Carole Mortimer - The Balfour Legacy

Then she lost the battle and the next thing she knew she was falling, her sharp cry of shock the last thing she remembered before she sank beneath the depths of the cool blue waters.

Nikos was grabbing her arms even as she broke through the surface again, winded and gasping for breath. It was his fiercely clenched face she first focused on, his blazing black eyes, as he hauled her up and out of the water like a quivering, shivering, dripping wet rag.

Camera bulbs flashed in the stunning silence that hung over the pool terrace. Still too shocked to care right now, her fingers clutched at the bunched muscles in Nikos’s forearms in an effort to remain standing upright. Her legs had turned to jelly and she’d lost her shoes in the tumble. Her hair had come loose and now it was dripping all over her face, and stinging hot tears were hurting her eyes.

‘What happened?’ Nikos roughed out harshly.

‘I would swear someone gave her a push,’ a disembodied voice claimed, and hearing someone say it out loud like that sent the air choking from her lungs on a broken sob.

Cursing softly Nikos tried to fold her into the shelter of his arms but she held back. ‘I will wet you.’

‘Do you think I care about that?’

A large warm towel arrived around her shoulders and she huddled into it gratefully, shivering badly now as the cool evening air struck deep into her wet skin.

‘Are you all right, Mia—?’ It was only when she heard Nina D’Lassio’s anxious question that she realised it must be her hostess who’d been so quick to produce the towel she was huddling into. ‘Are you hurt anywhere?’

With a shake of her head Mia made an effort to pull herself together, found the strength to push her wet hair from her face and discovered that her wrist was still hurting.

‘I’m OK,’ she shivered out, fighting to slow the pounding pump of her heartbeat. She managed to let out a small shrill laugh. ‘I don’t know how that h-happened but I will not be offended if you believe I am drunk!’

An appreciative ripple of laughter ran around the terrace. After that, people began to relax and talk again, giving her a chance to try and take stock of what she must look like. Staring down she saw that her dress was ruined, her bare toes curling into the cold white tiling in between the solid plant of Nikos’s black shoes.

‘Let me take care of her, Nikos,’ their hostess said quietly. ‘She needs to get out of those wet clothes.’

It was only then that Mia became aware of the way he was still holding her and of the fierce tension gripping him. Lifting her face up to look at him she discovered that without her shoes she had a long way to look up. Tall, dark, heart-shakingly gorgeous, it was like looking at the gladiator she’d first seen on the driveway of Balfour Manor, the flashing eyes, the fiercely clenched angular jaw, the tightly flattened mouth.

Feeling her looking at him, his black eyelashes flickering, he tilted his dark head to look down at her with a simmering shot of barely suppressed fury that made her suck in an unsteady breath.

‘I’m—OK,’ she said again, feeling the strangest need to reassure him. ‘It was just such a sh-shock to hit the water like that.’

‘Were you pushed?’ Quiet though his voice sounded Mia still recognised the danger it attempted to suppress.

A careful glance to her left and to her right told her that some people were still standing around staring at them. The odd flashbulb reminded her that the whole incident had probably been caught on camera a hundred times over. Nina and Santino D’Lassio stood close by, and like Nikos they too were waiting to hear her response.

Moistening her trembling lips, she lowered her eyes while she tried to decide how to answer. Did she lie and say she did not know how it happened, or did she tell the truth and admit she suspected that Anton Brunel had pushed her into the pool?

‘Perhaps I slipped.’ She went for the least sensational option, then frowned in confusion as Nikos increased the tension in the grip he still held her in.

‘Come on, Mia.’ Nina D’Lassio sounded relieved though, as her arm came to rest across her shivering shoulders. ‘Let’s get you dry and find you something to wear…’

‘I’ll call for the helicopter,’ Nikos said.

‘No, you will not!’ Mia reacted hotly. ‘I have no wish for people to think that I am a wimp as well as Oscar’s guilty mistake! Madre di Dio ,’ she breathed fiercely, unaware that their host and hostess were staring in surprise at her hot, hushed flare of temper. ‘I am wet and bedraggled and I saw the camera bulbs flashing. Tomorrow I will be plastered all over the papers looking like this, and you wish to turn me into a bigger joke by hauling me away?’

‘Santino will deal with the press, Mia,’ Nina assured her quickly. ‘Oh, do let go of her, Nikos, she is not going to fall apart if you do!’

The fact that both Mia and Nina had snapped at him seemed to wake Nikos up from wherever he had gone off to since he’d pulled her out of the pool. With a final flexing of impressive clenched muscles he dropped his arms away and took a step back, allowing Nina to lead her away.

‘My security people are checking film footage to find out what happened,’ Santino D’Lassio informed him quietly. ‘Fortunately we have a five-minute delay on what’s transmitted on television, so the incident will not go up on the screens.’

‘So you think she was pushed,’ Nikos said grimly.

‘You saw the way she went in there, Nikos,’ Santino responded. ‘She either jumped or she was pushed. Which do you think it was?’

Santino moved away, then began ushering his guests down to the marquee, leaving Nikos to mull over his sardonic question with his angry eyes shuttered while he replayed the moment in his head. The crush around the pool had been heavy but he’d picked Mia out of the crowd the moment he stepped outside. She’d been looking at him; he could see the way her anxious blue eyes lit up the moment they connected with his. He could feel them doing it, followed by the sudden jerk of her body and the look of horror and shock before she began to topple over into the pool.

What he could not see was who had been standing close enough to her to propel her into the damn pool because his full attention had been fixed exclusively on her.

‘So the cuckoo almost drowned and I missed it,’ a disappointed voice drawled beside him. ‘What a shame.’

In no mood for Diana’s Fischer’s twisted kind of humour Nikos intoned flatly, ‘You lead a sad life, Diana,’ then walked away, over to the almost deserted pool bar and ordered a drink while he awaited Mia’s return.

By the time the two women walked out of the house again he was the only person left on the terrace. As a foil for each other Mia’s darkness next to Nina’s flame was pretty much as good as it could get, Nikos observed. Then his full attention had welded on Mia’s transformation from wet and bedraggled to long and curvaceous, a seriously slinky siren which almost blew his edgy control to bits.

She was wearing a figure-hugging strapless black tube of a dress that was nothing short of mind-stopping. For a few seconds he was thrown back to the moment he’d first seen her on the Balfour Manor driveway.

Heat poured into his body. Desire so fierce he did not know how he kept it from showing on his face. Her wet hair had been slicked back and her makeup barely there except for a fresh touch of gloss to her soft full mouth. Her natural beauty just shone out of her, warm, dark—exotic—exquisite.

But as they came closer he saw she looked deathly pale and he knew somehow—instinct—that she was more shaken up by the incident than she was trying to let on. Then he noticed the way she was holding her right wrist in the palm of her other hand and his raging libido altered to raging anger that stung like a blister trying to burn a hole in his gut.