‘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?