It was the right decision to go. The lunch was delicious. Max was totally relaxed, enjoying Luther’s appetite for chicken as well as his own. Chloe had tied a sarong over her swimming costume, and relieved of being over-conscious of her body in his presence, she relaxed, too. Max had already been in the pool for a swim when she’d arrived and had a towel tucked around his waist-a decent enough covering to allay the unsettling awareness of his body.
Luther curled up on one of the lounges and went to sleep while they lingered at the table, finishing off the bottle of wine Edgar had brought with their lunch. Chloe screwed up her courage to do some probing into Max’s background, telling herself it was okay if he rebuffed her. He had a right to his privacy. She could apologise and backtrack into neutral subjects.
‘Max, I know your mother died of a drug overdose when you were sixteen. You must have been through worse things than me in your growing up years,’ she started off, her eyes earnestly appealing for his forbearance when she saw the shutting down of all expression on his face. ‘I just want to know how you moved past it.’
He turned his gaze away from her, eyelids lowered to half-mast. For several tense moments, Chloe sensed him brooding over whether to answer her or not, his mind travelling back to the past, sifting through it, weighing up whether he was prepared to reveal anything. When he finally spoke, it was in a very dry, dismissive tone.
‘When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. You move on because there’s no alternative.’ He looked back at her, his eyes very dark and intense. ‘You have the harder road to travel, Chloe. You know there’s someone you can retreat to if you find it too difficult. That may weaken your resolve to move on.’
‘I’ll never go back to my mother,’ she said vehemently, knowing she had been weak not to make the break before this. The feeling of being hopelessly trapped in a relentless cycle of demands was gone now, thanks to Max.
He smiled. ‘I hope not. Today I’ve seen a vitality in you that was missing when you were yourself, not playing a role for the camera.’
/> He made her feel more alive than she’d ever been. This wasn’t make-believe, escaping from reality. It was how she actually felt here and now. ‘Did you daydream as a kid, Max?’-escaping his realities?
‘No. I watched television. I absorbed television. I didn’t have a normal bed-time and it blocked out my mother’s crazy stuff. I’d sit there working out why one show had more popular appeal than another. Was it the storyline? Was it the actors? Was it the camera work? What would I do to make it better?’ His eyes twinkled in mocking amusement at having turned a bad time into something good. ‘Probably the best preparation for what I do now-judging what viewers will like and what they won’t, getting the right cast and the right crew to give a show optimum appeal.’
‘But you didn’t start off in television,’ Chloe remarked, puzzled that he hadn’t headed straight for it, given his intense interest.
He shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to be an odd-job boy at a television studio, which was all I could have been in that industry at sixteen.’
‘You might have been cast in a show if you’d tried out for one.’ He certainly had the male x-factor that was very marketable in television.
‘I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to run the show, Chloe, be in control.’
Master of his own fate, she thought. Had the drive for control been born in him or was it a reaction to the out-of-control life his mother had led? Her own life had been so overwhelmingly controlled, any overt rebellion crushed by abusive tirades, she’d lost the spirit to even try for any control. Until Max had stepped in. She fiercely resolved to be mistress of her own fate after she left here.
‘Getting a job at a publishing house was a stepping stone to the big picture,’ he went on. ‘It was the same field-selling stories, appealing to what people wanted whether it was fiction or non-fiction. I made it to marketing manager by the time I was eighteen. Which opened doors for me to get where I wanted to be.’
Chloe didn’t know his exact age-somewhere in his late thirties. It was an amazing accomplishment to have risen from nothing to a billionaire television baron. ‘It must give you a tremendous sense of satisfaction, having achieved the wealth and power to choose what shows you want to produce,’ she remarked admiringly.
‘Mmm…’Ruthless purpose flashed into his eyes. ‘My way.’
‘Like getting me for the lead role in this show,’ she murmured, remembering what he’d told her. ‘You didn’t care how much my mother haggled over the contract.’
His mouth quirked and the expression in his eyes simmered into something else-something that made her heart skip and sent tingles along every nerve. ‘I wanted you,’ he said.
On the surface it was a professional comment but it didn’t feel like one. She quickly lowered her gaze and covered her inner confusion by picking up her almost empty glass of wine and slowly finishing it off. Was she hearing what she wanted to hear, seeing what she wanted to see? Max was in a relationship with another woman-a stunningly beautiful woman who was probably as self-assured as he was. Why would a man like him find a lame duck like herself desirable?
Apart from which, she shouldn’t be excited by the idea that the attraction she felt with him was returned. It made her situation here perilously close to her mother’s nasty reading of it. Although Max had made no move on her. Not even the suggestion of a move. They were just talking. Which was what she should be doing instead of thinking.
‘What was your favourite show when you were a boy, Max?’ she asked, forcing herself to look at him with curious interest.
‘M*A*S*H,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘The script was brilliant, the cast of characters was brilliantly balanced, the acting was superb, and it could make you laugh and cry and tug at every emotion in between. I loved that show.’
Love…she could hear it in his voice and wondered if he’d ever loved a woman with the same fervour, loving everything about her.
‘Did it get to you, too?’ he asked.
Chloe had to drag her mind back to the conversation. She shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen it. My mother dictated what I watched.’
He grimaced, then looked consideringly at her. ‘Would you like to see some of it? I have the whole collection of M*A*S*H in my library. I could give you the first season’s episodes to watch and if you enjoy them…’
‘Yes, please.’ Chloe jumped up eagerly, seizing the opportunity to end the foolish meandering in her mind. ‘Could we go and get the discs now, Max? The activity this morning and the wine over lunch…I’m feeling drowsy so I want to head off for an afternoon nap. But I’d love to see what you saw in M*A*S*H when I wake up.’
He nodded agreeably, rising from his chair, and she quickly collected Luther, who was still asleep. The excursion to Max’s library only took ten minutes. It was an amazing library, the shelves more stocked with CD discs of movies and television shows than books, although there were stacks of them, as well. Max moved straight to the M*A*S*H collection, handed her a set of discs and invited her to exchange them for others anytime she liked. Chloe thanked him and quickly took her leave.
She was tired and she did go to sleep, driving off the madly mixed-up thoughts of Max by reading a book until her eyelids drooped. Luther’s yapping woke her, the insistent noise bringing her slowly out of deep slumber. She rolled over on the bed, intending to scoop the dog up to cuddle him back into silence, then realised the yapping was coming from the living room.