Mia’s Scandal
The Balfour Legacy
Michelle Reid

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MICHELLE REID grew up on the southern edges of Manchester, the youngest in a family of five lively children. Now she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire, with her busy executive husband and two grown-up daughters. She loves reading, the ballet and playing tennis when she gets the chance. She hates cooking, cleaning and despises ironing! Sleep she can do without and produces some of her best written work during the early hours of the morning.

EIGHT SISTERS, EIGHT SCANDALOUSLY SEDUCTIVE STORIES

THE BALFOUR LEGACY

Scandal on the night of the world-famous one hundredth Balfour Charity Ball has left the Balfour family in disarray! Proud patriarch Oscar Balfour knows that something must be done. His only option is to cut his daughters off from their lavish lifestyles and send them out into the real world to stand on their own two feet. So he dusts off the Balfour family rules and uses his powerful contacts to place each girl in a situation that will challenge her particular personality. He is determined that each of his daughters should learn that money will not buy happiness – integrity, decorum, strength, trust…and love are everything!

Each month Mills & Boon is delighted to bring you an exciting new instalment from The Balfour Legacy.

You won’t want to miss out!

MIA’S SCANDAL – Michelle Reid

KAT’S PRIDE – Sharon Kendrick

EMILY’S INNOCENCE – India Grey

SOPHIE’S SEDUCTION – Kim Lawrence

ZOE’S LESSON – Kate Hewitt

ANNIE’S SECRET – Carole Mortimer

BELLA’S DISGRACE – Sarah Morgan

OLIVIA’S AWAKENING – Margaret Way

For Imelda, my wonderful mother, who is currently enjoying her ninety-ninth year. Thanks, Mum, for gifting me with my love of reading and encouraging me to dare to write.

Prologue

MIA stood poised between two great stone gateposts on top of which stood a matching pair of fierce golden griffins perched as if ready to swoop.

A fine shiver ran down her taut backbone. She had to drag her eyes away from their watchful presence in case they glared her into losing her nerve. Part eagle, part lion, she recognised the two fearsome creatures from the Balfour family crest she’d seen emblazoned on the Balfour website along with the family motto Validus, Superbus quod Fidelis…

Powerful, Proud and Loyal…

‘Dio,’ she breathed in a soft shaken whisper, so intimidated by the sheer opulent grandeur of the stately entrance that the butterflies already playing havoc in her stomach went wild.

Behind her, the sound of the taxicab that had brought her here from the airport was slowly fading into the distance, leaving her alone in the weak February sunlight filtering down through the bare branches of the overhanging trees.

It felt strange to think that only one short week ago she had been living her life with her aunt in rural Tuscany, completely unaware that there was a rich and glamorous English family called Balfour, never mind that she could be connected to the glorious name.

She would still be unaware of it if that coldly distant person who was supposed to be her mother had not ignored her pleas to let her come and visit her, making Tia Giulia decide it was time to reveal a dark secret she had been keeping to herself for twenty long years.

Now here she stood on the very brink of meeting Oscar Balfour. Proud head of the house of Balfour. Powerful businessman and billionaire. Husband to three very different wives and father to seven—seven—beautiful daughters.

Eight daughters, Mia adjusted, and it made her tummy flip over.

Would a man who had already been blessed with seven daughters want another one?

It was the question she had come all this way to ask him. She needed to face Oscar Balfour and take his reaction to her existence square on her vulnerable chin. If he refused to acknowledge her, then what had she lost but a little bit more of her heart? The cold rejection of her mother had clawed out another huge chunk of it, so his rejection could not be any more hurtful, could it?

And anyway, there was that chance that he might be prepared to welcome her.

Biting down on her full soft trembling lip, Mia reached down to grasp the handle of her suitcase, then straightened. Setting her narrow shoulders inside her soft woven jacket she tipped the case onto its wheels. Her heart was going pitter-patter, she noticed, feeling a tightening across her chest that made it almost impossible for her to breathe. As she stepped out and placed her weight on her leading foot, tiny pinpricks of tension tingled up her leg to her spine. For a second she felt slightly dizzy. For a second she had to close her eyes.

When she opened them again she found she was staring down a long stretch of driveway lined either side by an avenue of old trees. She could not see the house from here because of a dip in the land ahead, but she knew it was out there defending its privacy in its own secluded valley, because it had said so on the Balfour website.

Now all she had to do was walk between those two lines of trees towards it, she told herself, aware as she made herself start walking that her insides were truly quailing with dread at what she was doing, and yet also aware of a quivering, tumbling sense of excitement that danced like fire in her blood.

Nikos Theakis was not a man who suffered emotional excesses. In fact, he prided himself on his cold, calm businesslike approach to most facets of his life. But as he drove away from his breakfast meeting with Oscar that morning, there was nothing calm or businesslike about what he was taking away with him.

He was in shock. The whole Balfour family was in shock, the only one of them seemingly managing to cope being Lillian Balfour herself.

A soft curse broke free from his throat as the pale frail image of Oscar’s beautiful wife swam up in front of him, smiling bravely as she’d bid him a painfully final farewell.

Emotion swooped down through his body, sending his foot down hard on the accelerator as if the angry burst of speed would take the alien feeling away. The powerful car leapt forward, up and out of the valley, taking him beneath the canopy of tangling bare branches that lined his route away from the Balfour estate.

But he wasn’t concentrating. Nikos knew that even as he saw her standing there, directly in his way. For a few chilling seconds he was so sure he was seeing some ghostly apparition dressed all in black that he forgot to slam his foot on the brakes.

He had never experienced anything like it. In those few stark, stunning split seconds it took him to connect with his wits, his shocked gaze had absorbed every long luscious inch of her, from her glossy black hair framing an exquisite heart-shaped face to the lush shape of her body enclosed inside a fitted jacket and a skirt that followed every long sinuous line of her curving hips, long slender thighs and shapely calves. And she was wearing boots, he noticed for some crazy reason. Little black leather ankle boots with heels like lethal spikes.

Then reality hit like a stinging shot of electricity to his wits and biting out a string of thick curses he slammed his foot down hard on the brakes.

Mia stood frozen as the low silver monster hurtled towards her, filling the air with a tire-burning, ear-piercing screech as the long silver bonnet came closer and closer until finally it slithered to a grit-spitting halt two tiny centimetres from her shins.

The engine hissed; the silver bonnet shuddered—silence returned like a numbing blow to the head. Pushing back into his seat, Nikos stared out at her with his heart pounding like a hammer and his fingers still clamped to the wheel. He had not believed he was going to stop in time. He wasn’t even sure that he had. He continued to sit in a state of near-total shutdown, waiting for her to give him a clue by making some kind of movement—by stepping back to show he hadn’t hit her or to drop down to the ground in a smashed heap!

Theos, she’s beautiful, his stupefied brain fed to him, then compounded the observation by feeding a rush of hot blood down his front. It gathered in his loins like a neat shot of testosterone. Reacting to it with an explosive force of anger he thrust open the car door and threw himself out.

‘What the hell do you think you are playing at!’ he raked out in full blistering fury. ‘Do you have a death wish or something? Why the hell didn’t you move out of my way—?’

It took every bit of Mia’s numbed strength just to breathe in and out. Her eyelashes finally gave a flutter of life and she managed to raise her eyes up from the car to focus on him instead. It came as a second shock to find she was staring at the most beautiful man she had ever seen in her life.

And he was striding towards her like a gladiator going to war. Only this gladiator had a black overcoat hanging from his impressive wide shoulders and wore a frighteningly elegant steelgrey three-piece suit beneath. His shirt was white, his tie a silky slither of smoke down his front.

Reaching the corner of the car he stopped to rake a downward glance at how close he had come to her fragile legs. Fire lit his eyes just before he reached out, clamped his hands around her waist and bodily plucked her off the ground. He was so intent on what he was doing he didn’t seem to hear her sharp gasp of shock, or the heavy thud as her suitcase dropped from her taut fingers and hit the ground. The next thing Mia knew she was up close and staring directly into a pair of deep dark polished-mahogany eyes beneath startlingly straight thick eyebrows as black as the hair on his head.

‘You stupid fool,’ he roughed out, skin the same rich gold tones as ripening olives stripped so pale it accentuated his strong jaw set as hard as a clenched fist. ‘Say something, for God’s sake. Are you all right?’

Like a plastic doll jerked by hidden strings, Mia gave a shaky nod of her head. ‘You—you almost killed me,’ she whispered.

‘I avoided trying to kill you,’ he corrected. ‘You should be thanking me for my fast reactions and skill.’

‘You think it is skilful to drive like a lunatic, signor?’

‘You think it is clever to stand stockstill in the middle of a private driveway while a car hurtles towards you, signorina?’ he shot right back.

As if only just realising he had hold of her, he muttered something, then twisted around before dumping her back on solid ground away from the lethal bumper of his car. The sheer unexpectedness of the whole shocking incident jolted Mia’s paralysed reflexes into action by forcing her to make a grab at his arms to steady herself when she almost toppled off the high heels of her boots. He braced his arms. Mia stared down at the amount of solid muscle and mighty male strength her fingers were clutching at and snatched them away again.

Feeling her legs go strangely hollow she turned away from him, saw her suitcase lying like a battered victim on the ground a few feet away from them and went to straighten it up.

Pushing his hands into the pockets in his overcoat, Nikos watched her stoop to catch hold of the handle in her trembling fingers and could not stop his eyes from surveying the attractive shape of her derrière moulded to the fabric of her skirt.

Nice, he thought, then frowned darkly as another rush of heat shot down his front. Spinning away, Nikos took a frowning glance at his wristwatch. He was late, he saw. He had a plane to catch. He had just come away from one of the worst situations he had ever had to deal with, and he was standing around here admiring the rear view of the woman he’d almost just flattened into the ground with his car!

A sound of self-disgust escaped him. ‘Try walking down the side of the drive from here,’ he said loftily, then strode back the length of his car. ‘And just for the record,’ he added as he opened the door. ‘If you’re the new housekeeper they’re all anxiously awaiting at the house, I think I should warn you you’ve gone over the top with the get-up.’

Straightening up from dusting off her suitcase, Mia blinked. Housekeeper…Get-up…Over the top…? She needed time to translate what he’d said so it would make some sense to her.

Then it did make sense. He thought she had come here to Balfour Manor dressed like this to take up the position of housekeeper.

Hurt gathered like a tight ball in her stomach. In all her life she had never felt hit so hard or so low. With the chilling cast of wounded dignity freezing her composure, she turned and walked herself and her suitcase around the bonnet of his fancy over-the-top supercar without bothering to offer him a single glance.

Housekeeper…Mia pushed out a strained bitter laugh. She’d learnt to speak English while housekeeping for an ancient English professor who’d owned a villa not far from her home. He had paid her to keep his house clean and cook for him, and he had let her use his library and his computer so long as she typed up the pages of his endlessly long and boring tome. The English language course had been thrown in free of charge. Then she would walk the two kilometres back home and work on her school studies before spending the evening assisting Tia Giulia with the sewing she took in to help subsidise the meagre income Tia made growing cut flowers to sell in the nearest market town.

She usually wore sensible flat shoes and faded old jeans or one of the couple of dresses she had for the hot Tuscan summers. For the first time in her life she was wearing something new, not handmade out of a cheap bit of fabric she’d bought from a market stall. And that horrid man in his elegant silver car and his elegant silver suit and his elegant grooming which put him right at home here on the Balfour estate shattered her hard-worked-for self-confidence with just a few words.

Nikos narrowed his eyes as he watched her walk off down the driveway—hogging the middle of it like a defiance aimed exclusively at him. His lips gave a wry twitch. Instead of getting in his car and driving off, he stood and watched her for a few more seconds, drawn to do so by the graceful movement of her long curving figure, and her spark of spirit and the lingering echo of her throaty accent—Italian by the fire in it, he mused.

And young, he tagged on.

As in too young to be anyone’s housekeeper?

The first seeds of doubt began to scratch at his conscience. Had he got it wrong and just insulted one of Oscar’s daughter’s friends?

Then it hit him what he was doing, and his frown came back as he climbed into his car and drove off down the drive. Whoever she was, he hoped she knew what she was walking into at Balfour Manor or she was in for one hell of a shock when she arrived.

Mia was already in shock because she’d just caught her first glimpse of Balfour Manor.

Nothing she’d read or seen on the Internet had prepared her for the sheer beauty of what she was looking at. Nestling in its own shallow valley, the stone-built house was at least ten times bigger than she had envisioned it to be, with row upon row of long casement windows glinting in the pale sunlight.

Trepidation began to fizz through the fine layers of her skin as she followed the driveway down into the valley and around the side of a pretty lake sheened like frosted glass. The closer she came to the house, the more intimidated she felt by it. It was huge. A grand stately home with tall palladium columns supporting a circular-shaped entrance, which dwarfed her courage along with her height as she walked between them and set her suitcase aside by a wall by the door.

Well, it was now or never, she told herself, and felt real trepidation clutch at her chest as she stepped in front of the heavy oak door.

Was she really certain she wanted to do this?

No, she wasn’t any longer, but to turn away now, she knew she would regret it for the rest of her life because she would never find the courage to do this a second time.

On that stark piece of counselling, Mia reached out and gripped the old-fashioned bell pull and gave it a wary tug, her fingers lowering to her side again where they curled into her palms as she waited for someone to answer the door.

Nothing in her entire life had ever felt as frightening as this did.

Nothing had ever been as important to her as this.

Tense, trembling, eyes wide and wary as she watched the door start to open, the very last person she expected to see appear in its aperture was Oscar Balfour himself.

Taller and so much more dauntingly striking than she had envisaged him with his snow-white hair and neat goatee beard. When he frowned down he looked so terribly grim and austere she almost turned and ran. If he asked her if she was the new housekeeper she would run—she would, she decided.

But he didn’t say it. He said, ‘Hello, young lady,’ and offered her a smile.

It was a nice smile, a kind smile which reached deep into the blue of his eyes.

Eyes the same colour blue as her own.

Eyes to which Mia clung. ‘Bon…bon giorno, s-signor…’ Too nervous to stop herself from greeting him in Italian, she gulped and switched to stammering English. ‘I don’t know if y-you know about m-me but my name is Mia Bianchi? I have been told that you are my father…’

Chapter One

FOR the first time in three long hard-travelled months, Nikos Theakis strode in through the doors belonging to his London offices and instantly claimed the full attention of every person present in the slick modern granite-and-glass foyer.

Tall and dark, blessed with the kind of lean, hard, powerful body of a peak trained athlete, the air around him positively vibrated with excess energy as he moved, bringing forth a flurry of, ‘Good morning, Nikos,’ that sounded breathless and charged.

That he had the same effect everywhere he went said a lot about the man’s personality. He was sharp, smooth, determined and driven. Working for him was like catching a ride on a rocket ship to the stars. Exciting, breathtaking, teeth-chatteringly scary sometimes because he took major risks others shied right away from. He was committed and focused and famously never, ever wrong.

Today he was frowning, the two straight black bars of his eyebrows drawn together across the bridge of his arrogantly straight nose. The lean golden cut of his classical Greek features locked in concentration on the conversation he was involved in via his mobile telephone. His acknowledgement to the greetings therefore consisted of a series of distracted nods of his glossy dark head as his long stride took him across the foyer and into one of the waiting lifts.

‘In the name of Theos, Oscar,’ he swore softly, ‘What kind of game are you trying to set me up with here?’

‘No game,’ Oscar Balfour insisted. ‘I’ve thought this through carefully, now I am asking you for your support.’

‘Asking?’ Nikos pounced on the word with lethal satire.

‘Unless you’re too big and important now to help out an old friend…’

Stabbing a long finger at the top-floor button, Nikos shrugged back the brilliant white shirt cuff so he could check the time on his wafer-thin multifunction platinum watch, then bit back the desire to curse. He had been back in the country for less than an hour after spending weeks flying around the world like a damn satellite, putting together a rescue package for a crisis-embattled multiconglomerate which did not deserve to go under because its international investors had turned chicken and pulled the plug on their loans. He was tired, hungry and seriously jet-lagged but upstairs in his boardroom awaited a group of anxious people desperate to hear the final results of his toils.

‘Stop trying to pull my strings,’he flicked out impatiently.

‘I’m flattered that you think I still can,’ Oscar drawled.

‘And stick to the point,’ he added, well aware that Oscar was the ruthless, cunning cut-throat king of manipulation so using that kind of invert flattery on him was wasted. ‘Instead, tell me what in hell’s name you expect me to do with one of your spoiled-to-death daughters?’

‘Not bed her anyway.’

About to stride out of the lift into the hushed luxury of the top-floor corridor, that short cool evenly delivered statement froze Nikos to the spot for a second, the acid-bite affront hoisting up his proud dark head.

‘That was not even remotely funny,’ he denounced with icy cold dignity. ‘I have never rested so much as a suggestive finger on any one of your daughters. It would be—’

‘Disrespectful to me—?’

‘Yes!’ Nikos incised, for no one knew better than Nikos himself how much he owed to Oscar for turning him into the person he was today. Maintaining a respectful distance between himself and Oscar’s beautiful daughters was a simple matter of paying honour to that debt.

‘Thank you,’ Oscar murmured.

‘I don’t want your thanks,’ Nikos dismissed, and started moving again, covering the length of the corridor with the elegant grace of his long restless stride. ‘And neither do I want one of your decorative daughters cluttering up my offices pretending to be a proficient PA just to please you,’ he tagged on. ‘Why this sudden decision to put them to work anyway?’ he asked curiously as he pushed open the door to his own suite of offices.

His secretary, Fiona, glanced up from her computer screen and beamed him a welcome-back smile. Indicating to his mobile, Nikos gave a series of instructions via a long-fingered hand which the experienced Fiona showed she understood with a nod of her curly blonde head, leaving him free to shut himself inside his own office knowing the group of people waiting for him in the boardroom would be informed of his delay.

It was only as he shut the door behind him that he picked up the silence hanging heavy on the phone. It made him frown again because Oscar Balfour possessed a brain which functioned at the speed of light so silences of any nature were unusual enough to cause Nikos a pang of concern.

‘Are you all right, Oscar?’ he questioned cautiously.

The older man released a sigh, ‘Actually, I feel like hell,’ he admitted. ‘I have started to wonder what the past thirty years of my life have been about.’

Picturing this big tough larger-than-life investment tycoon with his snow-white hair and neat goatee beard and the pride of his long aristocratic heritage stamped onto every facet of him—

‘You’re missing Lillian,’ Nikos murmured.

‘Every minute of every hour of every day,’ Oscar confirmed. ‘I go to sleep thinking about her and spend the night dreaming about her, and I wake up in the morning searching for her warm body next to mine in the bed.’

‘I’m—sorry.’ It was a grossly inadequate response to offer, Nikos knew that, for Oscar Balfour was still grieving the recent loss of his wife. ‘It’s been a tough time for all of you…’

‘With one death and two raging scandals following hard on the back of a world financial crisis which threatened to turn us all into beggars?’ Oscar let out a dry laugh. ‘Tough doesn’t cover it.’

Since Lillian Balfour’s swift and untimely death three months ago, the great Balfour name had been rocked by scandal after scandal. From the moment Oscar took it upon himself to announce that he had a twenty-year-old daughter no one previously knew about, anyone with an axe to grind on a Balfour had come creeping out of the woodwork to air any grievance they might have. In short, Nikos mused, for the past few months the Balfours had been featuring in their very own no-holds-barred fly-on-the-wall documentary. It might not have been by consent but it had been scandalously spicy.

‘You survived the crisis pretty well intact,’ Nikos went for a positive note.

‘So I did,’ agreed Oscar. ‘As you did.’

About to walk to his desk, Nikos found himself diverting across the room to go and stand in front of the large framed photograph of his home city he had mounted on the wall. If he narrowed his eyes he could just make out the murky dark spot down in the bottom corner, which represented the slum area of Athens where he’d spent the first twenty years of his life living by his wits from hand to mouth.

A nerve twitched along his hard jaw line, the rich colour of his eyes shadowing with his thoughts. Being street poor was as good an incentive he could come up with for working like a dog to ensure he would never be poor again, he pondered bleakly. And without the good fortune of an accidental meeting with Oscar, he would probably still be down there, living that same hand-to-mouth existence—with the odd spell in prison thrown in for good measure, he tagged on with a stark honesty that made him grimace.

This one man, this brilliant and shrewd, cunning-as-a-wily-fox Englishman had seen something in the arrogant young fool he had been back then, gone with his instincts and given him the chance to pull himself free of that life.

Made suddenly aware of the fine silk expense of his Italian suiting and his handmade shirt and shoes, Nikos turned to walk over to the plate of glass which gave his spacious top-floor office its famous London city views. He owned several other office buildings just like this one in the major capitals, along with the homes to complement his high-status lifestyle. He had the private yacht, the private plane, the personal investment portfolio to rival any out there…

The poor boy done good, Nikos quoted silently from a recent article an Athens newspaper had written about him.

Shame, he thought, about the scars he kept so deeply hidden inside even Oscar knew nothing about them.

‘However, my daughters did not have a clue that there even was a world banking crisis,’ Oscar’s voice arrived in his ear once again. ‘You’re right, Nikos, I’ve spoiled them. I indulged their pampered princess lifestyles to a point of parental abandonment, and now I’m reaping the rewards for my neglect. I intend to put that right.’

‘By cutting them off from your money and sending them out into the big bad world to sink or swim on their own—?’ Despite the gravity in the conversation Nikos released a dry laugh. ‘Trust me, Oscar, that’s overkill.’

‘Are you questioning my judgement?’

Yes, Nikos thought. ‘No,’ he deferred to the deep respect he held for this man, ‘of course not.’

‘Good,’ Oscar said. ‘Because I want you to take Mia under your wing and teach her everything she needs to know to survive as a Balfour.’

‘Mia—?’ Nikos repeated, needing a moment to connect with the unfamiliar name. ‘Is she the—’ He bit his teeth together, but too late.

‘Is Mia—what?’ Oscar demanded.

‘The—new one,’ Nikos described with what he thought was credible diplomacy considering the sensational way she had been outed as a Balfour.

‘You can use the term illegitimate without offending me, Nikos,’ drawled Oscar. ‘Though I cannot be certain that Mia will feel the same way. She’s—different than my other daughters…To put it bluntly,’Oscar sighed out, ‘Mia just is not coping well as a Balfour. I think living in London and working alongside you will be good for her—teach her some self-confidence and toughen her up.’

‘No way, my friend,’ Nikos refused coolly.

‘You can escort her to a few functions,’Oscar continued as if Nikos had not spoken. ‘Show her how to play the social scene.’

‘If she isn’t coping within the safety of Balfour Manor, then what you’re suggesting is the same thing as throwing her to the wolves,’ Nikos pointed out. ‘Take my advice and send her to one of the many matronly widows you know in London and let them teach her how to cope as a Balfour. I am a lone wolf, Oscar,’ Nikos stressed. ‘I always work alone and I eat the vulnerable.’

Another short silence sang down the phone line, only this one did not carry the heavy weight of grief like the last one had done. This one carried the stark chilling coldness of Oscar’s sudden change of mood.

‘I thought,’ he said, ‘we had already established that you don’t eat my daughters.’

‘I was not referring to—’

‘Don’t make me remind you that you owe me this, Nikos,’ Oscar interrupted. ‘Now I’m calling in the debt.’

Recognising the outright challenge which effectively pinned him to the floor with lead weights, Nikos tried for a last-ditch appeal. ‘Oscar…’

‘Are you going to refuse to do this favour for me?’ Oscar cut in.

‘No,’ Nikos sighed out in heavy surrender. ‘Of course I’m not refusing you.’

As Oscar had pointed out, he owed him—big time.

‘Good. Then it’s settled.’ Oscar sounded warm again. ‘And I thought that since you don’t like live-in staff invading your private space, she could use the staff apartment attached to your London penthouse.’

Like a cornered animal Nikos thundered out, ‘You mean you want me to babysit her as well as give her a job?’

‘She will be with you tomorrow—be nice.’

Be nice, Nikos mocked as he tossed his mobile phone down on the top of his desk with more violence than the essential piece of equipment deserved, then turned to sink his lean hips onto the desk’s polished edge.

In the act of honouring a moral debt he owed to Oscar, he had just agreed to compromise his own business values. A growl of bubbling frustration vibrated against his chest at the same moment a knock at his door heralded Fiona’s appearance as she stepped into the room.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she murmured quickly, seeing the glowering frown pushing his flat black eyebrows together. ‘But one of the Miss Balfours is down in reception asking to see you…She mentioned something about needing a spare set of keys to your apartment—?’

Nikos froze, as for the first time in his adult life he felt the rising tide of a hot blush try to destroy his legendary cool. What Fiona was really saying was that Oscar’s new, shy, not-coping-very-well cuckoo had just strolled into his reception and made an announcement which effectively placed them in an intimate relationship!

She was not even supposed to arrive here until tomorrow. He had not even met her yet! Now the foolish woman had just set this whole damn building alive with hot and spicy speculation about the two of them!

Miss damn Balfour wasn’t just foolish, she was outright dangerous!

Nikos leapt upright. To hell with being nice, he thought furiously as he strode right past the very curious Fiona and back down the corridor. In his experience you were not nice to a dangerous substance. What you did was treat it with cold hard respect while you carefully disposed of it.

Mia was standing by the reception desk already locked tautly into regret for blurting out what she had said in the way she had said it, when she saw the doors to one of the lifts slide open and a tall, dark, screamingly familiar man stride out.

Surprise closed her brain down for a second. She actually trembled on a moment of pure skin-tingling shock. His height, his colouring, his long hard body locked inside a crushingly elegant designer-cut business suit—it was the man who had almost run her over on the driveway of Balfour Manor on the day she had first arrived. Even the way he was coming towards her like a man on the war path screamed shocked recognition at her and filled her with the cowardly urge to start backing off.

‘Oh, Dio,’ she was unable to stop herself from gasping when he came to a stop an arm’s length from her. ‘It’s you.’

His sentiments exactly, Nikos thought grimly. For he was suffering from the same stark shattering shock of recognition he could see written on her face, though he possessed the self-control to keep his shock under wraps. Still, he did not seem able to prevent his eyes from making a thorough sweep of her tumbling-loose glossy-black hair and her simple white T-shirt with a short pale blue skirt. And she was wearing flat shoes, he noticed without wanting to. A pair of soft gold leather pumps which reduced her in height but did nothing to spoil the length of her fabulously long golden legs.

With barely a flicker of a silky black eyelash to say he’d understood what her shaken gasp represented, he questioned, ‘Miss Balfour?’ with clear cool polite formality. ‘Since we have not met before, I am Nikos Theakis. It is a pleasure to meet you at last.’

He offered up a long-fingered hand for Mia to take. Skin-peelingly aware of the listening receptionist and all the other people in the foyer who were standing curiously about, Mia got the cold message his greeting conveyed to her and wanted to curl up and die where she stood. For someone who shied away from being placed in the spotlight, like a bat needed the cover of darkness just to live, she could not believe that she had made such a stupid error as to speak her reason for being here in a public domain like this.

Be brave had been the last words of encouragement her father had offered her just before his car had swept her away, she remembered. But being brave had absolutely nothing to do with what she was feeling right now as she forced her hand to lift up and settle warily against his.

‘Bon—bon giorno,’ she managed to respond while her eyes anxiously tried to convey an apology to him.

If he saw it he did not acknowledge it. If anything his lean hard-boned expression froze up all the more. ‘I was not expecting you here until tomorrow,’ he announced. ‘However, I believe you have a domestic problem we need to sort out?’

‘I…Yes,’ Mia breathed in response.

Trying to ignore the sudden shot of electricity that stung through his palm when their hands touched, Nikos reclaimed his hand and took a quick glance at his watch. ‘I have a meeting to attend,’ he informed her briskly, ‘but if you come with me, my secretary will deal with any problems you have.’

With that he turned and strode back across the foyer, with his thoroughly subdued new charge trailing in his wake. Throughout the whole thing he had not acknowledged the interested throng loitering in his foyer but his razor-sharp instincts were telling him he had successfully killed any juicy speculation as to why Mia Balfour was here.

Grimly pleased with himself for achieving that, at least, it was the only thing he was pleased about as he strode into the lift, then waited for her to join him.

‘I am truly sorry!’ she burst into anxious speech the moment the doors shut them in.

‘You are a damn fool.’ Nikos was not in the least bit impressed with her apology. ‘If you’re going to work with me, Miss Balfour, I suggest you learn the art of discretion quickly or you are not going to last a day.’

‘I just did not think! Oscar told me to—’

‘Let’s leave your father out of this.’ His dark eyes flashed her a look of contempt. ‘When Oscar persuaded me to do this favour for him, I am convinced he would have established your agreement beforehand, which makes you responsible for your own actions, Miss Balfour. So, rule number one…you had better learn fast—don’t ever embarrass me like that again.’

‘I’m sorry,’Mia breathed for a second time, declining to try and add that it was Oscar who’d sent her here with the instruction to ask at reception for the keys to her new apartment. ‘But a courier is due to arrive at your—m-my new address with my things and I n-need to be able to get in.’

‘Try using a phone next time.’

Mia decided right there and then that she disliked Nikos Theakis.

‘And to make a point, in case you have not yet realised it,’ he continued with bite, ‘you are here under sufferance. I don’t work with fools. You will rise or fall on your own merits and if you don’t pull your weight you’re out. Got that?’

Beginning to feel just a bit annoyed now by his icy form of censure, Mia felt an unexpected urge to snap back at him. She had not deliberately set out to embarrass him after all. Why would she want to?

Tossing her head back, she looked at him standing there tall and erect with his contempt wafting over her in waves. He looked like what he was, a cold hard angry businessman, a thoroughly gorgeous, frighteningly successful arrogant Greek tycoon.

‘And let’s get one more thing straight before we leave this lift,’he went on. ‘I am not into nepotism. I believe that everyone must work as hard as the next person to earn their place in the world.’One of the reasons Nikos knew he commanded so much respect from his employees was because he encouraged each one of them to explore their own potential no matter where they stood in the employment ranks. ‘So you will pull your weight around here or you’re out, got that?’ he iced out.

‘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 holding 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 nowclosed 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.

‘I’m s-sorry,’ she felt compelled to apologise. ‘But I did not catch w-what you s-said to me.’

‘My command of the English language is that poor?’ he mocked.

‘N-no.’She hated him. ‘I l-lost concentration f-for a m-moment…’

Nikos wondered what she’d do if he asked her to use that delightfully husky stammer she’d just developed, tonight while lying naked beneath him in his bed?

Theos! The silent curse burned its way around his head in protest for letting his imagination go in that direction. Two damn long weeks of this and she was still here driving him crazy.

Did he really do all of those things she had listed or was she just out to pull his strings—?

A curse locked in his throat. His new PA might not like him, but she lusted after him with a fever she was too inept to keep hidden, though he was equally certain that she was not aware that she was so transparent.

And that was the reason Anton Brunel had picked up on the sexual vibrations at the lunch table, he determined. Her fault, not his fault. And as for all that touching stuff she’d accused him of—it only happened inside her overimaginative head.

She made him think of a living, breathing sexual grenade with the pin dangling halfway out—half precocious woman, half infuriating child—and she might heat him up like no women had ever done, but he did not want her in his bed!

Oscar would never forgive him.

On that final sense-cooling reminder, Nikos made a grab at the thread of this discussion. ‘Call John Lassiter,’ he instructed. ‘Tell him I’m no longer interested in doing business with them.’

‘Me—?’ Mia gasped. ‘But I don’t want—’

‘And bring me some coffee,’ he cut over her scared protest and sat forward to pick up his pen.

If this didn’t teach her to keep her provocative ways in check, then nothing would. The Lassiter-Brunel deal was worth several million on paper. The innately frugal Mia Bianchi-Balfour was going to gag at the loss of such a lucrative deal. ‘And remind Fiona I will be out for two hours at lunch.’

‘But…Nikos please,’ Mia murmured painfully. ‘I don’t know how to do what you said!’

‘Make coffee?’ he incised with a cruelty he actually enjoyed inflicting.

‘Tell somebody a deal is to be broken!’

‘Then you are about to ride yet another steep learning curve,’ he relayed without a hint of care. ‘And just for the record, I don’t approve of office affairs, romances or even friendships. So stop taking swipes at me by the way you dress, or the way you look at me, or the way you put that Lassiter-Brunel file in front of me, expecting me to find that article and question your motives so you could tell me what Brunel presumed about us. It was irritating and juvenile. There is no us. The rest of what you said lives only in your head. Now I have some calls to make.’

Dismissed, appalled, devastated—whipped by his cold assassination—Mia spun away and walked across his office on legs that shook.

Irritating and juvenile…

‘I hate him,’ Mia whispered once she was on the other side of the door.

‘Did you say something?’ Fiona glanced up from her work.

Wishing she was dead or at least far, far away from this place, Mia stumbled across the room to sink down in the chair behind her desk before her trembling legs crumbled altogether. ‘He’s in a very bad mood today and I hate him.’

‘Don’t we all, darlin’,’ Fiona responded dryly. ‘Our gorgeous boss is pure sex on legs but as cold as ice. It’s such a waste of good male flesh.’ Sitting back from her computer console, Fiona’s floppy blonde curls bounced on her head as she gave Mia’s pale face the once-over. ‘Bit your head off, did he?’

More than just my head, Mia thought tragically. ‘I don’t know how you have put up with him for as long as you have.’

‘I’m immune.’ Fiona waggled her left hand at Mia, showing off the three sparkling rings she wore on her marriage finger. ‘I’ve got my own sexy brute to go home to each evening, and he’s never cold.’

‘He wants me to cancel the Lassiter-Brunel deal.’

Fiona went still. ‘So you told him.’

Mia pressed her trembling lips together and nodded. ‘He didn’t believe me.’

‘Then why is he pulling out of the deal?’ the secretary quizzed with a frown.

‘To—to punish me,’ Mia answered. ‘He knows I don’t know how to do such a thing so he’s making me do it to teach me a lesson about the consequences of making up stories.’

‘Nikos Theakis is throwing away a lucrative deal just to teach you a lesson?’ Fiona laughed. ‘I don’t believe it. There has to be more to his reasoning than that.’

There was, Mia thought bleakly. She had told him some other things he had not wanted to hear about. ‘And he’s not taking me with him to his lunch today…’

And that harsh rebuff was striking her as hard as everything else. It was like being cut off from the main lifeline which kept her functioning. She might hate him but she revelled in being around him.

Why had she told him he constantly touched her? Why hadn’t she kept her big mouth shut?

‘Perhaps that’s a good thing,’ Fiona said gently.

Blinking her ridiculously long eyelashes Mia brought her gaze into focus on the other woman, read her sympathetic expression and went hot.

‘He wants coffee.’ Looking away she stood and walked across the office to the coffee machine to prepare a small tray, then on impulse she begged Fiona, ‘Will you take it in? I don’t think I can stand another visit in there right now.’

‘Sure…’ Always relaxed, always sunny, Fiona came to take the tray from her, then paused. ‘Mia…’ she posed gently, ‘take a bit of advice from someone older and wiser than you are…get yourself a man.’

Glancing up, she groaned, ‘Oh, Dio. Am I so obvious?’

Fiona’s sympathetic smile said it all. ‘You know, when you first arrived here everyone in the building was more than ready to dislike you for who you are and how you came by this job. It took you just a week to win us all over. You’re hard-working, sweet and nice, but he isn’t nice—to women.’

Mia started despising herself for bringing this lecture on.

‘He uses them, Mia,’ Fiona pressed on her. ‘He does not respect them.’

‘As they use him.’ She felt some crazy need to defend Nikos Theakis even though he did not deserve it.

‘Yes.’ Fiona couldn’t argue with that. ‘Especially Miss Supermodel Lucy Clayton who received her farewell gift by special messenger last week. By next week another woman just like her will have been put in her place. It’s the way he works. The way he likes to keep it,’ Fiona stressed. ‘He’s an amazing risk taker in the business arena. An absolute financial genius everybody admires and respects, and he’s commendably honest and committed to any promises he makes—in business—but in his personal life?’ Fiona shook her head. ‘He’s a smooth, cool, bone-meltingly gorgeous sexual predator. He does not connect sex with his emotions—if he has any—the jury is still out on that. So take my advice and don’t go there. Don’t even want to go there because if he decides to take you he will spoil you for ever. So get yourself a man,’she repeated, ‘and wean yourself off him while you still can.’

‘Where is my coffee?’ the sexual predator demanded.

Chapter Three

BOTH women jumped guiltily and turned to see Nikos Theakis standing in his office doorway. By his closed expression there was no way they could tell if he’d overheard them talking about him, but for the first time since she’d started working here, Mia saw two hot coins of guilt hit Fiona’s creamy cheekbones and knew her own cheeks wore the same hot sting.

Good, Nikos thought, tamping down hard on his anger for the second time this morning as he strode across the room to take the tray from his blushing secretary, then strode back into his office with it without uttering another word.

Get yourself a man… His lips compressed into a tight line as he set down the tray. Why had he not thought of offering his PA the same piece of advice?

The answer to that question was not a nice one. But then, as his secretary had just pointed out to Mia, he wasn’t nice.

It rankled—the not-nice part and the man part.

Throwing himself down in his chair Nikos swung it around to face the window. So I don’t respect women. A flash of irritation shot across his face. He did respect them or why the hell did he restrict himself to the kind that preferred to play the game the way he liked to play it? He wasn’t looking for love. He was not looking for marriage, so he steered well clear of the kind of women looking for either or both.

And that was respecting them, he determined. It would have been nice if Fiona had recognised that.

Vaguely surprised that there was a dose of hurt rolling round inside him, Nikos frowned. He was good to his staff, fair—generous, as Fiona had pointed out. He’d believed he had their respect. His secretary had shocked him with her view of him. It angered him that she’d felt it necessary to warn Mia off.

He rested a long forefinger along the line of his mouth where the smooth skin covering his lips felt tightly stretched, his eyes narrowed by an unwanted feeling of distaste at the idea of Mia turning all of that untapped passion on for some other man.

What if she took Fiona’s advice—?

‘Damn,’ he muttered, not liking what was rattling around inside him. Where was the guy who focused purely on business? The guy who barely noticed a woman unless she was stretched out naked on a bed?

Perhaps that was it. He needed a woman. Sex, he named it. A long night of seething hot passion with the kind of woman who could appreciate what he could do for her without expecting the whole heavy emotional bit by return. He was not possessive. He was not even mildly demonstrative like Mia had dared to suggest. If he touched her like she said he did, it was done with attention to polite good manners and respect. She was the one who’d misread the signals.

John Lassiter was at first stunned by Nikos Theakis’s decision to pull out of negotiations, then he grew increasingly more angry by Mia’s apologetic inability to give him answers as to why they were being dumped. Within minutes of her finally managing to put the phone down on the uncomfortable conversation, Fiona’s telephone was ringing and Anton Brunel was demanding to speak to Nikos.

With a telling glance at each other, Fiona put the call through to their boss. Ten minutes later he was striding out of his office with his too-handsome face locked into an iron-hard mask of contempt. He did not speak as he crossed their office; he did not cast them a glance. The dismissive tension he left behind him cloyed on Mia.

In the end, she couldn’t stand it, and she took herself off to the café around the corner to buy herself some lunch. While she sat at one of the small tables trying to eat a sandwich her tense throat did not want to swallow, a man from the accounts department came in to the café. Seeing her sitting on her own he brought his sandwich to her table and joined her.

After a shy start to her unexpected company Mia surprised herself by warming to his easygoing brand of friendly humour and began to relax and enjoy herself. They walked back to the office building together and lingered to finish their conversation in the foyer for a minute or two. It was all warm and nice and friendly and fun.

Striding into his plush grey-and-black marble foyer, Nikos caught sight of his PA standing there, talking with someone from his accounts team.

Shock almost brought him to a halt.

She looked young and beautiful and relaxed and alive. Something hard and hot grabbed hold of his chest and hung on. Without knowing he was about to do it, he parted his grim lips to snap out her name, only to clamp them shut again when her ‘pet dog on a leash’accusation leapt into his head.

He kept himself moving towards the bank of lifts and refused to look at the cosy duo again. Once he’d gained the privacy of his luxurious office, he went straight on the offensive and took out his mobile phone to start flicking through his address book. Five minutes later he had arranged dinner for that evening with the beautiful and very eager Lois Mansell and was feeling much better about himself. Lois was just what he needed. She was a cool smooth banking executive practiced in the art of sex just for sex. Young and irritatingly naive brunettes with more than a hint of Italian fire in their bellies, and with virgin territory stamped all over them, did not and never would do it for him.

Get yourself a man… Mia considered this as she sat alone in her flat that same evening, reworking a designer suit to look less high fashion and more office friendly so she could wear it to work next week.

Weaning herself off Nikos Theakis was making good sense the more she thought about it. He did not want her. Dio, he had gone into great detail to make it clear how much he did not want her!

Irritating and juvenile…

Putting her sewing aside she stood with a tense jerk and paced restlessly over to the window to look out. It was dark outside, the London night skyline twinkling with lights. It was Friday night and most people of her age would be out there enjoying themselves, but here was she alone in her flat with her hair stuck in a ponytail, wearing a pair of faded jeans and an old top, and no plans to go anywhere, or anyone to call upon if she did want to go out!

Right now she would kill to have a man ring her doorbell, or to be getting ready to go out to meet with him.

Fiona was right. It was time she weaned herself off this infatuation she suffered for Nikos Theakis. It was time for her to throw off the shy little country girl and make good use of the opportunity her father had given her to grow into herself.

A man…a man…How did one go about attracting a man?

Well, not by standing alone here in her flat, that was certain. Could she have enticed the man she’d shared lunch with today to ask her out, if she’d put her mind to it?

Her isolated life in Tuscany had not taught her anything about being a young independent woman living on her own in a big city. She’d lived all of her life with her aunt on a small hill farm five kilometres from the nearest village. She’d attended a tiny convent school for girls, and money had been so tight that even meeting her school friends in the nearest town on a Saturday to go shopping together had been beyond her meagre cash reserves.

In her life to date, she’d had just two abiding influences. A wonderfully caring but ageing aunt she adored, and an even older man she kept house and cooked for who lived very much in a world of his own. And the worst part was that no matter how hard Oscar and his daughters had tried to bring her out of herself, she was still that quiet, shy and isolated country girl on the inside.

She sighed, turning to face the room again with its bland walls and bland modern furniture and its television playing softly in the corner for company.

I’m going to go out.

The decision sparked out of nothing. It just hit her like a fever in her head and, before she knew it, Mia was striding out of the sitting room and into the bedroom. Ten minutes later she returned, dressed in a short dusky-lilac silk dress with a dipping neckline and tiny lace-cap sleeves. A hunt along the rail of hand-me-downs had uncovered a fashionably complicated fitted black satin jacket she pulled on over the dress as she walked.

And most important of all, her resolve to just get out there and do something was burning like a fire in her blood. Gathering up her purse she let herself out of her flat and crossed the plush creamy oval-shaped foyer to press the button to call the lift up to the top floor.

She was going to find a restaurant and eat out for a change. Lots of cool independent people in London dined alone. She’d seen them doing it at the lunches Nikos had taken her to so why not go and do it herself?

Brave Mia, she mocked, feeling tense tingles play havoc with her insides in direct opposition to the adventure she was about to embark upon. Because she wasn’t brave. Never had been. And if the lift didn’t arrive soon she was going to—

The sound of a door opening behind her had her spinning about. Instantly her tingling insides crashed to a fizzing burn when she found herself staring at Nikos.

It just was not fair that he had to pick this moment to leave his apartment, she decided as she stared at him in dismayed shock.

He was wearing a formal black dinner suit that sat smoothly on his long powerful frame. A black silk bow tie sat perfectly symmetrical across the butterfly collar of his dress shirt. And his hair was still damp, as if he’d dressed quickly after showering now the hint of curls lay black and thick and glossy on the top of his well-shaped head. Every single inch of him looked strong and sleek and formidably exclusive. Her mouth ran dry and her heart started beating too fast as she flickered her gaze up to stare at his recently shaved jaw, then the sensual shape of his unsmiling mouth. And finally—finally she made contact with his eyes.

He was looking back at her as if this accidental meeting had disconcerted him as much as it had done to her. Defensive tension stiffened her stance.

‘On your way out?’ he spoke first, smooth and cool and, Mia suspected, carefully pleasant.

‘Sí,’ she managed, unaware that her hands had clenched into fists on the ends of her arms held straight like sticks at her sides.

He nodded, the floating veil of his eyelashes sweeping downwards before he turned to pull the door to his apartment shut.

Fortunately the lift arrived then, giving Mia a good reason to drag her eyes away from him, though it made little difference, she realised a few seconds later, when the lift’s mirrored walls allowed her to watch him stride across the lobby and join her inside. The small space instantly grew even smaller, crammed by his superior height and that overpowering sense of presence he always carried around with him.

But then, the mirrors were giving her two or three or even four different views of him. That was a lot of Nikos Theakis to contend with in a confined space. Her breath caught again when he leant across her to hit the button to take them down to the ground floor. The subtle tangy scent of him assailed her nostrils. As his sleeve brushed against her arm she took a step back. So did he, straightening to his full formidable height.

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