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“Not many redheaded Greek women out there.” Cara smiled at her friend. She could have been the county fair Corn Queen for her Midwestern looks, a far cry from the supertanned blond beach bunny often spotted at topless beaches around the country.
Emma said theatrically, “Alas, alas, I’ll just have to be the legendary American co-ed on summer vacation.” She looked around in delight. They were now in the center of town and passing quaint tavernas and sidewalk cafеs. “But I thought there’d be more people around. You did say summers were crowded in the Cyclades.”
Cara studied the scene, spotting cameras and white limbs sticking out from shorts and tank tops. “The locals are probably home napping. They often have a siesta time, especially in the summer. Everybody else is a tourist.”
“Including us.” Emma laughed. “But we have to hit the club tonight. On a Friday night it should be pretty lively, right?”
“Definitely.” Seemed as if they were in for a girls’ night out. Emma wasn’t used to Greek guys and didn’t speak more than five words of the language. Cara snickered to herself. Too bad Cara didn’t have the long black clothes and black beady glare typical of an old widowed aunt protecting her naive charge from the big, bad men of the world.
“Doesn’t that sound fun, Cara?”
Actually, it did. Cara had loved going out on the town, particularly to a raucous Greek nightspot. “Sure, but don’t forget we’re still getting over jet lag.”
“Yes, Mother. Wait, how do you say that in Greek?”
“Ne, meetеra.”
Emma repeated it with an accent awful enough to make Cara groan. “Let’s practice your Greek after lunch.”
Emma waved her hand. “No thanks, I’ll practice on one of those Greek men tonight.”
“And they’ll be happy to let you.” Cara turned a corner and checked her directions. “Here we are.” Suddenly sick with anxiety, she pressed her hand against her stomach. She’d never been good around illness, and Athena was one of her best friends.
“Easy, Cara.” Emma must have picked up on her panic. “Take a couple deep breaths and we’ll see how she is.” Emma reached around her and knocked on the door. “I wonder why all the doors and window shutters are painted blue.”
“To keep out the Evil Eye,” Cara replied automatically, clicking back into tour guide mode. “It all dates to ancient times….” She continued talking until Demetria threw open the door and beckoned them into the narrow stone-tiled foyer.
“Karoleena, is that really you?” She pulled Cara to her bosom, kissing her heartily on each cheek. “Your hair, it’s so red and—how you say?—fluffy?”
“Emma, this is Demetria, Athena’s daughter-in-law,” Cara called to her friend as Demetria fussed over her.
“Oh, look at you! So round and healthy!” Demetria eyed Cara’s breasts and hips, which had expanded a bit since they last met. “You’re eating now!”
Time to change the subject. “Demetria, this is my friend Emma Taylor. She was kind enough to come to Aphrodisias with me.”
“Emma!” Demetria fell on a startled Emma with the same fervor with which she’d greeted Cara. After kissing Emma on the cheeks, she pulled back. “Another lovely girl! And so fair!” She pinched Emma’s cheek. “The boys here will love you. If only my son Spiro wasn’t away for the summer. A pretty blond American—he’ll be heartbroken he missed you.”
“Demetria…” an old voice quavered from a room beyond.
“Is that Athena?” Cara tried to control her nervousness, meanwhile, Demetria’s cheerful expression had turned grim.
“Yes. We’re coming,” she called. “Mother has been anxious to see you.” She ushered them into a sitting room where Athena lay on a couch, swathed in blankets.
Cara bit back a gasp. Her old friend looked terrible, pale and shadowed. “Oh, Athena, how are you?” She reached for Athena’s hand, and Athena grasped hers with surprising strength.
“Better, now that you are here.”
Cara looked over her shoulder at Demetria for confirmation. Demetria nodded. “It’s a miracle how much better she is.”
Athena let out a little moan and Cara spun back to her. “I’m glad to see you again,” she said soothingly. “And Aphrodisias is even more beautiful than you described.”
Athena nodded. “My birthplace, the place I knew I would return to in my old age. The place to fulfill my dream of a museum of Greek island weaving and other women’s arts.”
“When you feel better, you can work on your project.”
Athena’s black eyes went wide. “I was just about to purchase the perfect property when I fell and broke my hip. I was at the market and stepped on an olive. An olive, I tell you! I have been walking on my own two feet for over sixty-five years and a miserable olive trips me.” She lapsed into Greek and muttered several imprecations against that hapless squished fruit.
Emma looked blankly at Cara and Cara shrugged. Those weren’t words Emma needed to practice for polite conversation. “Emma, come meet my friend Athena.”
Cara made the introductions and Emma shook Athena’s hand gently. “Thank you for inviting me to come with Cara. I have nothing but the highest respect for the Greek land and its wonderful history of mathematics.”
Athena nodded regally, accepting all honors to Euclid, Pythagorus & Co. as her due. “Would you like to see Demetria’s lovely garden? The flowers are beautiful, thanks to a wet spring.”
Emma agreed and followed Demetria toward the end of the house, leaving Cara and Athena together.
Athena continued in Greek. “Karoleena, your friend speaks Greek?”
“Oxi.” Cara shook her head.
“Good. How does she think you and I know each other?”
“I told her I was working on a cruise ship through the islands and let her assume we met that way.”
“And that is all she knows?” Gone was the sick old lady, and in her place was the woman spearheading a new museum.
“Yes, Athena.” Cara checked Emma’s whereabouts, her voice faded as she went into the courtyard garden.
“Fine. I will keep your privacy, if that is what you wish.”
“Efkhareestо, Athena.”
“You’re welcome, chriso mou.” Athena smiled up at her with such sweetness that Cara bent down and hugged her gently. Chriso mou—my golden one. It had been so long since she’d heard those words. Athena patted her on the back.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
Athena heaved a sigh. “Yet not well enough to continue my project, which is why I need you.”
Cara sat up on the edge of the couch. “Me? What do I know about building a museum?”
Her friend waved a negligent hand. “You will be my eyes and ears. Just some minor details to finish, and if the men do not know you understand Greek, so much the better.”
“Athena…” Cara stood. “I only came to Aphrodisias because you were so sick and I wanted to make sure you were getting better. I wasn’t planning to stay.”
“Do you have a job in America you need to return to?” Athena raised an eyebrow.
Cara paced across the room. Stay in Greece? “No, but I’m taking classes at the university.”
“During the summer?”
“Well, kind of.” Athena gave her one of those baleful black stares older Greek women had perfected. “Well, they start in September, which is technically summer, at least until the twenty-first.” Cara never could lie to Athena.
“September? Pfft. It’s only June. And your friend Emma can stay, as well, unless she has a job.”
“No, she can work on her studies from here.” Cara looked out the window facing the courtyard. Emma was having a ball, sniffing the flowers and laughing at whatever Demetria was telling her. “Summer in Greece?” she murmured.
“It will do you good. Put some color in your cheeks and take that frown off your face.”
Cara made an effort to smile. Poor her. A summer on an idyllic Greek island with nothing to do but help an old, ailing friend. Boo hoo.
“Ah, that’s better.” Athena struggled to her elbows and smiled up at her. “Now come here for a kiss and have Demetria make us some coffee.”
Cara kissed Athena on both cheeks as she was bid and then sneezed. Something dusty was tickling her nose.
“Yia sou,” Athena blessed her.
“Thanks.” Cara sniffled and sought out Emma and Demetria in the garden.
Emma predictably squealed in glee at the idea of a Greek summer but then got a worried look on her face. “Be sure to tell me how much I owe you for rent and groceries, that kind of thing.”
Cara exchanged glances with Demetria. “Don’t worry about the money. We’ll get a deal since it’s a long-term rental.”
“Great!” Emma hugged her and pulled away. “Cara, you have some white stuff in your hair.” Emma brushed it out.
“Probably some dust or sand. So you girls are staying for the summer!” Demetria hugged them and pinched their cheeks again.
“Anything to help Athena.”
Demetria led them into the kitchen and began measuring cold water into the small metal coffeepot. “With you here, I think my mother-in-law will recover faster than you expect.”
2
“IS THAT TRUE, CARA, what Athena said about Aphrodisias?”
Cara blinked as Emma’s voice penetrated the late-afternoon haze as they stretched out on beach towels on the warm, sun-drenched sand. “Hmmm?” She took off her floppy sun hat and raised her head from where she’d been cradling it on her forearms.
Emma had been lying on her back in a tiny lavender-purple bikini but she’d propped herself up on her elbows. “You know, about the island being a magnet for lovers?”
Cara gestured to the surrounding beach. “It’s a popular vacation spot. People either bring their lovers or find a new one here.” She and Emma were practically the only non-romantic couple there. Pretty girls were snuggling with men, from potential male underwear models to men who should have had their banana-hammock swimsuits confiscated by Greek border security before they even entered the country.
Cara winced at one particularly gray and hairy dude in a neon-orange bikini bottom, the color of a traffic hazard cone. Warning, warning, hazardous materials, stay away…
Emma continued, “Athena said there was more to it than just fun and sun. She said the old ways still hold sway here.”
“I suppose that’s fair to say of many of the islands. Like you asked me before, the blue paint on doors and roofs is to block the Evil Eye, and some of the old gods were folded into Christian customs. That’s probably what Athena meant.”
“Maybe. But while you were in the kitchen with Demetria making coffee, she said that those who have been unlucky in love would always find love on Aphrodisias.”
“What?” Cara rolled onto her side and sat up. “What does that mean?”
Emma shrugged. “Something about Aphrodite taking pity on losers in the game of love.”
Great. Not only was Cara a loser pitied by her friend Athena, but also pitied by an ancient Greek goddess. “Are you looking to get lucky in love here?” Cara sure wasn’t.
“Love?” Emma pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I think I’d settle for sex at this point.”
Cara gaped at her usually staid friend, who waggled a finger at her. “Don’t look at me like that. I just wrapped up one set of my Ph.D. exams and haven’t even been on a date for months. The only men I’ve had any contact with are my happily married academic advisor and a couple fellow students who either want to rip off my work or discuss the Freudenthal suspension theorem in loving detail. So I deserve a little personal time with a man who has more to offer than his perspective on advanced mathematics.”
“If that’s what you want, you won’t have any trouble. Like Demetria said, Greek guys love blond Americans.” Several of the men on the beach, accompanied or not, had noticed Emma reclining on her towel, her bikini a perfect foil for her creamy skin.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, but what about you, Cara? Not that you’re unlucky in love—who hasn’t been?”
Cara muffled an ironic snort. Calling her unlucky in love was like calling the Titanic unlucky in seaworthiness.
Emma lifted her sunglasses and looked around. “But Aphrodisias certainly has a nice crop of men. If you don’t find one you like, wait for the next ferry to bring another. And when he leaves, look for a different one. We have the whole summer.”
Cara was momentarily speechless at her friend’s logical approach, and couldn’t help but tease her. “And if we don’t find suitable men here,” Cara went on, “we could always hop the ferry over to Naxos or Paros and search there. Or would leaving the island negate the Aphrodite Effect?”
Emma scoffed. “You’re still not getting into this place, are you?”
Cara shifted and rested her head on her arms so Emma couldn’t see her expression. “It’s lovely, and I don’t mean to rain on your vacation.”
“So don’t. You’ve needed to unwind ever since we’ve met, and this is your chance. Come fall, it’s back to the salt mines.”
Cara couldn’t disagree. She was signed up for a full course load, leaving no time for even thoughts of hot beaches and hotter men. “We’ll see about the men.” Maybe a nice, calm Brit or German would pass through to do a spot of bird-watching or nature photography. She could dip her toe in the water with a guy named Graham or Klaus.
“Although if you’re going to be lucky at love, you’ll need a hotter swimsuit than that.” Emma made a disparaging gesture at Cara’s white terry cloth cover-up and perfectly serviceable black one-piece suit. “Put a skirt on that thing and you’d look like my grandma going to her water aerobics class.”
Cara groaned. “Nice, very nice.”
Emma stretched her arms over her head. “I think I’ve had enough sun for the first day. Like you said, I don’t want to spend the summer crying on the couch from sun poisoning.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t have that problem with a swimsuit like mine.” Cara couldn’t resist the gibe.
“Smart off all you want, but we’re going to the swimsuit shop on our way back to the villa.” Emma sat up and reached for her shorts and sandals. “My treat.”
“You don’t need to pay for a swimsuit for me.” Emma was a typical cash-strapped grad student.
Emma stood and brushed the sand off her limbs. “Consider it a thanks for this incredible summer vacation.” She offered a hand up to Cara. “I insist.”
Cara started to protest, but changed her mind. Emma had her pride, and Cara understood pride. After all, how much could a bikini cost?
“ONE HUNDRED twenty-five euros? Are you nuts?” Cara yanked at the spaghetti straps of the turquoise string bikini. On reflection, she shouldn’t have been surprised. Any swimsuit store located half a block from a tourist beach was not going to be a bargain hunter’s paradise.
Emma lightly slapped her hands away from the neck ties. “Come on, Cara, this suit looks amazing on you. The color makes your eyes as blue as the ocean—”
“And my skin as pale as the sand,” Cara interjected.
“So you aren’t tanned to the consistency of saddle leather. I’m telling you, this is the suit for you and I won’t take no for an answer.”
