by Lynne Graham
Max froze by the window, bold bronzed profile set, wide shoulders rigid. ‘He killed her when I was twelve years old, during one of their frequent rows about money. I was there when it happened. He went to prison for life, which is why I ended up in England with my aunt. He died in prison a few years ago.’
And there was so much revealed in those few clipped sentences that Tia reeled, her every expectation trounced by his brutal honesty. She was very much shocked. He had seen his father murder his mother and had then become his aunt’s responsibility. ‘You must’ve been traumatised,’ she framed shakily.
‘Completely but I got over that and learned how to function in my new life,’ Max countered briskly to discourage her sympathy. ‘To be frank, that new life was one hell of a lot better than my old life. Plenty of food, a comfortable bed, no beatings, no police harassment, no bullying at school. It was a cakewalk compared with what I had been used to.’
‘I’m so sorry, Max,’ Tia breathed tautly. ‘I had no idea.’
‘How could you have had? It’s not information I share and it’s my past, not my present, Tia,’ he declared with forbidding finality. ‘I’ve only trailed all this out now so that I can try to explain to you why I was less than enthusiastic about the idea of becoming a father. There are no male role models in my background. My only role model came when I was older and it was Andrew, and even he turned out to be not quite the man I believed him to be. I was afraid that I’d be a useless father.’
‘But you’re not your father. You have none of his violence in you. Even tonight when you’re so angry with me I have not once felt physically threatened by you,’ she pointed out, wanting to ask him how her grandfather had disappointed him, but reluctant to demand too much at once from a man who was only telling what he had so far told her because he felt he had no other choice. ‘You’re also honourable and honest, responsible and law-abiding.’
‘Yet my wife walked out on that honest, honourable, non-violent man and hid herself from me and stayed away as long as she could,’ Max retorted with crushing dismissal. ‘So, where does that leave us?’
Tia flinched from that sardonic reminder. ‘That’s a whole different story,’ she argued in consternation. ‘The leaving was about me, not you. I was so unsure and confused about everything in my life. Everything changed so fast and then Andrew died and you freaked out about me being pregnant—’
‘I didn’t freak out,’ Max broke in angrily.
‘In silence, you freaked out,’ Tia rephrased. ‘A first baby is a huge life change for a woman. I needed you to want our baby as much as I did because neither of us were wanted children and that didn’t turn out well for us. I wanted our baby to have everything we didn’t have, starting with caring, involved parents.’
‘But you didn’t give me a chance,’ Max argued vehemently, dark eyes shimmering pure gold condemnation in the lamp light. ‘Andrew had just died. I didn’t want to lay my sordid background on you on top of everything else you were already going through. You were pregnant and I tried to deal with that as best I could without involving you.’
‘Which meant you acted like it hadn’t happened,’ Tia slotted in ruefully. ‘I couldn’t handle that. We’d got married in a hurry. I’d got pregnant in a hurry. I had to put my child first and I knew I needed to be stronger. I couldn’t get stronger with you because you were too busy looking after me to let me learn how to do things for myself. And I thought of Inez, who’s spent her whole life needing a man to lean on and provide for her...and I was determined that I wasn’t going to be that kind of weak woman.’
‘Leaning on me isn’t a weakness,’ Max growled as the door bell sounded. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Probably my customer wanting to pick up his party order,’ Tia recalled belatedly. ‘You stay here and I’ll sort him out.’
But Max was too curious about the life that Tia had built away from him to keep his distance. He watched her greet a man in his thirties and walk through to a spacious catering kitchen to lift a set of cake boxes. Max’s lean, strong face clenched as he listened to them banter like two old friends and he stepped back into the lounge while she showed her customer out again.
‘Who is he?’ he asked baldly when she reappeared. ‘He was flirting with you.’
‘Was he? I don’t think so,’ Tia responded with amusement to that suggestion because she had learned a thing or two over the past months. Now she knew when a man was flirting with her and when it was better to ignore an off-colour joke or call a halt to any overfamiliarity before someone got the wrong idea. ‘He’s a married man with five children and this is their third birthday party in as many months, so I’ve got to know him well.’
‘How many other men have you got to know well?’ Max enquired with lethal cool.
Tia glanced at him in open shock.
‘Obviously I’m going to ask. I’d prefer honesty,’ he admitted stonily.
Tia went pink. ‘There hasn’t been anyone...anything,’ she breathed tightly. ‘I’m very aware that I’m still married.’
‘Ditto,’ Max traded flatly. ‘We’ve both been living in limbo since you walked out. If you wanted your freedom, Tia, you only had to say so. We could have separated with a lot less drama and stress.’
Tia lost colour. ‘Is that what you want? A separation?’
Max settled glittering dark eyes on her. ‘I’m still so angry with you that I don’t know what I want.’
‘Angry?’ she queried uncertainly.
‘Very angry,’ Max qualified without hesitation. ‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten that last night... I haven’t.’
Tia’s face flamed. In fact she felt as though her whole body were burning with mortification below her clothes.
‘The last thing I was expecting the following morning was that letter. Why the goodbye sex?’
‘I don’t want to discuss that.’
Max planted himself in the doorway to prevent her from leaving the room. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to talk about a lot of stuff you don’t want to talk about before I leave you alone. I deserve the truth, Tia. I have always tried to be straight with you.’
Tia spun away from him, embarrassment claiming her, for she had often squirmed when she looked back to the way she had wantonly thrown herself at him that night after the funeral. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, I wanted you... OK?’ she exclaimed.
‘The wanting was more than OK but the walking out on our marriage afterwards wasn’t,’ Max delivered icily. ‘Not giving me the opportunity to answer your concerns was very unfair as well. There are no polite words to cover what I went through over the following months worrying about you. The press speculated that you’d left me because I screwed you over with your inheritance and they had a field day with your convent upbringing in comparison to my freewheeling days of sexual freedom.’
‘I had no idea!’ Tia exclaimed in dismay. ‘I don’t read many newspapers but I’ve kept a very low profile here. There was only that one photo of me that appeared in the papers, the one taken the night of the Grayson party and nobody would associate that designer-clad young woman with the woman I am now. I don’t try to draw attention to myself here with my clothes or hair or anything.’
Max didn’t know whether he should tell her that nothing could detract from the pure symmetry of her delicate features, the clarity of her skin or the slender suppleness of her body. ‘But that simply means that you’re living a lie here with Sancha,’ he condemned.
Tia bridled, eyes widening, head flipping back. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘That no matter what you do, you’re a very wealthy heiress and my wife. You can’t escape what you are, short of returning to Brazil and joining the good sisters again. This is your life and mine.’
An irritable burst of barking from outside made Tia unfreeze. ‘Oh, I forgot about Teddy! I let him out into the garden while I was packing those cakes.’
Brushing past him, Tia sped out and seconds later Teddy surged into the room, freezing
with a growl the instant he settled his eyes on the unexpected visitor and then moving closer to sniff at Max’s trouser legs.
‘You’ve met up with worse than me since we last were together?’ Max conjectured, daring to reach down and pat Teddy’s head. The terrier made no attempt to growl or bite.
‘He’s got much more used to other people, living here. I take him for regular walks.’ Tia paced restlessly round the room, her full attention welded to Max’s lean, powerful figure. ‘Where do we go from here, Max?’
‘You want an upfront list of demands?’ Max queried. ‘I want you to come home so that I can get to know my daughter.’
‘Redbridge Hall is not my home,’ Tia parried in disbelief.
‘I may have been paying your staff for you for the past nine months but, legally and every other way, Redbridge is yours until you either sell it or dispose of it in some other way. And the will probably restricts what you can do because Andrew wanted the property kept in the family,’ Max reminded her.
‘You’ve been paying the staff?’ Tia gasped.
‘Well, someone had to take responsibility for them,’ Max pointed out very drily. ‘Your grandfather employed a lot of people and several businesses operate on the estate. I think eventually you will decide to scale down the household staff to a more appropriate level.’
Tia had lost all her natural colour. ‘I didn’t think.’
‘No, of course you didn’t. You’ve never had staff before but now that you do, you do have to take care of them. And there are decisions waiting that I was unable to deal with because I am not the legal owner of the estate,’ he pointed out.
Tia reddened. ‘I’m so sorry, Max. I should’ve thought of all that.’
‘On the good news front, Grayson Industries is flourishing as never before and the profits will be astronomical this year because I’ve had little else but work to occupy me,’ he proclaimed with sardonic bite.
Tia sank weakly down on an armchair. Of course, he wanted her back at Redbridge to release him from the added burden of what had never been his responsibility in the first place. She was ashamed that it had not even occurred to her that in her absence life had had to continue at Redbridge. Wages had to be paid, maintenance decisions made and probably requests had had to be answered because the estate land was often used for local events.
‘I don’t care about the profits,’ she declared woodenly.
Max crouched down in front of her to study her with scorchingly furious dark golden eyes. ‘Well, I and thousands of other people employed by Grayson’s do care,’ he countered with lethal derision. ‘And it’s all yours. I may be in charge, I may be the figurehead but at the end of the day all those profits are yours, not mine.’
Taken aback by his vehemence, Tia flinched back a few inches. ‘But that’s not what Andrew intended.’
Max swore long and low in Italian, literal sparks dancing in his stunning dark eyes. ‘I don’t care what Andrew intended. I will only take the salary and the bonus package that was agreed when I first took over. I will not live off my wife’s wealth, or my ex-wife’s...or whatever you are planning to become.’
Tia was more shaken still by that aggressive statement. Max vaulted upright again, long, lean muscles flexing in his thighs, the fabric of his trousers pulling taut. She recognised that he had run out of patience and that he wanted decisions now. But she was taken aback by his attitude to the Grayson wealth. He didn’t want what he saw as her money.
‘What do you want now, Max?’ she murmured tautly. ‘You haven’t told me that yet.’
Max froze. The anger she had sent soaring through him ebbed and he thought about what he wanted. He looked at her and what he wanted was very, very basic. ‘I want you to untangle your hair from those ties and strip. I want sex. It’s been nine months and I’ve never gone through a dry spell this long since I grew up.’
Shock rocked Tia where she sat, transfixed like a deer in headlights. Slow colour rose in a tide below her fair skin, heat curling at the heart of her, touching and warming places she had stopped thinking about when she left him. She had suppressed that part of herself, her sensual side, meeting with it only in dreams that she could not control. Now she gazed back at Max, marvelling that he was so bold, so unapologetic about what he wanted and oddly excited by the forceful sexual energy he saw no reason to hide.
CHAPTER TEN
‘AND NOW THAT I’ve begun being honest, I’ll continue in the same vein,’ Max gritted in a driven undertone, working off a ‘might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb’ soapbox. ‘I also want my daughter with me under the same roof. I will not negotiate on that demand. I’ve missed out on an entire three months of her life and I’m a stranger to her through no fault of my own. That has to change—and fast. We’ll return to Redbridge Hall tomorrow.’
‘That’s absolutely impossible!’ Tia exclaimed, leaping upright in emphasis, guilt, shock and consternation flooding her in a heady tide. ‘I’m about to open the tea room for the Easter visitors and I have loads of orders to fulfil.’
‘You also have a very competent co-worker and you can afford to hire another employee to take your place. Oh, yes, I did my homework before I came here,’ Max intoned with sizzling cool.
‘But you don’t understand... Salsa Cakes is my business.’
‘No, your business is Grayson Industries,’ Max contradicted without hesitation. ‘Not what you have here. It’s time to join the real world again, Tia. You were born into one of the richest families in the UK and you can’t run away from your heritage.’
‘I didn’t run away!’ Tia seethed back at him, her hands clenched into fists by her sides, her colour high.
‘Your choice, your decision. I’m sorry but you’re rich and you’re married to a bastard who will take you any way he can get you. Deal with it, bella mia... I have.’
The thready wail of a hungry baby pierced the smouldering silence and very quickly grew into a much louder demonstration of baby impatience. ‘I’d better feed Sancha,’ Tia mumbled, bereft of breath and protest, indeed barely able to think or vocalise, too shaken by the change in Max, who certainly could not be accused of soft-coating his message.
She ran upstairs to scoop her daughter out of her cot and returned to the lounge at a slower pace. As Max moved forward, his lean, darkly handsome features unexpectedly softened, she disconcerted him by literally stuffing her sobbing child into his surprised arms. ‘Max, meet Sancha... Sancha, this is Daddy and he is at the very foot of a learning curve when it comes to babies.’
‘But I’m a quick study,’ Max asserted, bundling up Sancha and resting her against his shoulder, a big hand smoothing her back in a soothing motion.
‘I have to heat her bottle...and...er...change her...’
‘You don’t breastfeed?’
‘I did initially but I had problems so we ended up with the bottle and she’s thriving,’ Tia explained, leaving him to go and take care of necessities.
Max sat down and surveyed his angry-eyed daughter, who was struggling to catch her breath between sobs. He extracted her from the sleeping bag with great care and was amazed by how wriggly her fragile, light little body was. He was surprised to realise that much of his own anger had dissipated. Telling Tia how he felt had helped. Holding his daughter helped even more. All of a sudden he realised that he had moved on from the past that had once haunted him. Sharing that background story had been like curing an illness he had kept locked up inside him. And now he was looking forward and not back on a successful adult life, a stunning wife and an equally beautiful daughter.
My daughter, Max thought in wonderment, studying the little being snug in his arms. Her eyes and hair might be dark like his own but the shape of her eyes, her mouth and possibly her little button nose were all her mother’s. Her very beautiful mother. Max breathed in deep, fighting the reaction of his body with all his strength. He had been crude but the truth was the truth. All the months without Tia had suddenly just piled up in the back of his
brain like a giant rock crushing him. Life without Tia was dull, predictable and barely worth living.
* * *
A bastard who will take you any way he can get you.
Tia had been shaken by that statement but strangely fired up by his raw conviction as well. Max was very likely illegitimate, she acknowledged, for the background he had described seemed unlikely to have contained legally wedded parents. Why on earth was she thinking about something so irrelevant when Max had laid down what he wanted and it was all—from the sex to the immediate relocation—unacceptable?
The trouble was...life without Max was equally unacceptable because she wasn’t happy. That was a huge admission for Tia to make to herself when she had worked so hard to achieve independence. She adored her baby, she loved her little house and her embryo business, but existing deprived of Max’s presence was like eating curry every day without the spice. Nothing else could compare to the joy of knowing Max was in the room next door, within reach and with their daughter. Even though he was angry, knowing Max was near her again was like her every fantasy come true, she acknowledged shamefacedly. She still loved him. She hadn’t got over him. She looked at him and the wanting kicked in again within seconds and it was like coming alive after a long stretch of being denied sunshine and stimulation. Could she settle for the wanting? It did seem to be all Max had to give her.
‘I’ll show you how to feed her.’ Tia slotted the bottle into his lean brown hand and showed him the angle. ‘She guzzles it down quickly at this time of night.’
And Max settled back into a more relaxed pose and fed their child and the sight of them together warmed the cold space inside Tia, because she had feared that her baby would never have a proper father and that that was entirely her fault. Max followed her upstairs and watched her settle Sancha again.
‘You said something about my grandfather not being the man you thought he was,’ she reminded him softly. ‘What was that about?’