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‘Maybe I’m hoping you’ll finally come clean,’ Cristo murmured levelly.
Erin turned her head, smooth brow indented with a frown as she struggled to recall the conversation and get back into it again. ‘Come clean about what?’
Cristo pulled off the road into a layby before he responded. ‘I found out what you were up to while you were working for me at the Mobila spa.’
Erin twisted her entire body round to look at him, crystalline eyes flaring bright, her rising tension etched in the taut set of her heart-shaped face. ‘What do you mean, what I was up to?’
Cristo flexed long brown fingers round the steering wheel and then turned to look at her levelly, ebony dark eyes cool and opaque as frosted glass. ‘You were helping yourself to the profits in a variety of inventive ways but I employ a forensic accounting team, who have seen it all before, and they traced the transactions back to you. You were stealing from me.’
For a split second, Erin was pinned to the seat by the sheer weight of her incredulity and her eyes were huge. ‘That’s an outrageous and disgusting lie!’ she slammed back at him, her voice rising half an octave with a volume stirred by simple shock.
‘I have the proof and witnesses,’ Cristo breathed in a tone of cutting finality that brooked no argument, igniting the engine again and filtering the car back onto the main road without batting an eyelash.
‘You can’t have proof and witnesses for something that never happened!’ Erin launched at him furiously. ‘I can’t believe that you can accuse me of something like that—I’ve never stolen anything in my life!’
‘You stole from me,’ Cristo shot back at her with simmering emphasis, his bold bronzed profile hard as iron. ‘You can’t argue with hard evidence.’
Erin was stunned, not only by the accusation coming so long after the event and out of nowhere at her, but by the rock-solid assurance of his conviction in her guilt.
‘I don’t care what evidence you think you’ve got. As it never happened, as I never helped myself to anything I wasn’t entitled to, the evidence can only have been manufactured!’
‘Nothing was manufactured. Face facts. You got greedy and you got caught,’ Cristo asserted grittily. ‘I’d have had you charged with theft if I’d known where to find you but by the time I found out you were long gone.’
Trembling with frustrated fury, every nerve jangling with adrenalin, Erin waited impatiently for him to park outside the nineteen-thirties black and white frontage of the Black’s Inn hotel. Then she wrenched at the handle on the passenger door and leapt out. Cristo watched her through the windscreen, bleakly amused by the angry heat in her shaken face. She was shocked that he had found her out and not surprisingly frantic to convince him that she was as innocent as a newborn lamb of the charges. Naturally she wouldn’t want him to label her a thief with her current employer. Even if she had resisted temptation this time around, mud stuck and no boss could have a faith in a member of staff with such a fatal weakness.
Slowly and with the easy moving fluidity of a natural athlete, Cristo climbed out of the car and locked it.
Erin’s small hands clenched into fists at her side as she squared up to him. ‘We’re going to have this out!’
Infuriatingly in control, Cristo cast her a slumberous glance from below his ridiculously long lashes. ‘Not a good idea in a public place—’
‘We’ll borrow Owen’s office.’ Erin stalked into the hotel and saw the lanky blond manager already on his way out to welcome them. She hurried over to him. ‘We’ll do the tour in ten minutes. Right now we need somewhere private to talk. Could we use your office?’
‘Of course.’ Owen spread the door wide and as she passed him smiled down at her and whispered, ‘By the way, thanks for the heads-up.’
Cristo noticed that friendly little exchange but not its content and wondered at the precise nature of Erin’s relationship with the handsome young manager. Generally she liked older men, Cristo reflected until he recalled the youth barely, if even, into his twenties that he had surprised in her hotel bed and his expressive mouth clenched hard. He recalled Sam Morton’s gushing praise of his beautiful area manager and his derision rose even higher. He doubted that he’d ever met a man more in a woman’s thrall. Sam thought the sun, the moon and the stars rose on Erin Turner.
Erin closed the door on Cristo’s entry and spun back to him, amethyst eyes dark with anger. ‘I am not a thief, so naturally I want to know exactly why you’re making these allegations.’
He studied her with narrowed eyes. She was breathing fast, her silky top sliding tantalisingly against the rounded bulge of her breasts. Creamy lickable mounds topped by succulent strawberry nipples, he remembered lasciviously, his desire firing at that imagery as a bolt of lust shot through him in a flash, leaving him hard as a rock. What she lacked in height she more than made up for with wonderfully feminine curves. He had loved her body. Even worse, he had dreamt of her passion when he was away from her, craving the unparalleled sexual satisfaction he had yet to find with anyone else.
‘I’m not an idiot,’ Cristo informed her coldly, forcing his keen mind back to a safer pathway. ‘At the Mobila spa, you sold products out of the beauty store on your own behalf, falsified invoices and paid therapists who didn’t exist. Your fraudulent acts netted you something in the region of twenty grand in a comparatively short time frame. How could you think that that level of deceit would go unnoticed?’
‘I am not a thief,’ Erin repeated doggedly although an alarm bell had gone off in her head the instant he mentioned the theft and sale of products from the store.
She knew someone who had done that for she herself had actually caught the woman putting a box of products into her car. Sally, her administrative assistant in the office, whom she had relied on heavily at the time, had been stealing and selling the exclusive items online. Unfortunately Erin had no proof of that fact because she had neither called in the police to handle the matter nor shared the truth that Sally had been stealing with another member of staff. Instead she had sat a distraught Sally down to talk to her. Together the two women had then done a stocktake and Erin had ended up replacing the missing products out of her own pocket. Why? She had felt desperately sorry for the older woman, struggling to cope alone with two autistic children after her husband had walked out on her. But had she only scraped the tip of the iceberg when it came to Sally’s dishonesty? Had Sally even then been engaged in rather more imaginative methods of gaining money by duplicitous means?
‘I have the proof,’ Cristo retorted crisply.
‘And witnesses, you said,’ Erin recalled. ‘Would one of those witnesses be Sally Jennings?’
His lean strong face tightened and she knew she had hit a nerve. ‘You can’t talk or charm your way out of this, Erin—’
‘I’m not interested in charming you. I’m not the same woman I was when we were together,’ Erin countered curtly, for what he had done to her had toughened her. There was nothing like surviving an unhappy love affair to build self-knowledge and character, she reckoned painfully. He had broken her heart, taught her how fragile she was, left her bitter and humiliated. But she had had to pick herself up again fast once she discovered that she was pregnant. Choice and self-pity hadn’t come into that challenging equation.
Erin stared back at him, pale amethyst eyes searching his darkly handsome features, blocking her instinctive response to that beautiful bone structure. Had he truly not read a single one of her letters? What had happened to human curiosity? Her phone calls had gone unanswered and his PA had told her she was wasting her time phoning because Cristo wouldn’t accept a call from her. Even when she had got desperate enough to call his family home in Greece she had run into a brick wall erected by his spiteful foster mother, who had proudly told her that Cristo was getting married and wanted nothing more to do with, ‘a woman like her’. As if she were some trollop Cristo had picked up in the street for a night of sex, rather than the woman who had been his constant companion for a year.
Although, perhaps it hadn’t been his foster mother’s fault. After all, while she might have seen herself in the light of a serious relationship, it was clear that Cristo had seen her entirely differently. He had never let her meet his family and, even though he’d known that she wanted him to meet her mother, he had found it inconvenient every time she’d tried to set up even a casual encounter. She might have been part of his private life but he had walled her off from everyone else in it, for she had only occasionally met his friends and never again after the evening when one of his mates had made a point of commenting on how long he had been with Erin.
‘I think you’ll change your tune once you appreciate how few choices you have,’ Cristo responded softly. ‘Now let’s view the facilities here. I have a tight schedule.’
Her mouth tightening, she followed him out of the office. How did he expect her to change her tune? Certainly, he hadn’t listened to a word she’d said. Had Sally Jennings lied about her? What else could she think? Had her abrupt departure from her job at the Mobila spa played right into the older woman’s hands when the irregularities were exposed by the accounting team? Change her tune? What had he meant by that comment? Her brain engaged in working out what she could possibly do to combat such allegations, Erin realised that she would have to see the evidence he had mentioned to work out her own defence and how to nail the real culprit. Had she been a total idiot to let Sally off the hook when she caught her stealing? She was appalled that her sympathetic and supportive treatment of the older woman might have been repaid with lies calculated to make Erin look guilty in her place. Confronting Sally, appealing to her conscience—if she had one—might well be the only course she could take. But what had Cristo meant about choices?
Owen brimmed with enthusiasm as he showed them round the spa, describing the latest improvements and special offers as well as the upsurge in custom that had resulted. He finished by offering them coffee but Cristo demurred, pleading time constraints as he whisked Erin back out to the car and angled it back out onto the road to make their last call. Brackens was Sam’s most exclusive property. A Victorian house set in wooded surroundings, it was very popular with couples in search of a romantic weekend and the spa was run as a member’s only club.
Erin watched Mia, the elegant brunette in her thirties who managed Brackens, melt at Cristo’s first smile and allowed the knowledgeable manager to do most of the talking as she showed them round her impressive domain. Erin was struggling to concentrate on the job at hand. There was too much else on her bemused mind. So, for almost three years, Cristo had been under the impression that she had stolen a fat wad of cash from him. Why hadn’t he contacted her? Why had he virtually let it go instead of informing the police? Cristo never let people get away with doing the dirty on him. He was a man few would wish to cross but he did reward loyal, hardworking staff with generous bonuses and opportunities.
Watching Mia laugh flirtatiously with Cristo made Erin feel slightly nauseous. She could recall when she had been even more impressionable. One glance at that lean dark face of sharp angles and creative hollows and those stunning black diamond eyes and she had been enamoured, her interest caught, her body humming with unfamiliar thrills. Her wariness with men, her long hours of study while others partied, had made her more than usually vulnerable for a young woman of twenty-one. She slammed down hard on the memory, awarding Cristo a veiled glance when he ushered her back to his Bugatti with a fleeting remark on her quietness.
‘May I go home now?’ she enquired as he turned the sports car.
‘We’re having dinner together at my hotel,’ Cristo informed her. ‘We have things to talk about.’
‘I have nothing to talk to you about. Sam does his own negotiating,’ Erin volunteered drily. ‘I’m just the hired help.’
‘If rumour is to be believed, you’re not just anything when it comes to Sam Morton.’
Erin went rigid in the passenger seat at the suggestion. ‘Do you listen to rumours?’
‘You slept with me while I was employing you,’ Cristo reminded her without heat.
Her teeth ground together. For two pins she would have slapped him. ‘That’s different. We were already involved when I began working for you.’
Cristo compressed his beautifully shaped mouth, his thoughts taking him back even though he didn’t want to go there. He had never had to work so hard to get a woman into bed. Her elusiveness, her surprising inhibitions had heightened his desire, persuaded him that she was different. Yes, she had been different, she had lined her pockets at his expense throughout their affair, he recalled grimly. She had taken him for a fool just as she was taking Morton.
‘Sam and I are only friends—’
His eloquent mouth quirked. ‘The same sort of friendship you had with that other friend of yours, Tom?’
Erin stiffened, remembering how suspicious Cristo had become of her fondness for Tom’s company towards the end of their affair. ‘Not as familiar. Sam’s from a different generation.’
Tom was a mate from her university days, more like a brother than anything else and still an appreciated part of Erin’s life. Unfortunately Cristo didn’t believe that platonic friendships could exist and Erin had eventually given up trying to convince him otherwise, reasoning that she was entitled to her own friends regardless of his opinions.
‘Morton’s old enough to be your grandfather—’
‘Which is why there’s nothing else between us,’ Erin slotted in flatly. ‘I’m not sleeping with Sam.’
‘He’s besotted with you. I don’t believe you,’ Cristo framed succinctly.
‘That’s your prerogative.’ Erin dug out her mobile phone and tapped out her home number.
Her mother answered. In the background she could hear a child crying. Lorcan, she guessed. Her son sounded tired and cross and her heart clenched, for she felt guilty that she couldn’t be there with him. It hurt that she got to spend so little time with her children during the week and she cherished her weekends with the twins when she tried to make up for her absence during working hours.
‘I’m sorry but I’ll be late home tonight,’ she told Deidre Turner.
‘Why? What are you doing?’ the older woman asked.
‘I have some work to deal with before I can leave.’
Tight-lipped and knowing she still had a maternal interrogation to face, Erin put her phone back in her bag. The very last thing she could afford to tell her parent was that Cristo had reappeared in her life. She would never hear the end of it, much as she had yet to hear the end of the reproaches about bringing two children into the world without first having acquired a wedding ring on her finger. But she didn’t blame her mother for her attitude. Educated in a convent school by nuns and deeply devout, Deidre had somewhat rigid views. At the same time, however, she was a very loving and caring grandmother and Erin could not have coped as a single parent without the older woman’s support.
‘I still don’t know what this is about,’ Erin complained as Cristo parked outside the foremost hotel in the area. ‘I didn’t steal from you three years ago but until you give me more facts I can’t defend myself.’
‘One of the transactions was traced right back to your bank account. Don’t waste your time trying to plead innocence,’ Cristo shot back at her very drily.
‘I don’t want to have dinner with you. It’s not like we parted on good terms,’ Erin reminded him doggedly.
Cristo climbed gracefully out of the car. ‘It’s like this. Either you dine with me and we talk or I go straight to your boss with my file on your thefts.’
He spoke so levelly, so unemotionally that for several taut seconds Erin could not quite accept that he had threatened her without turning a hair. The blood drained from below her fair skin and she froze until she recognised that he had given her a choice. She could tell him to take his precious file of supposed evidence and put it where the sun didn’t shine. She could call his bluff. But, unhappily for her, she knew Cristophe Donakis and she knew what he was capable of.
He didn’t bluff and he was very determined. He would push to the limits and beyond to gain a desired result. He was tough, sufficiently volatile to be downright dangerous and a merciless enemy. If Cristo truly believed that she had stolen from him, he would not settle until he had punished her for her offence.
For the first time in a very long time, Erin felt utterly helpless. She had too much at stake to risk her children’s future. She had worked very hard to get to where she was and she would fight just as hard to retain it …
CHAPTER THREE
ERIN walked into the cloakroom of the hotel and ran her wrists below the cold water tap until the panicked thump of her heartbeat seemed to slow to a tolerable level. Get a grip on yourself, she told her tense reflection as she dried her hands. Why should Cristo come back into her life now and try to wreck it? On his part it would be a pointless exercise …
Unless he was after revenge. At the vanity counter she tidied her hair and noticed with annoyance that her hands were no longer steady. He had already contrived to wind her up like a clockwork toy, firing all her self-defence mechanisms into override. And she needed to watch out because panic would make her stupid and careless. She breathed in slow and deep, fighting to stay calm. He didn’t know about the children so evidently he had not read a single one of her letters. Had he known about the twins he would have left her in peace, she was convinced of it. What man went out of his way to dig up trouble?
Cristo did, a little voice piped up warningly at the back of her head, and all of a sudden time was taking her back to their first encounter.
At the time Erin was employed in her first job as a deputy manager at a council leisure centre. Elaine, one of her university friends, was from a wealthy home and her father had bought her an apartment in an exclusive building. When Elaine realised what a struggle Erin was having trying to find decent accommodation on a budget, she had offered Erin her box room, a space barely large enough for a single bed with storage beneath. But Erin hadn’t cared how small the room was, she had enjoyed having Elaine’s company, not to mention daily access to the residents’ fancy leisure complex on the ground floor.
Erin had always been a keen swimmer and had won so many trophies for her school that she could have aspired to an athletic career had her parents been of a different ilk. Regretfully, in spite of her coach’s efforts at persuasion, Erin’s parents had been unwilling to commit to the time and cost of supporting a serious training schedule for their talented daughter. However, Erin still loved the sport and swam as often as she could.
The first time she had seen Cristo he had been scything up and down the pool with the sleek flow of a shark. His technique had been lazy, his speed moderate, she had noted, overtaking him without effort as she pursued her usual vigorous workout.
‘Race me!’ he had challenged when he caught up with her.
And she still recalled those dark deep-set gorgeous eyes, gleaming like polished bronze, electrifying in his lean, darkly handsome features.
‘I’ll beat you,’ she warned him ruefully. ‘Can you take that?’
The dark golden eyes had flashed as though she had lit a fire inside him. ‘Bring it on …’ he had urged.
And just like him, she had loved the challenge, skimming through the water with the firing power of a bullet, beating him to the finish line and turning to cherish his look of disbelief. Afterwards she had hauled herself out of the water and he had followed suit, straightening his lean powerful length to tower over her diminutive frame, water streaming down over his six-pack abs, drawing her attention to his superb muscular development. It was possibly the very first time that she had ever seriously noticed a man’s body.
‘You’re tiny. How the hell did you beat me?’ he demanded incredulously.
‘I’m a good swimmer.’
‘We have to have a retrial, koukla mou.’
‘OK, same time Wednesday night but I warn you I train every day and your technique is sloppy—’
‘Sloppy …’ Cristo repeated in accented disbelief, an ebony brow quirking. ‘If I wasn’t tired, I’d have beaten you hollow!’
Erin laughed. ‘Sure you would,’ she agreed peaceably, knowing what the male ego was like.
He extended a lean brown hand. ‘I’m Cristophe Donakis … I’ll see you Wednesday and I’ll whip your hide.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she told him cheerfully.
‘Cristophe Donakis? You met Cristophe in the residents’ pool where us ordinary people swim?’ Elaine later gasped in consternation. ‘What on earth was he doing there? He owns the penthouse and he has a private pool on the roof.’
‘Well, he was slumming this evening. Who is he?’
‘A spoilt rotten Greek tycoon and playboy with pots of money and a different woman on the go every week. I’ve seen him taking them up there in the lift. He’s very fond of decorative beauties. Stay clear. He’d gobble you up like a mid-morning snack,’ Elaine warned her drily.
But that same night the recollection of Cristo’s flawless male perfection got Erin all hot and bothered in her dreams and she marvelled that he could have that effect on her, for her strict upbringing had made her reserved and wary about all things sexual. Even at a glance she had recognised that Cristophe Donakis was a very sexual animal. On the Wednesday she beat him a second time, albeit with a little more effort on her part.
‘Join me for a drink,’ he suggested afterwards, his hungry gaze wandering at leisure over her slim curves in the plain black and red suit she wore, rising to linger on her soft full mouth, the sexual charge of his interest blatant and bringing self-conscious colour to her cheeks.
‘No, thanks.’ Fear of getting out of her depth and of somehow making a fool of herself made Erin especially cautious
‘A rematch, then … third time lucky?’ he prompted, amusement dancing in his stunning eyes below the fringe of black curling lashes.
‘My flatmate tells me you have your own pool.’
‘It’s in the process of being replaced. Rematch?’ he pressed again, pure challenge gleaming in those bronzed eyes. ‘The next time the loser buys dinner. Give me your phone number and we’ll arrange a date for it. I’m about to leave for the US for a week.’
She admired his persistence and had never been able to resist a dare. The third time he beat her, punching the air with uninhibited triumph. And that was also the moment she fell for Cristo, loving the naturally dramatic streak that he kept concealed below the surface in favour of cool assurance and the gloriously wicked grin that could burnish his hard dark features with adorably boyish enthusiasm.
She fed him in an American-style diner down the street in the sort of basic unsophisticated setting that she could tell was unfamiliar to him, but he proved a good sport and an entertaining raconteur, who drew her out about her job and her ambitions. He assumed that she would accompany him back to his apartment after the meal, looked at her in frank surprise when she refused, for he was very much a male accustomed to easy conquests. After that rebuff it took him two whole weeks to phone her again.
‘He’ll hurt you,’ Elaine forecast. ‘He’s too handsome, too rich, too arrogant. You’re very down to earth. What have you got in common with a guy like that?’
And the answer was … nothing. But like a moth drawn to a candle flame she had refused to acknowledge the obvious and eventually she had got burned, badly enough burned to avoid getting involved ever since. From time to time other men had made a play for her but she had resisted, reluctant to entertain such a complication in her life. In any case living under the same roof as her mother was almost as good as wearing a chastity belt, she reflected with sheepish amusement.