He wasn't a stranger to beautiful women or to pleasures of a purely sexual kind but he definitely was a stranger to the kind of overwhelming emotions she stirred up inside his soul. There was no denying the fact that she was an outstandingly beautiful woman, a woman that any red-blooded male would respond to in the most elemental way.
Being a red-blooded male, Max had done exactly that. Fate, however, in its infinite wisdom had seen fit to make her as brilliant as she was beautiful and possessed of a heart so vulnerable that he could barely look at her without longing to pull her into his arms and keep her there, safe and secure, forever.
Forever.
What a joke.
Five years ago he'd handed his life over to a nameless, faceless organization simply because he hadn't anything better to do at that moment.
Forever wasn't something he worried about; the future, a concept not in his emotional vocabulary.
It hadn't occurred to him that there'd be anything in his life to make him change his mind--and up until last week in Maui, he'd been right.
Now there was Kelly and concepts like forever took on a meaning he'd never even suspected.
Unfortunately for Maximilian Steel, forever was impossible. The only thing he was sure of was that for the next month he could see Kelly's glorious face first thing each morning and last thing each night.
Somehow that would have to be enough. "We're almost there," Kelly said, peering out the window as they flew a wide arc across the tiny island. "It's gorgeous, Max."
Max leaned over and glanced down at Tranquility Island.
"I barely recognize it," he said. "Last time I was here there were only dirt roads and no airport."
"You don't recognize it? I thought you spent a lot of time here."
Good going, Brody. He struggled to remember what the current cover story was on Tranquility.
"Not in the last two years," he said, truthfully enough. "Business has been extremely demanding." He let his words trail off and to his relief Kelly accepted his explanation.
Civilization in the form of a private airport and a network of paved roads had found the lush retreat and it depressed him. It had been nice to know there was still some place in the western hemisphere where modern technology had yet to rear its ugly head.
Tranquility Island had been an oasis in a mechanized world, a place where twentieth century progress went about as far as intermittent bouts with electricity and three motor-driven cars. Owner after owner had resisted the lure of advancement, zealously preserving the feeling of the past.
Not any longer.
PAX had purchased the island three years ago and proceeded to turn it into Maximilian Steel's private hideaway. Not only was there an airport and paved roads, but PAX had built a stone and brick retreat that blended in with the hundred year old palm trees swaying in the late afternoon breeze.
Beautiful, yes, but that sense of otherworldliness no longer existed. He didn't have time to mourn the arrival of progress because the moment the wheels touched the tarmac Ryder rapped on the closed drawing room door and barged in without an invitation.
Max wasn't oblivious to Kelly's questioning look.
"The car is waiting," Ryder said, "but I have to stay behind for a little while. You'll be driving yourself. If I'd been able to talk to you, I would have told you sooner."
Kelly looked as if she'd fire the man on the spot for insubordination but Max found himself amused by his friend's irritation.
"Thank you, O'Neal," he said in his best multi-millionaire's tone of voice. "A chance for me to get back to nature."
Ryder looked as if he wanted to deck him and Max was setting himself for a confrontation when his friend's attention was drawn to the Scrabble board set up on the game table.
For the last half hour of the flight Max and Kelly had sat there in the drawing room playing Scrabble as if the three hours that came before had never happened.
Well, almost.
Anyone who looked closely at the game board was bound to notice that the tiles had formed some very interesting words, words that made the air sizzle with meaning.
Words like lush and sweet and throbbing had appeared as if by magic, countered with entries of desire and hot and erotic guaranteed to raise temperatures well past the comfort zone.
No one moved.
No one said a word.
Kelly looked out the window at the exit stairs being wheeled across the tiny air field.
Max watched Ryder.
Ryder turned bright red.
"Do you have a problem?" Max asked, tone bland.
Ryder's gaze darted to Kelly then back to Max again.
"Is there something else, O'Neal?" Max asked, thoroughly enjoying Ryder's discomfort.
Ryder looked as if he wanted to say something but, after a moment he flipped Max the keys to the Porsche waiting on the tarmac.
"Later," he said, the word fraught with meaning. With another glance at the Scrabble board, he left.
"I'm surprised you keep him on," Kelly said as soon as Ryder was out of earshot. "He certainly needs an attitude adjustment."
"He's been with me a long time," Max said, choking back a laugh. "He tends to think he runs things."
Kelly took a look at the Scrabble board herself then blushed same as Ryder had just moments before. "It does look rather incriminating, doesn't it?" She slid the wooden tiles back into their pouch then grinned. "Let's take the evidence with us. We didn't finish the game, you realize."
"I know. I was about to come up with an interesting variation on conjugal that may surprise you."
"Don't you know, Max Steel?" she said with a look that made his blood soar. "Everything you do surprises me."
#
"I feel like a voyeur," Ryder said, stretching out in bed as a sultry breeze wafted through the window later that night. "The worst kind of pervert."
Joanna's silky laugh floated through the telephone wires. reminding him of all he was missing. "Knowing what was going on and actually watching are two different things, Ryder."
He sat up against the headboard and reached for a cigarette. "You don't understand. The one thing we don't need and it's happening right under my very nose."
"You worry too much." Joanna was always the voice of reason. "We fell in love while you were on assignment and things still worked out, didn't they?"
"Barely. If that bomb had gone off--" Even years later the memory still made him shudder.
"You can't control everything, honey. If they fall in love, they fall in love. It's fate."
"You're a romantic," he said. "You believe in happy endings."
"I believe in letting people live their own lives and make their own mistakes."
"Fine for Max Brody," he shot back, "but Maximilian Steel belongs to PAX."
Joanna was silent for so long that he was afraid the connection had been lost.
"You can't own human beings, Ryder," she said at last. "Maybe PAX should think about that."
"Four years and eleven months we have nothing but smooth sailing," he said, "and now that we're ready to spring the trap--"
"You worry too much," she said with the laugh he loved so well. "They're marooned on Tranquility with you. What on earth could possibly go wrong?"
"Everything," said Ryder, closing his eyes. "Everything."
#
The man named Viktor wasn't happy and when he wasn't happy he made quite certain everyone within his sphere of influence was well aware of it.
Sean Ryan, unfortunately, was no exception and the broken wrist he'd been gifted with a few hours ago was visible proof. His attempt to contact Kelly had come to a disastrous end--an end he should have been clever enough to foresee.
"You call your daughter when we say you call your daughter," Viktor had said, discreetly looking away as the radial bone snapped beneath the hands of one of his overpaid under-brained thugs. "And if you do call your daughter you do not do it from private phones in fancy restaurants."
"My wall
et," Sean said through the blinding haze of pain. "I left my wallet with her last night and I needed to know if she found it."
"And did she?"
Sean resisted the urge to cradle his wrist to his chest to ease the pain. "I didn't speak to her," he managed.
"She was too busy for her father?" Viktor's eyes gleamed with malice. "How perfectly fitting."
"She was in a meeting."
"In a meeting." Viktor seemed quite amused as he looked at one of his more cerebral assistants. "Is that what they call it these days? She's in Florida, old man, spreading her legs for Max Steel."
"You stinking son of a--" The crack of Viktor's hand across his face stopped Sean's words. How he would love to drive a knife into Viktor's black heart.
Viktor motioned to his assistant who reached into an oversized leather attache case and removed two tissue-wrapped objects which Viktor tossed into Sean's lap.
"Are you acquainted with these?"
It was difficult to unwrap the items with the use of just one hand, but Sean managed.
"They're my daughter's." He was unable to control the quaver in his voice. "What have you done to her?"
Viktor allowed himself a smile. "Nothing," he said. "At least, not yet." He reached down and picked up the photo of Kelly and himself on the ranch with the president in the days before his election. "We just want you to know that we can."
As if he could forget.
It was Steel they wanted.
Why hadn't he seen that before?
His Kelly was the hook while poor, wasted Sean Ryan was naught but stinking bait dying a slow pathetic death.
He reached for the whiskey with his one good hand and, for the first time in years, said a prayer for his daughter--and one for himself.
Chapter Nineteen
"Try it again, Max." Kelly leaned forward and adjusted the top of her red bikini. "Just let your tongue slide over the L's..."
Max, looking virile and more dangerous than any man had a right to look, paced up and down the edge of the lagoon. "Lake...love...lascivious...Lamborghini..." He stopped in front of her. "This is ludicrous."
"Good word choice. You're catching on!" She took a sip of her pina colada and smiled up at him. "Your diction is absolutely perfect, Max. Once we get you past your public speaking phobia, you'll be unstoppable." For two weeks now they'd been working toward breaking him out of a pattern of stage fright so intense that beads of sweat trickled down his face even when she was the only one in the audience.
They'd set up a lectern and microphone in the drawing room of the main house and she'd videotaped him as he gave speech after speech, trying to accustom him to the spotlight and the attention that she would have thought him well used to.
In every other aspect of his life he was invulnerable, the "Man of Steel" that Time and Newsweek had tagged him.
Yet put him in front of an audience, even if that audience was imaginary, and the man turned to jelly.
To see him defenseless was incomprehensible.
If she'd been teetering on the brink of love before, this endearing--and very human--weakness pushed her over the edge.
She tried it on for size.
I love you, she thought, watching the way the sun danced off the top of his chestnut hair. And I don't know what I'm going to do when this is over.
Their talk was all of the present, as if the past had never happened and the future was somebody else's dream. The days passed swiftly in a haze of romance and work and not even Natalie's two emergency phone calls had managed to break the spell Kelly had fallen under.
He lowered himself down next to her, his hips pressed up close against the outer curve of her thigh.
"I'm ready, teacher," he said, kissing her mouth with a sweetness that stole her breath. "Time for another lesson?"
She stretched out on her towel. "Nice work if you can get it," she said lazily.
Too good, Kelly thought as his warmth caressed her body. Definitely too good to last.
She had enough Irish blood surging through her veins to know that nothing this wonderful came without a catch and for the past two and a half weeks she'd been listening for the sound of the other shoe dropping.
How many times in the dead of a New York winter had she imagined herself on a lush green island, surrounded by palm trees and bougainvillea, while she lounged next to a lagoon and nursed a pina colada.
A thousand times, that's how many.
But not even in the most intricate of her fantasies had she conjured up anyone like Max.
How could she?
Up until now men like him existed only in the movies--strong, tender, larger-than-life in every sense of the phrase.
Somehow he seemed to understand her deepest feelings in a way no one else ever had.
Or was it that no one else had ever cared enough to try?
She didn't know exactly but she did know that she had never before felt such a deep sense of happiness as she was experiencing now with Max.
The simplest things--a walk through the gardens beyond the lagoon, watching the sun set over the ocean, the sight of his beloved face next to hers each morning--were enough to make her believe in forever after and happy endings and all the other happy cliches the rest of the world embraced.
She told him things she had told no one before, intimate things about her childhood, about loneliness, about love that she'd feared a man would find laughable.
Certainly her own father and husband had never seemed interested.
Max listened. From that very first night in Hawaii to the ill-fated dinner at Il Duce to this very moment, he had drawn thoughts and emotions from Kelly she'd never dared share with another person.
He knew when to comfort and he knew when to console and more than anything else he knew just how very important this was for her.
It was a first for Kelly, this giving over of herself to a man, and the experience was a profound one.
But, then, Maximilian Steel wasn't your everyday man. With Max everything was different.
He pressed his lips against her shoulder and she moaned softly as he tasted her skin with his tongue. She let her hands slide along the swelling muscles of his arms, feeling his veins, rich with his life's blood, beneath her fingertips.
Yet again a sense of inevitability blossomed around them like a third presence.
This can't end, she thought as he eased the straps of her bikini off her shoulders. Not in two more weeks or two more lifetimes.
This couldn't be all they would share--one month out of so many months left in their lifetimes.
His hand slid across the fullness of her breasts, branding her with a line of fire that burned hotter than the tropical sun. He turned her slightly toward him and her arms crossed behind his neck. Plunging her hands into his thick hair she let the silky strands slip through her fingers as she traced the contours of his skull.
He bent his head toward her and his breath was warm and sweet against her cheek. Her lips parted as he kissed his way across her cheek, toward her mouth, with a touch as gentle as the fragrant air.
"Kelly...sweet, beautiful Kelly..."
His kiss was gentle, melding the fullness of his lips against the softness of hers. Her eyes fluttered closed as he ran his tongue across her lower lip then slid into her mouth to draw along her teeth and the strangely erotic spot at the roof of her mouth.
Her tongue met his in a loving battle and she drank him in as she would a fine wine.
"We should stop," she whispered as he bared her breasts to the sun. "Someone might--"
"No one will," he said, cupping her with his massive hands, watching her. Devouring her. "This is mine. No one else will come near."
She understood the shadow and the texture of meaning in his words on a level so deep that it was almost instinctual.
"Yes," she said, meeting his eyes. "No one but you." Not ever, Max. No matter what the future brings...
He skimmed off the bottom of her bikini and she held her breath as he sli
pped off his trunks.
The sun and the perfumed breezes played lightly over her body and she felt shy and more than a little wild as he held out his hand and drew her to her feet.
Every day, every minute, Max pushed at her boundaries until even she found it difficult to remember how she had lived before he walked into her life.
But maybe she hadn't. Up until now she had viewed her life in black and white--clear, crisp images that left no room for interpretation.
Since Max swept her off her feet, her world had exploded in technicolor bursts of ruby and gold and emerald, each moment a jewel glittering in the sunlight.
He led her into the lagoon and the warm seductive waters rose over her ankles, drifted up over her calves, then lapped lazily at the inner curve of her thighs, moving higher and higher until she knew she would soon be in over her head.
But, then, hadn't she been in over her head from the very first moment with Max? Drowning in sensuality, drenched with emotions so powerful she could scarcely put a name to them.
The water closed over her shoulders and slid up her throat and a flutter of fear awakened inside her chest.
"Max," she whispered. "I can't swim. I--"
"Wrap your legs around me." His voice was as silky as the waters playing against her breasts and shoulders. Those massive hands of his grasped her by the waist and pulled her toward him. "Closer, Kelly," he urged. "Let me feel you against me."
She did as he bade, handing over her trust as if it were a dozen red roses ready to bloom.
With his hands still at her waist, she leaned back into the water, her hair floating out behind her like a banner. She was weightless, fearless, more effortlessly joyful than at any time she could remember.
He moved against her in a way that made her gasp and his heat rose between them, demanding and proud.
"Yes," she whispered, her words a mist upon the water as he lifted her until his powerful desire throbbed against that secret spot at the juncture of her thighs. "Yes, Max..."
She opened for him, blossomed for him, surrounded him with endless waves of delicious contractions that made him drive more fiercely--wonderfully--into her until she became one with him and the gentle water and the rustle of the trees and the perfume of hibiscus and passion in the air.
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