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She knew she should just end this now—except it was as if her heart had been waiting to see him again, and she was curious as to what he had to say.
‘Very well.’ Mary nodded and unlocked the salon door. ‘But just for a moment...’
She felt as if she should apologise in advance for her rather tawdry living conditions, but then she remembered he didn’t know that she lived there.
Eftelis.
That was Costa’s first thought as he entered the salon to the jangle of a bell and looked around. It was tacky, garish, and everything Mary was not.
She does not belong here, was his second.
‘May I sit?’ he asked politely.
‘Please do.’
And although he sat in a chair in which perhaps a thousand others had also sat, Costa did not blend in. He was just too much man for the salon. She imagined the flurry if he were to walk in from the street on a work day...
‘Please don’t make this a habit,’ Mary told him. ‘I doubt my boss will be pleased if I have friends dropping by.’
‘I am glad you consider me a friend,’ Costa answered smoothly.
‘I meant—’
‘I know what you meant. Don’t worry—I have no intention of ever coming here again.’
Mary felt her nostrils pinch, for there was a slight warning behind his words that told her this man would never make a pest of himself.
It told her, too, that she had better listen—that this opportunity, this ‘proposal’ would not be made more than once. Costa Leventis was not a man who repeated himself.
She chose to stand as he angled the faux leather chair to face her. His coat fell open and beneath it she saw he was wearing a dark suit and crisp white shirt with a gunmetal-grey tie...
Quite simply, he thrilled her.
‘You have created quite a stir online,’ Costa told her. ‘I assume you’ve seen the gossip?’
‘What gossip?’
‘People are asking “Who is she?” because there is a photo circulating online of us outside the hotel. You really haven’t seen it?’
Mary gave a slight shake of her head. ‘I don’t have a mobile phone. I told you.’
To Costa it was as if she were in some kind of time warp, separate from the world around her...
Her arms were folded and at any moment, Costa knew, she would be ready to tell him to get the hell out.
Mary confused him: she was well-spoken and evidently clever, and yet she could not secure an apprenticeship. And she was so wary... Yet given the nature of her second job she was clearly adventurous too.
Her blonde hair was dark from the rain and unbrushed today, but her blue eyes were so vivid that each time they met his there was an element of surprise. For they were the colour of the Aegean Sea. Not the Aegean he could see from his Athens high-rise—her eyes were the colour of the Aegean on a summer’s day in Anapliró.
‘Your name is apt,’ he said now.
‘Is it?’
‘I remember when I learnt English at school there was a rhyme—“Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary”. I was eight or so, and had no idea whatcontrarymeant.’
He looked at her innocent and yet not so innocent eyes, her full lips and her absolutely unspoiled beauty, and he knew that she kept secrets.
‘I am starting to understand the meaning a little better now...’
