The Innocent's One-Night Surrender

Elizabeth Forrester had always struck Cristiano as the kind of woman who knew exactly on which side her bread was buttered, but for Laurel’s sake he nodded tersely. ‘Very well.’

‘Thank you.’

A truce, then, of sorts. Laurel glanced down at her plate and then, her chin tilted at a haughty, proud angle, she sat down and started to eat again. It seemed Laurel Forrester knew on which side her bread was buttered as well.

‘How did you feel betrayed by my father?’ Cristiano asked abruptly. The remark had niggled at him.

Laurel looked up warily. ‘Because one minute we were all playing happy families, and the next my mother and I were on the plane back to Illinois, and I never even saw him again. Not so much as a text.’

‘And your mother had two million euros in her private bank account,’ Cristiano reminded her flatly.

‘Two million euros that your father got back,’ Laurel retorted. ‘Thanks to his water-tight pre-nup agreement. She didn’t see a penny of it.’

‘That makes it better, then? Just because she was caught?’

Laurel had the grace to look away. ‘Caught doing what, exactly?’ she hedged. Did she think he didn’t know?

‘Caught stealing from my father,’ he snapped, annoyed that she was practically defending her mother’s indefensible actions. ‘Taking his money and squirreling it away.’

‘Is it stealing, when they were married?’ Laurel asked quietly. ‘She took money from a joint bank account. Technically it was hers too.’

‘Technically,’ Cristiano agreed, the word bitten off and spit out. ‘Fortunately the law did not consider it a technicality.’

‘Still,’ Laurel persisted. ‘What’s yours is mine and vice versa, isn’t that right? Or do you not believe in marriage vows?’

Cristiano sat back, starting to fume. He really hadn’t wanted to rake up old memories of Elizabeth Forrester’s betrayal of his father, but Laurel was forcing his hand. ‘She was stealing from him, bella, no question.’

‘I admit it might have looked like that, but she didn’t mean it the way you—’

‘She was siphoning money from various accounts and putting it in an offshore account under a different name!’ Cristiano cut her off, his voice like the snick of a blade. ‘Are you actually defending her?’

‘Not defending,’ Laurel answered, a flush rising to her face. ‘I know she’s...’ She stopped and shook her head, clearly at a loss, because she couldn’t defend her mother even if she wanted to. Elizabeth Forrester was so clearly indefensible.

‘And what was that money for?’ Cristiano continued, relentless now. ‘The day when she left him for some toy boy? Considering her behaviour since then, it seems likely.’

Laurel’s face went pale again. ‘What do you know of my mother’s behaviour since then?’

‘Tonight was not the first time she has come into La Sirena.’ He didn’t make a point of following Elizabeth Forrester’s romantic entanglements, but he’d seen her enough times over the last ten years—usually on the arm of some puffed-up aristo, fawning, flirting and making Cristiano nauseous—to know that she lived by her wits and fading beauty. Every time he’d seen her he’d felt vindicated in telling his father about the private account he’d discovered ten years ago.