The Balfour Legacy. Кэрол Мортимер

clenched into white-knuckle fists.

      Nikos viewed them with exasperation. ‘Body language is worth a thousand words,’ he sighed out. ‘Has it not occurred to you that if you don’t care where you came from, then no one else will care?’

      ‘Be brazen about it, you mean?’

      ‘It’s got to be better than clutching it to you like a grudge. Wake up and smell reality, Mia. Stop pitying yourself. You have a colourful past. So what? Without it you would not be here at all!’

      Pitying herself? She wanted to say—how do you know what it feels like to be me? But that would be self-pitying so she pressed her lips together and said nothing and simmered a furious glare at him instead. His eyes were almost black in the darkness, flamed by the gold from the pooling street light. The same with the warm olive skin covering the taut beauty of his cheekbones, his nose, the darker shaded contours of his smooth, wide sensual mouth.

      Something new charged up the atmosphere. It began with a small flicker of his long eyelashes as he dropped his gaze to her mouth. He wanted to kiss her. Mia knew it with an instinct older than time itself. Her heart stopped beating, then started up again at a faster pace because—Dio, she wanted him too—so much.

      He knew he was going to do it. He knew he just couldn’t hold back. She was beautiful, a warm, soft, achingly desirable creature with passion in her eyes and on her softly pulsing mouth.

      Sliding his fingers into her hair, he stroked a fingertip along the smoothness of her extended throat. The blue of her eyes deepened to purple and her lips parted. He felt the growing rush of her blood flow into his own. She swayed even closer, a willing recipient of what was about to happen. Feeling like a man controlled by a magnet, Nikos kept totally still as she brought her mouth closer and closer to his.

      A car drove past them sounding its horn noisily and they sprang apart like two tightly coiled springs breaking free from their restraints.

      Dizzied by the pressure that had built up inside her, Mia stumbled backward a few steps at the same time that Nikos broke the grip he still held on one of her arms. Staring at him, feeling a sinking sense of confusion assail her, it all suddenly changed to a sense-crawling horror when she realised that she had been the one about to kiss him.

      She spun away in a shaken, horrified need to escape what she’d almost done. The apartment’s car park was only a few metres away. Walking across it, she was so anxious to punch in her security PIN so she could get inside before he could reach the doors that she keyed the numbers in the wrong order and had to cancel to begin the sequence again. His arm reaching across her shoulder to do the job for her drew sparks from her muscles as they pulled taut.

      The door swung open. They stepped inside the lobby. Neither said another word to each other as the lift took them up to the top floor. Refusing to look into the mirrors, Mia glued her eyes to the lift’s marble floor. She could feel his presence though, like a fierce wave of energy battering into her and her insides were fizzing so badly she could not even breathe.

      The moment the doors opened she darted out of the lift to escape. ‘Wait a minute, Mia.’ His quiet voice pulled her to a stop halfway across the lobby. ‘You’ve forgotten something.’

      Narrow shoulders snapping with tension, she did not want to turn around but stiff pride made her do it. He was standing near the lift, his broad-shouldered posture somehow deceptively passive because, even with her nonexistent experience, Mia was able to detect the prowling sexual pulse beat emanating from him. Wild butterflies were beating their wings in her stomach. Without being aware she was doing it, she brought her fingers together across her front in an anxious defensive pleat.

      ‘What?’ she prompted warily, and not for the life of her could she look at his face…

      Nikos wondered how she would react if he offered to finish what they had started down in the street. She looked so damn beautiful standing there, trying hard not to show she was upset. And her innocence pounded at him like a bloody great barrier. It made him want to crash through it and just—

      Just what?

      Desire was one hell of an aphrodisiac when someone else was feeling it for you, he thought heavily. One unguarded look, the tempting thought of those anxious fingers touching his body, the sensual promise her lush parted mouth had offered him down in the car park…All it would take was a loosening of his self-control and the conflagration would happen and they might both gain some relief.

      Shame Oscar stopped him from carrying through.

      ‘Your manners,’ he responded finally. ‘It is usual to thank the guy that bought you dinner.’

      It was like he’d reached out and cut her throat. So cool, so sardonic, he was even still in lecture mode. Mia drew her eyes shut as the whole wretched agony of the way he was treating her exploded like a firework of needle-hot sparks which turned to ice as they embedded themselves in her flesh.

      ‘Thank you,’ she delivered with stiff obedience, ‘for such—a pleasant evening, signor.’

      ‘My pleasure, signorina,’ he returned, and even the supercontrolled Nikos Theakis could not stop the rueful twitch that took hold of his mouth.

      He caught a glimpse of some of Oscar’s arrogance in the way she nodded her head at him before she spun away on the heels of her ridiculously high shoes. Her chin was high, her shoulders back, her hair a glossy black stream of loose waves down her taut back. Not a single tremor showed in her body as she walked up to her door, keyed in her security code, then pushed open the door and stepped inside.

      The door shut with an impressively controlled soft thud behind her. As if it was a sign that he could drop his guard—or whatever it was that was holding him—Nikos let his shoulders fall back against the wall behind him and closed his eyes.

      Mia Bianchi was fast becoming the kind of recreational drug he never indulged in. The kind you only took on if you were looking for total loss of control of your life.

      He needed a woman, Nikos decided grimly. He should not have blown off the one he could have been seeing tonight, in favour of chasing after the one he could not have.

      Opening his eyes on that lowering confession, mouth turned down at the corners as he dragged himself free of the wall, he speared a final glance at her closed door, then turned to stride back into the lift and stabbed a long finger at the button which would take him back to the ground floor.

      Mia watched from her bedroom window as Nikos crossed the car park with the long loose-limbed stride of a man eager to depart. Duty done, she thought miserably. Annoying responsibility returned safely home, now he was going out to catch up on his real life. And he had his mobile phone clamped to his ear to find out where that life happened to be situated right now.

      A woman?

      Of course a woman, she told herself, reaching out to snap the blind shut so she could not see him any more.

      Chapter Five

      THE sound of her mobile chiming out its jingle brought Mia swimming up from the dark depths of the heavy sleep she had eventually tumbled into after tossing about restlessly for half of the night.

      Stretching out a hand and groping the bedside table to make contact with the flat black contraption, she tucked her arm back beneath the duvet and pushed the phone to her ear before mumbling, ‘Ciao.’

      ‘It’s Nikos,’ he announced with his usual impatience. ‘I have to go down to Hampshire and you’re coming with me.’

      Sitting up with a jolt, her sleepy eyes opened wide as saucers. ‘Hampshire?’ Mia echoed. ‘W-what is in Hampshire—?’

      ‘Work,’ came the sardonic answer. ‘Of the socialising kind.’

      Still trying to cast off the heavy mists of sleep, Mia pushed the tumble of ebony curls off her face. ‘But it’s Saturday,’ she remembered. ‘I am supposed to be meeting—’

      ‘I