Maisey Yates - Best Modern Romances Of The Year 2017

‘Max...’ she breathed, hurrying towards him, her eagerness to leave the party unconcealed in the huge cornflower-blue eyes pinned to him.

Max herded her outside towards the limo, striving honourably to ignore the little bounce of her small firm breasts as she went down the steps and the flash of long creamy inner thigh that led up to her scarlet-defined crotch. But he was still a man and he got painfully hard just picturing that first full-frontal view of her again, his brain quick to conjure up the definition of thin satin over a woman’s most intimate area. And then the rage took a hold of him like a rejuvenating bolt of lightning that burned out all sexual response, which in the strangest sense was a relief for him.

As soon as the driver closed the passenger door on them, Max rounded on Tia, dark eyes flaming gold with instinctive fury. ‘You don’t ever go out dressed like that again!’ he thundered across the car at her.

Taken aback by that sudden attack, Tia bridled and her eyes flared a darker blue in angry confusion. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You look like a pole dancer or a stripper. You’re showing too much skin. Where did you get those clothes? I can’t believe the stylist authorised those shorts.’

‘What’s a pole dancer?’ Tia enquired icily, her spine very stiff in her corner of the car because who did he think he was to tell her what he thought she should be wearing? He was a man and what she wore was none of his business.

‘Not the sort of woman you want to be mistaken for.’

‘Madalena loaned me these clothes and I wasn’t comfortable in them,’ Tia admitted grudgingly. ‘But her friends were wearing the same sort of thing. And the stylist didn’t authorise me to choose clothes today, I made my own choices and they were probably pretty boring choices because I didn’t pick any party stuff like this.’

‘People...men in particular will judge you by what you wear,’ Max bit out with a raw edge, his anger compressed but still burning like a solar flare inside his chest because every time he thought of the men who had enjoyed the same view of Tia that he had had, he got furious all over again.

‘That’s very old-fashioned,’ Tia replied without hesitation. ‘Anyway Maddie made sure our companions knew I wasn’t as sexy as I looked because she told them all that I was a virgin,’ she confessed boldly, far less embarrassed by that reality than she had been earlier that evening after Maddie had forced her to deal with that topic in public.

‘She told them?’ His nostrils flared with distaste, an ebony brow flying up in frowning query. ‘What the hell was she playing at?’

‘She tried to persuade me to lose my “V-card”, as she called it, by going into a bedroom with one of the men,’ Tia confided. ‘I refused and that’s why I got called a freak.’

‘She’s not a friend,’ Max pronounced, helplessly cast back to his own experience of betrayal by a friend he had trusted when he had been a teenager. ‘Definitely not a friend. Friends don’t try to harm or humiliate you.’

Tia winced. ‘Think I’ve kind of worked that out for myself, Max. I even suspect that dressing me up like this was part of the joke for her. She wasn’t the girl I remembered from school.’

Max closed a hand over hers where her small fingers were curling defensively against the leather upholstery. ‘Not your fault. It was mine. I shouldn’t have let you go alone. I didn’t even make sure you were carrying money.’

‘No, Max...’ Tia yanked her hand from beneath the comforting warmth of his although it took effort to voluntarily break that contact. ‘Don’t treat me like a child you have to take care of. I have to learn how to handle myself and not depend on others. I’ll find my way. I won’t be a freak for ever.’

‘You’re not a freak,’ Max growled, forcibly closing his hand over hers, all the more tense because he knew he had utilised that same word in his head when he’d first learned about her unusual background. ‘You’re only a little out of step with the modern world and given time that will quickly fade. Your father should’ve been shot for leaving you at the convent even after you finished school.’

‘He didn’t want to be bothered with me and out of sight was out of mind for him. My mother wasn’t much different,’ Tia sighed. ‘I think they were both a bit shallow and selfish when it came to personal relationships. With Dad, all his passion went into his missionary zeal and he didn’t really have room for anything that interfered with that. My mother, I think, is more driven by money and social position.’

His brows had drawn together. ‘You’ve met your mother? I assumed you hadn’t seen her since she left your father when you were a baby.’

Tia compressed her generous mouth and looked steadily back at him, for the first time striking him as being more mature than her age on paper. ‘Curiosity brought her to the convent. She visited me when I was thirteen to explain why she’d left me behind.’

‘Che diavolo...!’ Max exclaimed in surprise. ‘That must’ve been some explanation that long after the event.’

‘No, it was quite simple.’ Tia’s luscious soft mouth compressed. ‘She broke up with the man she originally left my father for and then she met another man, a rich man, and they married. Although her second husband knew she had been married before, he didn’t know she had left a baby behind her. They went on to have children together, two boys and another girl, I seem to remember.’

‘Your half-brothers and half-sister,’ Max commented.

Tia shrugged a slight shoulder in dismissal of that familial label. ‘But they don’t know I exist and my mother doesn’t want them to know because she’s afraid she would lose her husband and her wonderful life here in Rio after keeping me a secret for so long. He was more important to her than I could ever be. It was really that simple.’

For some reason that non-judgemental tone of acceptance made a kind of murderous rage swell up inside Max’s broad chest. His own parents had been appalling in terms of family affection and Tia had not done that much better, yet her parents had not even had the excuse of ignorance, poverty or addiction. He breathed in deep in the silence and swallowed hard, for there was really nothing he could say to her that she hadn’t already worked out for herself. She was shrewder than he had given her credit for, convent-bred or not. He was both disconcerted by that acknowledgement and relieved, for the more intelligent and wary she was, the quicker she would adapt to life as Andrew’s heiress. And as his wife?

Max stiffened, squaring his wide shoulders, his handsome mouth flattening. He refused to even think about that aspect this early in the day. If he did marry Tia as Andrew had urged him to do, no actual wedding would take place for months. Max refused to rush into anything. Max liked structure, order, strategic planning. He didn’t do impulse or invite disruption in any field and would never have scaled the heights he had without serious self-discipline. With Andrew expecting to survive another six months at least, Max planned to utilise a good part of that time to move in unthreatening, measured steps with Tia while she got to know her grandfather.

The limo drew up outside the brightly lit hotel. Max sprang out first and then disconcerted her by peeling off his suit jacket and draping it round her shoulders as she emerged from the car.

‘Is that really necessary?’ Tia enquired, reeling a little and struggling to find her balance in the ridiculous heels as the fresh air engulfed her.

‘Sì...if you can turn me on this hard and fast when I’m striving to stay cool, I imagine other men will stare too, and I am assuming you would prefer not to be stared at and lusted after,’ Max murmured in a raw undertone, astonishing her with that abrupt and unexpected admission. ‘On the other hand, if you enjoy being the centre of male attention, give me my jacket back...it’s entirely your decision.’