The Secrets She Carried

Gooseflesh covered the backs of her hands and suddenly she felt chilled. ‘Were you getting at something?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Don’t play games with me,’ she urged, breathing in deep and slow, nostrils flaring in dismay at the familiar spicy scent of his designer aftershave.

The smell of him, so familiar, so achingly familiar, unleashed a tide of memories. When he was away from her she used to sleep in one of his shirts but she would never have done anything so naff and revealing when he was around. Sometimes when she was at his city apartment she used to wash his shirts as well, she recalled numbly, eager to take on any little homely task that could made her feel more like one half of a committed couple. But Cristo had not made a commitment to her, had not done anything to make her feel secure and had never once mentioned love or the future. Recalling those hard facts, she wondered why she had once looked back on that phase as being the happiest of her life. Admittedly that year with Cristo had been the most exciting, varied and challenging of her twenty-five years of existence but the moments of happiness had often been fleeting and she had passed a great deal more time worrying about where their affair was going and never daring to ask. She had worked so hard at playing it cool with him, on not attaching strings or expectations that might irritate him. Her soft full mouth turned down at the recollection—much good all that anxious stressing and striving had done her! At the end of the day, in spite of all her precautions, he had still walked away untouched while she had been crushed in the process. She had had to accept that all along she had only been a Miss All-Right-For-Now on his terms, not a woman he was likely to stay with. No, she was just one more in a long line of women who had contrived to catch his eye and entertain him for a while until the time came for him to choose a suitable wife. The knowledge that she had meant so little to him that he had ditched her to marry another woman still burned like acid inside her.

‘Maybe I’m hoping you’ll finally come clean,’ Cristo murmured levelly.

Erin turned her head, smooth brow indented with a frown as she struggled to recall the conversation and get back into it again. ‘Come clean about what?’

Cristo pulled off the road into a layby before he responded. ‘I found out what you were up to while you were working for me at the Mobila spa.’

Erin twisted her entire body round to look at him, crystalline eyes flaring bright, her rising tension etched in the taut set of her heart-shaped face. ‘What do you mean, what I was up to?’

Cristo flexed long brown fingers round the steering wheel and then turned to look at her levelly, ebony dark eyes cool and opaque as frosted glass. ‘You were helping yourself to the profits in a variety of inventive ways but I employ a forensic accounting team, who have seen it all before, and they traced the transactions back to you. You were stealing from me.’

For a split second, Erin was pinned to the seat by the sheer weight of her incredulity and her eyes were huge. ‘That’s an outrageous and disgusting lie!’ she slammed back at him, her voice rising half an octave with a volume stirred by simple shock.

‘I have the proof and witnesses,’ Cristo breathed in a tone of cutting finality that brooked no argument, igniting the engine again and filtering the car back onto the main road without batting an eyelash.

‘You can’t have proof and witnesses for something that never happened!’ Erin launched at him furiously. ‘I can’t believe that you can accuse me of something like that—I’ve never stolen anything in my life!’

‘You stole from me,’ Cristo shot back at her with simmering emphasis, his bold bronzed profile hard as iron. ‘You can’t argue with hard evidence.’

Erin was stunned, not only by the accusation coming so long after the event and out of nowhere at her, but by the rock-solid assurance of his conviction in her guilt.

‘I don’t care what evidence you think you’ve got. As it never happened, as I never helped myself to anything I wasn’t entitled to, the evidence can only have been manufactured!’

‘Nothing was manufactured. Face facts. You got greedy and you got caught,’ Cristo asserted grittily. ‘I’d have had you charged with theft if I’d known where to find you but by the time I found out you were long gone.’

Trembling with frustrated fury, every nerve jangling with adrenalin, Erin waited impatiently for him to park outside the nineteen-thirties black and white frontage of the Black’s Inn hotel. Then she wrenched at the handle on the passenger door and leapt out. Cristo watched her through the windscreen, bleakly amused by the angry heat in her shaken face. She was shocked that he had found her out and not surprisingly frantic to convince him that she was as innocent as a newborn lamb of the charges. Naturally she wouldn’t want him to label her a thief with her current employer. Even if she had resisted temptation this time around, mud stuck and no boss could have a faith in a member of staff with such a fatal weakness.

Slowly and with the easy moving fluidity of a natural athlete, Cristo climbed out of the car and locked it.

Erin’s small hands clenched into fists at her side as she squared up to him. ‘We’re going to have this out!’

Infuriatingly in control, Cristo cast her a slumberous glance from below his ridiculously long lashes. ‘Not a good idea in a public place—’

‘We’ll borrow Owen’s office.’ Erin stalked into the hotel and saw the lanky blond manager already on his way out to welcome them. She hurried over to him. ‘We’ll do the tour in ten minutes. Right now we need somewhere private to talk. Could we use your office?’

‘Of course.’ Owen spread the door wide and as she passed him smiled down at her and whispered, ‘By the way, thanks for the heads-up.’

Cristo noticed that friendly little exchange but not its content and wondered at the precise nature of Erin’s relationship with the handsome young manager. Generally she liked older men, Cristo reflected until he recalled the youth barely, if even, into his twenties that he had surprised in her hotel bed and his expressive mouth clenched hard. He recalled Sam Morton’s gushing praise of his beautiful area manager and his derision rose even higher. He doubted that he’d ever met a man more in a woman’s thrall. Sam thought the sun, the moon and the stars rose on Erin Turner.

Erin closed the door on Cristo’s entry and spun back to him, amethyst eyes dark with anger. ‘I am not a thief, so naturally I want to know exactly why you’re making these allegations.’

He studied her with narrowed eyes. She was breathing fast, her silky top sliding tantalisingly against the rounded bulge of her breasts. Creamy lickable mounds topped by succulent strawberry nipples, he remembered lasciviously, his desire firing at that imagery as a bolt of lust shot through him in a flash, leaving him hard as a rock. What she lacked in height she more than made up for with wonderfully feminine curves. He had loved her body. Even worse, he had dreamt of her passion when he was away from her, craving the unparalleled sexual satisfaction he had yet to find with anyone else.

‘I’m not an idiot,’ Cristo informed her coldly, forcing his keen mind back to a safer pathway. ‘At the Mobila spa, you sold products out of the beauty store on your own behalf, falsified invoices and paid therapists who didn’t exist. Your fraudulent acts netted you something in the region of twenty grand in a comparatively short time frame. How could you think that that level of deceit would go unnoticed?’

‘I am not a thief,’ Erin repeated doggedly although an alarm bell had gone off in her head the instant he mentioned the theft and sale of products from the store.

She knew someone who had done that for she herself had actually caught the woman putting a box of products into her car. Sally, her administrative assistant in the office, whom she had relied on heavily at the time, had been stealing and selling the exclusive items online. Unfortunately Erin had no proof of that fact because she had neither called in the police to handle the matter nor shared the truth that Sally had been stealing with another member of staff. Instead she had sat a distraught Sally down to talk to her. Together the two women had then done a stocktake and Erin had ended up replacing the missing products out of her own pocket. Why? She had felt desperately sorry for the older woman, struggling to cope alone with two autistic children after her husband had walked out on her. But had she only scraped the tip of the iceberg when it came to Sally’s dishonesty? Had Sally even then been engaged in rather more imaginative methods of gaining money by duplicitous means?

‘I have the proof,’ Cristo retorted crisply.

‘And witnesses, you said,’ Erin recalled. ‘Would one of those witnesses be Sally Jennings?’