Читать книгу The Balfour Legacy - Ким Лоренс, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 11

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 now-closed folder back across the desk.

‘S-see to wh-what?’ she stammered out warily.

He lifted eyes to look at her. It was like being pinned to the wall by shards of black glass. Whatever it was that had exploded inside of him was gone now and the cold hard ruthlessly controlled animal was back.

‘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 1-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 overimag-inative 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 com-mendably 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.