Carole Mortimer - The Balfour Legacy

By then even Nikos was showing cracks in his unyielding demeanour when he turned round and moved to show the doctor out.

And he did not come back.

Mia continued to sit on the sofa, still too stunned to do more than take in the fact that Nikos had somehow managed to grab complete control of the situation before she’d even had a chance to grasp it for herself.

He knew she was pregnant. His other sources had been reporting her every move back to him, and by the amount he’d already indicated she had not taken a single step anywhere during the past two weeks without it being carefully tracked.

What was she supposed to make of that?

Suddenly wondering why she was still sitting here like some cowed fool waiting for him to deign to put in an appearance, Mia shot to her feet. Her mouth felt unnaturally dry and her stomach was still not happy but she discovered that she could walk without making the walls and floor move about.

Stepping out of the living room she discovered that the apartment was a lot bigger than she’d expected it to be. A wide central hallway fed right down its middle, with doors leading off from either side of it, most of them thrown open like the doors in his house in Hampshire.

Shivering she turned in the direction of the only closed door—the door out of here. She was going to escape while she had the chance. She needed to use the loo and she desperately needed a drink of something long and cool and thirst quenching. She did not need—

‘Don’t even think about it,’ his deep voice arrived with a quiet, seriously threatening undertone to it.

Pulses leaping like mad, Mia pressed her dry lips together and closed her eyes for a second, then opened them again and, folding her arms across her front, turned to look at him.

He was poised half in, half out of a room farther down the hallway. Her guarded blue eyes connected briefly with the narrowed glint reflecting from his, then dropped almost of their own volition down the length of his long lean stance.

He’d removed his suit jacket and his shirtsleeves had been folded up his forearms. He held what looked like a tea towel in one long-fingered hand. It came to her that she was seeing yet another side to this complicated man, this one being his domesticated side.

Did it distract from the raw sexual male she’d been so fascinated by for so long? No, she admitted helplessly as her tummy flipped for a different reason. Without knowing she was doing it she covered it with a hand.

Lowering his gaze to watch the revealing gesture, Nikos had to fight not to grind his teeth together as anger erupted inside. She was barely managing to stand upright. She looked the colour of paste. She’d lost weight—too much weight going by the way her pale blue cotton dress was hanging on her. And she looked so beautiful and fragile and vulnerable he wanted to leap on her and carry her off to the nearest bed!

Where the hell had he got the idea he could just brush her off like the others?

The clue was in the question, Nikos told himself grimly. She wasn’t like the others.

She was open, emotional, temperamental and feisty, he listed. Extraordinarily beautiful and soul-destroyingly sexy without knowing that she was. Even now while she stood there trying to maintain an upright position, all he could think about was stripping off that sack of a dress so he could see how much damage two weeks of barely eating had done to her fabulous shape.

And she was pregnant with his child, he tagged on finally. What the hell was sexy about knowing she was pregnant with his child? He had never wanted children. The knowledge of one nestling somewhere inside her should be bringing him out in a cold sweat, but it wasn’t.

He had to veil his eyes so she would not see how the powerful stuff pounding around inside him was almost knocking him over while he stood here trying to play it cool.

‘I’m preparing something to eat as per doctor’s orders,’ he relayed evenly. ‘If you can walk this far without collapsing, come and join me.’

For a second, for a pin-piercing, nerve-tripping second, he thought she was going to launch a second verbal attack on him. She drew in a breath, her chin shot up, her fabulous blue eyes sparked, her gorgeously soft, full, vulnerable mouth parted and the scent for the fight filled his body with a sizzling hot charge that would have only one outlet.

And that was the reason why he must have been mad to believe he could brush her off like the others. She fired him up even when he did not want firing up. She fired him up without even knowing she was doing it! She challenged him, fascinated him—annoyed the hell out of him.

‘I need to use a bathroom,’ she said.

It was like coming down from a drug-induced high. Long fingers gripping the tea towel like it was some kind of lethal weapon, he waved it at a door to her right. ‘Second door down,’ he indicated.

With that he stepped back into the kitchen and vented some of what was gripping him by tossing the tea towel across the room the moment he knew she couldn’t see him do it.

Mia collapsed against the closed bathroom door. She had absolutely no idea what had been going on just now but she felt as if she’d just survived an attack from invisible aliens. Every nerve end she possessed was standing on end and tingling with alarm. He had not moved. He had not said anything particularly contentious. He had not been anything but absolutely casual and cool.

It was her, she told herself. She was so uptight about these other sources she was sensing things about him that just were not there. Trying to pull herself together she turned to lock the door, only to frown when she discovered there wasn’t a lock there. Since when did multimil-lion-pound apartments come with no locks on the bathroom doors?

She was washing her hands when she recalled that the bathroom attached to her bedroom in Hampshire had no lock and neither had the bedroom door. And all of the doors there had been standing wide open, as if the sheer pace of restless energy Nikos always generated meant he needed to move around his homes without the irritating restriction of having to pause to fling open doors.

And that was it, Mia recognised suddenly. All those strange sensations she had been picking up on out there just now had been the sparking trails of his restless energy screaming around the walls, trying to get out, because he had to be feeling so constrained by the appalling discovery that she was carrying his child.

He was slicing a knife through a fresh crisp salad sandwich when she presented herself in the doorway. Her unpredictable stomach immediately reacted to the delicious smell with a hungry growl.

Glimpsing her hovering there Nikos indicated with the knife to one of the high stools set by a marble-topped eating bar. ‘Sit down,’ he invited.

Reluctant to move any closer to him but too hungry to stay where she was, Mia hitched herself onto the stool.

‘Drink,’ he said, setting a tall glass of sparkling fresh orange down in front of her. Half the sandwich arrived while she was drinking thirstily from the glass.

‘I don’t know what you like so I’ve piled everything in there. Just take out what you don’t want to eat.’

In other words, eating nothing was not an option, Mia interpreted. Not that she was thinking of causing a fight about it. She was too hungry.

‘I thought you were in Busan,’ she said as she set down her glass.

‘I flew back overnight.’ Lifting up a boiling kettle he poured the water into a stainless-steel cafetière, infusing the room with the rich aroma of freshly ground coffee.

About to pick up the sandwich, her fingers stilled. ‘Because you found out I was pregnant,’ she prompted.