by Lynne Graham
Her knees developed an irritating tremor below the file on her lap but she still fought for a clear head. ‘And according to your investigation these particular therapists didn’t exist?’
‘You know they didn’t,’ Cristo responded flatly.
Erin came to the final document and stared down at the evidence of a single large payment of a thousand pounds heading into a bank account in her name and nausea stirred in her stomach. Had she ever bothered to close that old bank account? She had intended to but couldn’t remember. Only one payment but one was enough to damn her. In her opinion only Sally Jennings could be responsible for such duplicity. She had pretty much automatically signed anything that the older woman put on her desk. With hindsight she knew she had been too trusting. Unhappily managing the spa had been her first serious job and she had had no deputy to stand in for her when Cristo wanted her to make time for him. Torn between too much work, hostile staff, who loathed working for the owner’s girlfriend, and a deep driving desire to impress Cristo with her efficiency, she had relied a lot on Sally, who had worked at the spa since it had opened ten years earlier and knew the business inside out. No such thing as a free ride, Erin told herself heavily now. Even Sam would doubt her innocence in the face of such damning proof as the file contained.
Erin stood up and dropped the file down with a distasteful clunk of dismissal on the coffee table. ‘Very impressive, but I didn’t do it! You gave me a great opportunity when you put me in that job and I wouldn’t have gone behind your back to steal from you.’
Cristo continued to stare at her, eyes like chips of bright gold below his luxuriant lashes, and all of a sudden she was struggling to breathe evenly and something inside her seemed to speed up as if her blood were racing through her veins and the buzz of forbidden excitement in the pit of her tummy were spreading like contagion to her entire body.
‘You still want me, koukla mou,’ Cristo purred, revelling in the charge in the atmosphere, the awareness in her clear gaze. It was the first time he had been able to read her again and it satisfied him.
‘No! That is absolutely not true!’ Erin shot back at him vehemently, wishing she had not asked to see that evidence in his presence as she recognised how much it had unnerved her and damaged her self-discipline. Now she was all shaken and stirred, a state to be avoided in a predator’s radius.
Cristo reached out a hand and curled his fingers around her slender wrist, edging her out from behind the table. The storm of reaction inside her rose to hurricane force, suppressing her caution and defensiveness.
‘No …’ she said in a small choked voice, fighting just to get air back into her lungs.
Nevertheless he drew her close, banding strong arms round her like a prison, and the heat and strength of him acted like an aphrodisiac on her disturbed senses. She tried to keep distance between them, her slender body rigid as a rock, but he closed the gap with inexorable purpose.
‘It’s OK,’ he rasped in the most frighteningly soothing tone. ‘I want you too.’
And Erin did not want to hear that from the male who had dumped her and gone straight off to marry another woman. He had never wanted her enough to love her or keep her and that was the only wanting she had ever needed from him. He meant sex, only sex, she told herself feverishly while the reassuring warmth of him filtered through their clothing to warm her chilled limbs. But far more insidious was the insanely familiar smell of him that close, her nostrils flaring on the faint aroma of the same designer cologne he had always worn, never forgotten, and she was breathing him headily in as though he were a forbidden drug.
‘Stop it, Cristo!’ she told him tartly. ‘I am not going there again. I am never going there again with you!’
‘We’ll see …’ And, golden eyes blazing down at the fiercely conflicted expression on her heart-shaped face, his beautiful mouth swooped down on hers to claim the kiss she would have done almost anything to deny him.
And the taste of him was instantly addictive even as her hands swept up to strike in fists against his broad shoulders while he hauled her closer. Hot, hungry need roared through her in a storm that made her knees shake and she didn’t know whether it was her or him behind it, or if, indeed, both of them were equally responsible. His tongue delved and she shuddered, so awake and defenceless against his every seductive move that it hurt, hurt to feel anything so strongly after so long without it. She wanted that kiss then with a sudden ferocity that terrified her. Nothing else mattered but the forceful power of that lean strong body against her own, the pulsing prominence of her nipples and the liquid burn between her thighs driving her on. His mouth bore down on hers with a seething, sizzling urgency that zinged through her slight length like an electric shock, stunning every sense into reaction. Nothing had ever tasted so good, nothing had ever felt so necessary and answering the shrill shriek of warning firing at the back of her brain took every atom of her inner strength.
‘No!’ she said in fierce rebuttal, thrusting him away from her with an abruptness that almost made him lose that famous catlike balance of his as he backed into a chair.
In a daze, Cristo blinked. She packed a punch like a world-class boxer. He shook his handsome dark head, dark eyes instantly veiling as he fought the bite of un-sated hunger clawing through his big powerful frame. ‘You’re right … this is not the moment. I have a flight to catch,’ he retorted thickly.
Erin’s breasts heaved as she frantically breathed in deep in an effort to emulate his fast recovery. Her amethyst eyes were dark with strong emotion as she studied his lean, darkly handsome features with a loathing she couldn’t hide. ‘I meant no as in never,’ she contradicted shakily. ‘Leave me alone, stay out of my life and stop threatening me.’
His black diamond eyes flared brilliant gold again, for there was nothing in life that Cristo enjoyed so much as a challenge. ‘I won’t go away.’
‘You’re going to get burned if you keep pushing me,’ Erin warned him angrily, her small face set like a stone, all emotion but anger repressed. ‘Get back out of my life or you’ll regret it.’
‘No, I won’t. I rarely regret anything that I do,’ Cristo fielded, visibly savouring the admission. ‘Are you worried that I’ll screw up your future with Morton? Sorry, koukla mou. I’ll be doing him a favour. You’re toxic.’
Her hands clenched into tight fists. ‘I think you’ll feel the toxic effect more strongly by the time this is over.’
Cristo shot her a grimly amused appraisal. ‘I could handle you with one hand tied behind my back.’
‘You always did like to believe your own publicity,’ Erin countered tightly, her spine as straight as an arrow as she walked to the door. ‘I’ll catch a taxi back to Stanwick.’
In the lift, she had what felt like a panic attack, her heart beating too fast for comfort, cold clamminess filming her skin. That kiss? Total dynamite! How could that be? How had that happened? She was not in love with him any more, had believed she was fully cured of all that foolishness … until the instant she laid eyes on him again and his mesmerising attraction gripped her as tightly as steel handcuffs.
Maybe she’d succumbed to that kiss because she had been upset after reading that file. Is that the best excuse you can find? a little voice sneered inside her brain. She reddened, hating herself almost as much as she now hated him. Her response to him had qualified as weak and that was something she could not accept.
CHAPTER FOUR
IN the early hours of the following morning, Erin rocked her son, Lorcan, on her lap. A nightmare had wakened him and it always took a while to comfort him and soothe him back to sleep.
‘Mum …’ he framed drowsily, fixing big dark eyes on her as she smoothed his short tousled curls back from his brow, lashes lowering again as tiredness swept him away again.
Much like her son, Erin was utterly exhausted. When she had arrived back at Stanwick to collect her car Sam had wanted a briefing on Cristo’s impressions, which had stretched into a meeting that lasted a couple of
hours. Sam was keen for his properties to join the Donakis empire because he sincerely believed that a businessman of Cristo’s standing could take his three hotels—his life’s work—to a higher level. For the first time Erin had felt uncomfortable with the older man, too aware that she was not being entirely honest with him. He didn’t know she had had a previous relationship with Cristo Donakis and she did not want him to know. If Sam were to realise that Cristo was the guy who had ditched her and ignored her letters and calls for assistance when she found herself pregnant, he would automatically distrust the younger man. And why should her messy personal life interfere with Sam’s plans for retirement? Letting that happen, she felt, would be more wrong than continuing to keep her secrets.
Lorcan shifted against her shoulder, his curly black hair tickling her chin, a warm weight of solid sleeping toddler.
‘Tuck him back into bed quickly,’ a voice advised quietly from the doorway.
As Deidre Turner, a small blonde woman, moved past to hastily flip back the bedding and assist her daughter in settling the little boy back into his cot, Erin sighed and stood up. ‘I’m sorry Lorcan wakened you again.’
‘Don’t be silly. I don’t have to get up as early as you do in the morning,’ her mother replied. ‘Go back to bed. You look like you’re sleepwalking. I don’t know what Sam’s thinking of, keeping you at work so late. He has no appreciation of the fact that you want to spend time with your family in the evening.’
‘Why should he have? He’s never had children to worry about,’ Erin murmured soothingly, twitching the covers back over her son’s small prone body. ‘Sam always likes to wind down with a chat at the end of the day and he’s very excited about the possibility of selling up.’
‘That’s all right for him, but if he does sell up where’s it going to leave you and the rest of the employees?’ Deidre questioned worriedly. ‘We couldn’t possibly manage on my pension.’
Erin patted her mother’s tense shoulder gently. ‘We’ll survive. Apparently the law protects our jobs in a takeover. But I’ll find work somewhere else if need be.’
‘It won’t be easy with the state the economy’s in. There aren’t many jobs out there to find,’ the older woman protested.
‘We’ll be all right,’ Erin pronounced with a confidence that she didn’t feel and a guilty conscience that she had not felt able to tell her mother that Cristo Donakis was Sam’s potential buyer.
But that news would only inflame Deidre Turner, who would also demand to know why her daughter had not made instant use of her access to Cristo to finally tell him that he was a father. In addition her mother was a constant worrier, always in search of the next black cloud on the horizon, and Erin only shared bad news with the older woman if she had no other choice. Checking that her daughter, Nuala, Lorcan’s twin sister, was still soundly asleep, curled up in a little round cosy ball inside her cot, Erin returned to bed and lay there in the darkness feeling every bit as anxious as her mother, if not more, as she struggled to count blessings rather than worries.
They lived in a comfortable terraced house. It was rented, not owned. Deidre, predictably imagining less prosperous times ahead, had decided that Erin borrowing money to buy a property for them was far too risky a venture. Her mother’s attitude had irritated Erin at the time, but now, with the future danger of unemployment on her mind again she was relieved to be a tenant living in modest accommodation. Sam had reassured her about her job, reminding her that the current legislation would protect his staff with guaranteed employment under the new ownership. But there was often a way round such rules, Erin ruminated worriedly, and, when she was already aware that Cristo didn’t want her on his staff, it would only be sensible to immediately begin looking for a new position. Unhappily that might take months to achieve but it was doable, wasn’t it? She had to be more positive, stronger, fired up and ready to meet the challenges ahead.
But, Cristo was not a challenge. He was like a great big massive rock set squarely in her path and she didn’t know how to get round such an obstacle. He believed she had stolen from him. But why hadn’t he pursued that at the time? Why hadn’t he called in the police? Erin was thinking back hard, reckoning that by the time Cristo received proof of her supposed theft he would have been married. Had he put the police on her, the fact that she was his ex would soon have emerged and perhaps got into the newspapers. Would that have embarrassed him? She didn’t think that the Cristo she recalled would have embarrassed that easily. But that publicity might have embarrassed or annoyed his bride. Was it even possible that Lisandra and Erin had both been in a relationship with Cristo at the same time? And that he had feared having that fact exposed? After all, Cristo had got married barely three months after ditching Erin and few couples went from first meeting to marrying that fast. Had he been two-timing both of them? She had never had cause to believe that he was unfaithful to her but refused to believe that he would be incapable of such behaviour. After all, what had she ever really known about Cristo when she had not even suspected that he was about to dump her?
Erin had always liked things safe and certain and she never took risks. The one time she had—Cristo—it had gone badly wrong. On that level she and Cristo were total opposites because nothing thrilled Cristo more than taking a risk or meeting a challenge. So when he had started calling her to ask her out after finally beating her at swimming she had said no, sorry, again and again and again until he had finally manoeuvred her into attending a party at his apartment, urging her to bring friends as her guests.
Her presence bolstered by the presence of Elaine and Tom, it had proved a strangely magical evening with Cristo, she later appreciated, on his very best behaviour. At the end of the night Cristo had kissed her for the first time and that single kiss had been so explosive, it had blown the lid off her wildest dreams … and terrified her. She had known straight off that Cristo Donakis was a high-risk venture: lethally dangerous to her peace of mind.
‘I like you … I do like you,’ she had told Cristo lamely while still shaking like a leaf in the aftermath of the intense passion that had flared up between them. ‘Why can’t we just be friends?’
‘Friends?’ Cristo had echoed as though that word had never come his way before.
‘That’s what I’d prefer,’ she had said brightly.
‘I don’t do that,’ he had told her drily.
With those reservations she’d had more sense at the outset of their affair than she had shown later on, she acknowledged painfully. And once she had had the twins, her life had been turned upside down. She was ashamed to realise that she had been so angry with Cristo in that hotel suite that she had actually been threatening to tell him she was the mother of his children. What aberration had almost driven her to that insane brink? He would not want her children, would never agree to take on the role of father, would only angrily resent the position she put him in and make her feel small and humiliated, a burden he resented. Surely she was entitled to retain some pride when there was no perceptible advantage to telling him the truth?
Cristo had, after all, once confided in her that one of his friends’ girlfriends had had a termination. ‘It broke them up,’ he had commented flatly. ‘Few couples survive that sort of stress. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for children. I prefer my life without baggage.’
And she had got the not exactly subtle message he had taken the trouble to put across, his so clever dark eyes pinned to hers: Don’t do that to me! Revealingly, it had been the one and only time he ever chose to make her a party to confidential information about someone he knew for Cristo was, by instinct, very discreet. She had taken it as a warning that if she fell pregnant, he would want her to have a termination and their relationship would be over. It still infuriated her that it had actually been entirely his fault that she had conceived and, although she had later grown desperate enough to try and contact him to ask for financial help, she had known even then that the announcement she had to make of his impending fatherhood
would infuriate him. Cristo was too arrogant and controlling to appreciate surprises from any source. That a woman could give birth to a baby without a man’s prior agreement to accept the responsibility would no doubt strike him as very unfair. No, she saw no point whatsoever in telling Cristo that he was the father of two young children.
Even so, what was she planning to do about his threat to reveal that file of impressive evidence? Cristo was threatening the security of her entire family. Everything she had worked to achieve could vanish overnight. Not only Erin, but her mother and her children would pay the cost of her losing her job and salary. On the other hand, if she could sink her pride enough to play Cristo’s cruel game, that file would never see the light of day and at the very least she would have another year of safe employment and plenty of time in which to search for an alternative position. What was one weekend out of the rest of her life, really? She pictured her mother’s face earlier, drawn and troubled as she fretted about the hotel group even changing hands. Life had taught Deidre Turner to fear the unknown and the unexpected. She did not deserve to be caught up in the upheaval that was gathering on her daughter’s horizon and there was little Erin would not have done to protect her children from the instability she had suffered growing up.
Unhappily, Erin believed that the entire situation was her own fault. Hadn’t she ignored everybody’s advice in getting involved with Cristo in the first place? Nobody had had a good word to say about Cristo, pointing out that his reputation as a womaniser spoke for him. And why had she made herself even more dependent by agreeing to go and work for him? Was that wise? her friends had asked worriedly. And no, nothing she had done that year with Cristo had been wise. Hadn’t she hung on in there even when the going got rough and her lover’s lack of commitment was blatantly obvious? He had not even managed to make it back into the UK to celebrate her last birthday with her. She had asked for trouble and now trouble had well and truly come home to roost. Cristo was not going to agree to play nice. Cristo had had over two years to fester over the conviction that she had dared to steal from him. Cristo was out for blood.