LITMIR.BIZ

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down whenever possible and was barely able to conceal his relief when people began leaving.

      ‘I think I’ll have an early night,’ Tia told him over a dinner in which she merely rearranged her food on her plate.

      ‘Good idea. It’s been a very long day.’

      ‘I miss him,’ Tia confessed gruffly.

      ‘I’ve never been in this house before when he wasn’t here. It feels strange.’

      Tia lay in the bath, composing herself while she made plans for her future. Max didn’t want their child and he didn’t want her except in the most basic sexual way. She deserved better and she wasn’t about to settle for less, she told herself urgently. She had to be strong and decisive. She would leave and use her grandmother’s inheritance to build a new independent life, possibly the life she would have enjoyed had she not met Max. What else could she do?

      Max had married her primarily to please Andrew and Andrew was no longer alive to be hurt and disappointed by her decision to abandon her hasty marriage. Max wouldn’t miss her. He would be far too busy with Grayson Industries. He didn’t want their child, couldn’t even bring himself to talk about the baby she carried. No, the best he could seem to do was ignore the subject in its entirety. Leaving was her only option.

      Max would not feel he had lost out when he had no contact with the child he had accidentally fathered. Their child would lose out on having a father but if Max wasn’t keen on being a father, wouldn’t his absence be less damaging in the long run? Perhaps years from now Max would succumb to curiosity as her own mother once had and he would find that he could communicate more easily with their child when he or she was more mature. Tia knew she could not expect to stay hidden for ever.

      Tears dampened her cheeks in the hothouse temperature of the opulent bathroom. How could she walk away from the man she loved? Even if it was the best thing for them both? Eventually they would have to get a divorce, which would leave them free to seek another relationship. Just then Tia didn’t think she would ever again be attracted to anyone and the thought of Max with anyone else absolutely destroyed her. Indeed, all she could think of at that instant was Max, his hair-roughened bronzed skin hot and a mixture of rough and smooth against her, the intoxicating taste of him, the burning need he excited...

      Irritated with herself, Tia clambered out of the bath, her body tingling and pulsing, and wrapped herself in a towel. In the bedroom, she hovered. One last night, she thought crazily, one last night with Max...why not? Why the heck not? She loved him, she wanted him. Afterwards she would write him a letter explaining how she felt but she wouldn’t tell him everything. If she told him she loved him he would feel guilty that he had hurt her. No, she would tell him that she needed her freedom; that life was too short to waste, that setting out to make her own life and live alone was what she had always dreamt of...and it would be the truth with just a few salient facts withheld.

      Swathed in a towelling robe, she walked out into the corridor and down to the bedroom that she knew Max was using. She didn’t knock on the door because she felt that would be silly. No, she walked straight in and caught Max lying in his boxers on the bed watching the business news. Against the backdrop of the white linen sheets, he was a breathtaking vision of masculine perfection.

      ‘I don’t want to be alone tonight,’ she told him honestly.

      Max was very much taken aback. He sat up, brilliant dark eyes widening as Tia untied the sash of the robe and let the robe tumble in a heap to the floor. He couldn’t believe what he was witnessing because Tia was usually endearingly modest and now here she was naked under the lights. Yet light was a good friend to that porcelain skin with its pearlised glow, that honey-blonde hair as glossy as polished silk and the full, pouting, pink-tipped breasts that shifted with her every movement. Max had never liked surprises but just then he felt as if he had died and gone to heaven and the television went silent as soon as he had made a successful fumbling attempt to locate the remote.

      ‘I’m all yours, bella mia,’ he breathed thickly, the pulse at his groin responding with alarming rapidity to his appreciation of her.

      Tia got on the bed and slid over him like a siren, leaning down, pink-tipped breasts brushing his chest as she planted her succulent pink lips against his. Max put his hands up and dragged her down to him, his urgency thrilling her. Bossy as always, he rearranged her to his satisfaction on the bed and worked his sensual passage down over her squirming body from her delicate collarbone to her straining nipples and then all the way down to the tender flesh between her thighs.

      ‘I wanted to torture you,’ she complained. ‘This was supposed to be my show.’

      ‘Some other time,’ Max growled, fighting to stay in control as he teased her damp receptive core and she made little gasping sounds that went straight to his groin and made him as rigid and hard as steel.

      ‘When’s it going to be my turn?’ she complained, running a desperate hand down over his strong muscular shoulders and clawing her fingers through his hair because those were the only parts of him she could reach.

      ‘I’m in no condition to argue right now.’

      He turned her firmly over onto her knees and plunged with erotic force into her. She cried out because he felt so impossibly good and she was only just realising in sudden dismay that if everything went to plan she would never experience such intimacy with Max again. That conviction panicked her and his next surge only intensified her body’s reaction. She arched as the tingling waves of excitement threatened to consume her, her whole body hot and liquid with uncontrollable craving.

      ‘Don’t you dare stop!’ she moaned, barely knowing what she was saying, unable to think and too frightened by what she had thought to even want to think.

      And Max didn’t. The long dreadful day of sadness faded with every voluptuously satisfying penetration of her receptive body. Tia’s need for him had startled him because her muted response to his earlier explanation about how he felt about her had disappointed him. Their all-consuming passion sparked and flamed into a frantic blaze of hunger neither of them could restrain. As release claimed them both into the trembling, perspiring aftermath, Max groaned out something ragged in Italian.

      When Tia rolled away, Max stretched out an arm and brought her back to him, knowing she needed that closeness, fighting his own awkwardness to give her what she deserved. He had not enjoyed sleeping apart from her, but it had been a necessary sacrifice when Andrew’s death had brought her so low, when he couldn’t trust himself to share a bed with her and not reach for her in the night.

      ‘Thank you,’ she said softly. ‘That was amazing.’

      ‘You don’t ever need to thank me for something that gives me so much pleasure.’

      ‘You thanked me once,’ she reminded him.

      Max didn’t remember. ‘Did I?’

      ‘You did,’ she whispered, quietly pulling free to slip out of the bed, knowing she had that letter to write and plans to make.

      ‘I got it wrong,’ Max husked softly. ‘Sometimes I’m going to get it wrong without meaning to.’

      Tia’s eyes prickled with tears because there was just no room for getting it wrong with a baby. It had gone wrong for her and she suspected it had gone wrong for Max as well, because why else would he be so reluctant to talk about his childhood? But she was determined not to let it go wrong for her child even if that entailed walking out on the man she loved. Her child was not going to pay either now or in the future because she had foolishly picked the wrong man to love and marry. That was her mistake and she would not allow her little boy or girl to pay the price of that mistake because it was a mistake that would reverberate down through the childhood years and leave a scar that wouldn’t heal.

CHAPTER NINE

      NINE 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

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