Mia’s Scandal (5 page)

Dinner with a man…

Something hard gave him a kick in his gut.

Was she meeting the tall blond clean-cut guy from accounts he had seen her with today?

If she was, the damn jerk needed to learn some manners. What kind of man let a young and beautiful stranger to this city find her own way to their chosen venue?

She looked lost already. And the weirdest kind of tingling sensation was skittering down his torso and legs.

She struck off to the right, disappearing out of his sight in seconds. Nikos held his stance for a few seconds longer, then he muttered, ‘Damn it,’ giving in to what the tingling represented and slid his hand into his pocket to exchange his car keys for his mobile phone.

Ten minutes later, Mia was hovering outside one of the bistros. She was pretending to read the menu list stuck on the window but really she was checking out the busy interior, and the bravado that had brought her this far was now lying dead at her feet.

She could not go in there. She did not know why she had ever come up with the crazy idea that she could! And the evening was chilly, the black satin jacket doing nothing to keep the chill at bay and—

‘Been stood up…?’

Hearing that deeply accented, mildly sar
donic and crushingly familiar voice arrive from somewhere behind her caused a sudden burn of weak tears to flood her eyes. It took every bit of self-control she had to blink the tears away again, then lift up her chin and turn to look at him.

He was standing across the busy pavement, leaning against the side of his silver supercar with his hands resting inside his trouser pockets, his jacket pushed back from his bright white shirt. Tall, dark and so very sexily sophisticated, Mia observed helplessly. The overhead lights shining amber onto the wet pavement also honeyed the skin of his too-perfect face. It was no wonder most of the women passing across the gap between them stared at him, Mia thought as a whole clutch of them went by with their eyes glued to his long, lean, supremely elegant stance.

If he noticed he did not show it. He did not take his eyes from her face. His mouth was wearing a kind of half-mocking smile that stung her pride and made her wish that some other tall, dark, handsome man would just walk up to her and pull her into his embrace.

Irritating and juvenile…

‘No,’ she answered his question. ‘He’s just a few minutes late.’

With the ease of a man used to doing every
thing with grace, she watched him tilt his dark head down and, without removing his hand from his pocket, twist his wrist, shrug back his shirt cuff and somehow manage to display his watch.

‘This is not the kind of place a man keeps a woman waiting out on the pavement,
cara,’
he said when he looked back at her again.

‘Well, you should know since you seem to be doing the same thing to your date,’ Mia fired back.

‘I pick my dates up at their door.’

‘Then please go and do so,’ she invited and turned back to the bistro window.

The seconds ticked by. Her ears pricked and her senses went on the alert for the sound of his car driving away. She found the space around her suddenly swamped by a group of people who wanted to check out the menu too. By the time they’d moved on she was wishing she’d had the foresight to tag on to them.

Because he was still there. She could feel his silent presence like some dark force trying to drag her back round to face him. After another second or two she heard him sigh, then the sound of his footsteps bringing him close. Tension zinged down her backbone and remained there stinging like an electric charge. A second later he was standing right behind her—she could feel his body heat along her back.

‘Will you go away,’ she snapped. ‘You are making me feel stupid!’

‘Once your date arrives,’ he agreed. ‘Who is he anyway?’

Keeping her eyes fixed rigidly on the bistro window, she said, ‘That is none of your business.’

‘No?’ A hand moved against her spine like a finely brushed admonishment. ‘I’m the guy who’s been placed in charge of your care, so that makes it my business.’

‘I do not need a babysitter.’

‘Nor do you need a man who plans to sit you down to dine in a place like this. It’s a bog standard pizza place, Mia, with a cheap and fast turnaround.’

Was it—? Mia stared at the menu, still none the wiser having never eaten at such an establishment. Until Nikos had taken her with him to his working lunches she had never eaten in a restaurant at all!

‘You will be outside again before you know you’ve eaten,’ he predicted. ‘What happens, then? An hour or so in one of the pubs dotted down the street to soften you up with a couple of glasses of cheap wine, or will he be expecting to go straight back to your place to finish off the evening in the comfort of your bed?’

‘Well, you should know since you are fabled for your fast turnaround,’ she swung round to
fling at him and was very pleased to see that likening his dating skills to a fast pizza restaurant made his chiselled jaw clench.

‘That was not what I—’

‘Grazie,
for your wise advice,’ Mia cut him off midsentence. ‘When my date arrives I will be certain to ask him what his intentions are.’

‘Or I will.’

Sparking up like a firework she gasped out, ‘No you will not!’

‘And he’s not only unforgivably late he’s unfit to date a Balfour.’

Half unwilling to believe they were even having this conversation, Mia stared up at him. ‘And you believe you have the right to make that judgement?’

‘In your father’s place—yes.’

In other words she was a
duty
he felt compelled to oversee! ‘Well, you are not my father—or my idea of what a father figure should be! And in case you have forgotten,’ she added stiffly. ‘You went out of your way to tell me to back off from irritating you, so now I am telling you to do the same thing for me, Nikos, and just go away!’

With that she turned to walk off down the high street. His long fingers curling around one of her shoulders held her still.

‘Mia, this is stupid,’ he sighed out heavily.

Or irritating and juvenile…
Why was that cutting remark still stinging her as badly as this? Mia asked herself.

She did not know. She did not understand what she was feeling or even what she was
doing
any more.

‘Please let go of me…’ She tried to move away from him.

His fingers tightened gently. ‘No,’ he refused. ‘Look…’ he said, ‘I’m—sorry if I sounded…insensitive to your feelings but—’

‘Sounded it?’ she threw out.

‘Was
insensitive, then,’ he altered, the chiselled line of his jaw clenching. ‘But it does not change the fact that your so-called date has either stood you up or is only too happy to leave you to stand around here like a fool!’

‘And that is your sensitive side talking?’ So close to tears now, she had to push a hand up between them so she could cover her trembling mouth.

A soft curse rattled from him. ‘I will take you to dinner,’ he offered, sounding so driven to say it that Mia almost snapped the hand up higher to slap his face!

But she didn’t because it would be
irritating and juvenile
of her to do it! ‘I can provide my own dinner,’ she told him stiffly. ‘And you already have a date.’

‘I did have a date until—’ Nikos stopped, compressing his lips, then dealt her a glinting glimmer of a look ‘—until I was stood up too,’ he finished dryly.

‘You—?’ It was like discovering he had a chink in his impenetrable armour. Mia was so intrigued by the phenomenon she stopped fighting his grip to stare up at him instead.

‘It happens to the best of us,’ Nikos compounded on his quick-thinking masterpiece of deception. ‘So shall we find somewhere quieter than this to—commiserate with each other while we eat?’

Like a lamb to the slaughter, he mocked, feeling his conscience pinch him when his beautiful PA dealt him a sympathetic look.

But at least the deal was done.

T
WENTY
minutes later they were being shown to a table in a very exclusive restaurant and the waiter was taking away her jacket while Mia glanced around.

If this was the kind of place Nikos tended to frequent, then she was willing to be impressed by its softly lit ambience.

‘Have I been here before?’ she asked.

‘Not to my knowledge.’

Surprising him with a sudden grin she told him, ‘If you have not brought me here for one of your business lunches, Nikos, then I have not been here. These kinds of places all have a similar look to them, don’t they?’

‘Do they?’ He glanced around their plush, hushed award-winning surroundings. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

Mia nodded. ‘They probably look different in the daylight when they are filled with sharpsuited men and women looking serious and in
telligent instead of…’ Her voice trailed off, even white teeth pressing down into her lower lip to halt the potentially provocative word she had been going to use.

‘Intimate.’ Nikos was not so sensitive. ‘It’s called good business sense,’ he enlightened. ‘Not the people but the restaurants,’ he explained what he’d meant. ‘They change their mood with the mood of the city. By day they provide the sharp suits like me with a place to work while we eat.’ A dryness entered his voice. ‘By night they soften their appearance to provide a more relaxed ambience for their more sociable clientele. I love the dress…’

‘Oh.’ Startled by the sudden and totally unexpected compliment Mia blushed as she glanced down at the lilac silk dress. ‘It used to belong to my sister Bella.’ Critical fingers plucked at the dress’s dipping cleavage. ‘There used to be a strip of lace here but I unpicked it because I thought it looked less fussy without it.’

‘Oscar has not provided you with your own wardrobe?’

His eyes were slow to rise to catch her brief shrug. ‘He offered. But I did not see the need to buy more new clothes when the closets at Balfour were stuffed full of things no one else wanted to wear.’

A young waiter arrived to offer them menus then. Mia winged him a warm smile and when she realised he was Italian she fell into conversation with him. Veiling his eyes Nikos observed the change in her as she talked. Her voice had taken on a warm and earthy vibrancy Nikos had not heard before. The young waiter fell in love with her as Nikos watched. She had no idea of the power she was wielding, had not even noticed the waiter’s darkened eyes and the raised colour in his face. When her slender hands joined in the conversation the waiter was hooked, his eyes fixed on the creamy cleavage on show behind the expressive fingers.

And Nikos felt a sudden blistering urge to punch the young fool! Perhaps he moved, he wasn’t sure, but something made the waiter glance his way. The next second he was rushing out an apology and moving away at lightning speed.

‘He comes from San Marcello,’ Mia enlightened him as if his Italian was not good enough to follow their conversation, and with no clue at all what had made the waiter take flight as if someone had set fire to his heels.

Nikos knew. He could still feel the trails of it lingering behind his veiling eyelids. ‘A neighbour, then,’ he murmured.

‘Sí,
by a hilltop or two.’ Settling back into her
seat she shook the silky fall of her hair back from her face, then picked up her menu.

When he continued to sit there doing and saying nothing she glanced up at him and frowned, then followed it up with a sigh. ‘OK, what have I done to annoy you this time?’ she demanded. ‘Have I broken some very important rule of dining that is likely to earn me a plate of cold food?’

‘Brunel would call it breaking the rules anyway,’ he responded impassively.

‘Brunel…? What has he got to do with…’

Enlightenment dawned. Mia flicked a look across the restaurant to where the friendly waiter now stood to attention, striving to keep his eyes away from this corner of the room.

‘You are accusing me of flirting,’ she said in a hushed breath of stunned disbelief.

Nikos picked up his menu and opened it. ‘You tied him in knots. For a few interesting seconds I thought he was going to pull out a chair and join us.’

‘We were just
talking
about
Italy!’
Mia impressed upon him in self-defence.

‘I got this really bad feeling that I was about to be sidelined. Not good for my ego at all.’ Nikos smiled. ‘Lesson one in the use of social skills,
cara,
concentrate solely on the man you are dining with.’

Not quite sure if she was supposed to laugh at the ridiculous image Nikos had constructed of the waiter muscling in on him, he diverted her with, ‘What would you like to eat?’

Mia dutifully buried her attention on the menu. A different waiter arrived to take their order. Nikos delivered it in the clipped cool tone that did not encourage the waiter to linger.

‘Talk to me,’ he said abruptly once they were alone again.

Lifting up her face she asked, ‘What about?’

‘Anything—the wine.’ He indicated to her glass.

Dutifully picking up her wine glass Mia sipped. ‘Nice,’ she said.

‘Is that it?’

‘Is this another lesson in social dining?’ she dared.

‘No.’ He almost let a smile catch hold of his mouth. ‘It is simply a request for you to extend your answer. You are Italian. I cannot believe you don’t have a better opinion about wine than just
nice.’

Be interesting, in other words. Well, OK, she could try to do that, Mia decided, relaxing back into her seat. ‘Tia Giulia and I make our own wine from our own grapes,’ she announced. ‘It’s just a hobby really, but our wine tastes easily as good as this very expensive wine…’ she said
with a wave of her glass. ‘We pick and tread the grapes in the traditional manner with our skirts held up like so—’ she gestured, unaware how entirely she had captured her audience ‘—and we laugh a lot—it is supposed to be good for the taste. If it is a good year, our neighbours will come to exchange other produce for bottles of our wine.
Tia
has some really wonderful old oak barrels in the cellar…’

Their first course arrived and Mia kept talking through it, taking a small forkful of sea bass laced with a delicious sauce she had never tasted before.

‘Your life in Tuscany was very different from the one you’re living now,’ Nikos observed when she paused for a breath.

Mia nodded, eyes shadowing as she sat forward to pick up her glass. ‘Do you miss Greece when you are away from it?’

‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘I fly in and out of Athens too often to miss it.’

‘Family, then,’ she probed.

‘None.’ The way he carefully veiled his eyes made Mia frown because she was almost certain she’d just hit a raw nerve. ‘Tell me why you left it so long to contact Oscar.’ As neatly as that he turned the conversation away from him and back on to her.

‘Because I only discovered I had a father
this year—on my twenty-first birthday to be exact…’

She went on to explain about discovering Oscar, in between savouring forkfuls of food. She didn’t notice that Nikos barely touched the food on his plate, or that he rarely removed his dark eyes from her face. She was not aware that he kept filling up her wine glass or that her tongue was loosening the more that she drank. By the time their dessert arrived she was feeling so mellow she even reached across the table to spoon up a sample of his untouched dessert and teased him with her laughing eyes as she placed the stolen morsel in her mouth.

‘I have a sweet tooth.’

‘Among other things,’ he murmured oddly.

About to ask him what he meant by that—

‘Do you want coffee?’ he got in before her.

‘And spoil the taste of the wine?
Grazie,
no,’ she refused.

‘Then if you’ve finished do you mind if we leave now?’

‘Oh…’ Mia tensed, her slender spine arching up on the sudden realisation that she’d talked his socks off all the way through the meal! It was no wonder he was wearing that blank expression on his face. ‘I had lost track of how long we have been here…’

‘And the restaurant has emptied,’ Nikos pointed out dryly. ‘We’re the last ones here…’

Flickering a surprised glance around the empty tables she noticed the restaurant staff standing around, trying hard not to look impatient for them to leave. ‘Why didn’t you say something sooner?’ she whispered from the depths of a sinking embarrassment.

‘You were enjoying your meal. There was no need to rush.’ With the merest glance in the waiter’s direction he brought him rushing to his side. ‘My companion’s jacket,’ he instructed, handing over a credit card. ‘You have time to finish your wine,’ he indicated smoothly to Mia, as if she would dare to take another sip!

‘No.’ She stood. ‘I think I’ve had enough.’ A flush of hot colour was burning her cheeks.

She wanted to die where she stood—deflate like a balloon and disappear altogether. She almost snatched her jacket from the waiter when he arrived with it, so eager to remove herself from here now that she could barely stop herself from doing it at a run.

The waiter was handing Nikos his credit card. Mia fumbled in her urgency to drag her jacket on and missed slotting her arm in the sleeve.

‘Allow me…’

She froze as Nikos took the garment from her and politely held it open, ready for her to slip it on. Her hair became trapped inside the black satin and she used the need to release it as an excuse to keep her head lowered so no one could see how hot her face had gone.

Outside the cool night air hit her like an icy slap in the face and she shivered. Nikos placed a hand against her lower back to walk her towards his waiting car. A beep sounded as the locks sprang free and his hand guided her into her seat.

The car growled into life. It moved away from the curb with the sleek prowling grace of a hunting panther. As her gaze was drawn downwards to watch as his long fingers moved the car through its gears, she saw something that caught her breath in her throat.

‘What—?’ Nikos asked, so sharp he obviously did not miss anything.

‘Nothing.’ Dragging her eyes away from the black-and-gold insignia she’d spied on the dash, she tried to pretend that she had not seen it. Then, without any warning at all, she choked, ‘I feel sick.’

The stunned silence which followed her announcement held for a second or two, then the car ground to a jerking halt. Nikos was out of it and striding round to yank her door open
before Mia could do it for herself. Out in the night air again, she began to shiver so badly he must have felt compelled to offer a supporting arm around her shaking shoulders while she stood fighting a battle with nausea that had nothing to do with the amount of wine she had drunk.

Nikos did not know that though. He was cursing himself. He wished the hell he knew what he had been playing at back there, feeding her wine by the glassful to draw her out of her shell. What had he hoped to gain from it? An insight into what made his PA tick, or had his motives been fixed somewhere else?

‘It’s usually better to throw up and get it over with than to fight it,’ he advised, trying to recall the last time he’d deliberately set out to get a woman drunk.

There had never been another time. He had never sunk this low before. She got to him and he didn’t like it. She made him think, do and want things he did not want to think, do or want.

‘I’m all r-right.’ Making an effort to pull herself together, Mia stepped away from his supporting arm to stand by herself.

Letting his arm drop to his side he sighed, ‘I’m—sorry.’

He
was sorry? ‘What for?’

‘I should not have let you drink all that wine.’

‘I can take my wine, Nikos Theakis,’ Mia threw back. ‘I am Italian. I grew up drinking wine. It was your car that made me feel sick. I hate it. I will walk the rest of the way—’

‘What do you mean, my car made you sick?’ Grabbing her arm as she went to walk away from him he pulled her to a halt.

Mia shivered. ‘It is a Mario Mattea production car.’

‘A limited edition,’ Nikos confirmed. ‘Only twenty of them were built. Most people would—’

‘One for each year Mario Mattea has been married to my mother,’ Mia whispered, then had to press her lips together as the nausea threatened to come back.

She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed the world-famous insignia before now! The two stylishly entwined gold letter
M’
s appeared on a million luxury products—on Mario Mattea’s main claim to fame—his world-championship-class formula-one racing cars!

A glance at the low silver bonnet and a thick laugh broke from her throat. Wouldn’t Mario just love it if he knew that one of his cars had almost ploughed her into the ground a few months ago!

Pushing off Nikos’s hand, she started walking, needing to get as far away from that car as
fast as she could. The nausea was churning up her stomach and her arms had wrapped themselves tight around her ribs. She’d lived twenty-one years in Italy and not once seen a Mattea car. Then she arrives in England, and on the very first day she’d almost had one toss her over its bonnet without realising the insult she would have been paying to herself!

‘Explain.’ Nikos caught up with her.

‘Oscar slept with my mother, Gabriella, the night before he married Lillian,’ she supplied in a cold, clipped voice. ‘She returned to Italy—to her fiancé Mario Mattea and eventually married him.’

Nikos breathed what Mia assumed was the Greek way of expressing shock. ‘So your mother is Gabriella Mattea…’

‘Don’t bother to fixate on it,’ Mia sparked out. ‘I do not recognise her as my mother. We do not communicate.’

‘Slow down before you twist off those ridiculous high shoes,’ he instructed impatiently, curling a set of long fingers around her arm.

‘You have forgotten your car,’ she muttered in the hopes that he would take the hint and leave her to walk home alone.

‘And you’ve forgotten the rules of dating again,’ Nikos responded coolly. ‘I see mine to their door.’

‘We did not have a date,’ Mia denied. ‘You hijacked me in the street.’

‘Same rules apply.’ Still holding on to her, his attention had diverted to the two streams of traffic moving up and down the street. He spotted a gap. His fingers tightened. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s cross while we can.’