Deadly Rivals

‘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 autumn.

Ann Faulton was fully recovered, although her accident and the months of pain that followed it had aged her. She looked ten years older than she had, and she could no longer manage her job as a sports mistress. She retired, but she too hated having nothing to do, so after a few months she decided to open a sports shop in the Lake District.

Olivia had chosen a college two hours away from home so that she could visit her mother quite often. During her first year there, she lived on the campus, in a narrow little room as bare as a monk’s cell, made a lot of new friends and learnt to live on very little, worked hard and went to a lot of parties.

She spent a fortnight with her father that summer in his elegant Monaco apartment with a view of the palace gardens, dark with cypress and brilliant with bougainvillaea. Gerald Faulton never mentioned either of the Agathios brothers, so eventually Olivia very casually asked over breakfast one day, ‘Are you still on the board of Max Agathios’s company?’

‘Yes, why?’ he asked, as if she might be an industrial spy, and she shrugged, still trying to look and sound totally offhand.

‘You always say you want me to be interested in your business affairs. I read in the newspapers that you had joined the board of Agathios Kera, that’s all…’ She paused, then asked, ‘Why Kera, by the way? What does that mean?’

‘Leon Kera is a sleeping partner who put up some of the money for the company—he’s a financier,’ her father said flatly. ‘The rumour is that Max Agathios is going to marry his daughter, which will keep the company in the family.’

Olivia’s skin turned cold. ‘Oh?’ She took a painful breath. ‘What’s her name?’ She had to know; she needed to know to believe it, to accept that Max was out of reach for her, that it was time to forget him.

‘Daphne,’ her father clipped out. ‘She’s Greek, a beautiful girl, typical Greek colouring—black hair, olive skin, dark eyes. She’s clever too, a good head on her shoulders. She works with Max. I usually see her at board meetings, sitting beside him. More coffee?’

She shook her head, too stunned to speak, and her father got up from the table, putting his newspaper under his arm.

‘Well, I have work to do,’ he said, walking away without looking at her, to her relief, because she hated to think he might read her expression and guess at her feelings.

The last remnants of her dream had just died. She hadn’t admitted it to herself, but she did now; for the past year she had gone on hoping that one day she would meet Max again and…

She broke off, biting down on her lower lip angrily. How stupid! She met a man once, spent a day with him, got kissed, and that was that. Why had she made such a big thing of it? He had probably forgotten her within a week.

Well, there were plenty of attractive guys around at her college. She had been keeping them all at a distance, turning down dates, refusing to get involved—but not any more. When she got back to college, she was going to have fun and forget Max Agathios.

* * *

The following two years were busy and enjoyable ones for Olivia. She did well in her course, and managed to get a good final result, and she was the centre of a lively social circle at her college. She went out with some of the best-looking men, but didn’t fall in love with any of them, although several claimed they had fallen in love with her.

One guy asked her to live with him; another asked her to marry him. She turned them both down. Kindly. But firmly.

From time to time she read about Max in the newspapers. His company seemed to be growing rapidly—he was now running a cruise line around the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. She saw advertisements for his cruises all the time. He still seemed to run ferries in the Aegean, and had ships carrying freight from island to island there too, she gathered, but cruise ships were now the major part of his business.

From the sound of it, Max’s company was now bigger than his brother’s, or her father’s. How did they like that? she wondered. They were both so competitive, and neither of them had much love for Max. It must be burning them up to see him forging ahead like this!

The summer of the year she left college she was invited to America for the whole summer by a guy she had been dating for months, but who was now returning for good to his Florida home after a year spent working in Britain.

His family had a beach house on the Keys in Florida; Gerry talked lovingly about brown pelicans and giant sea turtles, conch chowder and Key lime pie, mangrove swamps and glass-bottomed boats.

‘I want you to meet my folks,’ he said. ‘And they’re dying to meet you, they’ve heard so much about you. Oh, come on, Loll—if you don’t visit with us this year we may never see each other again!’

Her mother persuaded her to join her father though. After all, she pointed out, it was the only time they saw each other during a year.

‘OK, he isn’t a loving father, but by his own rather weird standards he’s always tried to act like a father, kept in touch, remembered your birthday and so on. I think you should go.’ Ann Faulton gave her a wry look. ‘And from what you’ve told me about this Gerry, he’s getting far too serious about you, but you’re not that way about him. If you spend the summer with him and his family he’ll be entitled to think you like him more than you do, Olivia.’

It was true, and, not for the first time, Olivia took her mother’s advice, told Gerry she was sorry but she couldn’t come to Florida, and went to Monaco instead.

The year since she last saw him showed her that her father was beginning to show his age. Gerald Faulton was now in his mid-fifties, and his hair was entirely silver, his skin lined from years of sun-worshipping. His regimen of diet and exercise had kept time at bay for a long time, and he was still very slim and upright, but Olivia felt a real pang of sadness as she realised that he was beginning to lose the battle. His neck was wrinkling, his jawline was no longer taut and firm, his eyes were set deeper in his tanned skin and he no longer moved with the same spring in his step.

His nature hadn’t softened with time either; he was as remote and cold of heart as ever. Within a couple of days, Olivia was wondering why on earth she had taken her mother’s advice and come. Why did her father go on inviting her when they had nothing in common, nothing to talk about, and there wasn’t a shred of warmth or affection between them?