After the Honeymoon Read Online Free PDF Page B

apple, on different levels, leading up to the mountains above. Locals with gappy teeth and wrinkled leathery skins who grinned at strangers.
    But Rosie was under no illusions. It took at least two generations to be fully accepted here. Jack’s children might just make it, if they were lucky.
    Jack. Oh God. Rosie sat upright in bed, stark naked in the liberating knowledge that her bedroom was built in such a way that no one could see her through the window. Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea, after all, to leave him. Running her hands through her short curls, bleached over the years by the sun, she suddenly panicked now that the time had come. Was she mad to leave Jack for three whole days on his own in charge of the Villa Rosa?
    It wasn’t too late to change her mind.
    ‘I can do it, Mum,’ he had insisted when the subject had first been raised, weeks ago. ‘Don’t you trust me?’
    Yes, she did. Jack wasn’t like the fifteen-year-old boys you read about in the English newspapers. He was reliable. Solid. Practical. Older than he looked with a wise head on his young shoulders. Much taller than she was – which wasn’t difficult, given that she was barely five foot two. He’d had to grow up fast. They both had.
    But every now and then, her son made the odd slip-up, like that booking last year which he’d forgotten to write down. ‘It won’t happen again, Mum,’ he’d assured her. And it hadn’t. At least, as far as she knew.
    Now Rosie slipped into her pretty cotton rosebud dressing gown that her friend Gemma had sent her for Christmas (they were both suckers for Cath Kidston) and padded across the room to turn off the noisy air conditioning. She needed to keep an eye on the bills but a/c was an essential at night when it could get unbearably stuffy. Glancing in the mirror, with its bright blue driftwood frame decorated with shells, she tilted her head to one side, looking at what her old drama teacher had described as her ‘delicate elfin features and mischievous eyes’ which had earned her the role of Puck one year in the school play.
    Opening the shutters, she leaned on the window sill and gazed out across the water. It was a view that never failed to enthrall her. Today there was a large white liner on the horizon and, closer to the shore, a fishing boat returning with the morning catch. It looked like Greco’s, the
Siphalonian
, with its jaunty red and white bow and little cabin beneath.
    Rosie felt a small smile creeping across her face along with a tremor of misgiving as a tall, lean, tanned man with the hint of a beard, wearing shorts and nothing on top, leaped easily out onto the shore, hauling the boat in.
    It wasn’t Jack she needed to worry about. It was Greco, with his broad chest and mass of curly black hairs sweeping down to his navel.
    ‘You’re going to Athens?’ he had exclaimed when she’d casually mentioned that she needed to visit suppliers. Over the years, Rosie had learned to speak Greek fairly fluently, but Greco usually spoke to her in English. ‘It so happens I have some business there myself. I will go with you, yes?’ He’d laid a hand lightly on her arm, as he did to any woman under ninety. ‘A beautiful woman like you should not travel alone.’
    She had laughed him off, pointing out that she’d been independent for a very long time and was quite used to looking after herself, thank you. Anyway, she’d added with a slight edge suggesting she didn’t fully believe his story, what kind of business did he have out there himself?
    ‘You still think after all these years that I am just a fisherman?’ he had replied, his eyes twinkling. ‘I will surprise you, Rosie. Just you wait and see. Besides, it will be good to have some time alone together, will it not?’ His face grew serious. ‘Away from the island and all those prying eyes.’
    He had a point.
    What had got into her? Rosie asked herself, stepping into her shower and shuddering as the cold water spurted out,