Free Mia’s Scandal by Michelle Reid Page A

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 punchin 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 for 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 nonexistent 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 fingerstogether 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 supercontrolled Nikos Theakis could not stop the rueful twitch that took hold of his mouth.
    He caught a glimpse of some of Oscar’s arrogance in the way she nodded her head at him before she spun away on the heels of her ridiculously high shoes. Her chin was high, her shoulders back, her hair a glossy black stream of loose waves down her taut back. Not a single tremor showed in her body as she walked up to her door, keyed in her security code, then pushed open the door and stepped inside.
    The door shut with an impressively controlled soft thud behind her. As if it was a sign that he could drop his guard—or whatever it was that was holding him—Nikos let his shoulders fall back against the wall behind him and closed his eyes.
    Mia Bianchi was fast becoming the kind of recreational drug he never indulged in. The kind you only took on if you were looking for total loss of control of your life.
    He needed a woman, Nikos decided grimly.He should not have blown off the one he could have been seeing tonight, in favour of chasing after the one he could not have.
    Opening his eyes on that