Page 2 of Vows of Revenge

So, this was Andrakis’s daughter. Well, anyone looking less like the kind of woman he usually consorted with he could not envisage—she was the very opposite of glamorous. But he made the necessary allowances. She’d been kneeling in the dirt, in the heat, so he could hardly be surprised at her flushed face, the smudge of dusty soil on one cheek, and the hair liberally sprinkled with dust too, working its way loose untidily from the tight knot clamped at the back of her head. As for what she was wearing...

Damos’s cataloguing was thorough—and ruthless.

A sweated-out shapeless tee in a singularly unlovely shade of mustard, and baggy cotton trousers with dirt on the knees in mud-brown. Feet stuck into worn trainers, also covered in dust and dried soil. Figure tall and gangly—impossible to tell more under those shapeless clothes, and quite probably that was just as well.

No. Kassia Andrakis, standing there, flushed and awkward, looking grubby and messy in her drab and dusty work clothes, with her shoulders stooped from kneeling, did not present an alluring image.

Can I really go through with this? Have an affair with this unlikely woman?

The question was in his head before he could stop it. Then his mouth tightened. His personal opinions of her as a female were irrelevant. She was a means to an end—that was all. And in pursuit of that end—which was lucrative and therefore a worthwhile one to him—he was prepared to put himself out.

As he was already doing.

He put a questioning expression on his face now. ‘Will you show us?’ he invited.

For a moment the woman he’d bestowed his smile upon did not move. She’d already frozen when she’d looked up from the shard cradled in her hands to see him standing there, beside the excavation’s director, and now he could see she looked like a rabbit caught in headlights. Just before it was turned into mush on the road...

Well, maybe that was a promising sign, at least. Not that it surprised him. Without vanity, life had taught him ever since his teens that women liked what they saw when they looked at him. Even before he’d made his money that had been so. Now, with money made, the problem was more to keep them at arm’s length. Though of course he enjoyed making his selection of those whose company he decided was most useful to him—and most pleasurable.

As ‘new money’—very new indeed—he knew it did him no harm to be seen with a well-known face on his arm, so he liked to select women already in the public eye, from actresses and TV personalities to models and socialites. All beautiful, all glamorous, all alluring. All of whom loved basking in the limelight and knew just how to do it. Women who knew, too, that being seen with him was good for them—their egos as well as their careers. No woman ever objected to an affair with him.

His eyes rested unreadably on this woman who—however unlike any of her predecessors she looked, and the very antithesis of glamour—was going to be next in that line. She would not object either—he would make sure of it. She would enjoy being his mistress.

But first he had to get her there...

She still had that rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights blank expression, and to it was now added a stain of hot colour across her already flushed cheeks that Damos knew had nothing to do with the baking heat of the day.

As if belatedly realising she could not just stand there and stare at him, she gave a start. ‘Er...’ she said, as if speaking coherently were utterly beyond her.

Her director came to her rescue. He peered forward at the grimy shard. ‘Let me see—a shoulder, definitely, and judging by the curve the original would have been at least twenty centimetres tall. Did you see the rest of it?’

Damos saw Kassia Andrakis’s eyes switch to her director, but it was as if it were an effort—as if there were weights on them.

‘Um... I think so—well, definitely more fragments. A bit of the pouring lip and some of one of the handles.’

Her voice was distracted, and that high colour was still in her cheeks.

It didn’t suit her.

Damos flicked his eyes away, back to what they were supposed to be looking at.

‘Is that some kind of decoration I can make out?’ he asked, as if he were interested.

‘Yes,’ enthused Dr Michaelis.

He started to wax lyrical about the kind of ceramic decoration prevalent at the time, and Damos listened politely until the director ran out of things to talk about.

Damos turned his attention back to Yorgos Andrakis’s daughter. ‘So, can you show me how you go about getting the rest of the pieces out? I take it you have to go carefully?’

He saw her swallow, clearly still ill at ease.

‘Um...’ she said, then glanced uncertainly at her director.

He took charge immediately. ‘I’ll get this piece photographed and listed,’ he said, deftly removing the shard from her hands. ‘You show our visitor how we work.’

He seemed keen that she should do so, and Damos knew why. He was a prospective sponsor—whatever he wanted would be immediately offered.

Damos saw the colour deepen in Kassia Andrakis’s face.

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