The Balfour Legacy

Nikos did not know that though. He was cursing himself. He wished the hell he knew what he had been playing at back there, feeding her wine by the glassful to draw her out of her shell. What had he hoped to gain from it? An insight into what made his PA tick, or had his motives been fixed somewhere else?

‘It’s usually better to throw up and get it over with than to fight it,’ he advised, trying to recall the last time he’d deliberately set out to get a woman drunk.

There had never been another time. He had never sunk this low before. She got to him and he didn’t like it. She made him think, do and want things he did not want to think, do or want.

‘I’m all r-right.’ Making an effort to pull herself together, Mia stepped away from his supporting arm to stand by herself.

Letting his arm drop to his side he sighed, ‘I’m—sorry.’

He was sorry? ‘What for?’

‘I should not have let you drink all that wine.’

‘I can take my wine, Nikos Theakis,’ Mia threw back. ‘I am Italian. I grew up drinking wine. It was your car that made me feel sick. I hate it. I will walk the rest of the way—’

‘What do you mean, my car made you sick?’ Grabbing her arm as she went to walk away from him he pulled her to a halt.

Mia shivered. ‘It is a Mario Mattea production car.’

‘A limited edition,’ Nikos confirmed. ‘Only twenty of them were built. Most people would—’

‘One for each year Mario Mattea has been married to my mother,’ Mia whispered, then had to press her lips together as the nausea threatened to come back.

She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed the world-famous insignia before now! The two stylishly entwined gold letter M’s appeared on a million luxury products—on Mario Mattea’s main claim to fame—his world-championship-class formula-one racing cars!

A glance at the low silver bonnet and a thick laugh broke from her throat. Wouldn’t Mario just love it if he knew that one of his cars had almost ploughed her into the ground a few months ago!

Pushing off Nikos’s hand, she started walking, needing to get as far away from that car as fast as she could. The nausea was churning up her stomach and her arms had wrapped themselves tight around her ribs. She’d lived twenty-one years in Italy and not once seen a Mattea car. Then she arrives in England, and on the very first day she’d almost had one toss her over its bonnet without realising the insult she would have been paying to herself!

‘Explain.’ Nikos caught up with her.

‘Oscar slept with my mother, Gabriella, the night before he married Lillian,’ she supplied in a cold, clipped voice. ‘She returned to Italy—to her fiancé Mario Mattea and eventually married him.’

Nikos breathed what Mia assumed was the Greek way of expressing shock. ‘So your mother is Gabriella Mattea…’

‘Don’t bother to fixate on it,’ Mia sparked out. ‘I do not recognise her as my mother. We do not communicate.’

‘Slow down before you twist off those ridiculous high shoes,’ he instructed impatiently, curling a set of long fingers around her arm.

‘You have forgotten your car,’ she muttered in the hopes that he would take the hint and leave her to walk home alone.

‘And you’ve forgotten the rules of dating again,’ Nikos responded coolly. ‘I see mine to their door.’

‘We did not have a date,’ Mia denied. ‘You hijacked me in the street.’

‘Same rules apply.’ Still holding on to her, his attention had diverted to the two streams of traffic moving up and down the street. He spotted a gap. His fingers tightened. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s cross while we can.’

Finding herself being hustled across the road, Mia was instinctively drawn to glancing both ways to check out the pace of the traffic for herself. Her eyes rested on his silver car standing abandoned against the curb a hundred metres away and she shivered, dragging her eyes away from it again. She hated the long, sleek, glossy power statement it made—the whole high-profile sparkle of the Mattea name. In Italy it meant glittering celebrity and untold wealth—much like the Balfour name did here, she likened, suddenly hating all of it.

‘I’m surprised the press here hasn’t picked up who your mother is,’ Nikos murmured once they were safely on the opposite pavement.

‘Oscar has been careful not to make the connection,’ she revealed. ‘Gabriella was still a Bianchi when he—knew her.’ Bianchi being the only name Gabriella had ever allowed Mia to own. Did she care? No, she told herself. It was bad enough that everyone knew she was the result of a sordid one-night stand of one decadent parent, Oscar Balfour, without being linked to her other notoriously decadent parent, Gabriella Mattea, as well. ‘Bianchi is a common name in Italy.’

They turned into the street on which their apartment block was situated. Once again Nikos slowed their pace. ‘Why aren’t you a Mattea?’

He just couldn’t leave it alone! ‘Why the sudden interest in my sleazy past?’

‘It’s not your sleaze, Mia, it’s theirs,’ Nikos pointed out.

Only slightly mollified by that response, Mia pulled in a tense breath. ‘When Gabriella found out she was pregnant with me she tried to pass me off as Mario’s child but she badly miscalculated,’ she explained. ‘Mario cannot have children apparently, and he certainly did not want some other man’s child cluttering up his life, so he set her an ultimatum. She kept me and lost him, or she gave me up and kept him. You know the rest,’ she concluded, tightening her grip on her ribcage as if trying to hug her bitter feelings in.

‘The isolated farm in Tuscany,’ Nikos confirmed, ‘an aunt barely scratching out a living for you both, while your filthy-rich parents live their lavish lives…It has all the ingredients for a seventeenth-century costume drama about the underbelly of two glittering royal houses,’ he described.

Mia pulled to a stop and swung on him. ‘You would make a really good member of the paparazzi to listen to you,’ she fired at him hotly, ‘and you would probably enjoy it!’

To her rising fury his mouth twitched out the beginnings of a smile.

‘You think my life is amusing?’

‘I think it’s priceless.’ The smile became a full white-toothed grin. ‘So should you.’

Tossing her hair back, Mia glared up at him. His lean dark face was so disgustingly gorgeous she—‘I don’t want to talk any more about it.’ She swung away again, hating the hot sexual tension she could feel working away at her insides.

She set off walking. Nikos kept pace at her side. ‘If you want my opinion, Mia…’

‘I do not,’ she clipped out.

‘You should talk about it more often,’ he continued anyway. ‘You take yourself too seriously—and stop this!’ He sighed, turning her back round to face him, then grimly prizing her arms away from her ribs and down to her sides, where her hands clenched into white-knuckle fists.

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

‘Be brazen about it, you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just what?

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

Shame Oscar stopped him from carrying through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A woman?

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

Chapter Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t recall promising you would get your weekends free when you came to work for me,’ Nikos rode roughshod over what she had been about to say. ‘So whatever it is you have planned get out of it. I have to go out for a few hours but when I get back I will expect you to be ready to leave. You will need a dress—something formal.’

‘Formal,’ Mia repeated, stunned by the way he had just discarded her plans. ‘H-how formal?’

‘Bella-at-her-red-carpet-best formal,’ he delivered dryly, referring to her wildly beautiful and glamorous supermodel half-sister. ‘Do you have something like that to wear?’ he then thought to ask.

Dragging herself to the edge of the bed and standing, Mia sent her mind’s eye sweeping down the packed dress rail in the other bedroom. ‘Sí, I think so,’ she mumbled. ‘But—Nikos, I am not very good at these formal occasions,’ she threw in anxiously. ‘I don’t think—’

‘This is at Oscar’s command, not mine,’ he informed her with the cool thrust of a murderer plunging a knife into her chest. ‘He wants you there to represent the family because no one else is available to attend. Do you want to call and tell him you’re not up to taking on the responsibility—?’

Dio. ‘No,’ Mia surrendered heavily. ‘I will come.’

‘Good,’ he approved. ‘Pack an overnight bag because we will be staying. See you at one o’clock.’

He cut the connection before she could find the necessary brain cells to ask any questions. Sinking heavily back onto the bed, her fuzzy brain listed: Hampshire, a formal evening dress, an overnight bag. Be ready to go by one o’clock…

Then she was suddenly lurching into panic mode and using her mobile phone to ring her half-sister Sophie.

‘What is happening this evening in Hampshire?’ she wrung out urgently.

‘Hampshire?’ Sophie Balfour repeated. ‘Oh, my…’

‘What does this oh my mean?’ Mia demanded, already feeling the chill of alarm skate down her spine.

‘Is Nikos taking you there?’

‘Sí.’

‘Then take a brave pill before you go, sweetie,’ her half-sister advised her. ‘If you thought attending the Balfour Charity Ball was major-nervous-breakdown stuff, then you’re in for a shock because Hampshire is huge.’

‘Huge…’ Mia whispered, grappling with the complicated idiosyncrasies of the English language when spoken with sarcasm like this. ‘You will have to explain this huge to me too,’ she begged.

‘Ever heard of the D’Lassio brothers?’

‘No.’ Mia frowned. ‘Should I have heard of them?’

‘What kind of Italian are you that you’ve never heard of the two sexiest Italian tycoons out there?’ Sophie sounded shocked. ‘Santino D’Lassio is married to the absolutely gorgeous Nina Francis and works out of London. Alessandro D’Lassio is so single it’s mind-boggling and works out of Milan. Each year they stage a cross-continent charity event to top all charity events. One takes place on their fabulous country estate in Hampshire, the other at their magnificent ancestry pile situated on the banks of Lake Como. The two events will be linked by satellite. Television stations and the paparazzi will be out in force. Pop stars, royalty, the megarich and the superfamous will be attending—you’re going to love it like a bullet in the head,’ Sophie predicted. ‘And I bet Lois Mansell is pretty miffed that Nikos is taking you instead of her,’ Sophie said.

As if someone had thrust an icy rod down her backbone, Mia tensed up. ‘Who—who is Lois Mansell?’

‘Check out this morning’s paper,’ her half-sister advised. ‘She’s the fabulous blonde captured wrapped around Nikos as they left a nightclub together last night.’

At one o’clock to the absolute second, Mia presented herself in the top-floor oval lobby with her weekend bag as per instructions, and the dress she had decided to wear this evening draped over her arm in a cream silk dress bag. She was wearing faded designer denims, a thigh-hugging black Vive La Rock T-shirt and fiercely high black designer shoes. She’d confined her hair loosely to her nape with a big shiny black clip and her make-up was light.

For casual, cool and in strict control of her emotions were the absolute keys to her standing here at all. Indeed she’d been a breath away from using the flu bug excuse right up until the moment she’d stepped out of her apartment door.

His apartment door opened and her heart gave a single heavy little thump as Nikos stepped out. He was dressed more casually than she’d ever seen him, in pale chinos and a dove-grey V-neck sweater worn over a pale blue-and-grey-checked shirt. Big, lean, dark and classy, Mia listed, and had to bite back a bitter grimace when her head gave her another image of him, dressed in a black dinner suit leaving a famous nightclub with a leggy blonde clinging like a blood-sucking limpet to his side.

Their eyes met for a second. Her throat felt so thick Mia found she needed to swallow but wouldn’t allow herself the relief. Their murmured greetings crossed over each other. She was the one to break the eye contact, lowering her eyelashes and feeling like the ice woman inside.

‘Here, let me take your bag…’

As he stooped to lift her canvas holdall from where it sat at her feet, Mia found herself staring at the top of his head where the black silky thickness of his hair was glossed by the hint of curls.

Curls Lois Mansell had no doubt enjoyed running her long limpet fingers through last night, Mia tormented herself with the image she’d evoked.

‘Do you want me to take your dress bag…?’

‘No—thank you,’ she managed politely.

The lift arrived and, determined to maintain a professional detachment if it killed her to do it, Mia walked into it, then stood with her chin tilted down so she did not have to look at him as they travelled to the ground floor.

The tabloid newspaper which printed the photograph had headlined it with:

Is this the new blonde Greek billionaire Nikos Theakis has chosen to replace Lucy Clayton?

As for the rest of the article, which highlighted his penchant for leggy blondes and his low attention threshold, it had said it all as far as Mia was concerned. She’d finally acknowledged that it was time for her to learn to get over him, and if that meant not looking at him, then she was not going to look at him.

‘Something wrong?’ his deep voice drawled.

‘Nothing,’ she responded.

‘If you’re worrying about tonight, then—’

‘I am not worrying about anything.’ She walked out of the lift before he could say anything else.

It was only as he forged ahead of her to open the door that she noticed he carried no weekend bag for himself. Presuming he must have already put it in his car, Mia walked past him and out into the bright sunlight…only to go still when she saw a brand-new shiny red sports car—that only a total hermit would not recognise for what it was—waiting in the place of his silver Mattea.

Her icy cool started to falter. ‘Y-you’ve changed your car.’

‘I prefer not to put my passengers through mental torture,’ he relayed drily.

As Mia walked up to the door he was holding open for her she caught a gleam in his eyes which told her he was waiting for her to make some kind of positive response because he had gone to this much trouble exclusively for her.

When she said nothing, he grimaced. ‘You can thank me later,’ he murmured, ‘once you’ve recovered from your sulk because I spoiled your plans for today.’

It took Mia a minute to grasp that he was referring to her plans to meet with Sophie. They’d planned to go shopping and take in a movie but Nikos had not given her a chance to tell him that during his phone call this morning. Opening her mouth to tell him, she snapped it shut again. Let him think what the heck he liked. What she did with her free time was none of his business—as his was not any of hers.

‘Seat belt,’ he issued as he climbed in next to her, and the pleasant tone had disappeared from his voice, Mia noticed.

A few minutes later they were driving across the river towards Battersea. Mia tried not to watch the way he controlled his new car as if he had been driving it for years. It must be in his blood to know instinctively what to do in any given situation. She’d seen him at work too often not to be impressed with the way he could control most things with an ease that was so breathtakingly natural even those he was controlling did not notice he was doing it.

It was no wonder he was arrogant sometimes, a bit of a bully when he felt he needed to be. Incisive, decisive, he was used to being right so why not expect other people to just fall in line to his bidding?

After attempting to kick-start several conversation subjects to which she replied in crushing monotones, he issued a driven sigh. ‘Quit the chilly sulk, Mia,’ he told her, ‘or I will turn this car around and take you back home again.’

Mia straightened in her seat. ‘I am not sulking.’

‘No?’ Stopping at a set of traffic lights he turned to look at her—deep brown eyes, feathered with flashes of glinting gold, spun nerve ends alive across her taut profile. ‘You remind me of a feral cat I once tried to befriend as a kid. One minute she was soft and coquettish and brushing her sleek body up against me, the next minute she had her claws in my neck and was spitting at me.’