Lorcan shifted against her shoulder, his curly black hair tickling her chin, a warm weight of solid sleeping toddler.
‘Tuck him back into bed quickly,’ a voice advised quietly from the doorway.
As Deidre Turner, a small blonde woman, moved past to hastily flip back the bedding and assist her daughter in settling the little boy back into his cot, Erin sighed and stood up. ‘I’m sorry Lorcan wakened you again.’
‘Don’t be silly. I don’t have to get up as early as you do in the morning,’ her mother replied. ‘Go back to bed. You look like you’re sleepwalking. I don’t know what Sam’s thinking of, keeping you at work so late. He has no appreciation of the fact that you want to spend time with your family in the evening.’
‘Why should he have? He’s never had children to worry about,’ Erin murmured soothingly, twitching the covers back over her son’s small prone body. ‘Sam always likes to wind down with a chat at the end of the day and he’s very excited about the possibility of selling up.’
‘That’s all right for him, but if he does sell up where’s it going to leave you and the rest of the employees?’ Deidre questioned worriedly. ‘We couldn’t possibly manage on my pension.’
Erin patted her mother’s tense shoulder gently. ‘We’ll survive. Apparently the law protects our jobs in a takeover. But I’ll find work somewhere else if need be.’
‘It won’t be easy with the state the economy’s in. There aren’t many jobs out there to find,’ the older woman protested.
‘We’ll be all right,’ Erin pronounced with a confidence that she didn’t feel and a guilty conscience that she had not felt able to tell her mother that Cristo Donakis was Sam’s potential buyer.
But that news would only inflame Deidre Turner, who would also demand to know why her daughter had not made instant use of her access to Cristo to finally tell him that he was a father. In addition her mother was a constant worrier, always in search of the next black cloud on the horizon, and Erin only shared bad news with the older woman if she had no other choice. Checking that her daughter, Nuala, Lorcan’s twin sister, was still soundly asleep, curled up in a little round cosy ball inside her cot, Erin returned to bed and lay there in the darkness feeling every bit as anxious as her mother, if not more, as she struggled to count blessings rather than worries.
They lived in a comfortable terraced house. It was rented, not owned. Deidre, predictably imagining less prosperous times ahead, had decided that Erin borrowing money to buy a property for them was far too risky a venture. Her mother’s attitude had irritated Erin at the time, but now, with the future danger of unemployment on her mind again she was relieved to be a tenant living in modest accommodation. Sam had reassured her about her job, reminding her that the current legislation would protect his staff with guaranteed employment under the new ownership. But there was often a way round such rules, Erin ruminated worriedly, and, when she was already aware that Cristo didn’t want her on his staff, it would only be sensible to immediately begin looking for a new position. Unhappily that might take months to achieve but it was doable, wasn’t it? She had to be more positive, stronger, fired up and ready to meet the challenges ahead.
But, Cristo was not a challenge. He was like a great big massive rock set squarely in her path and she didn’t know how to get round such an obstacle. He believed she had stolen from him. But why hadn’t he pursued that at the time? Why hadn’t he called in the police? Erin was thinking back hard, reckoning that by the time Cristo received proof of her supposed theft he would have been married. Had he put the police on her, the fact that she was his ex would soon have emerged and perhaps got into the newspapers. Would that have embarrassed him? She didn’t think that the Cristo she recalled would have embarrassed that easily. But that publicity might have embarrassed or annoyed his bride. Was it even possible that Lisandra and Erin had both been in a relationship with Cristo at the same time? And that he had feared having that fact exposed? After all, Cristo had got married barely three months after ditching Erin and few couples went from first meeting to marrying that fast. Had he been two-timing both of them? She had never had cause to believe that he was unfaithful to her but refused to believe that he would be incapable of such behaviour. After all, what had she ever really known about Cristo when she had not even suspected that he was about to dump her?
Erin had always liked things safe and certain and she never took risks. The one time she had—Cristo—it had gone badly wrong. On that level she and Cristo were total opposites because nothing thrilled Cristo more than taking a risk or meeting a challenge. So when he had started calling her to ask her out after finally beating her at swimming she had said no, sorry, again and again and again until he had finally manoeuvred her into attending a party at his apartment, urging her to bring friends as her guests.
Her presence bolstered by the presence of Elaine and Tom, it had proved a strangely magical evening with Cristo, she later appreciated, on his very best behaviour. At the end of the night Cristo had kissed her for the first time and that single kiss had been so explosive, it had blown the lid off her wildest dreams … and terrified her. She had known straight off that Cristo Donakis was a high-risk venture: lethally dangerous to her peace of mind.
‘I like you … I do like you,’ she had told Cristo lamely while still shaking like a leaf in the aftermath of the intense passion that had flared up between them. ‘Why can’t we just be friends?’
‘Friends?’ Cristo had echoed as though that word had never come his way before.
‘That’s what I’d prefer,’ she had said brightly.
‘I don’t do that,’ he had told her drily.
With those reservations she’d had more sense at the outset of their affair than she had shown later on, she acknowledged painfully. And once she had had the twins, her life had been turned upside down. She was ashamed to realise that she had been so angry with Cristo in that hotel suite that she had actually been threatening to tell him she was the mother of his children. What aberration had almost driven her to that insane brink? He would not want her children, would never agree to take on the role of father, would only angrily resent the position she put him in and make her feel small and humiliated, a burden he resented. Surely she was entitled to retain some pride when there was no perceptible advantage to telling him the truth?
Cristo had, after all, once confided in her that one of his friends’ girlfriends had had a termination. ‘It broke them up,’ he had commented flatly. ‘Few couples survive that sort of stress. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for children. I prefer my life without baggage.’
And she had got the not exactly subtle message he had taken the trouble to put across, his so clever dark eyes pinned to hers: Don’t do that to me! Revealingly, it had been the one and only time he ever chose to make her a party to confidential information about someone he knew for Cristo was, by instinct, very discreet. She had taken it as a warning that if she fell pregnant, he would want her to have a termination and their relationship would be over. It still infuriated her that it had actually been entirely his fault that she had conceived and, although she had later grown desperate enough to try and contact him to ask for financial help, she had known even then that the announcement she had to make of his impending fatherhood
would infuriate him. Cristo was too arrogant and controlling to appreciate surprises from any source. That a woman could give birth to a baby without a man’s prior agreement to accept the responsibility would no doubt strike him as very unfair. No, she saw no point whatsoever in telling Cristo that he was the father of two young children.
Even so, what was she planning to do about his threat to reveal that file of impressive evidence? Cristo was threatening the security of her entire family. Everything she had worked to achieve could vanish overnight. Not only Erin, but her mother and her children would pay the cost of her losing her job and salary. On the other hand, if she could sink her pride enough to play Cristo’s cruel game, that file would never see the light of day and at the very least she would have another year of safe employment and plenty of time in which to search for an alternative position. What was one weekend out of the rest of her life, really? She pictured her mother’s face earlier, drawn and troubled as she fretted about the hotel group even changing hands. Life had taught Deidre Turner to fear the unknown and the unexpected. She did not deserve to be caught up in the upheaval that was gathering on her daughter’s horizon and there was little Erin would not have done to protect her children from the instability she had suffered growing up.
Unhappily, Erin believed that the entire situation was her own fault. Hadn’t she ignored everybody’s advice in getting involved with Cristo in the first place? Nobody had had a good word to say about Cristo, pointing out that his reputation as a womaniser spoke for him. And why had she made herself even more dependent by agreeing to go and work for him? Was that wise? her friends had asked worriedly. And no, nothing she had done that year with Cristo had been wise. Hadn’t she hung on in there even when the going got rough and her lover’s lack of commitment was blatantly obvious? He had not even managed to make it back into the UK to celebrate her last birthday with her. She had asked for trouble and now trouble had well and truly come home to roost. Cristo was not going to agree to play nice. Cristo had had over two years to fester over the conviction that she had dared to steal from him. Cristo was out for blood.
As the sun went down in a blaze of glory, Cristo was staring out at the shaded gardens of his foster parents’ much-loved second home away from the smog and heavy traffic in Athens. On his terms, it was homely rather than impressive and it might be situated on the private island of Thesos, which Cristo had inherited at the age of twenty-one, but that was its sole claim to exclusivity.
Vasos and Appollonia Denes had always been extremely scrupulous when it came to enriching themselves in any way through their custodianship of a very wealthy little boy. Both his parents saw life in black and white with no shades of grey, which made them difficult to deal with, Cristo reflected in intense frustration. He had spent three very trying days locked in an office with Vasos, struggling to pull his father’s company back from the edge of bankruptcy without the escape route of even being able to offer the firm a cheap loan. They would not touch his money in any form. Yet his father was suffering from so much stress that he had fallen asleep in the middle of dinner and his mother was still worryingly quiet and troubled, in spite of all her protestations to the contrary. She had never quite recovered from the nervous breakdown she had gone through eighteen months earlier.
Had they had any idea what he was engaged in with Erin Turner they would have been sincerely appalled, Cristo acknowledged grudgingly. They adored him, always thought the best of him, and firmly believed that with the conservative upbringing they had given him he must have absorbed their values, their decent principles. But even as a child Cristo had understood what it took to please his parents and he had learned how to pretend as well as accept that it wasn’t always within his power to cure the evils of the world for them … His lean strong face hardened fiercely as a particularly unpleasant instance of that impossibility twanged deep in his conscience. He poured himself another drink and shook the memory off again fast.
When life was full of eighteen-hour days and the constant demands of his business empire, Erin was a wonderful distraction to toy with, that was all. If she didn’t phone him within the next twenty-four hours, however, they would be entering round two of their battle of wits and he would play hardball. He was already figuring out his next move, no regrets whatsoever. Plainly he lacked the forgiving gene. That was becoming obvious even to him and he was not a man given to self-examination. But the lust driving him was on another plane altogether. One kiss … hell, what was he, a teenager to have got so hot and bothered?
And why did it disturb him that right this very minute she might be lying in a bed with Sam Morton, ensuring his continuing devotion in the easiest and most basic way a woman could? Why should that matter to him? Why, in fact, did that mental vision make him seethe? It should turn him off, douse the fire she roused … disgust him. But all Cristo could think about just then, indeed the only blindingly blue stretch of sky in his immediate future, was the prospect of that weekend. A weekend of the most perfect fantasy. Of course, it went without saying that fantasy would inevitably turn out to be dross, he pondered cynically. And then it would be over and he would be cured of this inconvenient, incomprehensible craving for her cheating little carcass for all time. Done and dusted. He savoured that ideal prospect, increasingly keen to reach that moment of equilibrium.
Erin picked up the phone, her blood solidifying like ice in her veins. Caving in hurt; it was something she didn’t do any more. Show weakness and people often fell on you like vultures. She was not the woman she had been three years earlier. But while she might be tougher, it was useless because Cristo had put her in the no-win corner, giving her no choice other than to try and protect those that she loved by whatever means were within her power.