‘In those days …’ Cristo, engaged in watching the tense muscles in her slender back and the vulnerable piece of pale nape exposed by her bent head, floundered. ‘I wasn’t exactly in touch with my feelings.’
‘I’m not sure you had any … above your belt,’ Erin specified shakily.
‘That is so wrong!’ Cristo growled, lean hands closing forcefully to her shoulders to tug her back round to face him. ‘I was sick to the stomach when I thought you’d gone to bed with another man! It turned my whole life upside down!’
‘Try being pregnant by a man you can’t even get to speak to you on the phone!’ Erin lanced back at him with unconcealed bitterness.
His dark golden eyes shone amber bright at the challenge. ‘I would never have knowingly allowed that to happen. What reason would I have to treat you like some demented stalker? I intend to get the full story out of Amelia when I’m next in Athens where she works now.’
‘I’ll still never forgive you.’
His superb bone structure was taut and he gazed steadily back at her. ‘Was being pregnant so bad?’
‘I had to live on welfare benefits. It was a struggle I’ll never forget,’ Erin admitted truthfully. ‘My home was a damp tenth-floor council flat barely fit for human habitation. It was only when my mother came to see me and realised how I was living that she invited me to go home with her. There was also the not so little matter of me being pregnant and unmarried, which really did upset Mum. She’s an old-fashioned woman and as far as she’s concerned decent girls don’t have babies until they have a ring on their wedding finger. We were estranged for most of my pregnancy.’
His concern was unfeigned. ‘You had no support at all? What about your friend, Elaine? Did she ask you to move out of her apartment?’
‘No, I made that decision—I couldn’t pay my way any more,’ Erin explained ruefully. ‘But Tom and Melissa helped out as best they could.’
‘Melissa?’
‘Now Tom’s wife but at the time they were living together and I couldn’t have had better friends,’ Erin declared. ‘They were very good to me.’
His keen gaze was screened by his luxuriant black lashes, his eloquent mouth set in a forbidding line. ‘I owe them a debt for that.’
‘Yes, you do,’ Erin told him bluntly. ‘They didn’t have much either but what they had they shared.’
His lashes swept up on breathtakingly beautiful golden eyes from which all anger had vanished. ‘But I owe the biggest debt of all to you for bringing my children into the world. Don’t think I don’t appreciate that and know how lucky I was that you chose not to have a termination. I do know—I do appreciate it,’ he completed in a rare display of unmistakable emotion.
Cristo took the wind out of Erin’s sails with that candid little speech, but her anger with him was not so easily soothed. ‘When I was pregnant I assumed that if you had a choice you would have preferred me to have a termination. You once told me about that friend of yours whose girlfriend got pregnant,’ she reminded him.
‘I didn’t say that I approved of what they chose to do. Maybe it was right for them but I would not have reacted the same way that he did.’
‘Easy to say,’ she needled. ‘Hindsight is a wonderful device with which to rewrite the past. You also said that you preferred your life without baggage.’
‘Don’t judge me for what I did and didn’t do almost three years ago. I’ve grown up a lot since then,’ Cristo spelt out tautly.
His marriage to Lisandra, she thought ruefully, thinking it was sad that she apparently owed this rather less arrogant and reserved version of Cristo to the machinations of another woman. Even so, her heart could only be touched by his gratitude that she had given birth to Lorcan and Nuala. She had felt his sincerity and it meant a great deal to her. Cristo had, after all, taken to fatherhood with enthusiasm and energy. He seemed neither resentful of the responsibility he had had thrust on him, nor ill-at-ease with it. That awareness tore more than one brick out of Erin’s defensive wall.
Walking back indoors, she noticed a trio of large envelopes lying on an occasional table. Already opened, they were addressed to Cristo at his London office. ‘What are these?’
Cristo hesitated and then frowned, his restive pacing coming to a sudden halt. ‘The evidence I promised to show you once we got here. Take a look at what’s in those envelopes …’
‘Why? What’s in them?’
‘Photos which were sent to me during the latter months we were together in London.’
Erin extracted a large, slightly blurred photograph of a couple walking hand in hand. The man was her friend, Tom Harcourt, and the face on the woman was hers. As she had never held hands with Tom in her life she was astonished until she studied the body and the clothing of the female depicted. In a frantic rush, she leafed through the other photos, one showing the same couple kissing and another of them hugging. ‘That may be my face but it’s not my body—it’s Melissa’s. These photos are all of Tom with his wife, Melissa, but they’ve been digitally altered to make it look as though the woman is me!’ she murmured in disbelief.
‘Altered?’ Cristo stood by her side as she fanned out the photos and one by one proceeded to verbally pick them apart. ‘How altered?’
‘Whoever sent these photos to you grafted my face onto Melissa’s body,’ she told him angrily. ‘All we have in common is that we’re both blondes but I’d recognise that sweater from a mile away! How on earth could you think that was me, Cristo? Melissa is much smaller, well under five foot tall. Didn’t you notice how small she seems beside Tom, who isn’t that tall? And since when did I have a bust as big as that?’
Peering down at the
photos, Cristo noted every point of comparison. ‘None of them are of you with Tom,’ he finally breathed in bewilderment. ‘Why didn’t I notice those differences for myself?’
It might as well have been a rhetorical question because Erin had no intention of pursuing that pointless line of enquiry. ‘As you said, you act first and ask later. But I just don’t believe how secretive you can be! You received these rotten lying photos on three separate occasions and didn’t once mention them to me. No wonder you became so suspicious of my friendship with Tom!’