Tall and lean, strikingly attractive for a man in his sixtieth year, he touched his wife’s arm to gain her attention. ‘Gabriella,’ he murmured in a low warning voice.
Gabriella Mattea turned her luxurious dark head and looked into the pale face of the daughter she had not set eyes on in ten long years.
Silence poured into the gap between them. Mia felt her heart take on a thick pounding beat in her ears. Somewhere in the hazy distance she was aware of Nikos’s tension and of Mario’s. There were other people around them but they were invisible; she only saw her mother’s face.
Feeling as vulnerable as the small child she had been when she last stood this close to her mother, she whispered tremulously, ‘Ciao, M-Mama.’
Eyes like black glass looked her over. Mia watched the beautiful face in front of her freeze. ‘For goodness’ sake, will someone get this person away from me?’ Gabriella drawled out in cold Italian. ‘Is it impossible to eat out without being set upon by strangers these days?’
A stunning silence fell around the foyer. In the middle of it Mia slowly died. Then Nikos’s arm was a fierce brace across her shoulders. And Mario was bursting into speech.
‘Nikos,’ he greeted tensely. ‘I did not expect to see you—’
‘Excuse us,’ Nikos cut in coldly and walked them to the door.
The restaurant owner leapt to open it for them, murmuring apologies in a shocked anxious voice. They made it onto the pavement. So coldly furious he could hit something, Nikos speared a glance up the street, looking for where his driver had parked.
Turning his shaking frozen package towards him he wrapped her in one supporting arm, pressing her close against his body, while he located his mobile phone. Keeping his anger in check cost him control of his voice as he ordered his driver to come and get them.
‘Nikos, please.’ Mario appeared on the pavement beside them. ‘Let me explain to you why that unfortunate scene happened,’ he begged urgently. ‘My wife—’
‘An explanation is not required,’ Nikos sliced through the other man, his arm banding Mia all the tighter to him. ‘It happened because you gave Gabriella a choice and she chose you, your wealth and your lifestyle over her own child.’ As Nikos spoke, Mia quivered in fresh hurt as he outlined the stark cold truth of it. ‘It happened,’ he continued, ‘because you and your wife are soulless, with a soulless marriage, which in my view makes you well suited. Mia might not appreciate this right now but she has been better off without knowing either of you.’
‘Because she has Balfour to turn to now?’ Mario’s sudden harsh derision cut into Mia like a knife.
‘No,’ Nikos countered. ‘Because she has me.’
The car swept to a stop beside them, and Nikos reached out to open the rear door. There was a new atmosphere rocking the silence which hung in the warm evening, but Mia was too upset to work out why it was there. She let Nikos guide her into the limousine, and tried very hard to get a grip on herself. In truth she should not be feeling this bad, she told herself. After all, she was the one at fault for thinking she could approach a woman who had never shown the slightest hint that she cared about her.
The two men were still standing on the pavement. From the low grind of their voices Mia could tell their conversation was not nice. A quick glance showed her that Nikos’s whole body was rigid with aggression and icy as hell. Mario seemed to be pressing some urgent point and looked very pale, though she did not know the wealthy formula-one mogul to know he did not always look that shade.
She looked away again, down at her trembling fingers where they lay locked together on her lap. Nikos was right—who needed a mother like that? she told herself dimly, and felt tears press hard at the back of her throat.
Nikos climbed into the car and tapped on the partition glass to tell their driver to
go. As he sank back into the seat he did not glance at Mia. He couldn’t right now. He was too busy grappling with something he’d said to Mario in his initial volley of contempt that was still knocking him almost senseless.
Soulless marriage…
Isn’t that what he had been offering Mia? A soulless marriage with great sex and separate bedrooms afterwards?
Nikos shuddered in disgust. She possessed more integrity than her lousy mother by refusing what he was fast accepting had been a filthy insult of an offer. If Gabriella had held out against Mario Mattea, would she have won her man and kept her child—?
And even the thought was insultingly arrogant. For what would Mia be winning by getting him? Nothing more than he had been prepared to give her, which turned out to be nothing in the cold light of his new insight.
He should be getting down on his knees and thanking her for loving this cold and soulless bastard—
Love… Nikos backtracked, experiencing a fresh numbing clench of shock. She loved him. How long had he known that without allowing himself to acknowledge it? Desire, obsession, infatuation—he’d named it any other word he could grab. But she did—love him. And he did not deserve such an honour.
‘You know him,’ the silent figure beside him broke into the shattering train of his thoughts.
‘Sorry?’ he turned a questioning look on her and took the full weight of her importance to him like a blow to his gut.
‘You know Mario Mattea,’ she repeated, her blue eyes dull and dark in her pale face. ‘Why have you never said?’
Shot down but still functioning, Nikos recognised ruefully as her question pushed him out of one stark blinding revelation straight into the horror of another one. Did he tell her the truth or did he try to pass it off with a flippant comment. Lie, in other words.
He veiled his eyes and went for the half-truth. ‘I know a lot of business people,’ he said with a shrug.