by Various
The marriage thing, being the bone of contention. He refused to take no for an answer and she refused to say yes.
‘Will you just explain to me why you are being so stubborn about this,’ he demanded heavily.
Mia had at least a dozen reasons why, but the only one she was prepared to give him right now needed just two words. ‘Lois Mansell,’ she said, and waited for him to squirm.
But he did not squirm. He did not do anything other than to sustain steady eye contact with her like a smooth rat caught in a trap who arrogantly did not believe he had anything to squirm about!
‘Lois has nothing to do with us,’ he dismissed that line of argument.
‘The newspapers told it differently.’
‘You know all about newspapers, cara. They lie—or at the very least they tamper with the truth.’
‘You left that nightclub with her clinging to you like a limpet.’ Mia was unimpressed by his line of defence.
‘I delivered her home. I did not sleep with her.’
‘The way I see it, Nikos, you don’t sleep with any of your women.’
As a stab at their current sleeping arrangements Mia knew she’d hit her mark when his dark eyes shuttered and his mouth went tight.
‘No response?’ she sniped at him. ‘No smart comeback aimed to put me in my place?’
‘No,’ he murmured, looking away from her altogether.
‘Well, there you are, then.’ She looked away too. ‘You and I do not have the same view as to what marriage is supposed to be about.’
‘You’re pregnant with my child,’ he clipped out. ‘Such an event does not require mutual insight, it requires damage control.’
‘Damage control—?’ So hurt by that comment, she could not hold in her choked gasp. ‘And you wonder why I won’t say yes to you when you can come out with a cold statement like that?’
‘I’m trying to be practical—’
‘As you have been with our sleeping arrangements?’ She could not resist saying it, then yanked in a tight breath. ‘You get me pregnant. You expect me to marry you. But you don’t want to sleep in the same bed as me,’ she shook out. ‘I suppose you will also expect to continue to live your life as you have always done while I sit at home alone getting fat!’
‘So what do you want?’ he angled back at her.
A man who wants to marry me because he cannot live without me! Mia screamed inside her head. ‘Not a man who thinks of marriage as damage control,’ she muttered. ‘I would rather return to Italy and bring my child up alone than throw my life away on a man like that.’
‘Our child,’ he gritted out. ‘And you are going nowhere with or without the marriage. I will bring up my own child, Mia,’ he stated very grimly. ‘I will not let your silly stubborn truculence push me out of the frame over some—crazy issues you have about the quality of my commitment.’
The problem was there was no quality about it! Hurt tears clogged her throat. ‘Can we go back?’ she husked. ‘I don’t think I can eat anything.’
His growling sigh was driven. ‘You are such damn high maintenance—!’ he raked out.
Mia widened her blue eyes in simmering astonishment. ‘I don’t believe that you dared to say that!’ she choked. ‘I have cost you nothing! Not even the price of accommodation since the flat I used in London was yours anyway and was already standing vacant!’
‘I did not mean—’
‘Shut up!’ she heaved out. ‘You know what you are, Nikos?’ she hit back at him shakily. ‘You are an arrogant, selfish—cheapskate!’ Almost tumbling over the word because she was not certain she had said it correctly, she knew she’d hit the word exactly right when he tensed like a board and pushed up his aggressive chin.
‘So I f-fancied you—big deal,’ she railed on an angry high now. ‘So you condescended to take what I was putting on offer—Great, thank you, grazie tanto, amore mia—not! For what did it cost you? A reasonably priced dinner and a few hours of listening to me bore you to death, followed by a posh party and a swift bit of pleasure in your bed before you turned on me like an ice man and threw me out! If that makes me high maintenance, then may God forgive you for what you usually shower on to your women! No wonder they say beware of Greeks bearing gifts!’
‘Have you finished?’ the ice man delivered from between his clenched white teeth. ‘If so, then may I finish what I was about to say before you blew my head off? Yes? Sì? Ne?’ His sarcasm ripped like a razor through Mia’s trembling flesh. ‘I was about to add emotionally,’ he incised with deliberate precision. ‘High maintenance emotionally,’ he repeated. ‘And a bloody irritating pain in the neck!’
‘Don’t forget juvenile!’ Mia tagged on for herself.
The car came to a standstill. Without uttering another word Nikos opened his door and threw himself out. Mia continued to sit, simmering in silence, while she waited for him to come around and open her door. She could have got out under her own steam but she did not want to. If she had been given a choice—and he had allowed her very few choices over the past twelve hours—she would be staying right where she was!
‘Leave the temper in the car,’ he rasped as she arrived in front of him.
Refusing to give such a command mind space, Mia tossed her hair back from her face with an icy defiance that made Nikos grit his teeth.
Women were an absolute blast, he thought angrily as they walked together across the pavement towards one of the most exclusive eating establishments in town. They did not know when to behave themselves—or when a man had taken enough of their unbelievably volatile and inconsistent nonsense! She had not been so argumentative when he’d brought her down to straddle him during the flight over here and kissed her snappy mouth.
And, Theos, this was not the time to be recalling what they’d done next, when she was already firing him up again, because she looked nothing short of dazzling in full angry flow! Her eyes were alight, her mouth pumped and pouting because he’d cornered her just before they left his apartment and tried to kiss her out of her stubbornness. The kiss had been yet another ground-shaking experience—without the satisfying follow-up because her stubborn shell remained fixed in place.
But her sensational mouth still wore his kiss on it in defiance—and he wanted to kiss it again, right now!
‘Take care,’ he husked, taking hold of her arm as she went to negotiate the shallow step in front of the restaurant entrance.
She was wearing the usual lethal high heels and he made a silent promise to himself that he was going to chuck them all out the first opportunity he got! She was pregnant, for God’s sake. Carrying his baby. One accidental stumble off those ridiculous heels and it could all be over—
Something shockingly like panic struck down through his body, pulling him to a shuddering halt. Mia glanced up at him in frowning surprise and his heart made a weird kind of dive down to his toes.
‘What?’ she asked, glaring at him as if she was expecting yet another row to erupt.
‘Nothing,’ he said, pulling himself together. ‘I just remembered something I should have done before we left,’ he lied, feeling strangely light-headed as he reached around her to open the restaurant door.
She walked ahead of him into the foyer with a curvaceous glide of purple satin, short and fitted and fashionably edgy, her fabulous hair a silken stream of black waves that brushed her tense narrow back.
Purple for poison or purple for passion, he mused grimly. Tonight she was both.
The owner of the restaurant came hurrying up to greet him. He had to pull on his social face when he did not want to, smiling pleasantly while Mia stood beside him, thankfully donning her social smile too. So he’d taught her something, Nikos thought with bleak satire.
They were about to move on through to the restaurant proper when the door flew open and a group of newcomers came in. It was instinct that made him turn to send them a fleeting glance.
Nikos froze as an icy shaft of instant recognition locked up his muscles. No, he t
hought, this cannot be happening. He tried to deflect Mia’s attention when she turned to see where he was looking, but he was too late and she froze too.
‘We will leave,’ he husked, already reaching out to draw her protectively towards him.
‘No.’ Feeling as if the ground beneath her feet was trembling, Mia let him hold her for a moment.
But it wasn’t the ground, it was she who was trembling, shivery chills of shock tingling up and down her spine.
Gabriella.
Gabriella was right here in this place, in this city, standing a short metre away from her. Her mother, looking so agonizingly familiar to her because she saw that face in the mirror each time she looked at herself.
Her heart began to thump out of kilter. She felt Nikos trying his best to block her view with the long length of his body and his wide shoulders. And she knew he was doing it because she must have turned the colour of milk.
‘I’m going to speak to her,’ she whispered. The decision came without her even knowing she wanted to do such a thing.
‘No—Mia, don’t,’ Nikos advised gruffly. ‘You—’
But she was already stepping round him on legs that did not feel like they belonged to her any more. Mario Mattea glanced at her and he knew—that quickly he knew who it was he was looking at.
Tall and lean, strikingly attractive for a man in his sixtieth year, he touched his wife’s arm to gain her attention. ‘Gabriella,’ he murmured in a low warning voice.
Gabriella Mattea turned her luxurious dark head and looked into the pale face of the daughter she had not set eyes on in ten long years.
Silence poured into the gap between them. Mia felt her heart take on a thick pounding beat in her ears. Somewhere in the hazy distance she was aware of Nikos’s tension and of Mario’s. There were other people around them but they were invisible; she only saw her mother’s face.
Feeling as vulnerable as the small child she had been when she last stood this close to her mother, she whispered tremulously, ‘Ciao, M-Mama.’
Eyes like black glass looked her over. Mia watched the beautiful face in front of her freeze. ‘For goodness’ sake, will someone get this person away from me?’ Gabriella drawled out in cold Italian. ‘Is it impossible to eat out without being set upon by strangers these days?’
A stunning silence fell around the foyer. In the middle of it Mia slowly died. Then Nikos’s arm was a fierce brace across her shoulders. And Mario was bursting into speech.
‘Nikos,’ he greeted tensely. ‘I did not expect to see you—’
‘Excuse us,’ Nikos cut in coldly and walked them to the door.
The restaurant owner leapt to open it for them, murmuring apologies in a shocked anxious voice. They made it onto the pavement. So coldly furious he could hit something, Nikos speared a glance up the street, looking for where his driver had parked.
Turning his shaking frozen package towards him he wrapped her in one supporting arm, pressing her close against his body, while he located his mobile phone. Keeping his anger in check cost him control of his voice as he ordered his driver to come and get them.
‘Nikos, please.’ Mario appeared on the pavement beside them. ‘Let me explain to you why that unfortunate scene happened,’ he begged urgently. ‘My wife—’
‘An explanation is not required,’ Nikos sliced through the other man, his arm banding Mia all the tighter to him. ‘It happened because you gave Gabriella a choice and she chose you, your wealth and your lifestyle over her own child.’ As Nikos spoke, Mia quivered in fresh hurt as he outlined the stark cold truth of it. ‘It happened,’ he continued, ‘because you and your wife are soulless, with a soulless marriage, which in my view makes you well suited. Mia might not appreciate this right now but she has been better off without knowing either of you.’
‘Because she has Balfour to turn to now?’ Mario’s sudden harsh derision cut into Mia like a knife.
‘No,’ Nikos countered. ‘Because she has me.’
The car swept to a stop beside them, and Nikos reached out to open the rear door. There was a new atmosphere rocking the silence which hung in the warm evening, but Mia was too upset to work out why it was there. She let Nikos guide her into the limousine, and tried very hard to get a grip on herself. In truth she should not be feeling this bad, she told herself. After all, she was the one at fault for thinking she could approach a woman who had never shown the slightest hint that she cared about her.
The two men were still standing on the pavement. From the low grind of their voices Mia could tell their conversation was not nice. A quick glance showed her that Nikos’s whole body was rigid with aggression and icy as hell. Mario seemed to be pressing some urgent point and looked very pale, though she did not know the wealthy formula-one mogul to know he did not always look that shade.
She looked away again, down at her trembling fingers where they lay locked together on her lap. Nikos was right—who needed a mother like that? she told herself dimly, and felt tears press hard at the back of her throat.
Nikos climbed into the car and tapped on the partition glass to tell their driver to go. As he sank back into the seat he did not glance at Mia. He couldn’t right now. He was too busy grappling with something he’d said to Mario in his initial volley of contempt that was still knocking him almost senseless.
Soulless marriage…
Isn’t that what he had been offering Mia? A soulless marriage with great sex and separate bedrooms afterwards?
Nikos shuddered in disgust. She possessed more integrity than her lousy mother by refusing what he was fast accepting had been a filthy insult of an offer. If Gabriella had held out against Mario Mattea, would she have won her man and kept her child—?
And even the thought was insultingly arrogant. For what would Mia be winning by getting him? Nothing more than he had been prepared to give her, which turned out to be nothing in the cold light of his new insight.
He should be getting down on his knees and thanking her for loving this cold and soulless bastard—
Love…Nikos backtracked, experiencing a fresh numbing clench of shock. She loved him. How long had he known that without allowing himself to acknowledge it? Desire, obsession, infatuation—he’d named it any other word he could grab. But she did—love him. And he did not deserve such an honour.
‘You know him,’ the silent figure beside him broke into the shattering train of his thoughts.
‘Sorry?’ he turned a questioning look on her and took the full weight of her importance to him like a blow to his gut.
‘You know Mario Mattea,’ she repeated, her blue eyes dull and dark in her pale face. ‘Why have you never said?’
Shot down but still functioning, Nikos recognised ruefully as her question pushed him out of one stark blinding revelation straight into the horror of another one. Did he tell her the truth or did he try to pass it off with a flippant comment. Lie, in other words.
He veiled his eyes and went for the halftruth. ‘I know a lot of business people,’ he said with a shrug.
‘Have you met my—Gabriella before?’
‘No.’ And that was honest, Nikos mocked grimly. If he had met Gabriella Mattea before he would have recognised the cold bitch in her and perhaps been able to save Mia from what just took place. As it was, Nikos knew, right down to his seething twisting gut, he was in trouble here.
‘He’s here in Athens to set up a series of meetings with high-end financiers.’ He chickened out of telling the full truth. ‘The credit crunch has bitten hard into the car industry. Mario is desperate for someone to finance his business and his formula-one team before both sink without a trace.’
‘You mean he’s here for a series of meetings with you, don’t you?’
Nikos let his tense mouth stretch into a brief rueful smile. ‘I’m—one of his best bets to cough up the money.’
‘Are you going to?’
He sent her a glinting look. ‘What do you think?’
‘Because of me?’
‘Yes, because of you.’ And that was the full damn truth.
‘But you can’t do that!’ Surprising him by turning an aghast stare on him, she said, ‘They will know you turned away from them because of what happened tonight and they will blame me for it!’
His grim face toughened. ‘They should have considered that angle when they humiliated my future wife.’
‘I am not going to be your wife!’
‘What are you planning to be, then,’ he struck back, ‘the next Balfour scandal?’
Chapter Eleven
WRONG thing to say. Nikos knew it the moment the smart shot left his mouth.
‘I am not a Balfour,’ Mia denied, hating him for saying that—hating everyone. ‘For why would I want to be a Bianchi or a Balfour?’
‘Then don’t be,’ he persisted. ‘Be a Theakis instead.’
‘So that you can treat me like an unwelcome interloper into your life too?’
‘You would not be an unwelcome interloper.’
Mia released a soft bitter laugh. ‘I am a figure of pity to you right now. Tomorrow I will be a chain tied around your neck. Do you think I don’t know the way that it goes? Gabriella handed me over to my aunt, then walked away from me. She visited once a year for the first ten years of my life. She stopped visiting me when I asked her if she only came to give Tia money for my keep. You wish to hear her answer?’
‘No,’ Nikos muttered.
‘She admitted to my face it was so, then left. Tia’s money came by post from then on.’
A soft curse raked Nikos’s throat. ‘She is a selfish bitch with—’
‘Sì,’ Mia cut in on him quickly because she did not need him to tell her what her own mother was. ‘Oscar was more subtle. He allowed me to stay so long as I hid in the kitchen and played his housekeeper.’
‘He was protecting Lillian—’
‘You think I don’t know and appreciate that?’ she choked out. ‘Do you think I resented him protecting his poor wife’s feelings over mine? Do you think I did not understand when his other daughters must resent and blame me for the scandals which erupted later—or that I do not blame myself for those same events? But did he appreciate how I was feeling?’ she delivered with a hurt that until now she had kept buried deep inside. ‘Did my feelings stop him from sending me away again as quickly as he could?’