The Balfour Legacy

‘Tulio has nothing on you,’ she sniped, snatching up the glass.

To her surprise he husked out a soft laugh. ‘I’m beginning to like Tulio,’ he confided. ‘He sounds like my kind of guy. I’ll look forward to meeting him when we go to visit your aunt…’

Mia looked at him, deeply suspicious as to where he was leading her with that cool statement. The moment she made contact with his rich dark eyes and saw a golden light burning there, it made her shift tensely on the stool.

What was he up to—what was he thinking? Why was she reading the glint as the burn of promised complete and total possession in those eyes—so much so that she began to feel threatened?

Mia moistened her lips and felt them tingle when he lowered his eyes to watch the careful little gesture.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You are not going anywhere near Tia Giulia.’

He took his time bringing his eyes back up to hers. ‘Why not?’ he asked softly.

A sizzling fizz of heat began to fire deep down in her body. That there was something else going on here as well as the conversation they were involved in, made her flicker a wary scan of his face. He was leading her somewhere and she did not want to look at where that might be.

How did a man so famous for his cool self-control manage to transmit so much sexual tension without seeming to try—?

‘I would be too ashamed to present you to her,’ she said.

And hit a raw nerve. Mia watched that warm possessive golden light turn off like a switch. He leant back on the stool. It was like watching a dangerous animal take a serious blow it had not been prepared for, and she suddenly felt really bad for saying what she did.

‘Tia is going to be ashamed of me too,’ she added in what was a huskily spoken soother to the wounded beast. ‘And—and anyway, there is no reason why the two of you should m-meet.’

‘No,’ she thought she heard him utter from the deep dark recesses of his taut throat.

The atmosphere in the kitchen had suddenly gone somewhere Mia knew she did not want to follow. In fact, she decided without rhyme or reason as to why it hit her at this particular moment, she just knew she did not want to be here with him any longer.

Her slender fingers gripping the glass, she downed the rest of her orange, then put the glass down and slid off the stool. Nikos still was not moving and she was feeling distinctly threatened as she took a wary step towards the kitchen door.

‘Going somewhere?’ his deep voice questioned.

‘T-to my own apartment…’ She took another step.

‘We still have a lot to talk about,’ Nikos drawled.

Not if she could avoid it. ‘I’m—too tired to talk to you any more today,’ she said coolly. ‘We—we can talk again tomorrow.’

‘Too late then. We have plans to make before tomorrow.’

Mia nipped in a taut breath, then spun around. He’d recovered quickly enough from his wounds, was the first observation that leapt out at her, though he did still look strained around his mouth.

‘I don’t know what is the matter with you,’ she said, adding a flick of a hand to convey her helpless bewilderment. ‘What is the planning you speak about? We don’t have to plan anything! And you should be drowning your sorrows somewhere in a bottle of whisky instead of playing this silly game with me!’

‘No game,’ he denied.

‘Then where exactly do you think you are going with this?’ she burst out, asking the question she had been trying to run away from.

‘I know exactly where I’m going with it, cara,’ Nikos responded grimly. ‘Even with the crushing knock-back,’ he added with a twist of his taut mouth, ‘I am simply waiting for you to catch up with me.’

He was still seated on the stool with his long legs stretched out in front of him, looking for the world now like he was set to stay there like that for the rest of the day. But it was all just a big deception. Mia could still see that telling gleam in his eyes, a burn which reminded her of—

She took a step backwards. ‘S-stop looking at me like that—’

He arched one of his flat black eyebrows. ‘Like what?’

‘Like you…’ Running out of words she dragged in a tense breath of air and looked away.

‘Like I’m considering—other options to help you to catch up with me?’

He was thinking sex, Mia saw, though she did not want to. In the space of a few short minutes he’d gone from domestic animal to wounded animal, and now he was displaying the sexual animal.

‘This is an—improper conversation to be having in—in the middle of a crisis,’ Mia said primly.

‘I’m having improper urges,’ he came back quick as a flash.

Shocked by it, Mia gasped, her eyes widening and her pulse accelerating as he came to his feet.

‘Don’t you dare to come near me!’ She took another jerky step backwards and her spine made painful contact with the corner of the door frame. ‘Ouch,’ she jerked out.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Nikos murmured, walking forward to reach out to draw her towards him while Mia made a weak flailing attempt to ward him off. ‘You’re so fevered and flustered you hurt yourself. Much safer here,’ he said, folding her in against his warm hard frame.

A single night of passion with him had not prepared her for the shockingly patent physical evidence of his aroused state pressing against her. Surprised by the inner surge of heat which poured from her towards that contact, she swayed her hips away from him in sheer self-defence.

He used the flat of his hand to bring her back to him again, and smiled at her stifled gasp. ‘At last you’ve caught me up.’

‘N-no,’ she denied it.

He bent his dark head and touched the tip of his tongue to the corner of her trembling mouth. It was Mia who turned that teasing touch into a full-on kiss. It was she who pressed the already stinging tips of her breasts into his chest and floated her arms up around his neck.

His arms banded her to him. He prized her mouth open and ruthlessly deepened the kiss. If she had a single ounce of pride she would be fighting him like crazy, but hectic little whimpers of pleasure were rolling from her instead.

‘I am not going to bed with you!’ she shrilled up at him during a moment of separation when he reached up to drag her hair free of its clip.

‘The floor will do for me, amore mia,’ he countered huskily, helping her hair to tumble over his fingers. ‘The wall, the sofa, the kitchen table, even the door behind you.’

‘And stop talking to me in Italian,’ she shook out, shocked by his cool declaration and terribly excited by it at the same time.

‘You understand Italian better when you’re out of your head with pleasure,’ he confided, flaming her a hot mocking look. ‘I spent several very passionate hours loving you in Italian and you did not notice my testing efforts, did you? Shame on you, Mia. This time I will make love to you in Greek and you will wish by the time I have finished that you had bothered to learn my language!’

‘You’re mad. W-we can’t do this—’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m s-sick—’

‘With pining for me,’ he agreed. ‘Well, you’re pining is over, agapita.’ Something soft hit the backs of her knees and she collapsed onto a bed. She did not know how they’d even got here! Her arms jerked up around his shoulders on a startled shriek. ‘That’s right,’ he encouraged. ‘Cling to me, you are going to need me to keep you this close to stop from drowning.’

Her eyes fluttered open. ‘Why are you doing this?’

Lifting his dark head, Nikos looked down at her, eyes as black as midnight in his taut face. ‘Because you’ve got me, cara, even if you’re ashamed of me. Now I’m going to love you senseless before I take you somewhere and marry you.’

Marriage—did he say marriage—? ‘I’m not marrying you!’ she cried out shockingly. ‘No way!’

He took her lips with a hot driving hunger that devoured her ability to protest any more. Mia tried to hang on to her sanity but he robbed her of it as he explored her mouth with the sensuous force of a ruthless raider. She felt as if she was being consumed by his desire. She should be fighting him. She knew she should be fighting him, but the only urge flowing through her was the urge to rake her fingers through his hair and to apply pressure to his head to stop him from breaking the hot deep hungry kiss.

She didn’t even know where it had all come from. One minute they were fighting, the next minute eating, the next they were here on his bed making love with the kind of fever that should be shocking her stupid, but instead she was revelling in it. For days now she had walked around like a car accident, stunned by the way he’d enthralled her with his passion, then dumped her without a single qualm. Now here she lay being enthralled again as if all the hurt and rejection meant nothing at all!

He skimmed a restless hand down her body and located a silken slender thigh exposed because her dress had ridden up to her waist. The feather-light brush of his caress set her squirming against him and he muttered something hard and impatient, used his other hand to lift her up towards him, then without breaking the passionate seal of their lips, he ran down the zip of her dress. Cool air hit her skin and she shivered. In the next second she was breaking her mouth free on a cry of protest as he wrenched the pale blue cotton downwards, forcing her to let go of him so he could free it from her slender arms as it was trailed away.

Her lacy white bra drew the heat of his attention, and with breathtaking economy it sprang free and it too was being trailed away, revealing the firm fullness of her breasts with their twin tight peaks posing like shameless provocateurs.

‘Oh,’ Mia groaned and closed her eyes as he lowered his dark head and took one straining tip into his mouth, her fingers clawing at his shoulders when she just went wild.

As if her clutching fingers reminded him he was still wearing his clothes, he muttered something and reared back, wrenching impatiently at his shirt. Buttons flew in all directions. Opening her eyes she was shocked to see the amount of angry hot furious tension clenched in the muscles in his face.

‘Why are you so angry?’ she whispered.

‘I messed up with you,’ he answered harshly. ‘I don’t mess up.’

Rolling off the bed he stood so he could rid himself of the rest of his clothes.

‘Marriage was not on my agenda, nor were children,’ he muttered, raking his trousers off his body to display the astonishing beauty of his long tanned physique presented in its fully aroused state.

Mia touched the trembling tip of her tongue to her upper lip in sheer siren hunger. ‘I have not placed marriage on your agenda, Nikos.’

‘If I’m stuck with it, then you’re stuck with it. Theos,’ he groaned, coming back down to her. ‘I’ve been aching to do this again.’

It was like being handed a gift she had not been expecting, so Mia rewarded him with a passionate kiss. He’d wanted her. He’d flown around the world and ached for her. She was so exhilarated by that confession she forgot to continue the other subject.

The marriage subject.

Instead she let him sink her down into a deep dark well shored up with pure sensation. His touch was sheer tormenting pleasure. Clever and light, so sensually expert at driving her towards that screaming-pitch peak.

She raked his back with her fingernails. He set her sobbing with his mouth on her breasts. He made her touch him. He fed her hand down the length of his long body in a stirring trail that followed the virile line of dark curls to the velvet hard shock of his erection. He taught her how to send shudders of pleasure raking through him. When he made that first silken thrust inside her she felt the leash he had placed on himself shake his entire frame. He was hot, his skin moist with sweat, his lips trembling against hers and she clung to him, clung like she was in danger of drowning if she ever let go.

Now what? Mia wondered as she lay curled on her side, watching him move about the room. Another ruthless slap down in case she got romantic ideas about his feelings? Another grim demand for marriage she neither wanted nor was about to accept?

He had already showered but had not yet bothered to dress. A small towel rested low on his waist, hiding his tight narrow buttocks and clashing wonderfully with his deep bronzed skin.

‘When you’ve rested, you need to go and pack a bag,’ he said, lifting clean underwear out of a drawer.

‘Why,’ she asked warily. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Athens,’ he answered. ‘It’s time you saw how we run things from my main base.’

And that was it? No—go and buy a wedding dress? No return to the marriage subject at all? Curving a hand beneath her cheek, Mia said nothing, her eyelashes resting low across her eyes as she watched him move to a bank of wardrobes.

‘And it’s time you met the guy whose job you filched,’ he continued evenly, pulling a striped blue-and-white shirt on over his fabulous torso and making Mia pull a disappointed face. ‘Fortunately for Petros, he’s enjoyed staying behind in Athens, taking my place while I’ve been elsewhere.’

‘So he is not likely to want to beat me up.’

Fastening the top button on the shirt, he turned a glance on her. Belissimo, Mia thought. Sexy, she thought. Those lazy satiated love-darkened eyes should be censored—or kept right here in the bedroom with me.

‘You look like a long sleek golden cat lying there.’ He smiled at her.

Her heart tippled over, then gave a soft squeeze because he was not being cold with her, and the way he had not been looking at her while he talked had made her expect his cool detachment.

‘My hair is black,’ she pointed out.

‘I wasn’t referring to your hair, agape mou.’

Mia did not know she could blush all the way from her toes, but that was what she did. Nikos saw it and laughed as he strode across the room to the bed. He leant over her, smelling clean of soap and Nikos, and his slow intimate kiss tasted of mint.

‘No,’ he husked when she reached for him as he went to straighten again. ‘We haven’t got time for what you want us to do, little cat.’ Bending down he picked up her dress and dropped it on her. ‘You have an hour to get ready before we have to leave.’

Ignoring her disappointed pout he strode back to the wardrobes to select the pants to a navy suit. As he drew them up his legs and Mia sat up with all the reluctance of someone who did not want to go anywhere, he murmured, ‘And you will need to give me your birth certificate. Do you have it with you here?’

‘Yes, with my passport, but—’ she frowned ‘—I don’t understand why you need it.’

‘Marriage licence,’ he responded as cool as anything. ‘We will be married in Athens next week. Petros is already seeing to the arrangements.’

Chapter Ten

‘DON’T sulk,’ her tormentor chided coolly.

Mia unclenched her tightly clenched teeth. ‘I have told you before, I do not sulk,’ she denied stiffly.

‘Then look at me.’

Twisting her face around, Mia did as he commanded, only to feel the unwanted pull of his sexual magnetism descend on her like a stifling hot weight. He was just so—bello, she thought helplessly, his luxurious black hair, his liquid dark eyes, his firm sensually moulded mouth. The barely leashed power of his fiercely masculine physique clothed in a sense-stirringly casual iron-grey silk lounge suit and gorgeously body-moulding black T-shirt.

How was she supposed to continue to fight with him when even his long lounging posture in the plush leather limo seat next to her wound up her sexual cravings for him to the extent she hardly dare breathe in case she gave herself away.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I am looking. Say what it is you want to say so I can look away again.’

His sensual mouth moved to a slow mocking tilt. ‘Why, when you love looking at me?’

The pounding throb of her stubborn refusal to take up that goading remark sparked from her blue eyes like electricity. She’d maintained the same stance since they left London. Now they were driving across Athens on their way to dinner at some fancy restaurant when she would much rather have locked herself away in her bedroom.

Only Nikos’s Athens apartment had no locks on the bedroom doors, did it? Mia thought as she seethed.

They’d maintained an armed truce while they’d dressed to go out again—she shut away in her allotted bedroom, Nikos shut away in his. And that arrangement in itself made a complete laughing mockery of what it was they were warring about.

The marriage thing, being the bone of contention. He refused to take no for an answer and she refused to say yes.

‘Will you just explain to me why you are being so stubborn about this,’ he demanded heavily.

Mia had at least a dozen reasons why, but the only one she was prepared to give him right now needed just two words. ‘Lois Mansell,’ she said, and waited for him to squirm.

But he did not squirm. He did not do anything other than to sustain steady eye contact with her like a smooth rat caught in a trap who arrogantly did not believe he had anything to squirm about!

‘Lois has nothing to do with us,’ he dismissed that line of argument.

‘The newspapers told it differently.’

‘You know all about newspapers, cara. They lie—or at the very least they tamper with the truth.’

‘You left that nightclub with her clinging to you like a limpet.’ Mia was unimpressed by his line of defence.

‘I delivered her home. I did not sleep with her.’

‘The way I see it, Nikos, you don’t sleep with any of your women.’

As a stab at their current sleeping arrangements Mia knew she’d hit her mark when his dark eyes shuttered and his mouth went tight.

‘No response?’ she sniped at him. ‘No smart comeback aimed to put me in my place?’

‘No,’ he murmured, looking away from her altogether.

‘Well, there you are, then.’ She looked away too. ‘You and I do not have the same view as to what marriage is supposed to be about.’

‘You’re pregnant with my child,’ he clipped out. ‘Such an event does not require mutual insight, it requires damage control.’

‘Damage control—?’ So hurt by that comment, she could not hold in her choked gasp. ‘And you wonder why I won’t say yes to you when you can come out with a cold statement like that?’

‘I’m trying to be practical—’

‘As you have been with our sleeping arrangements?’ She could not resist saying it, then yanked in a tight breath. ‘You get me pregnant. You expect me to marry you. But you don’t want to sleep in the same bed as me,’ she shook out. ‘I suppose you will also expect to continue to live your life as you have always done while I sit at home alone getting fat!’

‘So what do you want?’ he angled back at her.

A man who wants to marry me because he cannot live without me! Mia screamed inside her head. ‘Not a man who thinks of marriage as damage control,’ she muttered. ‘I would rather return to Italy and bring my child up alone than throw my life away on a man like that.’

‘Our child,’ he gritted out. ‘And you are going nowhere with or without the marriage. I will bring up my own child, Mia,’ he stated very grimly. ‘I will not let your silly stubborn truculence push me out of the frame over some—crazy issues you have about the quality of my commitment.’

The problem was there was no quality about it! Hurt tears clogged her throat. ‘Can we go back?’ she husked. ‘I don’t think I can eat anything.’

His growling sigh was driven. ‘You are such damn high maintenance—!’ he raked out.

Mia widened her blue eyes in simmering astonishment. ‘I don’t believe that you dared to say that!’ she choked. ‘I have cost you nothing! Not even the price of accommodation since the flat I used in London was yours anyway and was already standing vacant!’

‘I did not mean—’

‘Shut up!’ she heaved out. ‘You know what you are, Nikos?’ she hit back at him shakily. ‘You are an arrogant, selfish—cheapskate!’ Almost tumbling over the word because she was not certain she had said it correctly, she knew she’d hit the word exactly right when he tensed like a board and pushed up his aggressive chin.

‘So I f-fancied you—big deal,’ she railed on an angry high now. ‘So you condescended to take what I was putting on offer—Great, thank you, grazie tanto, amore mia—not! For what did it cost you? A reasonably priced dinner and a few hours of listening to me bore you to death, followed by a posh party and a swift bit of pleasure in your bed before you turned on me like an ice man and threw me out! If that makes me high maintenance, then may God forgive you for what you usually shower on to your women! No wonder they say beware of Greeks bearing gifts!’

‘Have you finished?’ the ice man delivered from between his clenched white teeth. ‘If so, then may I finish what I was about to say before you blew my head off? Yes? Sì? Ne?’ His sarcasm ripped like a razor through Mia’s trembling flesh. ‘I was about to add emotionally,’ he incised with deliberate precision. ‘High maintenance emotionally,’ he repeated. ‘And a bloody irritating pain in the neck!’

‘Don’t forget juvenile!’ Mia tagged on for herself.

The car came to a standstill. Without uttering another word Nikos opened his door and threw himself out. Mia continued to sit, simmering in silence, while she waited for him to come around and open her door. She could have got out under her own steam but she did not want to. If she had been given a choice—and he had allowed her very few choices over the past twelve hours—she would be staying right where she was!

‘Leave the temper in the car,’ he rasped as she arrived in front of him.

Refusing to give such a command mind space, Mia tossed her hair back from her face with an icy defiance that made Nikos grit his teeth.

Women were an absolute blast, he thought angrily as they walked together across the pavement towards one of the most exclusive eating establishments in town. They did not know when to behave themselves—or when a man had taken enough of their unbelievably volatile and inconsistent nonsense! She had not been so argumentative when he’d brought her down to straddle him during the flight over here and kissed her snappy mouth.

And, Theos, this was not the time to be recalling what they’d done next, when she was already firing him up again, because she looked nothing short of dazzling in full angry flow! Her eyes were alight, her mouth pumped and pouting because he’d cornered her just before they left his apartment and tried to kiss her out of her stubbornness. The kiss had been yet another ground-shaking experience—without the satisfying follow-up because her stubborn shell remained fixed in place.

But her sensational mouth still wore his kiss on it in defiance—and he wanted to kiss it again, right now!

‘Take care,’ he husked, taking hold of her arm as she went to negotiate the shallow step in front of the restaurant entrance.

She was wearing the usual lethal high heels and he made a silent promise to himself that he was going to chuck them all out the first opportunity he got! She was pregnant, for God’s sake. Carrying his baby. One accidental stumble off those ridiculous heels and it could all be over—

Something shockingly like panic struck down through his body, pulling him to a shuddering halt. Mia glanced up at him in frowning surprise and his heart made a weird kind of dive down to his toes.

‘What?’ she asked, glaring at him as if she was expecting yet another row to erupt.

‘Nothing,’ he said, pulling himself together. ‘I just remembered something I should have done before we left,’ he lied, feeling strangely light-headed as he reached around her to open the restaurant door.

She walked ahead of him into the foyer with a curvaceous glide of purple satin, short and fitted and fashionably edgy, her fabulous hair a silken stream of black waves that brushed her tense narrow back.