Carole Mortimer - The Balfour Legacy

‘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.’

Finding herself being hustled across the road, Mia was instinctively drawn to glancing both ways to check out the pace of the traffic for herself. Her eyes rested on his silver car standing abandoned against the curb a hundred metres away and she shivered, dragging her eyes away from it again. She hated the long, sleek, glossy power statement it made—the whole high-profile sparkle of the Mattea name. In Italy it meant glittering celebrity and untold wealth—much like the Balfour name did here, she likened, suddenly hating all of it.

‘I’m surprised the press here hasn’t picked up who your mother is,’ Nikos murmured once they were safely on the opposite pavement.

‘Oscar has been careful not to make the connection,’ she revealed. ‘Gabriella was still a Bianchi when he—knew her.’ Bianchi being the only name Gabriella had ever allowed Mia to own. Did she care? No, she told herself. It was bad enough that everyone knew she was the result of a sordid one-night stand of one decadent parent, Oscar Balfour, without being linked to her other notoriously decadent parent, Gabriella Mattea, as well. ‘Bianchi is a common name in Italy.’

They turned into the street on which their apartment block was situated. Once again Nikos slowed their pace. ‘Why aren’t you a Mattea?’

He just couldn’t leave it alone! ‘Why the sudden interest in my sleazy past?’

‘It’s not your sleaze, Mia, it’s theirs,’ Nikos pointed out.

Only slightly mollified by that response, Mia pulled in a tense breath. ‘When Gabriella found out she was pregnant with me she tried to pass me off as Mario’s child but she badly miscalculated,’ she explained. ‘Mario cannot have children apparently, and he certainly did not want some other man’s child cluttering up his life, so he set her an ultimatum. She kept me and lost him, or she gave me up and kept him. You know the rest,’ she concluded, tightening her grip on her ribcage as if trying to hug her bitter feelings in.

‘The isolated farm in Tuscany,’ Nikos confirmed, ‘an aunt barely scratching out a living for you both, while your filthy-rich parents live their lavish lives…It has all the ingredients for a seventeenth-century costume drama about the underbelly of two glittering royal houses,’ he described.