You might change your mind. I refuse to be put on trial. And on a more serious note, it’s time I told my parents about you and the twins. I don’t want them to hear from another source,’ he imparted wryly. ‘I’ll go and see them after breakfast.’
‘They live here on the island?’ Now she grasped why he had never offered to bring her to Thesos for a visit.
‘They have a second home here. They use it weekends, holidays.’ He shrugged. ‘They’re here right now.’
‘How do you think they’ll react?’
‘I suspect my foster mother will be overjoyed—she’s crazy about children.’
‘Just not so crazy about me?’ Erin remarked uncomfortably as the twins scampered out of bed and she followed suit.
‘Some misunderstanding must’ve lain behind the strange impression you received of my foster mother during that phone call you made while you were pregnant. Appollonia had no reason to think badly of you. She knew nothing about you.’
The four of them enjoyed breakfast on the terrace and then Cristo left to visit his parents and Erin changed into a swimsuit, packed a bag and took the children down to the beach As the morning ticked slowly past she wondered anxiously what sort of a reception Cristo was receiving from his parents. His foster parents, she reminded herself again, having studied a picture on the wall of a glamorous young couple standing on the deck of a yacht and guessed that the glossy pair were Cristo’s birth parents. When she came back from the beach, she let Jenny take the exhausted twins and went for a shower, emerging to phone her mother and describe the island and the house and, finally, their plans to marry. Her parent was very pleased by her news.
Choosing a book from the well-stocked, handsome library to entertain her until lunchtime, Erin relaxed in a cushioned lounger in the shade below the trees. She was drowsing in the heat when a slight sound alerted her to the awareness that she was no longer alone. Taking off her sunglasses, she sat up and frowned at Cristo, who looked grim. Lines of strain were indented between his nose and mouth, his black hair was tousled and stubble darkened the revealing downward curve of his beautiful mouth.
‘What’s up?’ Erin demanded worriedly, checking her watch. He had been gone for hours. It was two in the afternoon.
As he sank down heavily opposite her Erin leant a little closer and sniffed. ‘Have you been drinking?’
‘I might have had a couple while I was waiting on the doctor’s arrival with Vasos,’ he volunteered half under his breath. ‘It’s been such a ghastly morning that I don’t really remember.’
‘Who needed a doctor?’ she exclaimed.
‘My mother.’
‘Appollonia’s taken ill?’
Cristo dealt her a troubled appraisal. ‘It was her … she was the one who hired the private detective. I wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t known enough to convince me. My father is in shock—he had no idea what was going on.’
Erin was bemused. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘My mother hired Will Grimes.’
Her eyes widened while she recognised how much that staggering discovery had upset him. There was enormous sorrow in his unshielded eyes that made her wince and long to hold him close, for she knew how deeply attached he was to the couple who had raised him. In fact it hurt her so much to see him wounded in such a way that she stopped lying to herself in that same moment: all her proud pretences and defences fell away and she was left to face the inescapable truth that she still loved Cristophe Donakis and had never stopped loving him.
‘APPOLLONIA learned that you and I had been together for at least a year from one of my friends. She was always ridiculously eager for me to settle down and have a family and she became convinced that you were holding me back from that development. She was obsessed with the idea of me marrying another Greek and spending more time here in Greece,’ Cristo explained with a heavy sigh as he sat opposite Erin, who was studying him fixedly. ‘She paid a private detective to investigate you and eventually told him that she would pay him a bonus if he would use whatever means were within his power to break us up.’
‘But that’s crazy,’ Erin whispered, reeling from the unexpected tale he was telling her. ‘You’re an adult. How could your mother interfere in your life like that?’
‘Appollonia seems honestly to have believed that she was doing it for the sake of my future happiness, koukla mou. How I might feel about it or how much damage she might do in the process to me or you never seems to have entered her head until it was too late.’
‘How on earth did you realise that it was your foster mother who had hired the detective?’
‘I was telling her about you and the twins and she suddenly made a rather scornful reference to the thefts from the spa. That immediately made me suspicious because she did not get that information from me. It could only have come from the detective she hired. Once she grasped that you were the mother of my children she was very shocked and guilty and in that state she blurted out the whole story. My father, Vasos, was appalled and he asked her what she had been thinking of …’
‘Did you tell her that I wasn’t the thief?’ Erin asked ruefully.
‘Of course. She didn’t ask the detective what weapons he used to bring about our split, in fact she didn’t want to know the dirty details, and once it was achieved she invited Lisandra to dinner and dangled her under my nose. I told her about the doctored photos and Sally being rewarded for identifying you as the thief. I also told her that it was her fault that Lorcan and Nuala were strangers until I met them two weeks ago. She remembered your phone call. She did honestly believe that you had been stealing from me and that was how she justified her interference—you were a wicked woman and I needed help to break free of your malign influence. That had become her excuse and when that excuse was taken from her she became extremely distressed. Vasos was shouting at her and it all got very hysterical and overheated.’ Cristo groaned, luxuriant black lashes almost hitting his exotic cheekbones as he briefly closed his eyes in frustration. ‘In the end we called the local doctor to administer a sedative to calm her down …’
‘Oh, my goodness, is this the reason she had a nervous breakdown when your marriage went wrong?’
‘Yes, although none of us appreciated that at the time. But she felt hugely guilty at having encouraged me to marry Lisandra.’
‘No offence intended, Cristo, but right now Appollonia sounds like the mother-in-law from hell,’ Erin remarked with an apologetic grimace.
‘I think it is good that the truth has come out at last.’ Cristo was seemingly determined to find a positive angle. ‘Possibly Appollonia’s secret arrangement with the detective has been the burden on her conscience which damaged her recovery from the breakdown she suffered. She is still a fragile personality but she wasn’t always like that.’
‘Was your PA got to by the detective as well? Was that why my calls were never put through and my letters were returned unread?’
Cristo sighed, ‘My foster mother
