Expectant Bride by Lynne Graham Page A

my chief accountant called me with the bad news, I cut him short. I didn’t want to discuss it any further. I’m afraid I just assumed that you had made that phone call from the airport. I was outraged.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Ellie conceded stiffly.
    â€˜But this morning I learnt that you had been telling the truth all along. There was someone else there that night. His arrival and his departure were recorded by the security camera in the corridor,’ Dio revealed ruefully. ‘If I had been in a more focused frame of mind at the time, I would’ve recalled the presence of that camera and I would have been able to check out your story immediately.’
    Ellie nodded in silence without looking back at him, her delicate profile taut.
    â€˜I have a hot temper. But I don’t usually rush into making instant judgements on the basis of circumstantial evidence,’ Dio continued.
    â€˜Well, it didn’t look good for me, did it?’ Ellie responded with determined lightness, keen to bring his visit to a speedyconclusion. ‘You didn’t know me, so how could you know that I wouldn’t do something like that?’
    â€˜You’re being very generous, but that’s not an excuse I need to hide behind. We had spent enough time together. I should have known,’ Dio contradicted levelly. ‘I very much regret the way I treated you on Chindos. I was…brutal.’
    Ellie didn’t argue that point. She stared at her own feet, eager to focus on anything that helped her to resist the temptation to look at him again. He was making resistance difficult. He hadn’t leapt on the excuse she had offered him, as most men would have done. He wasn’t trying to lessen his own offence. He wasn’t trying to deny that he had cruelly humiliated her.
    The silence stretched and stretched. She knew he was waiting for her to say something, but she had nothing to say.
    Dio exhaled in a soft hiss. ‘The employee who tipped off one of my competitors was an accounts manager called—’
    â€˜Ricky Bolton?’ Ellie interrupted before she could think better of it.
    His dark eyes narrowed. ‘How did you know who it was? I thought you didn’t see the man.’
    â€˜I didn’t, but during my break this evening Meg told me that he’d asked where I was that night, and he is an accounts manager—’
    â€˜Why would Bolton have been asking where you were?’
    Ellie grimaced. ‘He was the guy who was always trying to chat me up on level eight.’
    At that admission, Dio’s jawline took on an aggressive slant. ‘I was even denied the pleasure of sacking him. He resigned from his job the next day. He exchanged the information he had picked up for a more senior position in the other company—not that he’ll be there for long.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    A grim smile curved Dio’s wide, sensual mouth. ‘He hasno company loyalty. How can he be trusted? The first excuse they get, he’ll be fired.’
    â€˜Oh…’ Her shadowed gaze clung to that lean strong face, her mouth running dry, her breath feathering in her throat. ‘You don’t seem as angry as I thought you’d still be.’
    â€˜I put my plans for a buy-out on hold. And before word got out I made a healthy profit selling the stock I held in company A…’ His brilliant dark eyes held hers as he utilised the same terminology he had employed to explain his tactics as they had lain in bed together at the beach house.
    Ellie flushed, but she still couldn’t break that enervating visual link.
    â€˜As for company B, my competitors mistakenly assumed that if I was interested, company B must have some wonderful new technology under wraps. They bought a massive amount of their stock,’ Dio continued with a sardonic edge to his deep-pitched drawl. ‘Having now discovered otherwise, when they unload that stock, they are likely to make a