretended with the skill of an accomplished actor but I know now what wool you pulled over my eyes.’

      She looked at him in despair, her voice unable to rise above a distraught whisper. ‘You really hate me, don’t you, Damon?’

      His eyes burned into hers. ‘What else do you expect me to feel for you? Love?’

      ‘No…’ She lowered her gaze. ‘No, of course not…but hating me for something I didn’t do is so unjust.’

      ‘It might interest you to know that I was close to falling in love with you four years ago—the closest I had ever been with anyone before or since,’ he said. ‘I was even prepared to go against the tradition of my family, who had always married within the Greek community, and offer you marriage, but you showed your true colours just in time.’

      Charlotte had been well aware of the expectation that he would marry from within his own culture when the time was right. His mother had hinted at it gently from time to time, although she had seemed quite happy for him to indulge his passion with Charlotte and had even at times encouraged it. Alexandrine had told her that a man in his late twenties needed his freedom to prepare for the long road of commitment ahead. Her husband Nicolas had been several years older than her and had enjoyed his playboy lifestyle to the full, finally settling down into the role of devoted husband and father with great happiness and fulfilment until his untimely death when Damon had been a young teenager.

      Damon’s sister Eleni had been slightly less enthusiastic about Charlotte’s affair with her older brother, but to her credit she had still always remained friendly and polite. Charlotte had realised that Eleni was used to having her brother’s attention. Since their father’s death Damon had been a father figure for her as well as her brother. He clearly adored her and lavished her with attention whenever he could. However, once his affair with Charlotte became more intense, as his sister she’d had to take a back seat in his affections. But, as for her showing any sort of spite, Charlotte had never once seen or heard anything that would make her believe that Eleni was anything other than a lovely young woman who worshipped her older brother.

      It was hard to believe that the young girl was now dead. As soon as Charlotte had heard Damon had set up the Eleni Foundation in her memory she had been totally shocked. Eleni Latousakis had been so vibrant, so full of life. It didn’t seem possible that she was lying now in a cold grave.

      It was equally heartbreaking now to realise that Damon had been close to falling in love with her and had intended to ask her to marry

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