Claimed for the Leonelli Legacy

Tia moved forward on uncertain legs, already overcome by her luxurious surroundings and the bewildering suspicion that she had accidentally strayed into someone else’s dream. She gazed up at Max, colliding unwarily with his stunning, heavily lashed dark as night eyes. Her breath feathered in her throat and her heart slammed with sudden force against her breastbone as he extended his hand. ‘For you from me,’ he intoned. ‘It’s all charged up and ready to use.’

It was a mobile phone with a sparkly cover, the sort of cover a teenager might have admired but Tia was not fussy. With a whoop of pleasure at finally receiving what she had long wanted, Tia whirled breathlessly round the room. Madalena had kept on sending her phone number as if Tia could somehow magically conjure a phone out of thin air but she had kept her friend’s letters. ‘Thank you, Max,’ she said.

Max was a little disconcerted not to receive another hug, had indeed braced himself for one, but Tia, did he but know it, knew she had to be more circumspect around him once she had under

stood how much he attracted her. She didn’t want to behave like an infatuated schoolgirl and make a fool of herself.

The flowers were the next delivery, a gorgeous display of white lilies and foliage arranged by a maid in a crystal vase. ‘For...me?’ Tia whispered breathlessly, a fingertip stroking a velvety petal in appreciation.

‘Of course for you...’

Tia could not imagine why Max was giving her flowers when they were already in each other’s company and he had nothing to thank her for. The romantic angle, she discarded entirely as an explanation, having decided during the flight that allowing foolish fancies to take over her brain was likely only to lead to her humiliation.

Max got the message that he was not making his interest obvious enough and that was when he regretted not paying more attention to her while they were airborne. He studied her glowing face as she caressed the lily and imagined that small work-roughened hand gliding over a far more responsive part of his body and anticipation leapt through him like a sudden flame ready to burst out of control. The stirring of enthusiasm at his groin was unmistakeable and made him ache. He didn’t know why she had that instantaneous effect on him. Indeed, his lack of control around Tia annoyed him because he hadn’t suffered from the affliction of involuntary arousal since he was at school.

‘You like the flowers?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered distractedly. ‘I love flowers. I always dreamt of having a real garden of my own.’

‘I thought you wanted to be a teacher,’ Max remarked, because the Reverend Mother had shared that with him.

‘I was willing to be one to get the training and the education. In my life it’s always been a question of not what you want but what is possible,’ Tia explained. ‘There’s a teacher training college in Belém and I thought that studying there would be achievable but my father wasn’t willing to pay for it and that was that.’

‘Andrew’s country house has beautiful gardens,’ Max told her, watching the tip of her tongue steal out to moisten her full lower lip as she looked up at him and almost groaning with the force of his arousal.

His dark eyes were gleaming like gold ingots and Tia couldn’t drag her gaze from his lean, darkly beautiful face. Without even knowing what she was doing she took an infinitesimal step closer and Max reached for her almost simultaneously, hands sliding round her back and yanking her into contact with his lean, powerful body with a sexual insistence and impatience that should have shocked her but which instead thrilled her.

It was Tia’s first kiss—first everything, really—and the hard, hungry pressure of his beautiful masculine mouth crashing down on hers unleashed so many sensations in her body that she felt dizzy. The tips of her breasts tingled and stiffened, pushing against the coarse cotton material of her top. A sliding warmth prickled between her thighs and made her press them together tightly. Suddenly she was insanely conscious of a part of her body she never thought about, of the sensitivity and the shocking level of physical awareness she had never known before.

His tongue licked along the fullness of her lower lip and then nibbled at the tender swollen flesh before his tongue plunged into her mouth and withdrew. At that point her legs would have folded under her had he not literally been holding her upright with his hands because the sexual vibrations assailing her only intensified. A choked gasp was dragged from her as he spread his fingers across her narrow shoulder and held her there to kiss her breathless.

Max was fiercely fighting an insane urge to carry her into his bedroom when the knocking at the door finally penetrated the fog of his passion. What the hell was he doing? he asked himself furiously as he jerked back from her, almost overwhelmed by the passionate response he had won from her. He wanted more, he wanted so much more that it took a lot longer than the few seconds he had to get a grip on himself before he opened the door.

Four women greeted him with wide smiles and swiftly identified themselves as the team engaged to provide Tia with a new wardrobe. Shooting her a cloaked glance to note that she was very flushed and dazed in appearance, he urged her to take them into her bedroom.

Diavolo, he castigated himself as soon as the bedroom door closed. He had jumped the gun, offered too much too soon and probably shocked her, but going slowly with a woman, much like talking in a normal way, was something Max had never done before. And he had utilised all the finesse of a bull in a china shop, an awareness that infuriated him as he stomped off to change and have a cold shower to chill the fever still burning through him. It was not as though he were sex-starved, he reasoned angrily with himself, so why that lack of control? That mad grab and hold making-out session, which was not his style at all?

Relieved to escape the immediate aftermath of that embrace with Max, Tia was happy to be distracted by measurements and catalogues depicting various styles. She had only wanted jeans and tee shirts and some decent shoes but there was, she discovered in amazement, a vast area of choice from which to make selections. The little girl and disappointed teenager who had never got to have pretty clothes triumphed in the adult she had become and she went a little crazy before panicking and surging back into the other room to find Max.

‘What’s my budget...? I mean, how much can I spend?’ she pressed anxiously.

‘There is no budget. Order anything that takes your fancy...handbags, shoes, everything,’ Max stressed. ‘You’ll need it all in England and it’s better to arrive prepared.’

Tia surveyed his darkly handsome features with wondering appreciation. Had ever a young woman been so blessed as she was at that moment? she marvelled, smiling widely at him. She could buy anything she liked and Max, the man of her dreams, had kissed her, which meant that he was attracted to her as well, even if she suspected that he hadn’t quite intended to kiss her when he had.

Was Max struggling with the same feelings she was struggling with? Feeling buoyant at that suspicion and walking on air in the belief that the growing strength of her feelings was being reciprocated, Tia vanished back into the bedroom.

CHAPTER THREE

‘I DON’T WANT TO,’ Tia said simply as Afonso, one of Madalena’s male friends, tried to pull her into the bedroom that had just been vacated by another couple.

‘Thought you wanted to lose that V-card...’ In the face of her refusal, Afonso managed to both smile and sneer simultaneously. He was good-looking and he knew it, his lack of familiarity with rejection obvious to her.

‘Maddie was joking, for goodness’ sake,’ Tia declared, wishing that that were true of her former best friend but no longer quite sure because she felt as if she was learning the hard way that four years could change a friend into someone she barely recognised.

‘No, she wasn’t,’ Afonso insisted, still unwilling to accept that no meant no in Tia’s case as he pulled her against him with a possessive and determined hand.

He was drenched in cologne and she could hardly breathe that close to him. She gave him a dispassionate glance, hating the swimming sensation in her head from the alcohol she had already told Madalena she didn’t want to drink. Not because she was stuffy and prim, as Maddie had insisted she was. She had refused more alcohol as soon as she’d felt her body overreacting to that second large drink. No, indeed: the very last thing Tia wanted to risk was getting drunk at a wild party full of strangers, none of whom she felt she could rely on.