Read Online Mia’s Scandal by Michelle Reid - Free Book Online

us.’
    ‘We were just talking about Italy!’ Mia impressed upon him in self-defence.
    ‘I got this really bad feeling that I was about to be sidelined. Not good for my ego at all.’ Nikos smiled. ‘Lesson one in the use of social skills, cara, concentrate solely on the man you are dining with.’
    Not quite sure if she was supposed to laugh at the ridiculous image Nikos had constructed of the waiter muscling in on him, he diverted her with, ‘What would you like to eat?’
    Mia dutifully buried her attention on the menu. A different waiter arrived to take their order. Nikos delivered it in the clipped cool tone that did not encourage the waiter to linger.
    ‘Talk to me,’ he said abruptly once they were alone again.
    Lifting up her face she asked, ‘What about?’
    ‘Anything—the wine.’ He indicated to her glass.
    Dutifully picking up her wine glass Mia sipped. ‘Nice,’ she said.
    ‘Is that it?’
    ‘Is this another lesson in social dining?’ she dared.
    ‘No.’ He almost let a smile catch hold of his mouth. ‘It is simply a request for you to extend your answer. You are Italian. I cannot believe you don’t have a better opinion about wine than just nice.’
    Be interesting, in other words. Well, OK, she could try to do that, Mia decided, relaxing back into her seat. ‘Tia Giulia and I make our own wine from our own grapes,’ she announced. ‘It’s just a hobby really, but our wine tastes easily as good as this very expensive wine…’ she saidwith a wave of her glass. ‘We pick and tread the grapes in the traditional manner with our skirts held up like so—’ she gestured, unaware how entirely she had captured her audience ‘—and we laugh a lot—it is supposed to be good for the taste. If it is a good year, our neighbours will come to exchange other produce for bottles of our wine. Tia has some really wonderful old oak barrels in the cellar…’
    Their first course arrived and Mia kept talking through it, taking a small forkful of sea bass laced with a delicious sauce she had never tasted before.
    ‘Your life in Tuscany was very different from the one you’re living now,’ Nikos observed when she paused for a breath.
    Mia nodded, eyes shadowing as she sat forward to pick up her glass. ‘Do you miss Greece when you are away from it?’
    ‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘I fly in and out of Athens too often to miss it.’
    ‘Family, then,’ she probed.
    ‘None.’ The way he carefully veiled his eyes made Mia frown because she was almost certain she’d just hit a raw nerve. ‘Tell me why you left it so long to contact Oscar.’ As neatly as that he turned the conversation away from him and back on to her.
    ‘Because I only discovered I had a fatherthis year—on my twenty-first birthday to be exact…’
    She went on to explain about discovering Oscar, in between savouring forkfuls of food. She didn’t notice that Nikos barely touched the food on his plate, or that he rarely removed his dark eyes from her face. She was not aware that he kept filling up her wine glass or that her tongue was loosening the more that she drank. By the time their dessert arrived she was feeling so mellow she even reached across the table to spoon up a sample of his untouched dessert and teased him with her laughing eyes as she placed the stolen morsel in her mouth.
    ‘I have a sweet tooth.’
    ‘Among other things,’ he murmured oddly.
    About to ask him what he meant by that—
    ‘Do you want coffee?’ he got in before her.
    ‘And spoil the taste of the wine? Grazie, no,’ she refused.
    ‘Then if you’ve finished do you mind if we leave now?’
    ‘Oh…’ Mia tensed, her slender spine arching up on the sudden realisation that she’d talked his socks off all the way through the meal! It was no wonder he was wearing that blank expression on his face. ‘I had lost track of how long we have been here…’
    ‘And the restaurant has emptied,’ Nikos pointed out dryly. ‘We’re the last