you do,’ Erin told him bluntly. ‘They didn’t have much either but what they had they shared.’
His lashes swept up on breathtakingly beautiful golden eyes from which all anger had vanished. ‘But I owe the biggest debt of all to you for bringing my children into the world. Don’t think I don’t appreciate that and know how lucky I was that you chose not to have a termination. I do know—I do appreciate it,’ he completed in a rare display of unmistakable emotion.
Cristo took the wind out of Erin’s sails with that candid little speech, but her anger with him was not so easily soothed. ‘When I was pregnant I assumed that if you had a choice you would have preferred me to have a termination. You once told me about that friend of yours whose girlfriend got pregnant,’ she reminded him.
‘I didn’t say that I approved of what they chose to do. Maybe it was right for them but I would not have reacted the same way that he did.’
‘Easy to say,’ she needled. ‘Hindsight is a wonderful device with which to rewrite the past. You also said that you preferred your life without baggage.’
‘Don’t judge me for what I did and didn’t do almost three years ago. I’ve grown up a lot since then,’ Cristo spelt out tautly.
His marriage to Lisandra, she thought ruefully, thinking it was sad that she apparently owed this rather less arrogant and reserved version of Cristo to the machinations of another woman. Even so, her heart could only be touched by his gratitude that she had given birth to Lorcan and Nuala. She had felt his sincerity and it meant a great deal to her. Cristo had, after all, taken to fatherhood with enthusiasm and energy. He seemed neither resentful of the responsibility he had had thrust on him, nor ill-at-ease with it. That awareness tore more than one brick out of Erin’s defensive wall.
Walking back indoors, she noticed a trio of large envelopes lying on an occasional table. Already opened, they were addressed to Cristo at his London office. ‘What are these?’
Cristo hesitated and then frowned, his restive pacing coming to a sudden halt. ‘The evidence I promised to show you once we got here. Take a look at what’s in those envelopes …’
‘Why? What’s in them?’
‘Photos which were sent to me during the latter months we were together in London.’
Erin extracted a large, slightly blurred photograph of a couple walking hand in hand. The man was her friend, Tom Harcourt, and the face on the woman was hers. As she had never held hands with Tom in her life she was astonished until she studied the body and the clothing of the female depicted. In a frantic rush, she leafed through the other photos, one showing the same couple kissing and another of them hugging. ‘That may be my face but it’s not my body—it’s Melissa’s. These photos are all of Tom with his wife, Melissa, but they’ve been digitally altered to make it look as though the woman is me!’ she murmured in disbelief.
‘Altered?’ Cristo stood by her side as she fanned out the photos and one by one proceeded to verbally pick them apart. ‘How altered?’
‘Whoever sent these photos to you grafted my face onto Melissa’s body,’ she told him angrily. ‘All we have in common is that we’re both blondes but I’d recognise that sweater from a mile away! How on earth could you think that was me, Cristo? Melissa is much smaller, well under five foot tall. Didn’t you notice how small she seems beside Tom, who isn’t that tall? And since when did I have a bust as big as that?’
Peering down at the photos, Cristo noted every point of comparison. ‘None of them are of you with Tom,’ he finally breathed in bewilderment. ‘Why didn’t I notice those differences for myself?’
It might as well have been a rhetorical question because Erin had no intention of pursuing that pointless line of enquiry. ‘As you said, you act first and ask later. But I just don’t believe how secretive you can be! You received these rotten lying photos on three separate occasions and didn’t once mention them to me. No wonder you became so suspicious of my friendship with Tom!’
In retrospect she could recall the surprisingly sudden alteration in Cristo’s attitude towards her spending time with Tom while he was away on business. Cristo had gone from accepting that friendship without comment to suddenly questioning her every meeting with the other man, but only now was she discovering that genuine disquiet had provoked that change of heart.
Erin was struggling to understand why he had remained silent in the face of such provocation and failing. It was cruel to realise that she had gone through so much pain just because some hateful individual had decided to destroy Cristo’s trust in her, ensuring that he would reject her. He had walked away from her and almost straight away gone on to marry another woman. The wound inflicted by that decision of his had never left her. He had got over her so quickly and she believed that he must always have viewed her as not being good enough to marry. His choice of a rich Greek wife from a background similar to his own had been revealing.
‘Why didn’t you show these photos to me at the time?’ Erin demanded.
Lean, strong face shuttered, Cristo clenched his jaw. He walked away a few paces, his long, lean body as fluid and graceful as running water, his black hair gleaming like polished jet in the fading daylight above his bold bronzed profile. Sometimes he looked so incredibly handsome that she couldn’t take her eyes off him, she thought rawly, anguish for what they had lost engulfing her.
‘I had too much pride,’ Cristo grated the admission. ‘I could not make my mind up about whether you were cheating on me or whether your relationship with Tom had simply become too close and affectionate. I didn’t know what to think but it did make me doubt your loyalty—’
‘And when you walked into that hotel room and saw a strange man in the bed, you were in exactly the right frame of mind to assume that I was cheating on you,’ Erin completed with fierce resentment. ‘How could you not give me a single chance to defend myself?’
‘I will always regret it,’ Cristo confessed in a driven undertone, piling the photos together and cramming them into a single envelope. ‘We are now living with the consequences. I’ve missed more than two years of my children’s lives as a result. I would not like to be in the shoes of whomever I find is responsible for deliberately setting out to destroy us.’
‘But the hotel-room thing was just an unlucky coincidence,’ Erin reasoned heavily, shaken that anyone could have gone to such lengths to discredit her in his eyes. ‘I do understand after seeing those photos that you honestly believed you didn’t need to see me in the flesh in the same room to believe that I was cheating on you. Do you have a bunny-boiling ex-girlfriend somewhere in your past? Jealous women can be vicious. Who else would take so much time and trouble and put so much money into trying to split us up?’
‘I don’t know but I have every intention of finding out,’ he swore, a hostile expression stamped on his hard features. He cast the envelopes aside and drew her back to him with determined hands.
He lowered his head and caressed her parted lips slowly with his own in a move that completely disconcerted her. Her entire body tingled with electrified awareness. Coming alive to his sensual call, she was shamefully aware that the peaks of her breasts were straining into bullet points and her thighs pressing together to contain the ache of emptiness there. ‘I want a fresh start with you,’ he breathed in a raw undertone, his breath fanning her cheek. ‘Let’s get all the rubbish out of the way and leave it behind us.’
‘A lot of what you call rubbish messed up my life,’ Erin replied defensively, her eyes
