Best Modern Romances Of The Year 2017

CHAPTER FOUR

TIA SUCKED IN a great lungful of air as Max temporarily released her mouth. There was a golden glow of what she fully recognised as lust in his stunning eyes. It didn’t have to be love, she told herself, she wasn’t looking for love yet, was content with a dose of healthy normal lust. In the future, there would be plenty of time and opportunity for her to fall in love. But even so, nothing had ever felt so necessary as Max’s sensual mouth plundering hers and the sweet, sliding invasion of his tongue.

Her body was all pulled taut and needy with responses that were new to her. Her breasts felt ridiculously sensitive, the tightly beaded tips pushing against the scratchy fabric of her top.

‘You should make me wait for this,’ Max growled soft and low, conflict in his hungry gaze as he perused her.

Already flushed, Tia’s face burned at that unsought advice. ‘I can’t believe you’re saying that to me. I thought you wanted me.’

‘Doubt there’s a man in Rio who wouldn’t want you, bella mia,’ Max assured her helplessly. ‘But I also don’t want you to have any regrets.’

‘Why on earth would I regret this?’ Tia questioned, sitting lithely up to reclaim his drugging mouth again for herself, hands settling on his warm, wide shoulders, fingers flirting with the silky tips of his black hair. The buzz in her body wouldn’t let her stay still or act compliant.

Max loosed the halter tie at the nape of her neck and found the soft pouting swell of her breasts with his hands, catching her nipples between thumb and finger to pluck at the swollen buds, pushing her back against the banked-up pillows as she writhed.

The liquid heat at the heart of her went into a frenzy when he touched her breasts. She pressed her thighs together, head rolling back and shifting restively against the pillow as he released her reddened lips to close his to her straining nipples. The light was burning and her lashes flickered on a sudden view of Max’s dark head over her bare breasts. For an instant she went rigid, mortification threatening to claim her because she wasn’t accustomed to being even partially naked in front of anyone and the shock of that glimpse was extreme. Are you a woman or a mouse? a little voice asked at the back of her head, and the words bubbling on her tongue died there. She knew what she was doing, she did, she told herself, trembling as the heat between her thighs mounted with every tug of his mouth. How could anything that felt so good be wrong?

Max rearranged her petite body on the bed the better to enjoy her. Her nipples were a delicate tea-rose pink, darkened by his attentions, and her breasts exquisitely shaped but bare handfuls to a man used to better-endowed women. Even so, Max was enthralled by her porcelain-pale skin and the satiny softness of it, even while he was deciding that while Teddy the dog might be a little on the porky side his owner was a little too thin and needed feeding up. He wrenched at the shorts and the thin material ripped, startling her, troubled blue eyes opening to belatedly recognise that he was still fully clothed.

‘Take your shirt off,’ she whispered.

Charmed by that instruction, Max dealt her a slanting grin. ‘You wouldn’t think you were a first timer at this.’

Forcing herself to keep her hands loose on the bedspread when self-consciousness prompted her to cover her breasts from his view, Tia watched him strip off his shirt.

* * *

‘I’m a quick learner,’ she told him, her mouth watering as he exposed the coiled lines of muscle across his abdomen and flat stomach. The dampness at her core increased and she couldn’t drag her gaze from his lean, powerful body. His bronzed skin sheathed rippling muscles, a broad chest and narrow hips stretching down into long, hair-roughened thighs and around there her scrutiny bounced hurriedly upward again, noting the trail of dark hair that ran from his navel to disappear below the band of his boxers and, the whole time, striving not to think nervously about his obvious arousal.

Was she stupid? She was annoyed with herself for that schoolgirlish embarrassment. He was aroused, of course he was, just as she was. She wasn’t about to let the horror stories told by Maddie and her potty-mouthed friends of their first sexual experiences to unnerve her...was she? She was a grown woman, not an adolescent playing with forces she didn’t understand.

Max came down on the bed, kneeling over her, caging her with his big body and a rush of excitement snaked through her, every nerve ending jangling with anticipation. He had done this before, hadn’t he? Of course he had, she told herself instantly. But it didn’t always pay to make assumptions about people, she conceded.

‘You’ve done this before...haven’t you?’ Tia pressed awkwardly.

And Max, who didn’t embarrass easily, in fact who would have said he was impervious to embarrassment, could feel his face heating up. ‘Yes,’ he pronounced flatly, reasoning that, as she had waited, it was not impossible that he could have been the sort of rare male who waited too for that one special experience. And unfortunately, that set off a whole train of conjecture in his head about what Tia might want from a man. An innocence that matched her own? A guy who went to mass? A perfect shining angel of a male, who was honest and decent and religious? He didn’t think he was any of those things.

‘A lot?’ Tia could not resist prompting uneasily. ‘I mean...er, have you had a lot of women in your life?’

Wide, sensual lips compressing, Max simply jerked his head in acknowledgement, wishing that the heat in his face would subside.

Her own face warming, Tia closed her eyes but still saw the troubled dark gold of his gleaming eyes below the black fringe of his lashes. She had embarrassed him and she shouldn’t have done that. At least he had been honest, though; at least he hadn’t lied about it, she reflected ruefully.

‘I think this would be a lot more challenging if we were both virgins,’ Max breathed curtly while thinking he had never thought to share such a conversation in his life with a woman. Then again, he hadn’t bargained on a Constancia Grayson figuring in his future, had he? And Tia was very much one of a kind.

‘You’re probably right,’ Tia conceded.

‘But you’re also probably disappointed,’ Max breathed and gritted his teeth, suddenly feeling furiously out of his depth, wondering where he was planning to go with the dialogue and finally registering just how off his game he was that he didn’t actually know.

‘No. I don’t think I am,’ Tia murmured, huge blue eyes opening to dreamily survey him, pale fingers smoothing from his shoulder down over his chest in a considering caress that blanked his mind and locked his tongue, because the one thing Max did know at that precise moment was that he wanted her hands all over him.

Max lowered his dark head, drawn by forces he didn’t even understand. She might want some ideal, perfect male but guess what? She was getting him and she could learn to deal, he thought, with the kind of raw aggression that powered him through the business world. He focused on that soft, pouty mouth and went back hungrily for more, smiling into the kiss as her spine arched and her whole body reached up to him, responding to his expertise, wanting him.

Long brown fingers smoothed along her thigh and when she emerged from that kiss he was working his sensual path down over her squirming length and at some stage of the proceedings her knickers had gone and she felt shockingly, wickedly naked. But before she could even process that discovery, Max parted her thighs and began to do something she had read about but had never dreamt she would actually experience.

The wave of heat and mortification that pulsed through her shaken body was intense. In an abrupt move, she reached down and snarled her fingers into the black luxuriance of his hair and then he licked her, there, where she had never dreamt she would be so intimately touched, and such a pulse of shattering excitement gripped her that she fell back helpless against the pillows.

He did it again and she gasped, neck lifting, breasts straining, suddenly in the hold of something seemingly much stronger than she was. Her body writhed of its own volition, a crazy pressure building at her aching core, and her nails dug into his shoulders. He was ravishing her, tormenting her with pleasure, she thought wildly, in thrall to pure sensation. She trembled, shook, emitted muffled cries, utterly out of control, her entire being locked to the feeling of his fingers entering her previously unbreached body. His tongue flicked across the tiny bundle of nerves he had exposed and it was as though her body detonated, the pressure peaking and the aftershocks passing outward, sending a coiling energy blast of delight to pull at her. Sated, dazed, she fell back against the pillows in wonderment at what sex was all about.

‘No, you do not get to go to sleep now, bella mia,’ Max warned her thickly, sliding up her relaxed body to gaze down at her with molten golden eyes awash with hunger and need.

And Tia realised for possibly the first time that it wasn’t all about her and guilty colour washed her face, a new tenderness sliding in its wake as she noticed the tension etching his lean, darkly handsome features. As he lifted her legs and tilted her up to him, she only just restrained herself from wrapping her arms round him and hugging him for giving her a superlative introduction to the physical that bore no resemblance to the sexual horror stories she had been subjected to earlier that evening.

‘I hope this doesn’t hurt much but it might,’ Max breathed in a driven undertone. ‘I haven’t been with a virgin before.’

‘That’s all right,’ Tia framed in a rush, stretching up her head and claiming a kiss from that wide, sensual mouth that had taught her the meaning of pleasure.

As Max kissed her back, doing that flick of the tongue thing again that enthralled her and reanimated the heat in her pelvis, she felt him push against her tender flesh, inch by inch pushing for entry into her untested body. She was insanely conscious of his every tiny movement, equally aware that he had prepared her as well as he could. And it seemed to work until he drove deeper and there was a sharp pinch of pain that forced an involuntary gasp from between her parted lips. And he stopped.

‘No...go on,’ Tia urged, gritting her teeth, her body even more primed than she was for the great reveal, indeed the churning liquid heat in her pelvis craving exactly that development.

Max thrust home, crazily aware of her lush inner walls clenching round him. ‘So good,’ he ground out helplessly, revelling in every tight, hot, wet atom of her welcome and somewhere around then he lost himself as he had never lost himself in a woman before.

Hands clenched on her hips, he pulled back and then plunged into her again, hard and fast. The shock of it thrilled through her tender body like a storm warning. It was the most extraordinary pleasure she had ever experienced. As he pounded into her, her hands clawed in his hair and then into his shoulders and then down his back, the excitement and the pressure rising and rising until she could no longer contain it. Her heart thundering in her ears, her head jerking back and forth on the pillows, she felt that mighty surge of sensation gripping her womb and throwing her high as outer space again. She thrashed beneath him, unable to contain the ecstasy as convulsions quaked through her satiated body.

In the aftermath she felt so heavy, so languorous, she was bemused. ‘That was...don’t have the words...’

In bed or out of bed, Max rarely had words with women, preferring to escape intimacy with silence on the sensible grounds that what wasn’t said couldn’t be misinterpreted. But Tia had both arms and both legs wrapped around him and he was trapped. ‘That was the best sex I’ve ever had,’ he mumbled thickly, his head now aching so badly he couldn’t think straight.

In consternation at that awareness, Max reeled out of bed, as dizzy and disorientated as a drunk, and he finally appreciated that there was something badly amiss with him, something worse even than his usual punishing migraines. ‘Sorry, feeling weird,’ he framed with difficulty. ‘Think I must be overtired...’

Tia leapt out of bed as he sank down on the rug. ‘You need a doctor,’ she gasped.

‘Don’t want a doctor,’ Max told her predictably.

Fortunately, Tia discovered that a doctor was easily obtained by the helpful hotel staff. The minutes that followed her call were frantic. Between fetching Max a glass of water and finding and getting some clothes on her naked body before registering that Max was naturally equally naked, she felt harassed and anxious and very guilty. It was concussion, she knew it was, having seen the effects before in the convent infirmary. Max rambled on about his susceptibility to migraines and the medication he wanted her to get from his room but Tia only grabbed clothes from the built-in units in his room.

Persuading him to get back into the bed was a challenge but he didn’t appear to own pyjamas or a dressing gown and the only item of clothing she managed to get him into was a pair of boxers. By that stage the doctor was at the door and she had to answer it flustered and barefoot, but such was her apprehension for Max that she wasn’t concerned.

The young, chatty doctor wanted Max to have a hospital scan but Max was as immovable on that score as concrete laced with steel. For some reason, he didn’t like hospitals and he didn’t like scans. After considerable pressure from the worried doctor, who was equally convinced that Max had concussion from the blue-black bruising and the swelling that was visible when his hair was parted, Max agreed to attend the hospital the following morning. Discussing the treatment Max required, Tia saw the doctor out of the suite.

‘Tia...’ Max called almost as soon as she was out of his sight.

Breathless, Tia sped back and studied him, wondering what was normal for Max because the doctor had asked her that question when telling her to look out for abnormal behaviour. But how much did she know about the man she had just slept with? Next to nothing, came the answer. Ashamed of that reality, Tia reddened.

‘I can’t simply lie here in bed like I’m ill!’ Max bit out in frustration.

‘You have to. You’re very dizzy and if you fall I couldn’t get you up on my own,’ Tia pointed out sensibly, her practical nature taking charge. ‘It’s midnight anyway and it’s only for a few hours.’

‘I don’t go to bed at midnight like your grandfather. In fact I’m used to late hours and little sleep,’ Max murmured drily, studying her from below the lush black fringe of his lashes, barely contriving not to flinch. There she was: his beautiful downfall, the film-star beauty ruffled but no less appealing, golden hair tumbled round her heart-shaped face, blue eyes sparkling. She had a sort of effervescent glow about her. Knowing that he was about to douse that glow didn’t improve his mood.

‘Tia... I didn’t use protection,’ he divulged in a harsh undertone of self-blame.

‘What do you mean?’ she prompted uncertainly.

Max groaned out loud, for that naïve question said it all as far as he was concerned. He had taken cruel advantage of her innocence, he conceded grimly. ‘I assume that thump on the head left me disorientated. I didn’t use contraception with you.’

Belated comprehension striking her, Tia froze and her complexion turned pale and clammy. ‘Oh,’ she framed in dismay.

‘As I’m regularly tested there is no risk of disease,’ Max assured her, his intonation brusque. ‘Believe it or not, I have never before had sex without using protection. Obviously one doesn’t want consequences...’

‘Consequences...you mean, me getting pregnant,’ Tia gathered, her brain still struggling to handle the deeply unwelcome surprise he had dealt her.

How could she have been so foolish? She had got so carried away that she hadn’t even considered the risk of pregnancy and the acknowledgement that she could be that irresponsible was even more of a shock.

‘Clearly that’s a risk,’ Max spelt out flatly, having watched her pale and flinch from that reality. ‘We’re both young and healthy. There could definitely be consequences.’

Only that morning, Tia had wakened in the convent, still naïve and ignorant about matters that other young women took for granted at her age. Now all of a sudden it felt as though she was being subjected to a frightening crash course on what adulthood demanded and she was appalled by her carelessness. She had forgotten all common sense, everything she had been taught about how to look after herself and stay safe. She couldn’t even recall how many years it was since she had been assured that purity was the only certain way to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. So informed, her classmates had giggled and exchanged superior glances while whispering remarks about modern birth control. But, Tia told herself unhappily, her hindsight and regret came a little too late to the table to be helpful. It was done; wrongly or rightly, it was done.

‘We’ll have to get married,’ Max informed her without hesitation. ‘Immediately. In this situation where I was entrusted with your care, it’s the only possible remedy. Your grandfather trusts me. If there’s the smallest chance that you could be pregnant I need to marry you now.’

In silent disbelief, Tia stared back at him. Perspiration beaded her brow. That was the moment that Tia registered that, not only did she not want to be pregnant, but she also didn’t want to be married either. No, not even if Max resembled a Renaissance prince and took her to heavenly heights in bed. What Tia had dreamt of for so many years, what she had always craved was...freedom and independence. And nobody needed to warn her that there was little wriggle room for freedom in either matrimony or motherhood.

CHAPTER FIVE

BENEATH MAX’S INTENT, measuring gaze, Tia had lost all her natural colour and her bright eyes veiled as she studied the highly polished wooden floor instead of him. He realised instantly that Tia was not receptive to the idea of marrying him and it was a shocking wake-up call for a man who had spent years on the social scene being relentlessly pursued by ambitious young women in search of a rich husband. Tia had slept with him but she didn’t want to marry him.