are you doing here?’ She speared up at his surprised, disgustingly healthy-looking handsome dark face. ‘You should be feeling too ashamed to show your face!’
‘Mia—’
‘Don’t you dare say my name to me!’ she choked, yanking like a crazy woman at her imprisoned fists. ‘You turned me into my mother and I hate you for it! I will hate you for doing that to me for the rest of my life!’
With a final tug he let go of her, and the moment he did so she slithered round him, too engrossed in her own raw feelings to notice that, other than capturing her fists, he had been totally still throughout her attack.
Her legs felt wobbly when she tried to walk on them; the queasy feeling in her stomach had now reached her throat. She wasn’t really surprised that when she tried to focus on her apartment door, the oval-shaped walls of the lobby began to sway in and out. Reaching out for the nearest solid thing in an effort to steady herself, her trembling fingers closed around the hard-muscled strength of a silk-suited arm instead.
Mia tilted her head back, glazed blue eyes darkened by confusion staring at his fiercely frowning expression. She had not heard him move. Perhaps he had not moved at all and it was just an optical illusion like the moving walls and the swaying floor beneath her feet.
Then it all began to close in on her. ‘Nikos,’ she whispered just before she began to sink.
When she came around she was lying on a long soft leather sofa. Nikos was squatting down beside it, lancing Greek into his mobile phone while he held one of her hands trapped inside a tightly clenched grip.
He looked clenched all over, Mia observed dimly, gliding an unwilling glance over his taut profile and the fierce set of his shoulders inside his jacket. Nor did he look as elegantly turned out as he had done. He’d dragged the knot to his tie loose and undone two buttons of his shirt. Those two buttons looked as if they’d been yanked open to reveal a triangle of brown skin. There was tension in his strong neck muscles and his clenched jaw line. And as he bit out another line of Greek she noticed his blanched pallor and the lines of stress spoiling the shape of his wide sensual lips.
How long had she been out? Frowning, it took her several seconds to recall the full drama she had enacted before she’d swooned away at his feet. She’d attacked him like a madwoman. She had not even given him a chance to speak. She recalled his stunned frozen face when she’d vented her anger on him.
Then she remembered why she had reacted like that and a tiny sob escaped her lips.
His conversation stopped. He swung his dark head around to look at her. Fierce dark eyes that glittered with the oddest expression settled on hers and the fingers he had closed around her fingers tightened their grip.
‘You fainted,’ he told her as if she was too dense to work it out for herself.
Mia said nothing. Looking at him should be hurting by now and she was waiting for the pain to kick in.
‘You are in my apartment,’ he added after making a wary foray of her pale unresponsive countenance. ‘I carried you in here. You—scared me.’
Scared him? He did not know the meaning of scared, Mia thought dismally. Scared was what had made her attack him the way that she did.
As he was going to find out soon enough when she broke the news to him.
If she told him.
‘So I’ve called in a doctor.’
Mia snaked her fingers free. ‘That was not necessary.’
‘It was to me.’
Sitting up carefully in case she set off her fragile stomach again, she made a move with her legs that gave him no choice but to stand if he did not want her to unbalance him. Her head was still swimming and, pushing a set of fingers up to her brow, she was forced to remain sitting on his sofa when really she would have loved to just get up and walk out without speaking another word to him.
Pregnant…
At last the English translation had come to her. For some incomprehensible reason it had more impact in English. A hard word, abrupt—pregnant—no softness or sentimentality in it at all, unlike the so-much-gentler incinta…
‘You’ve lost weight.’
Lowering her hand she looked up and found he was standing several feet away, tall as a tree and blocking out most of the light from the window behind him, placing his face in shadow so she could not read his expression.
But she did not need light to feel the tension emanating from him.
‘You might as well call the doctor back and tell him not to bother because I will not see him,’ she said, looking away again because she could feel the first quivering beginning of hurt kicking in.
‘I am not ill.’ To prove it she made herself stand. ‘I am simply hungry because I forgot to eat today.’
‘And the day before that and the day before that,’ Nikos threw in. ‘There is hardly anything left of you and you are swaying where you stand. If you try to take a step you will probably hit the floor again—unless I catch you as I did before, of course, which is up for question right now because I am bloody angry with you, Mia. So angry I could give you a shake.’
‘You are angry—with me?’ Lifting up her chin her eyes sparked incredulous blue. ‘What do you think gives you the right to be anything where I am concerned?’
Ignoring that he said, ‘I’ve spoken to Fiona. You have been feeling unwell all week—’
Only for a week? Mia almost laughed at the understatement.
‘And you’ve been—going out drinking.’
Starting to wonder if she really had fainted again and not come around yet, Mia stared at his stiff censorious stance and waited to find out what her delirious imagination was going to make him say next!
‘With friends of Kat’s,’ he provided.
‘Fiona told you all of this?’ Even in her imagination she could not envisage his secretary would have offered up this kind of information about her.
‘No.’ He made a tense move with one broad shoulder. ‘I had—other sources.’
Other sources…‘What other sources?’
‘I think you should sit down—’
‘I don’t want to sit down!’ Mia exploded. ‘I want to know what business it is of yours what I’ve been doing! And why you believe you can stand there like a disapproving father, censuring me!’
The moment she finished screeching at him she ruined it all by swaying when her dizzy head protested at the pressure she’d placed on it.
‘Sit down!’ he barked at her.
‘No!’ she fired back.
Only to release a groan that turned into a frustrated whimper when her stomach began to heave. Her hand went to cover it, her other hand lifting to hold her dizzy head. She heard Nikos
