Best Modern Romances Of The Year 2017

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.

‘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.

‘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.’

She turned him on. Tia was exhilarated by that grated confession and clutched protectively at his jacket, which fell past her knees, revelling in the intimacy of the silk lining still warm from his skin and the faint evocative fragrance of his cologne that still clung to the fabric. She breathed that fragrance in like an addict. Unlike Afonso, Max didn’t drench himself in scent. The attraction was mutual. Of course, she had suspected that after the kiss but Max had been very businesslike and detached when they had been alone after the stylists had departed and she had felt discouraged. Now standing in the lift, wrapped in Max’s jacket, struggling not to study him with lustful eyes lest he instantly recognise her shamelessness, Tia felt transformed, shedding the sense of failure and mortification that events at the party had wakened in her.

If Max wanted her too, could anything else matter to her? In that instant nothing mattered to Tia but the way she was feeling. For so long she had been locked away from all the normal experiences she should have begun enjoying in her teen years. That was when she should’ve enjoyed her first kiss, falling in and out of love, dating, gossiping, learning all the many things that a young woman had to learn as she grew up. But Tia had been denied that adult education and now that she had met Max, she was greedy to catch up with everything she had missed out on.

Butterflies were whipping up a storm in her tummy and her heart was beating very fast. Max glanced down at her and swiftly looked away again, his strong jaw line pulling tight to define his superb bone structure even more cleanly.

‘You’ll want to go to bed now. You have an early start in the morning,’ he informed her briskly as he opened the door of their suite and stood back for her to precede him, the courtesy making her feel delightfully feminine.

‘I’m not a child, Max,’ Tia reminded him afresh.

Max gritted his teeth together, for he had not been impervious to the way she had studied him in the lift. But that kind of early intimacy wasn’t on his schedule and he refused to deviate from what his logic told him was the right and proper way to embark on any sort of relationship with Tia Grayson. That one kiss had been dynamite and he didn’t play with dynamite and he didn’t lust uncontrollably after virgins like the creepy little loser who had already tried to lure her into bed that night, he reasoned.

‘I’m twenty-two in three months’ time,’ she reminded him, wriggling her slight shoulders to remove his jacket and settle it on the arm of his chair.