by Lynne Graham
Sally had turned an unhealthy colour, her dazed eyes flickering between the two of them, and suddenly she spoke. ‘You’re a couple again, aren’t you?’ she exclaimed, her attention lodging almost accusingly on Erin. ‘And you’ve told him about me, haven’t you?’
‘Told me what?’ Cristo enquired lazily.
Taking on board the reality that Cristo was piling the pressure on Sally to admit that she had lied and offering Erin a level of support she had not expected to receive from him, Erin squared her shoulders in frustration. She had always fought her own battles.
Sally compressed her lips in mutinous silence as if daring Erin to answer that question.
‘While I was working here I discovered that Sally had been taking products from the store and selling them on online auctions.’ Erin turned her attention back to the older woman, who had once been a trusted colleague. ‘I know I promised that that was our secret but sometimes promises have to be broken.’
‘You were stealing?’ Cristo prompted Sally forbiddingly.
Tears spilled from Sally’s eyes and she knocked them away with her hand and fumbled for a tissue, which she clenched tightly in one hand.
‘I guarantee that whatever you tell me there will be no prosecution now or in the future.’ Lean, strong face taut, Cristo stood up, a lithe powerful figure of considerable command. ‘I very much regret that you felt unable to be honest with me when this business was first discovered but I’m hoping that for Erin’s sake you will now tell me the truth.’
‘No prosecution?’ Sally queried uncertainly.
‘No prosecution. I only want the truth,’ Cristo confirmed.
‘One lunchtime shortly before Erin resigned a man came to see me,’ Sally related in a flat voice. ‘He said he was a private detective and he offered me a substantial amount of money if I could give him information that would damage Erin’s reputation.’
‘What?’ Cristo positively erupted into speech, his disbelief unhidden.
‘His name was Will Grimes. He worked at an agency in Camden. That’s all I know about him. At first I said no to him. After all there wasn’t any information to give!’ Sally pointed out with a wry grimace. ‘You hadn’t done anything but work hard here, Erin, but then you suddenly resigned from your job and just like that I realised how I could get myself out of the trouble that I was in.’
‘Will Grimes,’ Cristo was repeating heavily.
‘I was in a great deal more financial trouble than I admitted when you found me helping myself to that stuff from the store,’ Sally told Erin tautly. ‘I had set up a couple of other scams in the books—’
‘The payments to therapists that didn’t exist, the altered invoices?’ Cristo specified.
‘Yes, and then you organised the audit and I started to panic,’ Sally confided tearfully. ‘Erin had left the spa by then.’
‘And you decided to let me take the blame for it?’ Erin prompted while she wondered how on earth she had ever attracted the attention of a private detective.
‘I wanted to stop taking the money,’ the older woman stressed in open desperation.’ I knew it was wrong but I had got in too deep. Once the fraud was uncovered and I set up things so that you got the blame I could go back to a normal life again and, of course, I still had my job. I knew you would be safe from prosecution with Mr Donakis—he wasn’t likely to trail his own girlfriend into court!’
‘You got me right on that score,’ Cristo derided.
‘Will you prosecute me now?’ Sally asked him shakily.
‘No. I gave you my word and I thank you for finally telling me what really happened,’ Cristo responded.
Clearly limp with relief, Sally braced her hands on the desk to stand up. ‘I’ll clear my desk immediately and leave—’
‘No, work out your notice here as normal,’ Cristo urged, resting a hand on Erin’s taut shoulder to ease her slowly upright.
‘Erin?’ Sally breathed stiltedly. ‘I’m sorry. When you were so kind to me, you deserved better from me.’
Erin nodded, even tried to force her lips into a forgiving smile, but couldn’t manage it for she was all too well aware how the false belief that she was a thief had affected Cristo’s opinion of her. In any case, she was deeply shaken by what Sally had confessed and she couldn’t hide the fact. She had been fond of the older woman, had only lost contact with her because she had fallen pregnant and on hard times. Pride had ensured that she did not pursue ongoing contact with anyone at her former workplace. She stole a veiled glance at Cristo’s profile. He was pale, his facial muscles taut below his dark complexion.
Cristo paused at the door on his way out. ‘Did you collect the reward money from the private detective and give him the supposed evidence of Erin’s dishonesty?’
Sally winced and nodded slowly. ‘It got me out of debt and gave me a fresh start.’
Erin gritted her teeth, disgusted by Sally’s selfishness.
Cristo felt as if the walls of his tough shell were crumbling around him. Astonishingly, Erin’s seemingly paranoid suspicion that she was being set up for a fall by persons unknown had been proven correct. He, who rarely got anything wrong, had been wrong. He had made an appalling error of judgement. But more than anything at that moment he wanted to know who could possibly have hired a detective to discredit Erin in his eyes by fair means or foul.
CHAPTER NINE
ERIN picked at the perfectly cooked lunch served on board Cristo’s private jet without much appetite. She was still angry at Sally and bitter that the older woman had got away with destroying Erin’s reputation rather than her own. How many other people were suffering from the mistaken assumption that she was a con woman, who had escaped her just deserts solely because she was the owner’s ex-girlfriend? As someone who had always worked hard with scrupulous honesty and pride in her performance of her duties, she deeply resented the false impression that Sally had created to hide her own wrongdoing.
‘We have to talk,’ Cristo remarked flatly.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard that phrase from you before,’ she parried waspishly, recalling that once upon a time Cristo had been the first out of he door when such a suggestion was laid before him. That had certainly been his all-too-masculine reaction on every occasion when she’d tried to corner him for a serious conversation.
From the cabin next door she could hear the sounds of the children playing and talking. Jenny, the charming young brunette nanny, had turned out not to work for the spa crèche after all. No, indeed, Jenny had been specifically hired by Cristo to take care of the twins while they were in Greece.
‘That’s so unnecessary and extravagant,’ Erin had criticised when she found out about the arrangement at the airport.
‘You can’t look after them 24-7,’ Cristo had informed her authoritatively.
‘Why can’t I?’ she had asked.
‘Why shouldn’t you have a break?’ he had responded arrogantly.
‘If Jenny is your concept of responsible parenting you need to buy another handbook,’ she had retorted curtly, annoyed that he had taken such a decision over her head. He was Lorcan and Nuala’s father: all right, she accepted that, however that didn’t mean that she would accept his interference in matters about which he was scarcely qualified to have an opinion. She was no more in need of a break than any other working mother, she thought thinly, which she supposed meant that, rail as she had at him, the prospect of the occasional hour in which she could relax and think of herself again was disturbingly appealing and made her feel quite appallingly guilty.
Returning to the present and the tense atmosphere currently stretching between them, Erin shot Cristo a glance from cool amethyst eyes. ‘You think we should talk? I’ll be frank—only if you crawled naked over broken glass would I think you had redeemed yourself.’
A wicked grin very briefly slashed Cristo’s lean bronzed features, his dark eyes shot with golden amusement below his thick sooty lashes, making him spectacularly handsome. ‘Not much chan
ce of that,’ he admitted.
‘So, where’s my apology?’ Erin demanded truculently to mask the effect of her dry mouth and quickened heartbeat because, no matter how furious he made her, she could still not remain impervious to his stunning good looks, a reality that mortified her. ‘It’s taking you long enough!’
‘I was trying to come up with the right words.’
‘Even if you swallowed a dictionary, it wouldn’t help you!’
Lean strong face taut, Cristo sprang out of his seat. ‘I am sincerely sorry that I ever entertained the suspicion that you had stolen from me, koukla mou.’
‘You didn’t just entertain it,’ she objected. ‘You fell for it hook, line and sinker!’
‘My security team are even at this moment checking into this Will Grimes angle. I can’t understand why a private detective would have been interested in you.’ Indeed, having thought deeply about that particular issue, Cristo could only think that someone he knew had hired a detective in an apparent effort to disgrace Erin. But who would have wasted their money on such a pursuit and what had been the motivation? It still made no sense to him. Erin had not been his wife or fiancée? Why would anyone have wanted to harm her and, through her, him?
Erin tilted her chin, eyes glinting pure lavender. ‘Seems I wasn’t paranoid, after all. I’m still waiting on that apology too.’
His strong jaw line hardened, dark eyes gleaming. ‘And you’ll be waiting a long time because you’re not getting a second. If you hadn’t been so direct about your expectations I might have soft-pedalled for the sake of peace, but now I’ll be equally direct: you brought that theft accusation down on your own head!’
Erin stared at him aghast, totally wrong-footed by that condemnation coming at her out of the blue when she had expected a grovelling apology. Really? Well, possibly not of the grovelling variety, but, yes, she had assumed he would be embarrassed by his misjudgement and eager to soothe her wounded feelings. Now, deprived of that development and outraged by his attitude, Erin leapt out of her seat to face him. ‘And how do you work that out?’
‘As far as I was aware Sally Jennings was an exemplary long-term employee with no strikes against her and no reason to lie. Had I known she had already been caught thieving at work I would have known to take a closer look at her activities,’ Cristo shot back at her levelly.
Erin stiffened, feeling she was on weaker ground when it came to the decision she had once made over Sally and defying the reflection. ‘Sally was going through a divorce and she has two autistic sons. At the time, I believed she needed compassionate handling rather than punishment.’
Cristo expelled his breath in a hiss, his brilliant eyes cracking like whips. ‘Compassion? If I’d known then how you mishandled her dishonesty I would have sacked you for incompetence!’
‘Incompetence?’ Erin bleated incredulously, rage jumping up and down inside her like a gushing fountain suddenly switched on.
‘Yes, incompetence,’ Cristo confirmed with succinct bite. ‘How would you feel about a manager who left a thief in a position of power in your business and chose not to warn anyone about her dangerous little weakness?’
‘I dealt with the situation as I saw fit back then. Looking back, I can see I was too trusting—’
‘Correction … bloody naïve!’ Cristo shot back at her witheringly. ‘I didn’t hire you to be compassionate. Plenty of people lead tough lives but few of them steal. I hired you to take care of part of my business and that was your sole responsibility. Listening to sob stories and letting a clever calculating woman get off scot-free with her crimes was no part of your job description!’
It took enormous will power but Erin managed to restrain her temper and the urge to snap back at him because she knew that he was making valid points. ‘It’s not a decision I would make now. Unfortunately I liked Sally and believed she was a wonderful worker. I was naïve—I’ll admit that—’
‘Why the hell didn’t you consult me about it or at least approach someone with more experience for their opinion on what to do about her?’ Cristo demanded angrily. ‘At the very least, once you knew Sally was a thief, all her activities at work should have been checked out thoroughly and she should have been moved to a position where she had no access to products, account books or money.’
As he made those cogent decrees Erin lifted her head high, refusing to go into retreat. ‘You’re right but I thought I could deal with the situation on my own. I didn’t want you to think that I couldn’t cope. But I was hugely overworked and stressed at the time. I notice the current manager has a deputy and I saw at least two administrators in the general office. I didn’t have anyone but Sally to rely on.’
‘Then you should have asked for more help,’ Cristo fielded without hesitation.
‘My biggest mistake was accepting a position from someone I was involved with. I was too proud, too busy trying to impress you about what a great job I was doing. I didn’t have enough experienced staff around me and those that were there kept their distance because I was too close to the boss. I was very focused on building the business, bringing in more custom, increasing productivity. It made me far too dependent on Sally for support. I can see that now,’ Erin concluded that honest statement curtly.
‘At least you can now see what that inappropriate decision cost you. Sally didn’t hesitate when it came to setting you up to take the blame for her acts of fraud or when she got the chance to reap financial benefits from her disloyalty,’ Cristo pointed out.
‘Don’t forget that Sally Jennings fooled you as well. The role she played was very convincing,’ Erin reminded him tightly. ‘You didn’t smell a rat in her performance either.’
‘But I would have done had you tipped me off about her stealing. Right, we’ve aired this for long enough, subject closed,’ Cristo pronounced decisively.
‘Now that you’ve had your say and blamed me for everything?’ Erin countered tautly, amethyst eyes dark and unwittingly vulnerable, for that word, ‘incompetence’, had cut deep as a knife. ‘Was it too much for me to expect that after knowing me for a year you would question the idea that I might have been filling my pockets at your expense?’
‘After certain suspicions had been awakened and the man I saw in your hotel-room bed I will concede that I was predisposed to think the worst of you,’ Cristo derided, compressing his wide sensual mouth into a tough line. ‘What’s that cliché about the easiest explanation usually being the right one? In this case, the easiest explanation was the wrong one.’
Erin sank back down in her seat. ‘Am I finally getting a clean slate on the score of the one-night stand with the toy boy?’ she asked grittily. ‘Tom’s brother, Dennis, was only nineteen back then.’
‘That’s not quite so clear cut. My suspicions in that quarter were first awakened by other indications, which I will discuss with you when we get to the island,’ he added as her triangular face tensed into a frown of bemusement. ‘I am sincerely sorry that I misjudged you and that I didn’t dig a little deeper three years back.’
Erin said nothing. What other evidence of her infidelity did he imagine he had? She hadn’t a clue what he was talking about and had no time for more mysteries. In addition her mind was being bombarded with thoughts after that heated exchange of views. He had shot her down in flames and it rankled and that was precisely why she had not approached him for advice after she had caught Sally stealing. She had known he would take the toughest stance and would call in the police. She had feared that he would blame her for the inadequate security in the products store, which had made Sally’s thefts all too easy. If she was honest she had also worried about how she would cope without Sally at her elbow. My mistake, she acknowledged painfully. A wrong decision that had cost her more than she could ever have dreamt.
Cristo watched in frustration as Erin made a weak excuse and went off to join Jenny and the twins. It had been right to tell her the truth, he told himself angrily. He was damned if the fact that she was the mother of his
children would make him start lying just to please her! Did shooting from the hip mean he had also shot himself in the foot? Almost three years ago, he had not talked to Erin about important issues and this time around he was determined not to repeat that mistake. Blunt speech had to be better than minimal communication and misunderstandings, he decided impatiently.
Shielded by the need to keep the twins occupied for what remained of a journey that entailed a final helicopter flight to the island of Thesos, Erin licked her wounds in private. From the air she had a fantastic view of Cristo’s island. It was bigger than she had imagined and the southern end was heavily forested with pine trees. She spied a cluster of low-rise structures on what appeared to be a building site on the furthest coast and a picturesque little town by the harbour before the helicopter flew level again and began to swoop down over the tree tops to land.
Lorcan was asleep and Cristo hoisted his son out of Erin’s arms and carried him off. They had landed about twenty yards from a magnificent ultra-modern villa surrounded by terraces and balconies to take advantage of the land and sea views.
‘This all looks new,’ Erin remarked.
‘I demolished my parents’ house and had this one designed about three years ago. It made more sense than trying to renovate the old place,’ he commented casually.
Three years ago, while they had still been a couple, Erin had known nothing about his island or the new house he was having built. Not for the first time Erin appreciated that Cristo had shut her out of a large section of his life and she wondered why. Obviously he had never considered her important enough to include her in the Greek half of his existence, which encompassed home and family. And that, whether she liked it or not, hurt, most particularly when he had married a Greek woman within months of dumping Erin.
A short brunette with warm brown eyes was introduced as Androula, the housekeeper. Straight away Androula cooed over the children in their arms and hurried off to show Erin and Jenny to the rooms set aside for their use. Erin was taken aback to discover that Cristo had already had accommodation specially prepared for his son and daughter, each complete with small beds, appropriate decoration and an array of toys. Leaving the capable Jenny to put the drowsy children to bed, Erin explored her own room with its doors opening onto the terrace and superb view through the trees to a white beach and a turquoise sea over which the sun was sinking in a display of fiery splendour.