Читать книгу Best Modern Romances Of The Year 2017 - Линн Грэхем, Maisey Yates - Страница 19
ОглавлениеNINE MONTHS AFTER Tia’s disappearance, Max finished the last phone call and stared at his desk. The Reverend Mother had promised him she would get in touch if she heard anything from Tia and she had not. Inez Santos had snarled down the phone that she had still not heard from her daughter and had no desire to hear from her. Ronnie had never been in a position to offer him any helpful leads. Tia had not confided in anyone.
The trail, such as it was, was dead. Tia had departed in a taxi with one suitcase and Teddy. The taxi had taken her to the railway station from where she had travelled to London. A couple of weeks later there had been a possible sighting of her on a train heading to Devon. He supposed that he should at least be grateful that she had inherited her grandmother’s money and was presumably making use of it. At least it meant that she was not destitute. But she had not once used the credit cards that he had given her or attempted to access the substantial private income that Andrew had set up for her. No, she had rejected everything Max and Andrew had given her and walked away.
Every line of the letter she had left behind haunted Max. It had been so blunt, so honest. You don’t really want me. That said all that needed to be said in terms of his performance as a husband, didn’t it? He had been married to Tia for over three months and that was the impression she had taken away from the experience. You married me to please Andrew. No, he hadn’t but he needed to find her to tell her that. You don’t want to be a father. Well, she had got that right. You don’t want our baby. She had got that wrong. He had climbed aboard that man train where you acted strong rather than admit fear and ambiguity and he had shot himself in the foot. Tia didn’t understand because he hadn’t told her what she needed to know to understand. And now it was too late.
Max lifted his chin, his formidable bone structure grim. It would never be too late because he would not give up. When something truly mattered to him, he refused to accept defeat. Somehow, sooner or later, he would find some small piece of information that would lead him to his runaway bride and he would then face his biggest challenge—persuading her to come home. Her and Teddy and hopefully their child. Had she had a safe delivery?
But he reckoned bringing his little family home to Redbridge—if all had gone well—would be the toughest challenge he had ever faced. Tia, after all, had never truly wanted to marry him. She hadn’t wanted to be tied down to a husband and if she had made the best of it for a few months he should be grateful for small mercies. She had wanted her freedom and now she had taken it. What nagged at Max most of all was the insidious suspicion that, had he moved more slowly with Tia, she would have wanted to stay married to him.
* * *
Tia tenderly zipped Sancha Mariana Leonelli back into her sleeping bag and tucked her back into her cot where she would sleep while her mother baked.
Motherhood was very different from what Tia had expected. She had not been remotely prepared for the intense joy that flooded her when she initially saw her infant daughter’s little face or for the anxiety that rocked her when Sancha got her first cold. After three months of being a mum, however, she had become a little more laid-back but she could still get emotional. When Sancha opened the dark liquid eyes that she had inherited from her father along with his blue-black hair, Tia’s heart clenched and her eyes sometimes stung because she was learning that time did not heal every pain.
Even nine months away from Max had failed to cure her heartache. Yet during those months of independence she had discovered so many enjoyable things and she had worked hard to make the days go past more quickly. But neither the satisfaction of a walk in sunlit frosted fields nor hard work had made her miss Max one atom less.
She had missed him worst of all when she gave birth to Sancha. Having attended a pre-natal class and made some friends, she had not been entirely alone at the hospital, but the absence of the man she loved had made her feel painfully isolated. Yet she knew that was ironic when Max had wanted neither her nor their child and would, had he but known it, have been very grateful to avoid the hullabaloo of childbirth and the chaotic aftermath of learning how to live with a newborn.
She had made friends when she moved to the picturesque village with the ancient church. In summer the village was busy with tourists. She had bought a little corner terraced house that came with an attached tea room, which she planned to open as a business in the spring. During the winter, she had baked traditional Brazilian cakes to offer at a church sale, and when the requests had come in for birthday cakes and fancy desserts she had fulfilled them and had ended up taking orders and eventually charging for the service. Before she knew where she was she was selling them like proverbial hotcakes and barely able to keep up with the demand.
Tia marvelled that a talent she had not even recognised as a talent was now providing her with a good living. She had learned to bake at Sister Mariana’s side and the fabulous cakes she produced had once provided an evening treat at the convent. Her repertoire ran from coconut cake to passion fruit mousse cake and back to peach pound cake, which could be sliced and toasted for breakfast and served with fruit and cream. She planned to make her cakes the mainstay of her offerings at the tea room when it opened and, that in mind, she had hired a local woman to work with her.
Hilary was an energetic brunette and a terrific baker. Experienced in catering, she had helped Tia deal with suppliers and customers and had helped her work through the stringent health and safety regulations that had to be passed before the reopening of the tea shop could be achieved.
‘Sancha is already sleeping through the night for you,’ Hilary remarked enviously, the mother of a rumbustious boy, who was still disturbing her nights at three years old.
‘And I am transformed,’ Tia responded with a roll of her eyes. ‘I was run pretty ragged the first couple of months. Just getting myself up in the morning was a challenge. I couldn’t have done all this without you.’
‘No, you couldn’t have done it without your incredible cakes,’ Hilary countered with a wry smile. ‘Not many women could have achieved as much as you have in a few short months. Certainly not as a preggers mum-to-be on her own. Do you think your husband will eventually want to come and visit?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tia said awkwardly, wishing that she had found it possible to lie to Hilary and pretend that Sancha was the result of a one-night stand. Instead she had found herself admitting that her marriage had broken down when she had revealed her pregnancy to a man who was less than keen on fatherhood. ‘Tea?’
‘Even if he wasn’t that keen on being a dad, he’s bound to be curious. I think you should consider giving him a chance,’ Hilary reasoned, settling at the table with her tea and some paperwork. ‘But then what do I know? I didn’t do so well with my own marriage.’
Tia stared out of the window while she drank her own tea and brooded over the unsettling thoughts that Hilary had awakened. Sancha was Max’s daughter as well. Had she given Max a fair chance in the parenting stakes? She knew she hadn’t given him a chance at all. Despite his lack of enthusiasm over her pregnancy, wasn’t there at least a possibility that his reservations would have melted away once he saw his baby daughter in the flesh? And just when was she planning to give him that chance?
Why was it that she hadn’t thought about what was fair to Max nine months ago? She had made her deductions and acted on them in the heat of emotion, which was never wise. Everything had happened so fast: her marriage and her pregnancy, Andrew’s death and his will and her unsettling encounter with her mother, when once again she had been forced to recognise that she was the child of a woman who chilled her. Would she still have walked out on Max if she had taken the time to think through events more calmly? Might she not have decided that talking to Max and giving him a fair hearing would be a more reasonable approach? More and more, Tia’s conscience warned her that she had not so much walked out as run away from a situation that had made her feel trapped and powerless.
And whether she liked it or not, Sancha was Max’s baby too. She had ignored his rights, favouring her own. And what about the divorce he probably wanted now? He would want his freedom back and the opportunity to move on with his life, but the vanishing act she had pulled would make that process even more difficult.
Tia was ashamed of the truth that she didn’t want to give Max a divorce and see him move on to another woman. How could she be that selfish? Hadn’t she walked away? He was entitled to his freedom if he wanted it. Not that he so far seemed to have taken much advantage of their separation, she conceded. Max had led quite an active life on the social scene before he met her, for she had checked him out on the Internet and, from what she had been able to establish since then, if Max had returned to his former lifestyle he was being very discreet about it. Of course, she had made that awkward for him too because he was neither single nor even officially separated from her.
And just as Tia had taken charge of her life nine months earlier she recognised that she had to come out of hiding now and face the music. It was time for her to stand up and deal with the challenges she had been avoiding. The very first step of that process, she acknowledged ruefully, would be contacting Max.
While Hilary was enjoying her tea, Tia pulled out her phone and before she could lose her nerve she accessed Max’s phone number on her phone, attached a photo of Sancha to it and texted him her address as well as the name she had been using to avoid detection. For the sake of anonymity, she was known as Tia Ramos locally. Ramos had been her mother’s maiden name.
Max received that text in the middle of a business meeting and his rage knew no bounds as he scrutinised his first blurry picture of his daughter, Sancha. She looked at the camera with big dark eyes, her tiny face astonishingly serious for a baby. Sancha Leonelli, Max was thinking in wonderment, until he read the full text message from his runaway wife and registered on a fresh tide of threatening fury that Tia had cast off the Leonelli name as entirely as she had cast off her husband. A blasted text! Not even a phone call. Was that all he rated after a nine-month silence? Nine months of unceasing worry that would have slaughtered a lesser man? A text... Max gritted his even white teeth, launched upright and strode out without even an apology for his departure. He had a wife to deal with.
Tia was slightly surprised when Max did not respond to her message. Had he changed his number? Moved on from their marriage to the extent that he did not feel her text required an immediate response? Common sense kicked in, reminding her that Max had only just received his first glimpse of his baby daughter. More probably Max was furious with her. Anxiously mulling over those possibilities, Tia kept herself busy once she had put Sancha down for the night. The tea-room kitchen where she did all her baking was linked by a door to her house and, as long as she set up the baby monitor while she worked, she could hear her daughter if she wakened, but during the day she kept Sancha tucked in her travel cot and within easy reach.
She was busy packing an Anthill cake, which was stuffed with chocolate chips, when she heard her house doorbell ring and she sped back next door before the noise could waken Sancha. When she opened the door to Max she was knocked for six because the very last response she had expected from him was an instant unannounced visit.
‘Oh, it’s the kitchen fairy,’ Max derided, running gleaming dark eyes down over her flour-smudged nose to her full ripe mouth and the shapeless chef’s overall she wore. He had checked her out before his arrival and he knew all about the cakes she was baking. It irritated him that, not only had he not known that she could bake, but she had also not once made the effort to bake anything for him.
Tia went red, grateful she had removed her kitchen hat before she answered the door, but her fingers lifted to self-consciously smooth the hair braided neatly round her head. Poised below the porch light, Max looked amazing, blue-black hair glossy, his lean dark angel features smooth over his high cheekbones while a shadow of dark stubble roughened and accentuated the contrast between his angular jaw line and his wide, full modelled mouth. Her mouth ran dry.
‘Or maybe it’s Heidi and you’re about to start yodelling,’ Max breathed between gritted teeth.
‘Heidi?’ Tia frowned, not having come across that book as a child, staring up at him, frantically wishing she were dressed and wearing proper shoes with heels instead of clad for comfort and warmth in jeans, a winter sweater and flatties.
‘It must be the cute little-girl braids,’ Max extended sardonically, moving forward to force her to move back, a waft of cold air eddying into the house with him. ‘Makes you look about ten years old.’
Tia backed several steps and thrust the door shut behind him. ‘You should’ve told me you were coming,’ she protested defensively, feeling menaced by the intimidating size of Max in the confined area of her small hallway.
‘My apologies,’ Max intoned softly. ‘Your nine months of silence killed any manners I ever had stone dead.’
Tia’s colour flared again because there wasn’t much she could say to that in her own defence. She had speculated so many times about what seeing Max again would be like and now she was appreciating that she had got it wrong every time. She was all flustered, every sense on overdrive. She had forgotten his sheer physical impact on her, the heightened heart rate that dampened her skin, the challenge to breathe evenly, the surge of helpless excitement when she collided with his brilliant dark golden eyes. Feeling weak and uneasy with that least allowable sensation, she hastily thrust open the lounge door.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch sooner,’ Tia murmured tautly. ‘I didn’t know what to say. I know that’s no excuse but—’
‘You’re right. It’s not an excuse. If it was I’d have first call on it,’ Max sliced in without warning. ‘I didn’t know what to say when you told me that you were pregnant...and, Dio mio, haven’t you made me pay for that lack of verbal dexterity?’
Wrong-footed once again, Tia clasped her hands together tightly in front of her. ‘I didn’t want my child to have an uncaring father.’
‘On what grounds did you assume that I would be uncaring?’ Max shot back at her. ‘And where is my daughter? I want to see her.’
‘She’s asleep.’ Tia swallowed hard, unaccustomed to being under attack by Max, feeling the novelty of that unexpected experience like a sudden blow, her skin turning clammy and cold.
Max planted himself expectantly back by the door into the hall. ‘I can be very quiet,’ he told her.
‘Max, I—’
‘I’ve waited months. I won’t wait any longer,’ Max informed her impatiently. ‘When was she born?’
Tia gave him the date of their daughter’s birth.
‘Naturally I’ve been worried sick about you all this time,’ Max pointed out curtly. ‘I wondered if you were ill, whether you were in hospital, seeing a doctor regularly for check-ups... I even wondered if you could have lost the baby.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think my silence through,’ Tia countered stiltedly, mounting the narrow stairs and then stepping back from the doorway of Sancha’s little bedroom to let him precede her, if anything grateful for the distraction from the hard questions he was shooting at her and the guilt he had awakened.
Max had believed his rage would ebb once he entered the house but being greeted by his wife as though everything were normal when it was as far from normal as it was possible to be had grated on him. Being forced to ask to see his own daughter didn’t help and the suffocatingly small bedroom sent another biting surge of fury through him. As a child he had had so little. Now that he had a child of his own he wanted his child to have everything, and everything encompassed space and comfort and every material advantage he could provide. Now he stood in a small slot of a room only just big enough for a cot and a chest of drawers. It was clean, adequate but not sufficient to satisfy him.
‘The courts take a very dim view of mothers who deny fathers all right of access to their children,’ he heard himself impart grimly.
The blood chilled in Tia’s veins because what she heard was a threat. ‘I thought I was doing the best thing for all of us when I left. I thought you didn’t want her, didn’t want the responsibility.’
‘But I never said that, did I? Nor did I ever suggest that you terminate the pregnancy or indeed anything of that nature,’ Max reminded her fiercely, finally approaching the cot with somewhat hesitant steps and looking down to see what he could of the sleeping baby. The light from the landing illuminated her little face, the sweet sweep of lashes on her flushed baby cheeks, the fullness of the little rosebud mouth she had definitely inherited from her mother. The sudden tightness in his chest forced Max to drag in a long, deep, steadying breath. Sancha was very small and the short tufts of her tousled dark hair stuck up comically in all directions while her tiny starfish hand lay relaxed against the mattress.
‘She’s...gorgeous.’ Max almost whispered the word, what he had planned to say next flying back out of his head while he drank in his first glimpse of his daughter.
‘She looks just like you,’ Tia framed nervously, still reeling from that reference to the courts and parental rights because she knew what she had done and was bright enough to fear the consequences.
‘What does it say on her birth certificate?’ Max prompted tautly.
‘Sancha Mariana Leonelli. I didn’t know any of your family names so I couldn’t include any,’ Tia told him. ‘And the sisters were the only family I ever knew.’
‘I wouldn’t have wanted my family names included,’ Max admitted in a raw undertone, striding back to the door. ‘There are no good memories there that I would want carried on into the next generation.’
Tia chewed uncertainly at her lower lip and then glanced at him at the top of the stairs, clashing involuntarily with glittering dark eyes of challenge. ‘I kind of suspected that,’ she confided.
‘That’s why I found it so challenging to imagine becoming a father,’ Max revealed, clattering down the stairs, using the activity as cover to make himself force out that lowering admission of vulnerability. ‘Actually I couldn’t imagine it... I found the concept too frightening.’
‘Oh... Max,’ Tia whispered, her eyes burning with a sudden rush of moisture and regret. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that? I was nervous of becoming a mother too. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to cope or that I wouldn’t be able to feel attached to my baby because...for whatever reasons... Inez never got properly attached to me.’
‘Even so, my background is considerably less presentable than yours,’ Max volunteered diffidently. ‘I have never discussed that reality with anyone, which only makes it more difficult for me to talk about it. But my aunt didn’t want to know and Andrew said my past was better left decently buried, so I kept my experiences to myself.’
Tia was aghast that a clearly damaged child had been forced to keep his ordeal a secret that decent people needed to be protected from. ‘I don’t think that was the right approach.’
‘I don’t know,’ Max conceded with a grim shake of his arrogant dark head. ‘Perhaps if I’d been encouraged to talk and think about what happened I would have wallowed in it, which would have been worse. I had nightmares at first and they still come occasionally.’
‘I remember you dreaming,’ Tia remarked uncomfortably.
Max nodded confirmation. ‘But aside of that I did manage to move on without looking back, but my own experiences ensured that I had no plans to ever have kids. There’s bad blood in me and I didn’t want to pass it on—’
‘There’s no such thing as “bad blood”,’ Tia interrupted, angry on his behalf. ‘Who used that expression?’
‘My aunt. Carina was always waiting for me to reveal some violent, criminal tendency that I had inherited from my father. She never trusted me and never let me forget the fact.’
Seeing no point in sharing her poor opinion of his aunt’s attitude towards the child in her care, Tia breathed in slow and deep. ‘Your father was violent?’
‘Very violent. An alcoholic tyrant. He didn’t start out that way though. He was from a decent family and the son of a well-respected businessman but he became a drug-dealing thug at a young age. His family threw him out and he took up with my mother, who was equally wayward in her youth. She once told me that I was the child of his rape,’ Max breathed curtly. ‘But I suspect that that was her excuse for getting involved with a vicious loser. I’ll never know because they are both dead now and the truth died with them.’
‘Oh, Max,’ Tia muttered, tormented on his behalf. ‘What a truly awful thing to tell an innocent child.’
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.
