She was already thinking of the little cove under the castle. She’d have a secluded beach with only herself and Nikos.

She glanced up from the document she was signing and saw Nikos watching her-and she blushed.

He grinned.

She blushed some more.

She was signing the last contract. The lawyers were starting to pack up documents, beaming, congratulating.

And then Nikos’s phone rang.

He listened and his face lost colour. She was at his side in an instant. ‘What…what…’

‘Mama’s just rung,’ he said. ‘The kids…Demos has the kids.’

He had her hand. He was running, tugging her behind him, down the castle steps to the limousine parked in front. The lawyers were abandoned, shocked to silence.


She drove while Nikos barked orders into his phone. Then he told her what had happened.

‘Mama used the time while she had the kids to cook dinner for a neighbour who’s ill. The kids were playing-they were happy and she thought it’d only take five minutes to pop the food next door, the children were in the garden and Joe was in the house. He’d taken his eyes off the children only for a moment. The first he knew of trouble was a scream from the cove below the house. By the time he got down there they were gone.’

Gone…

‘Is he sure it’s Demos?’ Athena asked in a voice she scarcely recognised as hers.

‘He saw him,’ he said, his voice catching. ‘He had both the children in the boat-the same boat that tried to hit you. I’ve just rung Alexandros on Sappheiros. He has a helicopter. I thought this was safe. I never dreamed…’ His voice broke.

She wanted to hold him. She had to keep driving, but it took every ounce of self-restraint not to pull over, take him in her arms and comfort him.

He was her man. She knew it. Whatever had happened in the past, Nikos was her man and she’d fight for him. As she’d fight for her child. Her children, she corrected herself. Her family.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ANNIA was standing in her kitchen, white-faced and tearful. They walked in, she stepped straight into Nikos’s arms and sobbed out her horror on his chest.

Then she tugged back from Nikos and hugged Athena. And then Joe came lumbering in, looking like a dog who’d been kicked. Before Thena knew it, Joe was a part of the hug.

Family.

Despite her terror, here was a glimmer of comfort. She let herself be hugged, she let herself be wept on and if she wept too, it didn’t matter.

The hugs were fast; there were too many imperatives to indulge in emotion, but it steadied her. For this moment she’d take comfort where she could find it.

There were more men entering the kitchen now, summoned by Joe-big men, determined, grave-faced. Not knowing what to do.

She held Nikos and Nikos held her. Who was holding who up? It didn’t matter. They were facing this as one.

But there was nothing to do. The consensus was that all their hope had to be in Alexandros and his helicopter. It was the only thing fast enough to locate a boat so powerful.

She was trying so hard to think. How to think when you were enmeshed in panic? She must.

‘What…what would Demos do with them?’ she managed, speaking to the room in general, and the unsayable had been said.

Annia gave one heartrending sob and ended up held again by Nikos.

But Athena wasn’t thinking like that. She met Nikos’s gaze over his mother’s head. She saw his terror, and inexplicably it steadied her.

She knew her cousin. He was a weak-willed man, greedy for riches. Desperate even. But he wasn’t completely stupid.

‘He wouldn’t hurt them,’ she said, and the words themselves steadied her, for she knew they were the truth. ‘Not deliberately. Yes, he tried to kill Nicky and me, but that was aimed at the two of us, staged to be an accident. Think of all he’d lose by hurting them now. He’s been seen. He knows that. If he’s known to have hurt them, he could never claim this Crown. Plus, this world doesn’t hold a hiding place deep and dark enough if he touches my Nicky.’ She shook her head, still puzzled. ‘And I don’t understand how he got them both onto his boat. Was there only him?’

‘Yes,’ Joe said. ‘He had them in the boat by the time I saw them.’

‘If he’d grabbed Christa, Nicky might have decided to stay with her,’ Nikos said doubtfully, following her train of thought. ‘Was it Nicky who screamed?’

‘It surely was,’ Joe said. ‘I heard him screaming from here, and by the time I reached the beach I could still hear him.’

‘If Demos came up here and grabbed them…why didn’t he scream here? You’d surely have heard if he had.’

Joe had no answers.

It made less and less sense. She knew her Nicky. ‘For Demos to creep in here and grab them without alerting you…And to get him into the boat…Was he holding him? Why didn’t he jump out?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe Demos tied him up. I couldn’t see.’

‘He’ll be trying to blackmail you into giving up the throne,’ Nikos said.

‘He must be.’ But she’d steadied. She’d heard enough now to be less panicked. ‘And if he is then he’ll contact us.’ She forced herself to say what they all knew they had to do. ‘We have to wait.’

But Nikos’s face was still strained to breaking.

‘Christa has a heart condition,’ he said numbly to the room in general, and she felt his wash of absolute fear. Her normally daredevil lover was jelly in the face of a threat to his daughter. ‘She’s on medication. She has to have it. If we don’t find her…’

‘He can’t have her,’ Annia said fiercely. ‘He’d never love her. Oh…’

‘It’s okay, Mama,’ Nikos said, hauling himself together again in the face of his mother’s terror. ‘Demos doesn’t want her and, like Thena said, he can’t afford to hurt them. We’ll find her.’

Oscar was at Thena’s feet. She knelt and hugged him while Nikos held his mother. ‘Why didn’t you bite him, Oscar?’ she whispered.

There was no answer.

Her terror had faded a little. This had to be an attempt at blackmail, she thought. But…in her confused mind she found room for more questions. What had Annia said? ‘He can’t have her. He’d never love her.’

Why would Demos want Christa? There were undercurrents here she didn’t understand.

She straightened and Nikos’s arm came round her waist and held. He was more afraid than she was, she thought.

How serious was Christa’s heart condition?

Now wasn’t the time to ask. Now it seemed all they could do was wait, and to wait seemed the hardest thing in the world.

‘I’ll make…I’ll make coffee,’ Annia said, but subsided into her handkerchief instead.

And then Nikos’s phone rang.

He flipped it open and listened.

He had the absolute attention of everyone in the room. Even Oscar was looking up, though that probably had more to do with the time and the absence of dinner.

But Oscar’s dinner was doomed to wait. Nikos flipped the phone closed again. Frowning.

‘Alexandros himself is flying the chopper,’ Nikos told them, speaking slowly, thinking it through as he spoke. ‘That was Alex now. Demos and the children are indeed in the boat, and they seem fine. But, according to Alexandros, they’re going nowhere. Their boat’s stopped. He thinks it must have run out of petrol. It’s floating half a mile off the northern end of the island. Alexandros is holding position until we can reach them.’

He took a deep breath. Moving on.

‘We’ll take my runabout. It’s faster than the bigger boats,’ he snapped. ‘Let’s go. I’ll radio as soon as we know. Can you guys bring one of the bigger boats after us?’

He grabbed Athena’s hand, and they were gone.


It took fifteen long minutes to get there. Fifteen minutes with the runabout’s motor roaring at full throttle. Smashing through the swells with sickening thumps.

If Demos had restarted the engine…Or if they’d tipped the boat…

She glanced at Nikos and his face was grim as death.

He’d do whatever it took.

She’d never doubted it. Not for a minute. He’d do whatever he must to keep these children safe. To keep the islanders safe.

To keep her…

And suddenly her thoughts were lurching with the boat. Taking her beyond her present fear.

This man had betrayed her. Or she’d thought he had. But…as she watched him at the tiller, as she saw the bleakness behind his eyes, she felt the sense of betrayal finally leave her, and all that remained was the knowledge of his honour.

He’d lost his father when he was twelve. He’d been on the boat with him-his father had a heart attack and by the time twelve-year-old Nikos had managed to get their fishing boat back to harbour his father was dead.

From that day on he’d taken on responsibilities too heavy for a boy. He’d been desperate to care for everyone, to make sure nothing like his father’s death happened again.

And Marika…Christa’s mother. Nikos’s short-term wife. She’d never been able to think of Marika without the pain of betrayal overwhelming her. But, given these moments of enforced thought, the scene they’d just left came back to her. And Annia’s words, speaking of Christa.

‘He can’t have her,’ Annia had said fiercely. ‘He’d never love her.’

Marika had been older than she was and a bit…reckless. She’d been infatuated by Demos, desperate to get away from her bully of a father and away from the island. Her mother was one of Nikos’s relations-almost family-but her father was a thug. If her father had found out Marika was pregnant…She shuddered to think of his reaction.

The germ of an idea-the germ of truth she’d discovered back in Annia’s kitchen-was suddenly turned to full blown certainty.

But now wasn’t the time to be talking of this with Nikos. Nikos was sick with worry. She should be sick with worry too-but still things didn’t quite fit. She knew her son.