by Various
‘You think I am a useless freeloader,’ Mia realised.
‘Is a freeloader one step up from a housekeeper or one step down?’ he threw back quick as a flash.
An angry flush bloomed in her cheeks. ‘The housekeeper assumption was your mistake, not mine.’
‘To which you took offence and flounced off like a fully fledged prima donna,’ he threw back. ‘I find it really curious to discover, three months later, that the day we met you were on your way to throw the whole Balfour family into a flat spin—as if they did not have enough to contend with at the time.’
Her moment of defiance crushed by that reminder, Mia pulled her guilty eyes away from his. He was referring to Oscar’s poor wife, Lillian, Mia realised, and the way her unexpected arrival had caused so much trouble the after-effects were still rippling throughout the whole family today.
‘I did not know that Lillian was ill,’ she murmured defensively.
‘But if I had known what you were up to that morning, I would have stopped you from going anywhere near them. Think about it,’ he advised. ‘If you’d lost the flounce and tried offering up an explanation to me, your arrival at Balfour Manor would not have been so badly timed because I could have stopped it from taking place, and the ensuing rush of shocks and scandals could possibly have been avoided.’
Could it really have been that simple? Mia wondered bleakly. Could a split-second decision made at a highly charged and very tense moment redirect the hand of fate as easily as that?
Ripples on a pond, she likened as the lift doors slid open and Nikos Theakis strode out, leaving her standing there feeling as if he’d just used her to wipe the floor with.
‘I s-suppose you think it would have been better for everyone if you had just run me over.’ She threaded after him.
Nikos paused five strides down the corridor, and turned around on the heels of his shoes. She was standing framed by the open lift doors with her hair flowing free around her shoulders and her beautiful face washed pale.
Young, he heard himself reiterate an observation he’d first made on the Balfour driveway. Guilty, vulnerable, hurt. In his anger he had just dumped full responsibility for the actions of the whole Balfour family upon her tense shoulders. Did he feel good about doing that?
No, he didn’t. His punishment did not fit her crime.
And there was another element of this he had been trying hard not to focus on but he did so now by allowing his eyes to make a sweeping scan of her body and was instantly rewarded by a rush of heat down his front. It was the same rush of heat he’d experienced the first time he had seen her—the same one he’d been suffering every time he’d let his mind take him back to that moment on the Balfour’s drive.
He was attracted to her. He’d been thinking about her on and off ever since. If he had been able to get back to the UK in the past months he would have been travelling down to Balfour Manor to try and find out who she was.
Now he knew.
She was a Balfour, which put her so out of bounds it effectively slammed shut the door to his attraction in his face.
So it went without saying that he did not want her invading his work place. He did not want her anywhere near him at all, threatening to mess up his nice calm business environment with her long lush figure and her soft sensual mouth and the promise of hot passion he could see gleaming behind the hurt blue of her eyes.
He took the cruel option and did not bother to answer her remark but instead turned away and strode on. He was behaving like a cold ruthless bastard and he knew it but it was the only way to protect himself.
He was about to give her one week—two, at most—before his cold hard critical assault on her vulnerable self-confidence sent her running back to Oscar in Buckinghamshire, Nikos told himself as he left Mia Balfour in the care of Fiona and went to chair his delayed meeting.
Chapter Two
TWO long hard stubborn weeks later, Mia stood a good four paces back from the desk and sizzled inside with grim defiant patience while she waited for Nikos to acknowledge her presence.
She was wearing a simple-cut cream linen dress today, cinched in at her waist by a mustard-yellow leather belt, and on her feet she wore a pair of matching shoes. The whole outfit would have cost her full annual salary to buy new but as hand-me-downs went, Mia did not complain.
Would not dream of complaining. She was more horrified by the exorbitant price tags her half-sisters thought nothing of paying for the wear-once-and-discard clothes they crammed into the closets back at Balfour Manor. Hanging from a dress rail in the spare bedroom in her little apartment was a whole range of fabulous hand-me-downs just waiting for her eager fingers to unstitch and rework.
But this particular outfit had been picked off the rail with only one purpose in mind—to challenge Nikos Theakis to find anything objectionable about it.
He could frame a thousand criticisms with one sweeping glance from his cold dark eyes. And yesterday’s objection had been aimed at the short pearl-grey skirt she had worn with a delicious plum-coloured silk georgette blouse. His sweeping glance of disapproval had taken in the length of leg she had on show and glittered with ice at the see-through fabric of the blouse even though she wore a matching camisole underneath it. So today she’d covered up in a dress with a hem that finished primly two inches below her knees. And she’d scraped back her hair into such a tight bun the skin framing her face felt tight, because yesterday he’d also snapped at her when she had to keep pushing the heavy weight of glossy black waves away from her face each time she’d looked down at her work.
And she was absolutely certain that he was deliberately making her wait like this to string out the tension by keeping his chair swung facing the window so all she could see of him was the top of his dark head.
It was all part of the war of attrition he was waging against her, because he hated having her working here as much as she hated having to be here. He was never going to forgive her for walking into a job she had not worked hard to earn, and she was not going to give up and run away from it because, for Oscar’s sake and only Oscar’s sake, she was determined to stick this thing out and learn to be the person her father wanted her to be even if it killed her in the process.
Or she killed Nikos Theakis.
Nikos was wondering if she had a single clue that he could read her thoughts through the back of his head. The trouble with Mia Balfour was that she was too young to have learnt the art of masking her feelings, and too Italian to want to do so if she could.
Murmuring a response to Petros, his Athens-based second in command, Nikos kept his brooding dark gaze fixed on the plate of tinted glass set between him and the view of London beyond, though he did not see the view. His attention was focused on the smoked glass itself, onto which Mia’s image was stamped like a poorly exposed photograph, visible but misted by the daylight filtering in from outside.
There but not there, he likened. He preferred her like that, out of focus and out of reach so he could pretend that whatever else kept on charging up between them wasn’t there either.
His call to Petros concluded, Nikos shut down his mobile phone, took in a deep mental breath, then swung his chair around. An instant surge of testosterone-charged heat took a leap down his front to gather like a flaming knife in his groin.
The provocative witch, he thought, letting his eyes shutter out the telling gleam he felt spark to life in them while, at the same time, taking in every smooth sleek inch. The dress was a classy work of formal modesty, the pulled-back hair an insult to its fabulous long and waving length. Everything, even the length of her skirt, was telling him she’d corrected each criticism he’d aimed at her—spoken or unspoken.
His jaw line flexed. She missed damn well nothing.
Mia read the flexing tension as yet another display of criticism which threatened to crucify her self-confidence as much as it made her blood start to burn. She wished she could adopt the same physical indifference to him that he dealt out to her but she’d
tried and she couldn’t. Even though she hated him she could not stop herself from responding—inwardly, at least—to the pure male animal magnetism that poured out of him in such hot sinful waves. He made her feel breathless and snarled up by self-awareness she neither understood, nor could control.
‘So, what have you got there for me?’ he broke the silence, and even the rich deep tones of his voice made her insides quiver as she walked forward to place the file she was holding down on his desk.
‘The information you wanted on Lassiter-Brunel,’ she supplied.
Nikos glanced down at the bulky file, then back to Mia again, his lengthy black eyelashes flickering in surprise. ‘That was quick.’ Reaching forward he slid the file towards him. ‘Did you stay up all night?’
‘You said you wanted it by this morning,’ Mia reminded him.
‘So I did.’ Lowering his gaze again, Nikos experienced a pang of guilt as he scanned through the sheets of information she’d compiled. He had a whole department of experts employed specifically to compile information like this which, he accepted uncomfortably, had made the work she had clearly put in here a complete waste of her time.
Then something unusual caught his attention. Sliding a slip of paper out from the rest he relaxed back in his chair to read.
Recognising what that something was made Mia tense, ready to be told that reading an old press piece she’d unearthed on the Internet describing Anton Brunel’s less-than-nice reputation with the opposite sex was not what he expected to see in a business report.
One of his sleek black eyebrows rose upwards. ‘You think this is appropriate information to include in here?’ he made the predicted enquiry.
‘It says he paid a lot of money to silence a female work colleague he had been—seeing.’ Mia couldn’t quite bring herself to say the descriptive words the article used.
‘It alleges he paid hush money,’ Nikos corrected.
‘Sí.’ Mia nodded to accept the correction. ‘As you can see though, the lady in question filed sexual harassment charges which were then quickly dropped. If you look at the next document, you will find that on checking her out I discovered she had a child eight months later, a boy she named Anthony.’
‘And your point?’
Mia tried not to pull in a deep breath. ‘If a man is willing to abuse his position of power by seducing an employee, then pay her to keep silent about it, he is not reputable.’
‘In your opinion,’ Nikos pointed out.
‘In my opinion,’ Mia allowed.
‘And if the—affair had been a mutual and amicable agreement, would that alter your opinion?’ her interrogator enquired.
‘He is married with children—’
‘That was not my question.’
Mia shifted restively. ‘The article says—’
‘Alleges…’
‘Alleges,’ she echoed with the barest hint of a snap. ‘She was quite distressed at the time she made the charges and she wore bruises on her arms and her face…There are photographs.’ Mia pointed towards the file.
Allowing the lush curve of his eyelashes to droop again, Nikos looked at the photographs, the twist of his mouth showing his distaste before he used long fingers to slide the images aside.
‘This article says that Brunel denied all knowledge as to how the lady acquired her bruises. He claims she set him up.’
‘For what purpose would she do that?’ Mia stared at him in bafflement.
‘For the purpose of receiving the nice hefty pay-off she eventually got?’
‘What about the baby?’
‘Could be anyone’s baby,’ Nikos said with an indifferent shrug.
‘But that is such a cynical way to view the situation,’ Mia immediately flared up. ‘You cannot know that for a fact, and—’
‘You cannot know for a fact that Brunel’s version isn’t the truth,’ Nikos cut in with incisive logic. ‘I suspect the truth probably sits somewhere in the middle of both story versions, but since it was never proven either way I suppose we will never know.’ Casting the sheet of paper aside he looked up at her. ‘So tell me again why you included this in your report?’
Mia shifted from one foot to the other, not really wanting to answer that question. ‘I—I don’t like him,’ she finally contrived to push out.
This time both sleek eyebrows rose upwards. ‘But you’ve only met him once, the other day over lunch.’
‘He has an—uncomfortable manner…’
Nikos suddenly lurched forward, his calm demeanour gone in a single sharp blink of his eyes. ‘Explain that,’ he commanded.
‘I…No.’ Feeling her cheeks start to heat, Mia lowered her gaze.
‘You damn well will, Mia,’ he countered harshly. ‘And you will do it right now!’
‘Why are you angry with me?’ she queried hotly. ‘You instructed me to find out everything I could about Lassiter-Brunel. I found these articles. You prefer that I pretended I did not?’
She was trying to divert the subject, Nikos recognised, narrowing his eyes as he swung his mind back to the working lunch they’d shared earlier this week with John Lassiter and Anton Brunel. The two men were good-looking, arrogantly confident cut-throat businessmen—nothing wrong with any of those characteristics in people that strove for success.
However, his PA had been wearing a sexy red summer dress that fitted tightly beneath the voluptuous thrust of her breasts. The little black shrug thing she’d worn with it helped to cover nothing which mattered, and her hair had been drawn loosely back from her face in a big red clip. She’d looked like an exotic flower in a room packed with staid dark suits. Each time she let her big blue eyes drift across the lunch table the other two men lost the plot as to what they were talking about. Lush red lipstick, Nikos remembered. The warm and throaty tones of her Italian accent whenever she found the courage to speak.
Something he did not want to feel brought him to his feet with the smooth graceful movement of a leaping big cat. ‘I want to know why you’ve decided you don’t like Anton Brunel,’ he insisted. ‘Did he say something to offend you?’ he quizzed sharply. ‘Did he make a pass?’
Wishing now that she had not started this by including that article, Mia shifted uncomfortably. ‘No—’
‘What then—?’ he shot at her.
‘It was n-nothing!’ Her eyes widened in alarm when he came striding around the side of the desk and pulled to a stop only when he towered right over her. Intimidated by the whole macho physicality of his stance, Mia took a wary step back. ‘W-what is the matter with you?’ she husked out.
‘Just answer the question.’ Nikos stepped in close again, halting her next backward step by catching hold of her arms to make her stay where she was.
Feeling the pressure of his fingers slither a streak of heat over her shoulders, Mia hurriedly tried to bury the sensation in a rush of speech. ‘He—he said something I took offence to when—when we were leaving and you were talking to John Lassiter.’
‘What did he say? And look at me when you talk to me,’ Nikos rasped in annoyance. ‘It infuriates me when you hide your eyes from me like that.’
Pulling in a tense breath, Mia did as he bade her, found herself clashing with a pair of polished-mahogany eyes, a flame in their depths she had never seen there before. For a second she forgot what they were talking about while she absorbed this fascinating new discovery and—
‘Speak,’ Nikos commanded.
Mia blinked, elaborately long soot-black eyelashes a trembling framework around the startling rich blue of her eyes. ‘He—he claimed I was m-making the big eyes at him, then made a—a personal remark about you and me,’ she enlightened. ‘It’s your own fault, Nikos!’ she then flared up before he could react. ‘You make me follow you about like a pet dog on a leash! You glare at me if I move. You glare at me if I smile. You touch my hair, my arm, my fingers if I rest them on the table. You slide your hand around my waist when we walk! Look at you now,’ Mia charged up heatedly. ‘You are holdin
g me here in front of you as if you have some special right to do so! That horrible man must have misread the signals you were giving, and dared to tell me he would like to enjoy a little slice of what y-you were getting from me!’
Nikos snapped his fingers from her arms as if she’d burned him. Mia almost staggered off the heels of her shoes in shock. The stunned expression on his face made her wring out a little laugh. ‘You don’t know you do it, do you?’ she choked out unsteadily. ‘You have no clue at all that you do any of the things I said! Well, you do, and he assumed from your behaviour towards me that we are—intimate.’ The word struggled to leave her throat. ‘And—and he asked me if I would like to meet with him one afternoon when you were unavailable.’
Nikos turned to stone in front of her. Shaken up by what she had just said to him, Mia tried to tug in a strained breath. In the two weeks she’d been working with him, Nikos had been treating her more like his lowly slave than his personal assistant. He’d dragged her out to every business luncheon he had attended. He’d brought her tumbling out of bed at ungodly hours of the morning to accompany him to working breakfasts too. If she spoke he didn’t like it; if she smiled he didn’t like it. If she let her attention drift to take in her surroundings he touched her hand to bring her gaze back to him, then frowned at her as if she had committed a mortal sin. Then he dumped her back at her apartment in the evenings and left her there alone—to recover, she presumed, while he went out and—did whatever it was he did in the evenings with whoever it was he did it with!
‘So we drop the Lassiter-Brunel deal.’
Tuning in too late to catch what he’d said, Mia saw that he’d moved back round his desk and lowered himself back into his chair again.
‘See to it,’ he instructed, pushing the now-closed folder back across the desk.
‘S-see to wh-what?’ she stammered out warily.
He lifted eyes to look at her. It was like being pinned to the wall by shards of black glass. Whatever it was that had exploded inside of him was gone now and the cold hard ruthlessly controlled animal was back.