He looked like what he was, a cold hard angry businessman, a thoroughly gorgeous, frighteningly successful arrogant Greek tycoon.
‘And let’s get one more thing straight before we leave this lift,’he went on. ‘I am not into nepotism. I believe that everyone must work as hard as the next person to earn their place in the world.’One of the reasons Nikos knew he commanded so much respect from his employees was because he encouraged each one of them to explore their own potential no matter where they stood in the employment ranks. ‘So you will pull your weight around here or you’re out, got that?’ he iced out.
‘You think I am a useless freeloader,’ Mia realised.
‘Is a freeloader one step up from a housekeeper or one step down?’ he threw back quick as a flash.
An angry flush bloomed in her cheeks. ‘The housekeeper assumption was your mistake, not mine.’
‘To which you took offence and flounced off like a fully fledged prima donna,’ he threw back. ‘I find it really curious to discover, three months later, that the day we met you were on your way to throw the whole Balfour family into a flat spin—as if they did not have enough to contend with at the time.’
Her moment of defiance crushed by that reminder, Mia pulled her guilty eyes away from his. He was referring to Oscar’s poor wife, Lillian, Mia realised, and the way her unexpected arrival had caused so much trouble the after-effects were still rippling throughout the whole family today.
‘I did not know that Lillian was ill,’ she murmured defensively.
‘But if I had known what you were up to that morning, I would have stopped you from going anywhere near them. Think about it,’ he advised. ‘If you’d lost the flounce and tried offering up an explanation to me, your arrival at Balfour Manor would not have been so badly timed because I could have stopped it from taking place, and the ensuing rush of shocks and scandals could possibly have been avoided.’
Could it really have been that simple? Mia wondered bleakly. Could a split-second decision made at a highly charged and very tense moment redirect the hand of fate as easily as that?
Ripples on a pond, she likened as the lift doors slid open and Nikos Theakis strode out, leaving her standing there feeling as if he’d just used her to wipe the floor with.
‘I s-suppose you think it would have been better for everyone if you had just run me over.’ She threaded after him.
Nikos paused five strides down the corridor, and turned around on the heels of his shoes. She was standing framed by the open lift doors with her hair flowing free around her shoulders and her beautiful face washed pale.
Young, he heard himself reiterate an observation he’d first made on the Balfour driveway. Guilty, vulnerable, hurt. In his anger he had just dumped full responsibility for the actions of the whole Balfour family upon her tense shoulders. Did he feel good about doing that?
No, he didn’t. His punishment did not fit her crime.
And there was another element of this he had been trying hard not to focus on but he did so now by allowing his eyes to make a sweeping scan of her body and was instantly rewarded by a rush of heat down his front. It was the same rush of heat he’d experienced the first time he had seen her—the same one he’d been suffering every time he’d let his mind take him back to that moment on the Balfour’s drive.
He was attracted to her. He’d been thinking about her on and off ever since. If he had been able to get back to the UK in the past months he would have been travelling down to Balfour Manor to try and find out who she was.
Now he knew.
She was a Balfour, which put her so out of bounds it effectively slammed shut the door to his attraction in his face.
So it went without saying that he did not want her invading his work place. He did not want her anywhere near him at all, threatening to mess up his nice calm business environment with her long lush figure and her soft sensual mouth and the promise of hot passion he could see gleaming behind the hurt blue of her eyes.
He took the cruel option and did not bother to answer her remark but instead turned away and strode on. He was behaving like a cold ruthless bastard and he knew it but it was the only way to protect himself.
He was about to give her one week—two, at most—before his cold hard critical assault on her vulnerable self-confidence sent her running back to Oscar in Buckinghamshire, Nikos told himself as he left Mia Balfour in the care of Fiona and went to chair his delayed meeting.
Chapter Two
TWO long hard stubborn weeks later, Mia stood a good four paces back from the desk and sizzled inside with grim defiant patience while she waited for Nikos to acknowledge her presence.
She was wearing a simple-cut cream linen dress today, cinched in at her waist by a mustard-yellow leather belt, and on her feet she wore a pair of matching shoes. The whole outfit would have cost her full annual salary to buy new but as hand-me-downs went, Mia did not complain.
Would not dream of complaining. She was more horrified by the exorbitant price tags her half-sisters thought nothing of paying for the wear-once-and-discard clothes they crammed into the closets back at Balfour Manor. Hanging from a dress rail in the spare bedroom in her little apartment was a whole range of fabulous hand-me-downs just waiting for her eager fingers to unstitch and rework.
But this particular outfit had been picked off the rail with only one purpose in mind—to challenge Nikos Theakis to find anything objectionable about it.
He could frame a thousand criticisms with one sweeping glance from his cold dark eyes. And yesterday’s objection had been aimed at the short pearl-grey skirt she had worn with a delicious plum-coloured silk georgette blouse. His sweeping glance of disapproval had taken in the length of leg she had on show and glittered with ice at the see-through fabric of the blouse even though she wore a matching camisole underneath it. So today she’d covered up in a dress with a hem that finished primly two inches below her knees. And she’d scraped back her hair into such a tight bun the skin framing her face felt tight, because yesterday he’d also snapped at her when she had to keep pushing the heavy weight of glossy black waves away from her face each time she’d looked down at her work.
And she was absolutely certain that he was deliberately making her wait like this to string out the tension by keeping his chair swung facing the window so all she could see of him was the top of his dark head.
It was all part of the war of attrition he was waging against her, because he hated having her working here as much as she hated having to be here. He was never going to forgive her for walking into a job she had not worked hard to earn, and she was not going to give up and run away from it because, for Oscar’s sake and only Oscar’s sake, she was determined to stick this thing out and learn to be the person her father wanted her to be even if it killed her in the process.
Or she killed Nikos Theakis.
Nikos was wondering if she had a single clue that he could read her thoughts through the back of his head. The trouble with Mia Balfour was that she was too young to have learnt the art of masking her feelings, and too Italian to want to do so if she could.
Murmuring a response to Petros, his Athens-based second in command, Nikos kept his brooding dark gaze fixed on the plate of tinted glass set between him and
