Playing the Royal Game
And Cristo registered in some surprise at his predictability that he was no different from that self-serving libidinous majority. I could go there again, he thought fiercely, his adrenalin pumping at the prospect of that sexual challenge. I could really enjoy going there again. She’s wasted on an old man and far too devious to be contained by a male with a conventional outlook. He began to read the file, discovering that Erin’s wealthy employer was a widower. He could only assume that she had her ambition squarely centred on becoming the second Mrs Morton. Why else would a scheming gold-digger be working to ingratiate herself and earn a fairly humble crust? He was convinced that she would not have been able to resist the temptation of helping herself to funds from Sam Morton’s spas as well.
Her healthy survival instincts and enduring cunning offended Cristo’s sense of justice. Had he really believed that such a cool little schemer might turn over a new leaf in the aftermath of their affair? Had he ever been that naïve? Certainly, he had compared every woman he had ever had in his bed to Erin and found them all wanting in one way or another. That was a most disconcerting truth to accept. Clearly, he had never got her out of his system, he reflected grimly. Like a piece of baggage he couldn’t shed, she had travelled on with him even when he believed that he was free of her malign influence. It was time that he finally stowed that excess baggage and moved on and how better to do that than by exorcising her from his psyche with one last sexual escapade?
He knew what Erin Turner was and he also knew that memory always lied. Memory would have embellished her image and polished her up to a degree that would not withstand the harsh light of reality. He needed to puncture the myth, explode the persistent fantasy and seeing her again in the flesh would accomplish that desirable conclusion most effectively. A hard smile slashed Cristo’s handsome mouth as he imagined her dismay at his untimely reappearance in her life.
‘Look before you leap,’ his risk-adverse foster mother had earnestly told him when he was a child, fearing his adventurous, rebellious nature and unable to comprehend the unimaginably entertaining attraction of taking a leap into the unknown. In spite of all his foster parents’ efforts to tame his passionate temperament, however, Cristo’s notoriously hot-blooded Donakis genes still ran true to form in his veins. His birth parents might not have survived to raise their son but he had inherited their volatile spirits in the cradle.
Without a second thought about the likelihood of consequences, indeed merely reacting to the insidious arousal and sense of challenge tugging at his every physical sense, Cristo lifted the phone. He informed the executive head of his acquisitions team that he would be taking over the next phase of the negotiations with the owner of the Stanwick Hall Hotel group.
* * *
‘Well, what do you think?’ Sam prompted, taken aback by Erin’s unusual silence by his side. ‘You needed a new car and here it is!’
Erin was still staring with a dropped jaw at the top-of-the-range silver BMW parked outside the garages for her examination. ‘It’s beautiful but—’
‘But nothing!’ Sam interrupted impatiently as if he had been awaiting an adverse comment and was keen to stifle it. Only marginally taller than Erin’s five feet two inches, he was a trim man with a shock of white hair and bright blue eyes that burned with restive energy in his suntanned face. ‘You do a big important job here at Stanwick and you need a car that suits the part—’
‘Only not such an exclusive luxury model,’ she protested awkwardly, wondering what on earth her colleagues would think if they saw her pulling up in a vehicle that undoubtedly cost more than she could earn in several years of employment. ‘That’s too much—’
‘Only the best for my star employee,’ Sam countered with cheerful unconcern. ‘You’re the one who taught me the importance of image in business and an economical runabout certainly doesn’t cut the mustard.’
‘I just can’t accept it, Sam,’ Erin told him uncomfortably.
‘You don’t have a choice,’ her boss responded with immoveable good humour as he pressed a set of car keys into her reluctant hand. ‘Your old Fiesta is gone. Thanks, Sam, is all you need to say.’