The Balfour Legacy. Кэрол Мортимер

and you are swaying where you stand. If you try to take a step you will probably hit the floor again—unless I catch you as I did before, of course, which is up for question right now because I am bloody angry with you, Mia. So angry I could give you a shake.’

      ‘You are angry—with me?’ Lifting up her chin her eyes sparked incredulous blue. ‘What do you think gives you the right to be anything where I am concerned?’

      Ignoring that he said, ‘I’ve spoken to Fiona. You have been feeling unwell all week—’

      Only for a week? Mia almost laughed at the understatement.

      ‘And you’ve been—going out drinking.’

      Starting to wonder if she really had fainted again and not come around yet, Mia stared at his stiff censorious stance and waited to find out what her delirious imagination was going to make him say next!

      ‘With friends of Kat’s,’ he provided.

      ‘Fiona told you all of this?’ Even in her imagination she could not envisage his secretary would have offered up this kind of information about her.

      ‘No.’ He made a tense move with one broad shoulder. ‘I had—other sources.’

      Other sources…‘What other sources?’

      ‘I think you should sit down—’

      ‘I don’t want to sit down!’ Mia exploded. ‘I want to know what business it is of yours what I’ve been doing! And why you believe you can stand there like a disapproving father, censuring me!’

      The moment she finished screeching at him she ruined it all by swaying when her dizzy head protested at the pressure she’d placed on it.

      ‘Sit down!’ he barked at her.

      ‘No!’ she fired back.

      Only to release a groan that turned into a frustrated whimper when her stomach began to heave. Her hand went to cover it, her other hand lifting to hold her dizzy head. She heard Nikos mutter something not very polite about stubborn females, then felt his hands cup her elbows and she was being forcibly guided back down onto the sofa.

      Then the doorbell went.

      ‘Stay right there,’ Nikos instructed—as if she was in a fit state to go anywhere!—and strode off.

      Two minutes later he was back again, walking into the room with a middle-aged man carrying a doctor’s bag following in his wake, and Mia was back on her feet again, trying her best to look as if she was bursting with robust health.

      ‘Good afternoon, Miss Balfour,’ the doctor greeted briskly. ‘How may I help you?’

      ‘I really don’t—’

      ‘She is suffering from nausea and extreme spells of dizziness,’ Nikos took over with smooth, grim efficiency, then added with all the gracious cool of someone happy to toss a fizzing bomb down at her feet, ‘She is also in the early stages of pregnancy.’

      Chapter Nine

      SHE should have fainted again, Mia thought later. It would have been the easiest way to get out of what took place next.

      But she didn’t faint.

      Instead she was forced to endure a second consultation in one day, plus a gentle lecture on consuming the right healthy diet and taking the right kind of rest, exercise and sleep.

      Having presented his bomb, Nikos had withdrawn to the window again. Long back presented to the room, jacket shoved back, hands thrust into his trouser pockets. He stood like that, signalling his retreat from proceedings, and Mia could not drag her eyes away from him, the shock he had so neatly delivered on her was so great.

      The doctor began a speech about the variances of early pregnancy, though she barely heard a word that he said. And even he was feeling the strain in the atmosphere because it was so suffocatingly tense. He kept on glancing at Nikos, then back to Mia’s frozen profile while she stared at Nikos too. It had to be obvious that they were not a joyously expecting couple, overexcited and overanxious about becoming parents.

      As he prepared to leave, he expressed one final message. ‘The nurturing of a new life is a precious gift that should be cherished. Anything less is an offence to the child itself.’

      By then even Nikos was showing cracks in his unyielding demeanour when he turned round and moved to show the doctor out.

      And he did not come back.

      Mia continued to sit on the sofa, still too stunned to do more than take in the fact that Nikos had somehow managed to grab complete control of the situation before she’d even had a chance to grasp it for herself.

      He knew she was pregnant. His other sources had been reporting her every move back to him, and by the amount he’d already indicated she had not taken a single step anywhere during the past two weeks without it being carefully tracked.

      What was she supposed to make of that?

      Suddenly wondering why she was still sitting here like some cowed fool waiting for him to deign to put in an appearance, Mia shot to her feet. Her mouth felt unnaturally dry and her stomach was still not happy but she discovered that she could walk without making the walls and floor move about.

      Stepping out of the living room she discovered that the apartment was a lot bigger than she’d expected it to be. A wide central hallway fed right down its middle, with doors leading off from either side of it, most of them thrown open like the doors in his house in Hampshire.

      Shivering she turned in the direction of the only closed door—the door out of here. She was going to escape while she had the chance. She needed to use the loo and she desperately needed a drink of something long and cool and thirst quenching. She did not need—

      ‘Don’t even think about it,’ his deep voice arrived with a quiet, seriously threatening undertone to it.

      Pulses leaping like mad, Mia pressed her dry lips together and closed her eyes for a second, then opened them again and, folding her arms across her front, turned to look at him.

      He was poised half in, half out of a room farther down the hallway. Her guarded blue eyes connected briefly with the narrowed glint reflecting from his, then dropped almost of their own volition down the length of his long lean stance.

      He’d removed his suit jacket and his shirtsleeves had been folded up his forearms. He held what looked like a tea towel in one long-fingered hand. It came to her that she was seeing yet another side to this complicated man, this one being his domesticated side.

      Did it distract from the raw sexual male she’d been so fascinated by for so long? No, she admitted helplessly as her tummy flipped for a different reason. Without knowing she was doing it she covered it with a hand.

      Lowering his gaze to watch the revealing gesture, Nikos had to fight not to grind his teeth together as anger erupted inside. She was barely managing to stand upright. She looked the colour of paste. She’d lost weight—too much weight going by the way her pale blue cotton dress was hanging on her. And she looked so beautiful and fragile and vulnerable he wanted to leap on her and carry her off to the nearest bed!

      Where the hell had he got the idea he could just brush her off like the others?

      The clue was in the question, Nikos told himself grimly. She wasn’t like the others.

      She was open, emotional, temperamental and feisty, he listed. Extraordinarily beautiful and soul-destroyingly sexy without knowing that she was. Even now while she stood there trying to maintain an upright position, all he could think about was stripping off that sack of a dress so he could see how much damage two weeks of barely eating had done to her fabulous shape.

      And she was pregnant with his child, he tagged on finally. What the hell was sexy about knowing she was pregnant with his child? He had never wanted children. The knowledge of one nestling somewhere inside her