Maisey Yates - Best Modern Romances Of The Year 2017

‘You like the flowers?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered distractedly. ‘I love flowers. I always dreamt of having a real garden of my own.’

‘I thought you wanted to be a teacher,’ Max remarked, because the Reverend Mother had shared that with him.

‘I was willing to be one to get the training and the education. In my life it’s always been a question of not what you want but what is possible,’ Tia explained. ‘There’s a teacher training college in Belém and I thought that studying there would be achievable but my father wasn’t willing to pay for it and that was that.’

‘Andrew’s country house has beautiful gardens,’ Max told her, watching the tip of her tongue steal out to moisten her full lower lip as she looked up at him and almost groaning with the force of his arousal.

His dark eyes were gleaming like gold ingots and Tia couldn’t drag her gaze from his lean, darkly beautiful face. Without even knowing what she was doing she took an infinitesimal step closer and Max reached for her almost simultaneously, hands sliding round her back and yanking her into contact with his lean, powerful body with a sexual insistence and impatience that should have shocked her but which instead thrilled her.

It was Tia’s first kiss—first everything, really—and the hard, hungry pressure of his beautiful masculine mouth crashing down on hers unleashed so many sensations in her body that she felt dizzy. The tips of her breasts tingled and stiffened, pushing against the coarse cotton material of her top. A sliding warmth prickled between her thighs and made her press them together tightly. Suddenly she was insanely conscious of a part of her body she never thought about, of the sensitivity and the shocking level of physical awareness she had never known before.

His tongue licked along the fullness of her lower lip and then nibbled at the tender swollen flesh before his tongue plunged into her mouth and withdrew. At that point her legs would have folded under her had he not literally been holding her upright with his hands because the sexual vibrations assailing her only intensified. A choked gasp was dragged from her as he spread his fingers across her narrow shoulder and held her there to kiss her breathless.

Max was fiercely fighting an insane urge to carry her into his bedroom when the knocking at the door finally penetrated the fog of his passion. What the hell was he doing? he asked himself furiously as he jerked back from her, almost overwhelmed by the passionate response he had won from her. He wanted more, he wanted so much more that it took a lot longer than the few seconds he had to get a grip on himself before he opened the door.

Four women greeted him with wide smiles and swiftly identified themselves as the team engaged to provide Tia with a new wardrobe. Shooting her a cloaked glance to note that she was very flushed and dazed in appearance, he urged her to take them into her bedroom.

Diavolo, he castigated himself as soon as the bedroom door closed. He had jumped the gun, offered too much too soon and probably shocked her, but going slowly with a woman, much like talking in a normal way, was something Max had never done before. And he had utilised all the finesse of a bull in a china shop, an awareness that infuriated him as he stomped off to change and have a cold shower to chill the fever still burning through him. It was not as though he were sex-starved, he reasoned angrily with himself, so why that lack of control? That mad grab and hold making-out session, which was not his style at all?

Relieved to escape the immediate aftermath of that embrace with Max, Tia was happy to be distracted by measurements and catalogues depicting various styles. She had only wanted jeans and tee shirts and some decent shoes but there was, she discovered in amazement, a vast area of choice from which to make selections. The little girl and disappointed teenager who had never got to have pretty clothes triumphed in the adult she had become and she went a little crazy before panicking and surging back into the other room to find Max.

‘What’s my budget...? I mean, how much can I spend?’ she pressed anxiously.

‘There is no budget. Order anything that takes your fancy...handbags, shoes, everything,’ Max stressed. ‘You’ll need it all in England and it’s better to arrive prepared.’

Tia surveyed his darkly handsome features with wondering appreciation. Had ever a young woman been so blessed as she was at that moment? she marvelled, smiling widely at him. She could buy anything she liked and Max, the man of her dreams, had kissed her, which meant that he was attracted to her as well, even if she suspected that he hadn’t quite intended to kiss her when he had.

Was Max struggling with the same feelings she was struggling with? Feeling buoyant at that suspicion and walking on air in the belief that the growing strength of her feelings was being reciprocated, Tia vanished back into the bedroom.

CHAPTER THREE

‘I DON’T WANT TO,’ Tia said simply as Afonso, one of Madalena’s male friends, tried to pull her into the bedroom that had just been vacated by another couple.

‘Thought you wanted to lose that V-card...’ In the face of her refusal, Afonso managed to both smile and sneer simultaneously. He was good-looking and he knew it, his lack of familiarity with rejection obvious to her.

‘Maddie was joking, for goodness’ sake,’ Tia declared, wishing that that were true of her former best friend but no longer quite sure because she felt as if she was learning the hard way that four years could change a friend into someone she barely recognised.

‘No, she wasn’t,’ Afonso insisted, still unwilling to accept that no meant no in Tia’s case as he pulled her against him with a possessive and determined hand.

He was drenched in cologne and she could hardly breathe that close to him. She gave him a dispassionate glance, hating the swimming sensation in her head from the alcohol she had already told Madalena she didn’t want to drink. Not because she was stuffy and prim, as Maddie had insisted she was. She had refused more alcohol as soon as she’d felt her body overreacting to that second large drink. No, indeed: the very last thing Tia wanted to risk was getting drunk at a wild party full of strangers, none of whom she felt she could rely on.

It was ironic that she wasn’t having anything like the fun she had once assumed such social events delivered when she was younger. Fun, she rather thought now, depended on the company you were in and she knew she was in the wrong company. Losing her virginity with some stranger on a night out had no appeal for her. Maddie, however, had decided it was a terrific idea, pointing out that the first time was always ‘rubbish’ for a woman. Tia had said nothing because that conversation had taken place in a group setting and she had been embarrassed at having her sexual ignorance talked about in public as if it were solely a subject for amusement.

Nothing with Maddie had gone as Tia had planned and hoped. When she had phoned Maddie that afternoon, the brunette had invited her over that very evening and Tia had naively pictured a chatty session of catching up. When she’d arrived, though, Maddie had already been entertaining a bunch of friends and the first thing she had done was insist that Tia borrow some of her party clothes to go out with them. Stripped of her jeans and tee, Tia had found herself being crammed into tight satin shorts and a backless top, both garments exposing far more of her body than she was comfortable with. But the other women had been wearing similar outfits and she had wanted so desperately to try to fit in and not be the party pooper Maddie had suggested she was that she had kept her reservations to herself.

Maddie was engaged to a handsome young businessman. Unhappily the couple had vanished within minutes of arriving at the party, lumbering Tia with Afonso and his sidekicks, whose only topic of conversation appeared to be dirty, rather infantile jokes. Before Maddie had finally abandoned her, however, Tia had seen a scattering of powder below her school friend’s nose and had suspected that she was using drugs, which probably explained her unfamiliar highly extroverted and bad-tempered behaviour.