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 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?’