like a poorly exposed photograph, visible but misted by the daylight filtering in from outside.
There but not there, he likened. He preferred her like that, out of focus and out of reach so he could pretend that whatever else kept on charging up between them wasn’t there either.
His call to Petros concluded, Nikos shut down his mobile phone, took in a deep mental breath, then swung his chair around. An instant surge of testosterone-charged heat took a leap down his front to gather like a flaming knife in his groin.
The provocative witch, he thought, letting his eyes shutter out the telling gleam he felt spark to life in them while, at the same time, taking in every smooth sleek inch. The dress was a classy work of formal modesty, the pulled-back hair an insult to its fabulous long and waving length. Everything, even the length of her skirt, was telling him she’d corrected each criticism he’d aimed at her—spoken or unspoken.
His jaw line flexed. She missed damn well nothing.
Mia read the flexing tension as yet another display of criticism which threatened to crucify her self-confidence as much as it made her blood start to burn. She wished she could adopt the same physical indifference to him that he dealt out to her but she’d tried and she couldn’t. Even though she hated him she could not stop herself from responding—inwardly, at least—to the pure male animal magnetism that poured out of him in such hot sinful waves. He made her feel breathless and snarled up by self-awareness she neither understood, nor could control.
‘So, what have you got there for me?’ he broke the silence, and even the rich deep tones of his voice made her insides quiver as she walked forward to place the file she was holding down on his desk.
‘The information you wanted on Lassiter-Brunel,’ she supplied.
Nikos glanced down at the bulky file, then back to Mia again, his lengthy black eyelashes flickering in surprise. ‘That was quick.’ Reaching forward he slid the file towards him. ‘Did you stay up all night?’
‘You said you wanted it by this morning,’ Mia reminded him.
‘So I did.’ Lowering his gaze again, Nikos experienced a pang of guilt as he scanned through the sheets of information she’d compiled. He had a whole department of experts employed specifically to compile information like this which, he accepted uncomfortably, had made the work she had clearly put in here a complete waste of her time.
Then something unusual caught his attention. Sliding a slip of paper out from the rest he relaxed back in his chair to read.
Recognising what that something was made Mia tense, ready to be told that reading an old press piece she’d unearthed on the Internet describing Anton Brunel’s less-than-nice reputation with the opposite sex was not what he expected to see in a business report.
One of his sleek black eyebrows rose upwards. ‘You think this is appropriate information to include in here?’ he made the predicted enquiry.
‘It says he paid a lot of money to silence a female work colleague he had been—seeing.’ Mia couldn’t quite bring herself to say the descriptive words the article used.
‘It alleges he paid hush money,’ Nikos corrected.
‘Sí.’ Mia nodded to accept the correction. ‘As you can see though, the lady in question filed sexual harassment charges which were then quickly dropped. If you look at the next document, you will find that on checking her out I discovered she had a child eight months later, a boy she named Anthony.’
‘And your point?’
Mia tried not to pull in a deep breath. ‘If a man is willing to abuse his position of power by seducing an employee, then pay her to keep silent about it, he is not reputable.’
‘In your opinion,’ Nikos pointed out.
‘In my opinion,’ Mia allowed.
‘And if the—affair had been a mutual and amicable agreement, would that alter your opinion?’ her interrogator enquired.
‘He is married with children—’
‘That was not my question.’
Mia shifted restively. ‘The article says—’
‘Alleges…’
‘Alleges,’ she echoed with the barest hint of a snap. ‘She was quite distressed at the time she made the charges and she wore bruises on her arms and her face…There are photographs.’ Mia pointed towards the file.
Allowing the lush curve of his eyelashes to droop again, Nikos looked at the photographs, the twist of his mouth showing his distaste before he used long fingers to slide the images aside.
‘This article says that Brunel denied all knowledge as to how the lady acquired her bruises. He claims she set him up.’
‘For what purpose would she do that?’ Mia stared at him in bafflement.
‘For the purpose of receiving the nice hefty pay-off she eventually got?’
‘What about the baby?’
‘Could be anyone’s baby,’ Nikos said with an indifferent shrug.
‘But that is such a cynical way to view the situation,’ Mia immediately flared up. ‘You cannot know that for a fact, and—’
‘You cannot know for a fact that Brunel’s version isn’t the truth,’ Nikos cut in with incisive logic. ‘I suspect the truth probably sits somewhere in the middle of both story versions, but since it was never proven either way I suppose we will never know.’ Casting the sheet of paper aside he looked up at her. ‘So tell me again why you included this in your report?’
Mia shifted from one foot to the other, not really wanting to answer that question. ‘I—I don’t like him,’ she finally contrived to push out.
This time both sleek eyebrows rose upwards. ‘But you’ve only met him once, the other day over lunch.’
‘He has an—uncomfortable manner…’
Nikos suddenly lurched forward, his calm demeanour gone in a single sharp blink of his eyes. ‘Explain that,’ he commanded.
‘I…No.’ Feeling her cheeks start to heat, Mia lowered her gaze.
‘You damn well will, Mia,’ he countered harshly. ‘And you will do it right now!’
‘Why are you angry with me?’ she queried hotly. ‘You instructed me to find out everything I could about Lassiter-Brunel. I found these articles. You prefer that I pretended I did not?’
She was trying to divert the subject, Nikos recognised, narrowing his eyes as he swung his mind back to the working lunch they’d shared earlier this week with John Lassiter and Anton Brunel. The two men were good-looking, arrogantly confident cut-throat businessmen—nothing wrong with any of those characteristics in people that strove for success.
However, his PA had been wearing a sexy red summer dress that fitted tightly beneath the voluptuous thrust of her breasts. The little black shrug thing she’d worn with it helped to cover
