The Secrets She Carried

Erin followed him into the bathroom. ‘We definitely are, Cristo. You can’t accuse me of infidelity and expect me to accept it in silence! What’s wrong with you? You think I’m a thief as well but you said nothing about that either at the time. In retrospect don’t you find all this muck being flung at me a little strange?’

Cristo was engaged in stripping off his wine-stained clothing. ‘In what way strange?’ he queried curtly.

‘It’s beginning to look to me like someone set out to deliberately discredit me in your eyes.’

His handsome mouth took on a sardonic curve as he peeled off his jeans and left them in a heap. ‘That sounds like paranoia.’

Erin averted her attention as he stripped off his boxers and discovered that she was studying his long, powerful, hair-roughened thighs instead. The colour in her cheeks heightened as she lifted her head again, struggling to blot out the sight of the lean ropes of muscle banding his powerful torso. ‘There’s nothing paranoid about my suspicions—’

‘You cheated on me and I found out … get over it,’ Cristo advised witheringly as he switched on the shower and stepped in, utterly unconcerned by the nudity of his lean bronzed body. But then he had never been shy. ‘It’s ancient history. Don’t try to resurrect it.’

‘I wish I’d hit you with that bottle.’

Cristo rammed back the shower door and rested cold dark eyes of warning on her angry, defiant face. ‘Don’t you ever do anything like that again or I won’t be responsible for what I do.’

Erin clashed with scorching golden eyes and her tummy lurched. Rage washed over her again because butterflies were leaping in her pelvis. Infuriatingly her body was reacting to him with all the control of an infatuated adolescent. ‘I wish I had cheated on you … the way you treated me, I might as well have done!’

She stalked out of the bathroom. He had knocked her for six with that accusation. He had also taught her that she didn’t know him as well as she had always believed she did. Although she had recognised his reserve she had never dreamt that he might have the capacity to keep such big secrets from her. What else didn’t she know about Cristo? And what else had happened that had caused him to doubt her loyalty? What were those other ‘things’ he had grudgingly mentioned? Yanking the bedspread off the bed, and lifting a pillow, she made up the sofa on the far side of the room for her occupation.

‘You’re not sleeping over there,’ Cristo told her tautly.

‘I’m certainly not getting back into a bed with a man who thinks I’m a slut as well as a thief!’ Erin replied with spirit, pale hair bouncing on her shoulders as she spun round to face him.

Stark naked, Cristo was hauling fresh clothing from drawers. He shot her a censorious appraisal from brilliant dark eyes. ‘We have a deal—’

‘But I intend to add my own conditions,’ Erin declared thinly. ‘I’ll keep to our agreement if—’

‘Too late—we already have a deal.’

‘If that’s your attitude I’m sleeping on the sofa.’

His thick sooty lashes lowered on stunning golden eyes while he surveyed her. ‘Do you cheat at cards too?’

‘You ought to know—you taught me to play,’ she reminded him.

The silence buzzed like an angry wasp. Cristo continued to watch her, his attention locked to the sultry pink pout of her mouth. He wished he had kept his own shut and could not think why he had admitted that he knew of her betrayal. Everything had been going so well until she decided that honour demanded she now prove that she was pure as the driven snow. In exasperation he scored long brown fingers through his damp black hair. ‘What conditions?’ he demanded impatiently.

‘I’ll get back into that bed if—and only if—you agree to talk to Tom, who will verify that he passed the key card for the room to his brother and later dropped me off at the hospital a hundred miles away to be with my mother.’

Cristo looked pained. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

Erin tilted her chin. ‘No, it’s the least of what you owe me.’

‘I owe you nothing.’ He was poised there insolently, still half naked but for the jeans he had pulled on. Just looking at Cristo made her heartbeat pick up speed and her breathing quicken: he was so physically gorgeous. White-hot sex appeal was bred into his very bones. Even more disturbingly, the wilful line of his beautiful mouth was remarkably like her son, Lorcan’s, she registered in dismay, rushing to suppress that unnerving sense of familiarity. Inside himself Cristo was seething with anger, she did know that, but Cristo rarely revealed anger on the surface, deeming that a weakness. And one thing Cristophe Donakis did not do was weakness.

‘I deserve that you check out my side of the story,’ Erin proclaimed as regally as a queen. ‘You didn’t give me the opportunity three years ago, so the least you can do is take care of the omission now.’

A winged ebony brow quirked. ‘And if I agree, you’ll get back into bed?’

‘I have just one more thing to say.’

‘You’re pricing yourself out of the market.’

Erin gazed back at him, remembering when she had loved him, when she had simply lived for his quick easy smile and attention and shrinking from the recollection, fearful of ever laying her heart out again. ‘No, I’m worth waiting for.’

Cristo dealt her a hungry appraisal that made her triangular face burn as though he had turned an open flame on her skin. ‘Speak …’

‘Ask yourself why I would commit fraud and put myself at risk of a prison sentence while refusing to accept the valuable diamond jewellery you tried to give me on several occasions,’ she advised softly. ‘If I wanted money that badly, keeping the diamonds and selling them would have been much more sensible.’