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  ‘And you’re doing a terrific job,’ Tia told him sunnily.

  Max frowned at that undeserved accolade. ‘Not tonight, I didn’t.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ Tia denied, leaping upright to walk closer to him and reinforce her conviction. ‘You calmed me down and came to pick me up. I feel safe with you—’

  Max expelled his breath in a pent-up hiss. ‘But you’re not safe with me. I’m not qualified to be playing a big brother role around a gorgeous woman—’

  Tia stood her ground, a slight giggle at his terminology escaping the ripe pink parted lips that were his sole focus while she wondered if he really meant that flattering word he had ascribed to her. ‘I don’t want you as a big brother, Max, and I’m glad you can be so honest because I want to be honest too...’ she began.

  Max made a last-ditch effort to save her from him and from herself and disconcerted her by suddenly bending down to scoop her up into his arms and stride at speed towards her bedroom, where he intended to stow her safely out of reach. He burned for her but it wasn’t that simple. He would not allow himself to be tempted beyond the boundaries he had set. He didn’t want her to be honest with him when he couldn’t be honest with her. Andrew had forbidden Max to even tell his granddaughter that he was terminally ill because he wanted to handle that information personally. Andrew wanted Tia kept in the dark about everything: his business empire and her inheritance, his fears, his fiercely protective desire for her to marry Max. Regrettably, Andrew’s rules simply made Max’s role more difficult.

  For a heady split second, Tia assumed that Max was taking her into her bedroom for immoral purposes and in the mood she was in she was fully on board with that idea, but when he laid her down on the wide bed he started to straighten and pull back. It occurred to her then that he was actually physically putting her to bed like a misbehaving child and, outraged by that suspicion, she shot out a hand to grab his sleeve and pull him back to her.

  ‘Max!’ she censured sharply.

  Max jerked back another step and hit his head, a crushing blow on the ornate wooden strut of the four-poster bed frame. For an instant he literally saw stars and swayed and, seeing that, Tia succumbed to guilt and regret.

  Scrambling up on her knees, she grabbed his hand worriedly. ‘That was my fault. Are you all right? That was quite a thump you got.’

  ‘Sì...’ Max conceded, blinking rapidly in an effort to clear his fuzzy head and dismiss the pain while slowly turning to look down at her. Her blue eyes were so honest and anxious and the luscious mouth below them so perfectly plump and inviting that the ache at his groin almost made him groan out loud.

  ‘Sit down for a minute. You’ve gone very pale,’ Tia told him.

  ‘I don’t need to sit down.’ A shred of sanity remained in Max’s bemused brain and in it the bed loomed large as a trap of catastrophic proportions.

  ‘Sit down, for goodness’ sake.’ Wondering if he had concussion because he seemed dazed, Tia used her hand on his to yank him down on the mattress beside her. Rising to her knees, she reached up to feather her fingers gently through his tousled black hair to feel the faint swelling beneath. ‘We should go to the hospital.’

  ‘It’s only a bump, Tia,’ Max groaned, turning his head to look at her in wonderment because after the childhood he had endured bumps and bruises, including broken bones, were nothing new to him.

  ‘If I hadn’t been...messing around...’ Tia selected her wording with care, her conscience still twanging as she marvelled at her own misplaced and mistimed boldness ‘...it wouldn’t have happened.’

  And what was about to happen wouldn’t happen either, Max continued inwardly, absolutely enthralled by the upturned pink swell of her tantalising mouth and discovering too late that that was the true trap, not the bed, after all, because he leant down as if being drawn by invisible strings to touch his mouth to hers.

  And holy hell, she tasted like sweet juicy strawberries and the hot, spicy night air. Max fisted a hank of golden hair in one hand and he crushed her soft pillowy lips beneath his own with fervour, hunger leaping through him with unstoppable force.

  His tongue flicked against the sensitive roof of her mouth and delved deep and a massive ripple of seductive sensation slivered right through to Tia. Unlike Max earlier she had no doubts about what she was doing or what she was inviting. Max was, basically, the man of her dreams and when Tia wanted anything she threw her heart and her soul into getting it with a stubborn, steady-minded resolve that her grandfather would have recognised as his own. Max was kissing her again, which meant he wanted her as much as she wanted him. Of course, he had tried to put the breakers on this exact development, she acknowledged absently, loving that he hadn’t wanted to rush her into anything too soon, recognising what she saw as being an honourable streak in his character.

  But Tia made her mind up fast and she was eager to live the life she had been denied for so long, in fact, grab it with two greedy hands and run as fast as she could with it...

  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 whisp
ered.

  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 satia
ted 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.