car leapt forward, up and out of the valley, taking him beneath the canopy of tangling bare branches that lined his route away from the Balfour estate.
But he wasn’t concentrating. Nikos knew that even as he saw her standing there, directly in his way. For a few chilling seconds he was so sure he was seeing some ghostly apparition dressed all in black that he forgot to slam his foot on the brakes.
He had never experienced anything like it. In those few stark, stunning split seconds it took him to connect with his wits, his shocked gaze had absorbed every long luscious inch of her, from her glossy black hair framing an exquisite heart-shaped face to the lush shape of her body enclosed inside a fitted jacket and a skirt that followed every long sinuous line of her curving hips, long slender thighs and shapely calves. And she was wearing boots, he noticed for some crazy reason. Little black leather ankle boots with heels like lethal spikes.
Then reality hit like a stinging shot of electricity to his wits and biting out a string of thick curses he slammed his foot down hard on the brakes.
Mia stood frozen as the low silver monster hurtled towards her, filling the air with a tire-burning, ear-piercing screech as the long silver bonnet came closer and closer until finally it slithered to a grit-spitting halt two tiny centimetres from her shins.
The engine hissed; the silver bonnet shuddered—silence returned like a numbing blow to the head. Pushing back into his seat, Nikos stared out at her with his heart pounding like a hammer and his fingers still clamped to the wheel. He had not believed he was going to stop in time. He wasn’t even sure that he had. He continued to sit in a state of near-total shutdown, waiting for her to give him a clue by making some kind of movement—by stepping back to show he hadn’t hit her or to drop down to the ground in a smashed heap!
Theos, she’s beautiful, his stupefied brain fed to him, then compounded the observation by feeding a rush of hot blood down his front. It gathered in his loins like a neat shot of testosterone. Reacting to it with an explosive force of anger he thrust open the car door and threw himself out.
‘What the hell do you think you are playing at!’ he raked out in full blistering fury. ‘Do you have a death wish or something? Why the hell didn’t you move out of my way—?’
It took every bit of Mia’s numbed strength just to breathe in and out. Her eyelashes finally gave a flutter of life and she managed to raise her eyes up from the car to focus on him instead. It came as a second shock to find she was staring at the most beautiful man she had ever seen in her life.
And he was striding towards her like a gladiator going to war. Only this gladiator had a black overcoat hanging from his impressive wide shoulders and wore a frighteningly elegant steelgrey three-piece suit beneath. His shirt was white, his tie a silky slither of smoke down his front.
Reaching the corner of the car he stopped to rake a downward glance at how close he had come to her fragile legs. Fire lit his eyes just before he reached out, clamped his hands around her waist and bodily plucked her off the ground. He was so intent on what he was doing he didn’t seem to hear her sharp gasp of shock, or the heavy thud as her suitcase dropped from her taut fingers and hit the ground. The next thing Mia knew she was up close and staring directly into a pair of deep dark polished-mahogany eyes beneath startlingly straight thick eyebrows as black as the hair on his head.
‘You stupid fool,’ he roughed out, skin the same rich gold tones as ripening olives stripped so pale it accentuated his strong jaw set as hard as a clenched fist. ‘Say something, for God’s sake. Are you all right?’
Like a plastic doll jerked by hidden strings, Mia gave a shaky nod of her head. ‘You—you almost killed me,’ she whispered.
‘I avoided trying to kill you,’ he corrected. ‘You should be thanking me for my fast reactions and skill.’
‘You think it is skilful to drive like a lunatic, signor?’
‘You think it is clever to stand stockstill in the middle of a private driveway while a car hurtles towards you, signorina?’ he shot right back.
As if only just realising he had hold of her, he muttered something, then twisted around before dumping her back on solid ground away from the lethal bumper of his car. The sheer unexpectedness of the whole shocking incident jolted Mia’s paralysed reflexes into action by forcing her to make a grab at his arms to steady herself when she almost toppled off the high heels of her boots. He braced his arms. Mia stared down at the amount of solid muscle and mighty male strength her fingers were clutching at and snatched them away again.
Feeling her legs go strangely hollow she turned away from him, saw her suitcase lying like a battered victim on the ground a few feet away from them and went to straighten it up.
Pushing his hands into the pockets in his overcoat, Nikos watched her stoop to catch hold of the handle in her trembling fingers and could not stop his eyes from surveying the attractive shape of her derrière moulded to the fabric of her skirt.
Nice, he thought, then frowned darkly as another rush of heat shot down his front. Spinning away, Nikos took a frowning glance at his wristwatch. He was late, he saw. He had a plane to catch. He had just come away from one of the worst situations he had ever had to deal with, and he was standing around here admiring the rear view of the woman he’d almost just flattened into the ground with his car!
A sound of self-disgust escaped him. ‘Try walking down the side of the drive from here,’ he said loftily, then strode back the length of his car. ‘And just for the record,’ he added as he opened the door. ‘If you’re the new housekeeper they’re all anxiously awaiting at the house, I think I should warn you you’ve gone over the top with the get-up.’
Straightening up from dusting off her suitcase, Mia blinked. Housekeeper…Get-up…Over the top…? She needed time to translate what he’d said so it would make some sense to her.
Then it did make sense. He thought she had come here to Balfour Manor dressed like this to take up the position of housekeeper.
Hurt gathered like a tight ball in her stomach. In all her life she had never felt hit so hard or so low. With the chilling cast of wounded dignity freezing her composure, she turned and walked herself and her suitcase around the bonnet of his fancy over-the-top supercar without bothering to offer him a single glance.
Housekeeper…Mia pushed out a strained bitter laugh. She’d learnt to speak English while housekeeping for an ancient English professor who’d owned a villa not far from her home. He had paid her to keep his house clean and cook for him, and he had let her use his library and his computer so long as she typed up the pages of his endlessly long and boring tome. The English language course had been thrown in free of charge. Then she would walk the two kilometres back home and work on her school studies before spending the evening assisting Tia Giulia with the sewing she took in to help subsidise the meagre income Tia made growing cut flowers to sell in the nearest market town.
She usually wore sensible flat shoes and faded old jeans or one of the couple of dresses she had for the hot Tuscan summers. For the first time in her life she was wearing something new, not handmade out of a cheap bit of fabric she’d bought from a market stall. And that horrid man in his elegant silver car and his elegant silver suit and his elegant grooming which put him right at home here on the Balfour estate shattered her hard-worked-for self-confidence with just a few words.
Nikos narrowed his eyes as he watched her walk off down the driveway—hogging the middle of it like a defiance aimed exclusively at him. His lips gave a wry twitch. Instead of getting in his car and driving
