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confidence, but he changed the subject almost abruptly, enquiring about old friends in Limassol and Nicosia until the meal was at an end.
    Half impatiently Anna pushed back her chair.
    ‘The flowers will be in,’ she explained. ‘I have to arrange them while I have a moment to spare and my mother should rest for an hour.’
    It was dismissal and he seemed to accept it.
    'I'll see you again,' he promised, holding her mother’s Hands. I'm here for a week or two at the moment and I’m practically on your doorstep.’
    ‘Where are you staying?' Dorothy asked eagerly.
    For a fraction of a second he hesitated as he looked in Anna's direction. ‘At the Crescent Beach,' he said. ‘I find it very comfortable.’
    It was the hotel next door. The four-star hotel next door!
    Anna walked across the hall like someone in a dream seeing her mother into the lift.
    ‘Do you still play tennis?’ Andreas asked. ‘When you have time, that is.’
    ‘Not too often.’ She crossed to where the flowers had been delivered to Reception. ‘I must see to these right away.'
    'I thought you might use the Crescent courts,’ he suggested. They are excellent.’
    'And new and expensive,' she retorted. You'll enjoy playing there.'
    ‘I would need a partner,’ he said. ‘That’s why I asked.’
    'I am not on holiday,’ she reminded him, picking up the flowers she had yet to arrange.
    ‘Neither am I, but I expect to have some leisure time ’
    She turned as she reached the office. ‘Does that mean you are here on business?’ She hadn’t meant to be inquisitive or even faintly interested. 'Of course, it’s no affair of mine.'
    'It could be,’ he said enigmatically, ‘if you were prepared to listen to me, but you are not. Not at the present moment, anyway.’
    And not ever, she thought defiantly. ‘I must go,’ she declared. ‘I am wasting time.’
    He put a hand out to stop her. 'Think about it,. Anna,’ he said.
    ‘About playing tennis at the Crescent Beach?’
    'About listening to what I have to say.’
    'Why should I?’ She met his eyes over the sheaf of flowers, her cheeks as pink as the flush on the magnolia blossoms she held in her arms. ‘I don’t need advice, Andreas—especially from you.’
    She saw his jaw tighten, knowing that she had stung him to anger.
    ‘I think you’ll ask for it one day, all the same,’ he told her on his way to the door.
     

CHAPTER TWO
    It was three days before she saw him again. She was cutting mimosa from the garden trees when he came along the beach from the Crescent Hotel, dressed informally this time in light trousers and an open-necked shirt. It was very hot, and even the wind which blew up with unfailing regularity each afternoon at that time of year had failed to disturb the silvery eucalyptus leaves above her head.
    ‘I’ve given you time to be less busy,’ he pointed out. ‘I want to talk to you.’
    ‘I can’t think what we have to discuss.’
    A spray of the mimosa she had gathered fell at his feet and he picked it up before he answered her. ‘Several things,’ he said.
    ‘If it’s tennis ’
    ‘No, it isn’t tennis.’ He fell into step beside her as she turned back towards the villa. ‘I’d like you to come to Paphos with me to look at a flat.’
    ‘Why me?’ She could hardly believe that he had made such a personal request. ‘Surely you are able to make that sort of decision for yourself.’
    ‘I need a second opinion—a woman’s opinion, if you like—and you know Paphos very well.’
    Her mind flew back to the times they had spent there as children and, later, when they were growing up, to the memory of a dawning awareness that they were, after all, not brother and sister but two impressionable adolescents responding unconsciously to their romantic surroundings on this magic island where legendary Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, had come up from the sea.
    ‘There must be someone else you can ask,’ she suggested.
    ‘Not at the moment.’ They