The Secrets She Carried

‘You know they didn’t,’ Cristo responded flatly.

Erin came to the final document and stared down at the evidence of a single large payment of a thousand pounds heading into a bank account in her name and nausea stirred in her stomach. Had she ever bothered to close that old bank account? She had intended to but couldn’t remember. Only one payment but one was enough to damn her. In her opinion only Sally Jennings could be responsible for such duplicity. She had pretty much automatically signed anything that the older woman put on her desk. With hindsight she knew she had been too trusting. Unhappily managing the spa had been her first serious job and she had had no deputy to stand in for her when Cristo wanted her to make time for him. Torn between too much work, hostile staff, who loathed working for the owner’s girlfriend, and a deep driving desire to impress Cristo with her efficiency, she had relied a lot on Sally, who had worked at the spa since it had opened ten years earlier and knew the business inside out. No such thing as a free ride, Erin told herself heavily now. Even Sam would doubt her innocence in the face of such damning proof as the file contained.

Erin stood up and dropped the file down with a distasteful clunk of dismissal on the coffee table. ‘Very impressive, but I didn’t do it! You gave me a great opportunity when you put me in that job and I wouldn’t have gone behind your back to steal from you.’

Cristo continued to stare at her, eyes like chips of bright gold below his luxuriant lashes, and all of a sudden she was struggling to breathe evenly and something inside her seemed to speed up as if her blood were racing through her veins and the buzz of forbidden excitement in the pit of her tummy were spreading like contagion to her entire body.

‘You still want me, koukla mou,’ Cristo purred, revelling in the charge in the atmosphere, the awareness in her clear gaze. It was the first time he had been able to read her again and it satisfied him.

‘No! That is absolutely not true!’ Erin shot back at him vehemently, wishing she had not asked to see that evidence in his presence as she recognised how much it had unnerved her and damaged her self-discipline. Now she was all shaken and stirred, a state to be avoided in a predator’s radius.

Cristo reached out a hand and curled his fingers around her slender wrist, edging her out from behind the table. The storm of reaction inside her rose to hurricane force, suppressing her caution and defensiveness.

‘No …’ she said in a small choked voice, fighting just to get air back into her lungs.

Nevertheless he drew her close, banding strong arms round her like a prison, and the heat and strength of him acted like an aphrodisiac on her disturbed senses. She tried to keep distance between them, her slender body rigid as a rock, but he closed the gap with inexorable purpose.

‘It’s OK,’ he rasped in the most frighteningly soothing tone. ‘I want you too.’

And Erin did not want to hear that from the male who had dumped her and gone straight off to marry another woman. He had never wanted her enough to love her or keep her and that was the only wanting she had ever needed from him. He meant sex, only sex, she told herself feverishly while the reassuring warmth of him filtered through their clothing to warm her chilled limbs. But far more insidious was the insanely familiar smell of him that close, her nostrils flaring on the faint aroma of the same designer cologne he had always worn, never forgotten, and she was breathing him headily in as though he were a forbidden drug.

‘Stop it, Cristo!’ she told him tartly. ‘I am not going there again. I am never going there again with you!’

‘We’ll see …’ And, golden eyes blazing down at the fiercely conflicted expression on her heart-shaped face, his beautiful mouth swooped down on hers to claim the kiss she would have done almost anything to deny him.

And the taste of him was instantly addictive even as her hands swept up to strike in fists against his broad shoulders while he hauled her closer. Hot, hungry need roared through her in a storm that made her knees shake and she didn’t know whether it was her or him behind it, or if, indeed, both of them were equally responsible. His tongue delved and she shuddered, so awake and defenceless against his every seductive move that it hurt, hurt to feel anything so strongly after so long without it. She wanted that kiss then with a sudden ferocity that terrified her. Nothing else mattered but the forceful power of that lean strong body against her own, the pulsing prominence of her nipples and the liquid burn between her thighs driving her on. His mouth bore down on hers with a seething, sizzling urgency that zinged through her slight length like an electric shock, stunning every sense into reaction. Nothing had ever tasted so good, nothing had ever felt so necessary and answering the shrill shriek of warning firing at the back of her brain took every atom of her inner strength.

‘No!’ she said in fierce rebuttal, thrusting him away from her with an abruptness that almost made him lose that famous catlike balance of his as he backed into a chair.

In a daze, Cristo blinked. She packed a punch like a world-class boxer. He shook his handsome dark head, dark eyes instantly veiling as he fought the bite of un-sated hunger clawing through his big powerful frame. ‘You’re right … this is not the moment. I have a flight to catch,’ he retorted thickly.

Erin’s breasts heaved as she frantically breathed in deep in an effort to emulate his fast recovery. Her amethyst eyes were dark with strong emotion as she studied his lean, darkly handsome features with a loathing she couldn’t hide. ‘I meant no as in never,’ she contradicted shakily. ‘Leave me alone, stay out of my life and stop threatening me.’

His black diamond eyes flared brilliant gold again, for there was nothing in life that Cristo enjoyed so much as a challenge. ‘I won’t go away.’

‘You’re going to get burned if you keep pushing me,’ Erin warned him angrily, her small face set like a stone, all emotion but anger repressed. ‘Get back out of my life or you’ll regret it.’

‘No, I won’t. I rarely regret anything that I do,’ Cristo fielded, visibly savouring the admission. ‘Are you worried that I’ll screw up your future with Morton? Sorry, koukla mou. I’ll be doing him a favour. You’re toxic.’

Her hands clenched into tight fists. ‘I think you’ll feel the toxic effect more strongly by the time this is over.’

Cristo shot her a grimly amused appraisal. ‘I could handle you with one hand tied behind my back.’

‘You always did like to believe your own publicity,’ Erin countered tightly, her spine as straight as an arrow as she walked to the door. ‘I’ll catch a taxi back to Stanwick.’

In the lift, she had what felt like a panic attack, her heart beating too fast for comfort, cold clamminess filming her skin. That kiss? Total dynamite! How could that be? How had that happened? She was not in love with him any more, had believed she was fully cured of all that foolishness … until the instant she laid eyes on him again and his mesmerising attraction gripped her as tightly as steel handcuffs.

Maybe she’d succumbed to that kiss because she had been upset after reading that file. Is that the best excuse you can find? a little voice sneered inside her brain. She reddened, hating herself almost as much as she now hated him. Her response to him had qualified as weak and that was something she could not accept.

CHAPTER FOUR

IN the early hours of the following morning, Erin rocked her son, Lorcan, on her lap. A nightmare had wakened him and it always took a while to comfort him and soothe him back to sleep.

‘Mum …’ he framed drowsily, fixing big dark eyes on her as she smoothed his short tousled curls back from his brow, lashes lowering again as tiredness swept him away again.

Much like her son, Erin was utterly exhausted. When she had arrived back at Stanwick to collect her car Sam had wanted a briefing on Cristo’s impressions, which had stretched into a meeting that lasted a couple of

hours. Sam was keen for his properties to join the Donakis empire because he sincerely believed that a businessman of Cristo’s standing could take his three hotels—his life’s work—to a higher level. For the first time Erin had felt uncomfortable with the older man, too aware that she was not being entirely honest with him. He didn’t know she had had a previous relationship with Cristo Donakis and she did not want him to know. If Sam were to realise that Cristo was the guy who had ditched her and ignored her letters and calls for assistance when she found herself pregnant, he would automatically distrust the younger man. And why should her messy personal life interfere with Sam’s plans for retirement? Letting that happen, she felt, would be more wrong than continuing to keep her secrets.