Maisey Yates - Best Modern Romances Of The Year 2017

‘So where exactly are we here?’ Tia asked again.

‘Why do you keep on asking me that? I don’t know the address. It belongs to Domingos Paredes. We’re in Jardim Botânico. It’s an exclusive residential area.’ Afonso trailed a suggestive hand down her bare back, making her shudder. ‘Play your cards right and you could end up swanning around a house like this. I bet there’s nothing you want more than to be a wife and a mother. Some guys go for that. Come on...stop being such a prude.’

‘I’m not a prude,’ Tia argued as Afonso backed her up against the wall. ‘I don’t feel that way about you.’

‘But you haven’t even given me a try,’ Afonso protested, hands roving all over her and trying to go in for a kiss but stymied by the manner in which Tia hastily jerked her head away.

‘Let go of me!’ she told him with sudden loud, angry emphasis. ‘I don’t have to put up with this if I don’t want to!’

Afonso backed away a step and swore viciously at her. ‘You’re a freak,’ he told her nastily. ‘Nothing but a damned freak!’

As the young Brazilian stalked back into the crowded main room of the party in a rage of wounded vanity, Tia was trembling and tears were burning the backs of her eyes, making them throb. She walked towards the back of the big house, stepping over prone bodies and entwined couples to escape the worst of the noise. On the terrace she dug out her new mobile phone with a shaking hand and rang Max, who had programmed his number in.

‘I want to come back to the hotel,’ she told him chokily.

‘What’s the address?’ Max queried. ‘Has something happened?’

‘I’m at a party and someone called me a freak. It’s probably the truth,’ she told him in a shaky rush. ‘I don’t know the address but I know who the house belongs to and the area. I can’t get a taxi because I have no money.’

‘I’ll find out where you are and pick you up as soon as I can.’

‘I’ll wait outside.’

‘No, stay indoors where it’s safe,’ Max instructed. ‘And calm down.’

Ashamed of the tears blurring her vision and what felt like her general uselessness as the strong independent woman she was determined to be, Tia approached a female in the bathroom queue and finally asked for the address, which she duly passed on to Max.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Maddie demanded of her in the hall. ‘And what did you do to poor Afonso? When I last saw him, he was really into you.’

‘I wasn’t into him.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter. We’re all moving on now to this great club.’

‘I’m going back to the hotel, but thanks for bringing me out,’ Tia said very politely.

‘Mother Sancha did a real number on you, didn’t she? You really don’t know how to enjoy yourself at all,’ Maddie declared pityingly. ‘If I’m honest I always thought you’d join the flock.’

‘I never had a vocation,’ Tia admitted, wondering how long it would take for Max to arrive and sitting down on a chair by the wall because she was light-headed. ‘But I’ll admit that I don’t know how to enjoy myself the way you do. I’ll return these clothes back to you tomorrow.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. I won’t wear them again after you’ve worn them,’ Maddie confessed with a little moue of distaste at the idea. ‘I’d only be dumping them.’

Tia reddened and nodded, more uncomfortable than ever. In the convent, they had utilised and recycled everything possible. ‘I’ll collect my jeans,’ she said stubbornly. ‘They’re my very first pair.’

‘And that says it all really, doesn’t it?’ Maddie said almost sadly as she walked on by.

Her colour fluctuating, Tia thought about Max and admitted that what she had felt in his arms had also told her all she needed to know. After all, once he had kissed her she had immediately known that she didn’t want anyone else kissing her. But what if on his terms it had merely been a casual kiss? Of the same sort that Afonso had offered? How did she tell the difference? How did she know?

All that she knew was that Max’s mouth on hers had been the most glorious and exhilarating feeling she had ever experienced and she literally couldn’t wait for him to do it again. But would he want to do it again? And how did a woman encourage a man to make that kind of advance without being brazen about it? She was mortified to acknowledge that she would have gone into a bedroom with Max without a word of protest. What did that mean about her? That the convent teaching of purity before marriage had hit stony ground when it came to her? Or that while she was aware of that moral ideal, it was only an ideal and she was equally well aware that many people experimented with sex before marriage?

Max was in the back of a limousine speeding through the Jardim Botânico area and he felt like the biggest bastard in the world. He was supposed to be taking care of Tia but he had no experience of looking after anyone and, clearly, he’d fallen at the first hurdle. Instead of accompanying her to her friend’s house, he had let her go alone and he had not even ensured that she had money with her. Admittedly he had first established that Madalena Perez was the daughter of a respected diplomat and seemed a safe companion. Although it hadn’t occurred to him that Tia could be going out on the social scene, it should have done and he should have been there. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, a minatory voice sneered in his hind brain. He had ducked his responsibility because he’d wanted to work.

What did that say about him?

After all, Tia was infinitely more precious to Andrew Grayson than his empire and Max knew it. As Max’s future bride, she should be equally precious to Max and deserving of special attention, but he had let her down. He had organised a spa grooming appointment for her the next day, not to mention a trip to see the giant religious statue on top of Corcovado Mountain, but those were superficial treats and would be of little consolation to her when she was as hurt and upset as she had sounded on the phone.

Max helped himself to a second drink, his inbuilt alcohol monitor screaming reproach at him for the choice. As the son of a violent alcoholic, Max usually only had one drink at a time, never more, fearful that he could have inherited a gene that could make him more likely to fall into his father’s addiction. Not that there was anything good to be said for any of the genes Max had inherited, he conceded with grim self-loathing. Not for the first time, he reminded himself that his mother’s sister, Carina, his aunt, had been a perfectly normal woman in decent employment and respected by all who knew her, but it didn’t remove the sting of shame that any recollection of his own seedy beginnings invariably unleashed.

Even in the surge of arrivals and departures that saw cars constantly moving up and down the driveway to the big villa, Tia was primed to recognise the one that contained Max and she had bounced up off her chair even before he appeared at the door, head and shoulders wider and taller than the two younger men who arrived there before him. When someone dragged open the door and her expectant gaze landed on his darkly beautiful features she felt ridiculously tearful and had to restrain herself from throwing herself at him like a child.

Max, for his part, was frankly shocked rigid by the vision of Tia in skin-tight red satin shorts, a silky, glittery, barely there top and Perspex stripper heels. He had relished the shape of her in the jeans she had worn earlier that afternoon, almost painfully aware of her long slender legs and her delicate but highly feminine curves at hip and chest. But braless and in shorts, everything was on view and he had an outrageous urge to yank his jacket off and drape it round her because the blatant sexuality of what she brandished in such an outfit was a very poor frame for the young woman she actually was.