Julia James - Irresistible Greeks - Secrets and Seduction

He took her out for a drive in an open-topped sports car. Such freedom felt strange to her. She was accustomed to taking the twins to the park on Saturday mornings. Guilt weighed her down for she knew that her children would be missing out on that outing because Erin’s mother found it difficult to watch over her grandchildren alone in a public place. Lorcan loved to explore and he wandered off, often followed by his sister. Erin had twice found her son standing up to his knees in the boating lake and had carried him kicking and screaming back to dry land where Nuala waited to enrage him with the toddler version of, ‘I told you so.’

‘How did you end up working for Sam Morton?’ Cristo prompted.

‘Pure good luck. I was living at home and working as a personal trainer again. My best client was a friend of Sam’s. That kind lady talked me up to him when he was looking for a spa manager and he phoned me and offered me an interview.’

‘What made you leave London to return to Oxford?’

Erin shot him a taut glance and opted for honesty. ‘I couldn’t afford city life when I was living on benefits. I should never have resigned from my job at the Mobila spa—that was rash and short-sighted of me.’

‘I was surprised when you resigned,’ Cristo admitted. ‘Later I assumed it was because you’d been dipping into the till and you thought it would be safer to stage a vanishing act.’

Erin stiffened at that reminder but said nothing, resigned to the fact that she could not combat that charge until she had, at least, tackled Sally Jennings. ‘I left because I didn’t want to keep running into you and I assumed you’d feel the same way but I was over-sensitive. Leaving after working there such a short time blighted my CV. It was also much harder to find another job than I thought it would be.’ Especially once she had realised that she was pregnant and no longer feeling well, she completed inwardly.

A hundred memories of their time together were assailing Cristo and lending a brooding edge to his mood. He remembered her twirling in the rain with an umbrella. She had preferred nights in watching DVDs to nights out at a club but the horror movies, which she loved, gave her nightmares. He had learned not to mind being used as a security blanket in the middle of the night. They had virtually lived together at weekends when he was in London, his innate untidiness driving her wild while her love of pizza had left him cold. Now he asked himself how well he had ever known her.

The sun beat down on them as they walked around a little hill village, packed with stone houses and narrow twisting alleys. In the cool quiet interior of the tiny ancient church, she lit a candle and said a little prayer for peace while Cristo waited outside for her. Around him she couldn’t think straight and the level of her emotional turmoil was starting to scare her. She needed to hate him but what she was feeling was not hatred. That she knew, but what she did feel beyond the pull of his magnetic attraction was much harder to pin down and she abandoned the challenge. In twenty-four hours she would be heading home and this little episode would be finished, she reasoned doggedly, keen to ground herself to solid earth again. What was the point in tormenting herself with regrets and foolish questions?

They had a simple lunch in the medieval piazza where Cristo stretched like a lion basking in the midday heat while Erin sat back in the shade, aware that without it her winter pale skin would burn. The waitress, a young woman in her twenties, couldn’t take her eyes off the striking beauty of Cristo’s classic features or the sizzling effect of his honey-coloured gaze when he smiled. With a sinking heart Erin recalled when she had been even more impressionable.

Even now, she flushed beneath his disturbingly intent scrutiny. ‘ What ?’

‘You look beautiful and you didn’t even have to make an effort. It only took you ten minutes to get dressed.’

‘You’re accustomed to more decorative women … that’s all.’

‘You always turn aside compliments as though they’re insincere,’ Cristo murmured, his attention lodging revealingly on the voluptuous curve of her raspberry-tinted lips.

Erin knew that look, recognised his sexual hunger and felt the raw pull of it deep inside her body. Her nipples tingled and a pool of liquid heat formed in her pelvis, making her instantly ashamed of her lack of self-discipline. Breathing rapidly in the warm still air in an attempt to suppress those unwelcome reactions, she tensed but she remained insanely aware of his appreciative scrutiny. The atmosphere positively smouldered. Cristo laughed with husky satisfaction and her heart hammered like a trapped bird in her chest.

‘Time for us to leave, koukla mou ,’ he murmured, silkily suggestive, sliding fluidly upright to take care of the bill.

Tomorrow could not come soon enough for her, Erin told herself. The weekend would be over and she could pretty much slip back into the comforting routine of her very ordinary life. But she would also be working for Cristo again and in the wake of this forty-eight-hour break from reality that would be no easy challenge.

They walked back downhill, Erin moving a few steps in Cristo’s wake. It was the hottest hour of the day and even her light clothing was clinging to her damp skin but she loved the sunshine. He caught her hand as he drew level with the car and drew her closer, hot, hungry eyes with the pure lustre of gold connecting with hers. He bent his dark head and claimed her lips in a searing kiss. Every response she had fought since leaving the villa bubbled up in a fountain of need. The erotic charge between them was delirious, devastating her defences as he fed hungrily from the sweetness of her mouth. She could feel the leashed demand in his lean, hard body as he bent her back against the car bonnet, the tremor in the long fingers clasping her cheek as her tongue tangled with his. She wanted to eat him alive. With a ragged groan, he stepped back from her.

‘Let’s go,’ he rasped.

Her legs were as bendy and unreliable as twigs as she stumbled into the passenger seat. With her heart thundering and her head swimming after that lusty exchange her thoughts ran blood red with guilt and shame. This was not how she had expected the weekend to turn out: she had never counted on still being so attracted to Cristo that every barrier between them dropped.

Snatching in a steadying breath, Cristo drove off. He felt out of control and he didn’t like that. When had ‘just sex’ become ‘must-have sex’? And what had happened to the exorcism goal? This was getting her out of his system? He thought of his marriage, an infallible reminder of the danger of undisciplined impulses, and straight away the electrifying heat in his blood cooled, his arousal subsiding to a more bearable level.

Erin’s mobile phone started ringing as she entered the villa. She snatched it out of her bag with a frown and answered it. ‘Mum?’ she queried into the excited barrage of her mother’s too fast hail of words. ‘Calm down. What is it?’

Cristo watched Erin begin to pace the hall in quick short steps. ‘What sort of an accident?’ she was asking urgently, her triangular face lint white with shock and dismay. ‘Oh m-my … word … how bad is it?’

Erin pressed a concerned hand to her parted lips and turned in a clumsy uncoordinated circle. Nuala had had an accident at the playground and had broken her arm. It was a fracture and required surgery. Erin’s heart was beating so fast with worry that she felt sick. Assuring her mother that she would be at the hospital as soon as possible, she ended the call.

‘Bad news?’ Cristo prompted.

‘It’s an emergency—you’ve got to get me home as fast as you can. I’m sorry. I’ll go and pack.’