To her rising fury his mouth twitched out the beginnings of a smile.
‘You think my life is amusing?’
‘I think it’s priceless.’ The smile became a full white-toothed grin. ‘So should you.’
Tossing her hair back, Mia glared up at him. His lean dark face was so disgustingly gorgeous she—‘I don’t want to talk any more about it.’ She swung away again, hating the hot sexual tension she could feel working away at her insides.
She set off walking. Nikos kept pace at her side. ‘If you want my opinion, Mia…’
‘I do not,’ she clipped out.
‘You should talk about it more often,’ he continued anyway. ‘You take yourself too seriously—and stop this!’ He sighed, turning her back round to face him, then grimly prizing her arms away from her ribs and down to her sides, where her hands clenched into white-knuckle fists.
Nikos viewed them with exasperation. ‘Body language is worth a thousand words,’ he sighed out. ‘Has it not occurred to you that if you don’t care where you came from, then no one else will care?’
‘Be brazen about it, you mean?’
‘It’s got to be better than clutching it to you like a grudge. Wake up and smell reality, Mia. Stop pitying yourself. You have a colourful past. So what? Without it you would not be here at all!’
Pitying herself? She wanted to say—how do you know what it feels like to be me? But that would be self-pitying so she pressed her lips together and said nothing and simmered a furious glare at him instead. His eyes were almost black in the darkness, flamed by the gold from the pooling street light. The same with the warm olive skin covering the taut beauty of his cheekbones, his nose, the darker shaded contours of his smooth, wide sensual mouth.
Something new charged up the atmosphere. It began with a small flicker of his long eyelashes as he dropped his gaze to her mouth. He wanted to kiss her. Mia knew it with an instinct older than time itself. Her heart stopped beating, then started up again at a faster pace because—Dio, she wanted him too—so much.
He knew he was going to do it. He knew he just couldn’t hold back. She was beautiful, a warm, soft, achingly desirable creature with passion in her eyes and on her softly pulsing mouth.
Sliding his fingers into her hair, he stroked a fingertip along the smoothness of her extended throat. The blue of her eyes deepened to purple and her lips parted. He felt the growing rush of her blood flow into his own. She swayed even closer, a willing recipient of what was about to happen. Feeling like a man controlled by a magnet, Nikos kept totally still as she brought her mouth closer and closer to his.
A car drove past them sounding its horn noisily and they sprang apart like two tightly coiled springs breaking free from their restraints.
Dizzied by the pressure that had built up inside her, Mia stumbled backward a few steps at the same time that Nikos broke the grip he still held on one of her arms. Staring at him, feeling a sinking sense of confusion assail her, it all suddenly changed to a sense-crawling horror when she realised that she had been the one about to kiss him.
She spun away in a shaken, horrified need to escape what she’d almost done. The apartment’s car park was only a few metres away. Walking across it, she was so anxious to punch in her security PIN so she could get inside before he could reach the doors that she keyed the numbers in the wrong order and had to cancel to begin the sequence again. His arm reaching across her shoulder to do the job f
or her drew sparks from her muscles as they pulled taut.
The door swung open. They stepped inside the lobby. Neither said another word to each other as the lift took them up to the top floor. Refusing to look into the mirrors, Mia glued her eyes to the lift’s marble floor. She could feel his presence though, like a fierce wave of energy battering into her and her insides were fizzing so badly she could not even breathe.
The moment the doors opened she darted out of the lift to escape. ‘Wait a minute, Mia.’ His quiet voice pulled her to a stop halfway across the lobby. ‘You’ve forgotten something.’
Narrow shoulders snapping with tension, she did not want to turn around but stiff pride made her do it. He was standing near the lift, his broad-shouldered posture somehow deceptively passive because, even with her non-existent experience, Mia was able to detect the prowling sexual pulse beat emanating from him. Wild butterflies were beating their wings in her stomach. Without being aware she was doing it, she brought her fingers together across her front in an anxious defensive pleat.
‘What?’ she prompted warily, and not for the life of her could she look at his face…
Nikos wondered how she would react if he offered to finish what they had started down in the street. She looked so damn beautiful standing there, trying hard not to show she was upset. And her innocence pounded at him like a bloody great barrier. It made him want to crash through it and just—
Just what?
Desire was one hell of an aphrodisiac when someone else was feeling it for you, he thought heavily. One unguarded look, the tempting thought of those anxious fingers touching his body, the sensual promise her lush parted mouth had offered him down in the car park… All it would take was a loosening of his self-control and the conflagration would happen and they might both gain some relief.
Shame Oscar stopped him from carrying through.
‘Your manners,’ he responded finally. ‘It is usual to thank the guy that bought you dinner.’
It was like he’d reached out and cut her throat. So cool, so sardonic, he was even still in lecture mode. Mia drew her eyes shut as the whole wretched agony of the way he was treating her exploded like a firework of needle-hot sparks which turned to ice as they embedded themselves in her flesh.
‘Thank you,’ she delivered with stiff obedience, ‘for such—a pleasant evening, signor.’
‘My pleasure, signorina,’ he returned, and even the super-controlled Nikos Theakis could not stop the rueful twitch that took hold of his mouth.