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‘Told me what?’ Cristo enquired lazily.
Taking on board the reality that Cristo was piling the pressure on Sally to admit that she had lied and offering Erin a level of support she had not expected to receive from him, Erin squared her shoulders in frustration. She had always fought her own battles.
Sally compressed her lips in mutinous silence as if daring Erin to answer that question.
‘While I was working here I discovered that Sally had been taking products from the store and selling them on online auctions.’ Erin turned her attention back to the older woman, who had once been a trusted colleague. ‘I know I promised that that was our secret but sometimes promises have to be broken.’
‘You were stealing?’ Cristo prompted Sally forbiddingly.
Tears spilled from Sally’s eyes and she knocked them away with her hand and fumbled for a tissue, which she clenched tightly in one hand.
‘I guarantee that whatever you tell me there will be no prosecution now or in the future.’ Lean, strong face taut, Cristo stood up, a lithe powerful figure of considerable command. ‘I very much regret that you felt unable to be honest with me when this business was first discovered but I’m hoping that for Erin’s sake you will now tell me the truth.’
‘No prosecution?’ Sally queried uncertainly.
‘No prosecution. I only want the truth,’ Cristo confirmed.
‘One lunchtime shortly before Erin resigned a man came to see me,’ Sally related in a flat voice. ‘He said he was a private detective and he offered me a substantial amount of money if I could give him information that would damage Erin’s reputation.’
‘What?’ Cristo positively erupted into speech, his disbelief unhidden.
‘His name was Will Grimes. He worked at an agency in Camden. That’s all I know about him. At first I said no to him. After all there wasn’t any information to give!’ Sally pointed out with a wry grimace. ‘You hadn’t done anything but work hard here, Erin, but then you suddenly resigned from your job and just like that I realised how I could get myself out of the trouble that I was in.’
‘Will Grimes,’ Cristo was repeating heavily.
‘I was in a great deal more financial trouble than I admitted when you found me helping myself to that stuff from the store,’ Sally told Erin tautly. ‘I had set up a couple of other scams in the books—’
‘The payments to therapists that didn’t exist, the altered invoices?’ Cristo specified.
‘Yes, and then you organised the audit and I started to panic,’ Sally confided tearfully. ‘Erin had left the spa by then.’
‘And you decided to let me take the blame for it?’ Erin prompted while she wondered how on earth she had ever attracted the attention of a private detective.
‘I wanted to stop taking the money,’ the older woman stressed in open desperation.’ I knew it was wrong but I had got in too deep. Once the fraud was uncovered and I set up things so that you got the blame I could go back to a normal life again and, of course, I still had my job. I knew you would be safe from prosecution with Mr Donakis—he wasn’t likely to trail his own girlfriend into court!’
‘You got me right on that score,’ Cristo derided.
‘Will you prosecute me now?’ Sally asked him shakily.
‘No. I gave you my word and I thank you for finally telling me what really happened,’ Cristo responded.
Clearly limp with relief, Sally braced her hands on the desk to stand up. ‘I’ll clear my desk immediately and leave—’
‘No, work out your notice here as normal,’ Cristo urged, resting a hand on Erin’s taut shoulder to ease her slowly upright.
‘Erin?’ Sally breathed stiltedly. ‘I’m sorry. When you were so kind to me, you deserved better from me.’
Erin nodded, even tried to force her lips into a forgiving smile, but couldn’t manage it for she was all too well aware how the false belief that she was a thief had affected Cristo’s opinion of her. In any case, she was deeply shaken by what Sally had confessed and she couldn’t hide the fact. She had been fond of the older woman, had only lost contact with her because she had fallen pregnant and on hard times. Pride had ensured that she did not pursue ongoing contact with anyone at her former workplace. She stole a veiled glance at Cristo’s profile. He was pale, his facial muscles taut below his dark complexion.
Cristo paused at the door on his way out. ‘Did you collect the reward money from the private detective and give him the supposed evidence of Erin’s dishonesty?’
Sally winced and nodded slowly. ‘It got me out of debt and gave me a fresh start.’
Erin gritted her teeth, disgusted by Sally’s selfishness.
Cristo felt as if the walls of his tough shell were crumbling around him. Astonishingly, Erin’s seemingly paranoid suspicion that she was being set up for a fall by persons unknown had been proven correct. He, who rarely got anything wrong, had been wrong. He had made an appalling error of judgement. But more than anything at that moment he wanted to know who could possibly have hired a detective to discredit Erin in his eyes by fair means or foul.
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_ccb26674-d641-5fcc-8ac5-aed22e824fec)
ERIN picked at the perfectly cooked lunch served on board Cristo’s private jet without much appetite. She was still angry at Sally and bitter that the older woman had got away with destroying Erin’s reputation rather than her own. How many other people were suffering from the mistaken assumption that she was a con woman, who had escaped her just deserts solely because she was the owner’s ex-girlfriend? As someone who had always worked hard with scrupulous honesty and pride in her performance of her duties, she deeply resented the false impression that Sally had created to hide her own wrongdoing.
‘We have to talk,’ Cristo remarked flatly.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard that phrase from you before,’ she parried waspishly, recalling that once upon a time Cristo had been the first out of he door when such a suggestion was laid before him. That had certainly been his all-too-masculine reaction on every occasion when she’d tried to corner him for a serious conversation.
From the cabin next door she could hear the sounds of the children playing and talking. Jenny, the charming young brunette nanny, had turned out not to work for the spa crèche after all. No, indeed, Jenny had been specifically hired by Cristo to take care of the twins while they were in Greece.
‘That’s so unnecessary and extravagant,’ Erin had criticised when she found out about the arrangement at the airport.
‘You can’t look after them 24-7,’ Cristo had informed her authoritatively.
‘Why can’t I?’ she had asked.
‘Why shouldn’t you have a break?’ he had responded arrogantly.
‘If Jenny is your concept of responsible parenting you need to buy another handbook,’ she had retorted curtly, annoyed that he had taken such a decision over her head. He was Lorcan and Nuala’s father: all right, she accepted that, however that didn’t mean that she would accept his interference in matters about which he was scarcely qualified to have an opinion. She was no more in need of a break than any other working mother, she thought thinly, which she supposed meant that, rail as she had at him, the prospect of the occasional hour in which she could relax and think of herself again was disturbingly appealing and made her feel quite appallingly guilty.
Returning to the present and the tense atmosphere currently stretching between them, Erin shot Cristo a glance from cool amethyst eyes. ‘You think we should talk? I’ll be frank—only if you crawled naked over broken glass would I think you had redeemed yourself.’
A wicked grin very briefly slashed Cristo’s lean bronzed features, his dark eyes shot with golden amusement below his thick sooty lashes, making him spectacularly handsome. ‘Not much chance of that,’ he admitted.
‘So, where’s my apology?’ Erin demanded truculently to mask the effect of her dry mouth and quickened heartbeat because, no matter how furious he made her, she could still not remain impervious to his stunning good looks, a reality that mortified her. ‘It’s taking you long enough!’
‘I was trying to come up with the right words.’
‘Even if you swallowed a dictionary, it wouldn’t help you!’
Lean strong face taut, Cristo sprang out of his seat. ‘I am sincerely sorry that I ever entertained the suspicion that you had stolen from me, koukla mou
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