Out of the Blue

by Belinda Jones

  About the Book

  Selena Harper always thought she had the perfect job: working on a luxury cruiseship, she's whisked around the world from Alaska to Zanzibar with excitement and adventure awaiting her in every port. But as she prepares for her latest shore-leave—and finds herself unexpectedly deserted by her newly-engaged best friend—she begins to wonder if life on the ocean waves really is her dream come true. Why is she the only one who isn't settling down? And how can she be feeling homesick when she has no home?

  On a whim, she agrees to spend a week on the idyllic island of Crete, in the company of Alekos, a man she's convinced is an incorrigible womaniser. Steeped in mythology, the island soon starts to work its magic on Selena—and, more worryingly, so does Alekos. Is he really the cad she's always thought him to be? Or could it turn out that his home is where her heart is?

  About the Author

  Belinda Jones’ first paid job was on cult kiddy comic Postman Pat. Since then she has written for a multitude of magazines and newspapers including Sunday, Daily Express, Empire, FHM, heat, New Woman and more! magazine where she was a staff writer for four years. Belinda’s widely acclaimed first novel, Divas Las Vegas, was voted No. 2 in the New Woman Bloody Good Reads Awards in 2001 and On the Road to Mr Right – a non-fiction travelogue love quest – was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller. Out of the Blue is her seventh novel.

  Also available by Belinda Jones

  Fiction

  Divas Las Vegas

  I Love Capri

  The California Club

  The Paradise Room

  Café Tropicana

  The Love Academy

  Non-fiction

  On the Road to Mr Right

  For a selection of travel tips, location photos, book club questions and extracts from all Belinda’s books go to:

  www.belindajones.com

  OUT OF THE BLUE

  Belinda Jones

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446492208

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow Books 2008

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Belinda Jones 2008

  Belinda Jones has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Real names of people and events are used in limited cases but the plot and all other characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  Arrow Books

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099517634

  To my editor Kate Elton

  (This one’s for you!)

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly, this story simply would not have existed were it not for the one and only Yiorgos Kakaroubas! Unlimited filakia for your divine character inspiration and commitment to this book!

  Elegant epharistos to Greek goddess Lena Melidonioti of Helios Hotels, the smartest and swiftest marketing director in the business. And to Nikolaos Chronis for your amazing generosity with the heavenly Elounda Carob Tree Valley Villas.

  Other stars of Elounda include Petros, Angelos, Birgit, Drew, Jack and Jessica. And in Athens: Athina, Sylvia Fierro and the wondrous Nia Vardalos.

  Em and Graeme – thank you for sharing in the midday sun madness of it all! Raki toast to you both and blue cocktail chinkings to wonder-wit Dylan Callaghan and my able seamen Ian Nathan, Adam Smith and the irrepressible Jindrich. Carry on cruising!

  Retsina all round for the Random House crew – Georgina, Rob, Oli, Laura, Claire, Louisa, Emma – and my agents Eugenie and Rowan at William Morris Associates – you all deserve a week on a Greek island for the hard work you put in!

  There are always two people (and one cat) who go above and beyond the call of duty in terms of supporting me in the writing process and they are my mama mia Pamela and flatmate and head chef James. Well, who can write on an empty stomach? And who enjoys a fish dinner more than Cabbage? Love you all. Finally, a sun-kissed infinity pool hug to Mr Dean Tony Joseph whose encouraging words kept me focussed until The End.

  Special mention to the hilarious dream-energiser Barbara Sher and all my fellow Scanners worldwide!

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Belinda Jones

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  1

  ‘We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds.’ – Aristotle Onassis

  Oh no. Here he comes again.

  Striding purposefully towards me in precision-pressed naval whites complete with rigid black epaulettes, soft white loafers and a patent peaked cap with nifty gold insignia. Even his Mediterranean tan and onyx-glow eyes look like they’ve been officially issued in a bid to create the ultimate cruiseship pin-up, all perfectly offset against an icy blue ocean backdrop.

  I dart back along the corridor and into my cabin, leaning on the door like a fugitive. Ever since Officer Alekos Diamantakis boarded the ship in Alaska last month, my life has been one long Benny Hill sketch. I can honestly say that in my twelve years working in Shore Excursions, I have never been pursued so doggedly. I still can’t fathom why someone several thousand leagues too good-looking for me is in such hot pursuit but in a matter of hours all speculation will be irrelevant as I am airlifted to safety – having completed my eight-month contract, I am about to get my standard two months off.

  I am prone to end-of-an-era blues on my last night, bidding farewell to so many people I’ll never see again, running a little flicker book in my mind of all the sights I’ve seen on this latest journey; I even get nostalgic about the soft furnishings. But tonight is different, for the very first time I’ve put in a request to return to the same ship. And it’s not that this one is any more fabulous than the others, it’s just that lately I seem to be having an uncharacteristic craving for familiarity. At least I think it’s that. If I was
going to attempt to define the exact sensation, I’d say I’m feeling homesick. But how is that possible when I have no home?

  Last year my parents emigrated to New Zealand to be near my sister and her new baby. I did have a brief moment feeling like a child in an abandoned pram but I don’t blame them. It’s just possible that coastal Wellington, voted twelfth-best quality-of-living city in the world, has the edge over Watford and as my mum says, I’m never home anyway and just as likely to crop up in the southern hemisphere as the northern.

  Besides, it’s not like I’m going to miss out on my trips to the Harlequin shopping centre because my new best friend Jules lives just a few streets away from my parents’ old house, so at least I can leave my homing device set to the same co-ordinates for now. She’s who I’ll be staying with on my shore leave. The fact that she’s a former cruise staffer (we shared a cabin in Hawaii) really eases the transition back to dry land – she understands all the jargon and the nature of ship gossip. Not least because she was often the centre of it.

  ‘Spa girls’ (those working in beauty therapy and fitness), along with the female dancers, are the most sought-after women on the ship, especially among the highly competitive Greek officers. I did wonder if that was why Alekos homed in on me initially. I was up visiting my hairdresser friend Kirby when he made his first approach. Admittedly, when he found out I was more sightseeing than shiatsu, he didn’t cast me aside, but the fact that he was loitering around the salon in the first place rang a few Tibetan tingsha bells.

  Speaking of spas, Jules has already booked me in for a Jet Lag Body Wrap to eliminate the travel toxins accumulated on my ten-hour flight from Vancouver. This will be followed by a marathon catch-up of the last series of Brothers & Sisters while eating gluten-free home-made muffins. I know the gluten-free bit kind of kills the pampering vibe but, cocktails aside, Jules’ body is a highly toned temple and I’m just grateful I won’t be the one watching TV in an assortment of yoga poses. Plus, the fact that I won’t have to make any decisions while I’m under her roof is the real holiday. All day long I’m super-organised, keeping track of numerous tour groups, but with Jules I get to set the paperwork aside and relax in the passenger seat. Quite literally, this coming week, as she’s planned a little roadtrip to Brighton for my birthday, insisting we wear candy colours and wedge heels, even when we go paddling. I suppose her directional assertiveness spills over from her working life – calling out aerobic moves, correcting people’s posture, making sure they are exercising correctly. She’s equally opinionated when it comes to other people’s love lives and heaven knows I need guidance there.

  I remember when she first came on board and I was seeing the Norwegian Chief Radio Officer – Nils. Generally I don’t like to get involved with fellow shipmates unless either myself or the other party only has a few weeks left of their contract. It’s the first question I ask: ‘How much longer have you got?’ Like we all have a terminal disease. It’s just too risky otherwise – bad enough breaking up with someone in the same town, but on the same ship, with a maximum storm-off distance of three hundred metres? Hideous. But I hadn’t been out with anyone in two years and he was so darn clean and courteous, I broke my rule. I did not choose well.

  Unaware that Jules was my new cabin-mate, Nils made a play for her. She came straight to me requesting my permission to accept the invitation back to his cabin so she could infiltrate the emails on his laptop and suss him out. She took along a special spa treatment for him to use in the shower, insisting he try it immediately, thus giving her opportunity to snoop. Oh the humiliation when she revealed the magnitude and multiplicity of his cheating ways – forget his seafaring skills, this is a man you’d want in charge of flight paths at an airport, he was so unbelievably adept at keeping numerous affairs criss-crossing without clashing. Until that moment anyway. She copied every girl in on his mailbox and then forwarded the lot to her own account so she could show me: My darling Caterina . . . My darling Ola . . . My darling Narinda . . . My darling Sheila . . . Talk about a woman in every port, I think it was more literally every porthole. And they say men can’t multitask.

  I’m just grateful that she was there to give us all a wake-up call.

  It’s like that with Alekos; everyone else is trying to persuade me to give him a go whereas Jules, well actually she thinks I should sleep with him too but for a very different reason.

  ‘It’s the quickest way to get rid of him!’ she told me when I first started to complain of his relentless wooing.

  ‘Oh charming!’ I retorted. ‘What exactly are you implying about my prowess in the boudoir?’

  ‘Nooo!’ she had laughed. ‘No personal slight intended. It’s just that he’s only lingering and fixating on you because you’re resisting.’

  That’s a good friend, one who’ll tell you straight: ‘He’s all about the chase!’, not fill your head with nonsense about him being different to all the others and worth a chance.

  Jules may not be one of life’s romantics but she’s never short of male attention. Despite all her offers from officers – and one indecent proposal from the captain – it was actually the ship’s DJ who triumphed. Dominic was a reluctant sailor, not someone who had ever considered taking a cruise, let alone working on board, but his former girlfriend – an effervescent Entertainments Manager called Cherry – persuaded him to give up his job and flat in Ipswich and do a stint in the ship’s nightclub. Within a matter of weeks she got a better offer, not from another man but another ship! It’s lucky that Jules was there to comfort Dom after Cherry left. They soon became an item and when Jules’ contract ended he cut his short and they went back to England together. That was nearly a year ago now.

  I miss having her on board but cruising for Jules was just a way to get a really good tan; for me it’s a way of life. It may not be perfect – a little too reminiscent of boarding school at times and not the best earner – but as far as I’m concerned it beats any alternative.

  My mum likes to trace my career choice back to my mermaid-themed ninth birthday party and my sister attributes it to covert viewings of The Love Boat but in actuality it was Shirley Valentine that made me run off to sea.

  I missed the film when it first came out, which is nearly twenty years ago if you can believe it. In fact, it wasn’t until about eight years later when I was twenty myself that I saw it. At the time, I’d opted to forgo university (and my planned degree in Travel & Tourism) in favour of staying home with my boyfriend Ricky. I’ll never forget how we met – I was washing my hands in this trendy restaurant bathroom when I felt another soapy set of fingers entwine with my own. I jumped back and looked below the mirror ledge and there was a scruffy blond head staring back at me, equally perturbed. Turns out the bathroom designer had thought it would be amusing to link the sinks between the Ladies and the Gents, but without any obvious indication that this had been done. We got talking, kept talking all weekend and by Sunday night I’d lost my heart and mind. The sense of complete surrender felt nice in a way – in life there is so much deliberation, weighing things up, assessing worst-case scenarios, but for him I was willing to sacrifice all I had planned without question. Everything went blurry, he was my only focus. And when we moved in together my world shrank even more.

  Cohabitation wasn’t quite the non-stop cuddle I’d imagined it to be. He was working long hours in construction and when he got home he had no energy for anything except splaying in front of the TV, still covered in brick dust. Meanwhile, the summer job I’d taken in the local travel agent became full-time and though I loved nothing better than matchmaking holidaymaker and hotel, the irony wasn’t lost on me that I had the power to send people whizzing all around the globe and yet couldn’t get my own boyfriend off the sofa. Still. That’s cosy isn’t it? Snuggling up watching TV. It got a lot cosier when he lost his job. This was pre-Tivo and I found him so brain-dullingly indiscriminate about what he would watch. Even being a party to his mindless channel-hopping made me feel my life was slippi
ng away from me. Despite my every encouragement he made no effort to look for a new job – well, why should we both suffer? Perhaps we’d take it in turns to work!

  And then Marianne at the agency was offered a familiarisation trip to a new resort in Greece and she invited me around the night before for moussaka and Shirley Valentine on video, scandalised that I’d never seen it. Poor woman didn’t bargain on my reaction. To me this personable comedy was more chilling than any horror film because it could really happen, does happen all the time – women fall in love, get married, have children and lose themselves. And then they spend the rest of their lives searching for ‘The Girl Who Used To Be Me’ as the theme song goes.

  Watching it was like a flash to the future, a cautionary tale – at twenty I could already relate to the feelings of domestic drudgery and ‘Is this it?’ resignation. Twenty years on would I be talking to the wall and wearing polyester housecoats? Would I have sent a thousand people on exotic adventures and not done a single sodding thing with my life? I went back to the flat in a daze. Without even looking up from the TV, Ricky said he needed me to leave him a fiver for lunch the next day. I explained that I hadn’t been to the cashpoint and only had schrapnel in my purse. He promptly went ballistic, telling me how inconsiderate I was and what was he supposed to do, starve? At that point it struck me that actually I could be a little bit worse off than Shirley because at least her husband Joe had a job.

  When I went into work the next day my first instinct was to follow Marianne to Mykonos. But I’d had a couple of dodgy family holidays in Greece in the past and even if this one went like a dream it would only save me for two weeks. I needed something more profoundly life-changing. Something I couldn’t cop out of the second I had a pang for Ricky’s heart-ensnaring kisses, which is what got me into the trouble in the first place. And that’s when a couple came in to book a cruise.

  They’d been every year for the past ten, got pally with staff in every department including the one that sold and arranged the trips in each port of call – i.e. Shore Excursions. Though obviously comparable to my own profession, what they described was the absolute antithesis of my current existence and light years away from suburbia.