The Balfour Legacy. Кэрол МортимерЧитать онлайн книгу.

      Michelle Reid grew up on the southern edges of Manchester, the youngest in a family of five lively children. Now she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire, with her busy executive husband and two grown-up daughters. She loves reading, the ballet and playing tennis when she gets the chance. She hates cooking, cleaning and despises ironing! Sleep she can do without and produces some of her best written work during the early hours of the morning.

      For Imelda, my wonderful mother, who is currently enjoying her ninety-ninth year.

      Thanks, Mum, for gifting me with my love of reading and encouraging me to dare to write.

      Prologue

      MIA stood poised between two great stone gateposts on top of which stood a matching pair of fierce golden griffins perched as if ready to swoop.

      A fine shiver ran down her taut backbone. She had to drag her eyes away from their watchful presence in case they glared her into losing her nerve. Part eagle, part lion, she recognised the two fearsome creatures from the Balfour family crest she’d seen emblazoned on the Balfour website along with the family motto Validus, Superbus quod Fidelis…

      Powerful, Proud and Loyal…

      ‘Dio,’ she breathed in a soft shaken whisper, so intimidated by the sheer opulent grandeur of the stately entrance that the butterflies already playing havoc in her stomach went wild.

      Behind her, the sound of the taxicab that had brought her here from the airport was slowly fading into the distance, leaving her alone in the weak February sunlight filtering down through the bare branches of the overhanging trees.

      It felt strange to think that only one short week ago she had been living her life with her aunt in rural Tuscany, completely unaware that there was a rich and glamorous English family called Balfour, never mind that she could be connected to the glorious name.

      She would still be unaware of it if that coldly distant person who was supposed to be her mother had not ignored her pleas to let her come and visit her, making Tia Giulia decide it was time to reveal a dark secret she had been keeping to herself for twenty long years.

      Now here she stood on the very brink of meeting Oscar Balfour. Proud head of the house of Balfour. Powerful businessman and billionaire. Husband to three very different wives and father to seven—seven—beautiful daughters.

      Eight daughters, Mia adjusted, and it made her tummy flip over.

      Would a man who had already been blessed with seven daughters want another one?

      It was the question she had come all this way to ask him. She needed to face Oscar Balfour and take his reaction to her existence square on her vulnerable chin. If he refused to acknowledge her, then what had she lost but a little bit more of her heart? The cold rejection of her mother had clawed out another huge chunk of it, so his rejection could not be any more hurtful, could it?

      And anyway, there was that chance that he might be prepared to welcome her.

      Biting down on her full soft trembling lip, Mia reached down to grasp the handle of her suitcase, then straightened. Setting her narrow shoulders inside her soft woven jacket she tipped the case onto its wheels. Her heart was going pitter-patter, she noticed, feeling a tightening across her chest that made it almost impossible for her to breathe. As she stepped out and placed her weight on her leading foot, tiny pinpricks of tension tingled up her leg to her spine. For a second she felt slightly dizzy. For a second she had to close her eyes.

      When she opened them again she found she was staring down a long stretch of driveway lined either side by an avenue of old trees. She could not see the house from here because of a dip in the land ahead, but she knew it was out there defending its privacy in its own secluded valley, because it had said so on the Balfour website.

      Now all she had to do was walk between those two lines of trees towards it, she told herself, aware as she made herself start walking that her insides were truly quailing with dread at what she was doing, and yet also aware of a quivering, tumbling sense of excitement that danced like fire in her blood.

      Nikos Theakis was not a man who suffered emotional excesses. In fact, he prided himself on his cold, calm businesslike approach to most facets of his life. But as he drove away from his breakfast meeting with Oscar that morning, there was nothing calm or businesslike about what he was taking away with him.

      He was in shock. The whole Balfour family was in shock, the only one of them seemingly managing to cope being Lillian Balfour herself.

      A soft curse broke free from his throat as the pale frail image of Oscar’s beautiful wife swam up in front of him, smiling bravely as she’d bid him a painfully final farewell.

      Emotion swooped down through his body, sending his foot down hard on the accelerator as if the angry burst of speed would take the alien feeling away. The powerful car leapt forward, up and out of the valley, taking him beneath the canopy of tangling bare branches that lined his route away from the Balfour estate.

      But he wasn’t concentrating. Nikos knew that even as he saw her standing there, directly in his way. For a few chilling seconds he was so sure he was seeing some ghostly apparition dressed all in black that he forgot to slam his foot on the brakes.

      He had never experienced anything like it. In those few stark, stunning split seconds it took him to connect with his wits, his shocked gaze