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.’
‘I have never brushed up against you!’ she denied, then felt her cheeks flame when she recalled the way she’d moved towards him last night. ‘Nor have I drawn my claws,’ she added as a quick cover-up. ‘And if I remind you of your friend the feral cat, then you remind me of our donkey,’ she threw back, sparked into defending herself.
‘Your—what?’ he raked out.
‘Tulio, our donkey,’ she supplied. ‘One minute he is beautifully relaxed and amenable, the next he acts as if he does not occupy the same planet as everyone else.’
‘You’re accusing me of being moody?’ Nikos delivered across the gap separating them.
Mia fixed her gaze on the traffic lights. ‘I cannot predict how you are going to speak to me from one minute to another. Tulio is the same. Only he does not speak—he just gives me the evil eye to say I don’t feel like being nice to you any longer, and so he isn’t.’ She added a self-explanatory shrug. ‘The lights have changed colour,’ she pointed out.
‘A donkey,’ he breathed, steering the car into a right turn, then accelerating up the street. ‘Grazie, cara,’ he said with grim sarcasm, and swung the car off the street into a small car park by the banks of the river, killed the car engine and climbed out.
Mia hugged a pleased smile to herself as she watched him stride around the car bonnet with his golden good looks pronounced by the savage look on his face.
So she’d just insulted him and ruined his day.
Good, she thought, because he had ruined hers too with his nocturnal activities splashed all over the papers!
Did she have the right to be angry about that?
She did not care if she had no right—she just did!
She hated him. She hoped Lois Mansell was the worst lover he had ever bothered to bed. And she was not jealous! she told herself furiously, she was just—
He pulled open her door for her with more angry strength than the beautifully designed piece of equipment required. As she carefully manoeuvred her high-heeled shoes over the sill of the car, his grim impatience with her transferred to the long fingers he clamped around her arm to help straighten her up. Arriving in front of him with more impulse than was necessary, she ended up almost flattened against him, which shocked her enough into glancing up.
Their eyes clashed—his
