He hesitated and then said the words that had to be said. The words that had been in his head for the entire tour of the park.

‘Except on the question of my son,’ he said.

She gasped. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘Life’s not fair. Get over it, Athena, and come home. Princess.’

Nicky had been listening on the sidelines, troubled, not understanding but trying. ‘You said my son,’ he pointed out, trying to be helpful. ‘Did you mean your daughter?’

Nikos nodded. Grave as Nicky. ‘I must have,’ he agreed. ‘But I’m a bit upset right now. I need your mama to come back to the island where she was born.’

‘You called her a princess.’

‘She is a princess.’

‘She’s my Mama.’

‘She can be both. I bet your mama says you can be anything you want if you try hard enough.’ He turned and faced Athena straight on. She was lovely, he thought. In her casual sweatshirt, her jeans, her tumbled curls tied back with a piece of red ribbon…She was a mature version of the girl he’d fallen for ten years ago. Longer. The girl he’d loved for ever.

He couldn’t think that.

‘Your mama can do anything she wants,’ he said to Nicky, but he kept right on looking at Athena. ‘I think it’s time for your mama to do just that. Because I think she wants the island of Argyros to be safe just as much as I do.’

CHAPTER THREE

SO TWO weeks later…Maybe she was out of her mind, but she was going back to a place she’d thought she’d never set foot on again. Argyros. The Silver Island of the Diamond Isles.

If Giorgos had had a son this never would have happened.

Generations of islanders had ached for the islands to revert to the three principalities they had once been. Now with Giorgos’s death, they had.

‘But why did it have to happen on my watch?’ Athena muttered as she stood on the deck of the Athens-Argyros ferry and watched her island home grow bigger.