LITMIR.BIZ

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she should be done packing, as he would be arriving soon to pick her up. Yet she was still sorting haphazardly through her clothes and placing them in her suitcase. Normally Lizzie was far more organized. But for now she couldn’t think clearly.

      She hated it when her attraction to Max dragged her under its unwelcome spell, and lately it seemed to be getting worse. But they’d both learned to deal with it, just as she was trying to get a handle on how his attachment to Tokoni was making her feel. Even with his troubled past, being around children was easy for Max. Lizzie was terribly nervous about meeting the boy. Kids didn’t relate to her in the fun-and-free way they did with him. Of course her stodgy behavior in their presence didn’t help. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to change that side of herself.

      After her mother had drifted into a deathly sleep, she’d compensated for the loss by taking on the characteristics of an adult, long before she should have.

      But what choice did she have? Her grieving father had bailed out on parenthood, leaving her with nannies and cooks. He’d immersed himself in his high-powered work and business travels, allowing her to grow up in a big lonely house full of strangers. Lizzie didn’t have any extended family to speak of.

      Even after all these years, she and her dad barely communicated. Was it any wonder that she’d gone off to Columbia University searching for a connection to her mom? She’d even taken the same journalism major. She’d walked in her mother’s path, but it hadn’t done a bit of good. She’d returned with the same disjointed feelings.

      Her memories of her mom were painfully odd: scattered images of a beautifully fragile blonde who used to stare unblinkingly at herself in the mirror, who used to give lavish parties and tell Lizzie how essential it was for a young lady of her standing to be a good hostess, who used to laugh at the drop of a hat and then cry just as easily. Mama’s biggest ambition was to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. But mostly she just threw away her writings. Sometimes she even burned them, tossing them into the fireplace and murmuring to herself in French, the language of her ancestors.

      Mama was rife with strange emotions, with crazy behaviors, but she was warm and loving, too, cuddling Lizzie at night. Without her sweet, dreamy mother by her side, Elizabeth “Lizzie” McQueen had been crushed, like a bug on a long white limousine’s windshield.

      After Mama killed herself, Dad sold their Savannah home, got a new job in Los Angeles and told Lizzie that she was going to be a California kid from then on.

      But by that time she’d already gotten used to imitating her mother’s lady-of-the-manor ways, presenting a rich-girl image that made her popular. Nonetheless, she’d lied to her new friends, saying that her socialite mother had suffered a brain aneurysm. Dad told his new workmates the same phony story. Lizzie had been coaxed by him to protect their privacy, and she’d embraced the lie.

      Until she met Max.

      She’d felt compelled to reveal the truth to him. But he was different from her other peers—a shy, lonely boy, who was as damaged as she was.

      The doorbell rang, and Lizzie caught her breath.

      She dashed to answer the summons, and there he was: Max Marquez, with his longish black hair shining like a raven’s wing. He wore it parted down the middle and falling past his neck, but not quite to his shoulders. His deeply set eyes were brown, but sometimes they looked as black as his hair. His face was strong and angular, with a bone structure to die for. The gangly teenager he’d once been was gone. He’d grown into a fiercely handsome man.

      “Are you ready?” he asked.

      She shook her head. “Sorry. No. I’m still packing.”

      He entered her condo. “That’s okay. I’ll text my pilot and tell him we’re running late.”

      Lizzie nodded. Max’s success provided him the luxury of a private jet. She’d inherited her mother’s old Savannah money, but she was nowhere as wealthy as he was. He wasn’t the only Native American foster kid in LA who’d made good. He remained close to two of his foster brothers, who’d also become billionaires. Max had been instrumental in helping them attain their fortunes, loaning them money to get their businesses off the ground.

      He followed her into her room, where her suitcase was on the bed, surrounded by the clothes she’d been sorting.

      He lifted a floral-printed dress from the pile. “This is pretty.” He glanced at a lace bra and panty set. “And those.” Clearly, he was teasing her, as if making a joke was easier than anything else he could think of doing or saying.

      “Knock it off.” She grabbed the lingerie and shoved them into a pouch on the side of her Louis Vuitton luggage, glad that he hadn’t actually touched her underwear. As for the dress, she tugged it away from him.

      “Did you really have a thing for me in high school?” he asked.

      Oh, goodness. He was bringing that up now? “Yes, I really did.” She’d developed a quirky little crush on him, formed within the ache of the secrets they’d shared. But he’d totally blown her away when she returned from university and saw his physical transformation. He’d changed in all sorts of ways by then. While she’d been hitting the books, he’d already earned his first million, selling an app he’d designed, and he hadn’t even gone to college. These days, he invested in start-ups and made a killing doing it.

      “It never would have worked between us,” he said.

      Lizzie considered flinging her makeup bag at him and knocking him upside that computer chip brain of his. “I never proposed that it would.”

      “You were too classy for me.” He gazed at her from across the bed. “Sometimes I think you still are.”

      A surge of heat shot through her blood. “That’s nonsense. You date tons of socialites. They’re your type.”

      “Because you set the standard. How could I be around you and not want that type?”

      “Don’t do this, Max.” He’d gone beyond the realm of making jokes. “You shouldn’t even be in my room, let alone be saying that sort of stuff.”

      “As if.” He brushed it off. “I’ve been in your room plenty of times before. Remember last New Year’s Eve? I poured you into bed when you got too drunk to stand.”

      She looked at him as if he’d gone mad. But maybe he had lost his grip on reality. Or maybe she had. Either way, she challenged him. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t inebriated. I was coming down with the flu.”

      “So you kept telling me.” He gave her a pointed look. “I think it was all those cosmopolitans that international playboy lover of yours kept plying you with.”

      Seriously? His memory couldn’t be that bad. “You were tending bar at the party that night.” Here at her house, with her guests.

      “Was I? Are you sure? I thought it was that Grand Prix driver you met in Monte Carlo. The one all the women swooned over.”

      “He and I were over by then.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’re the one who kept adding extra vodka to my drinks.”

      “I must have felt sorry for you, getting dumped by that guy.”

      “From what I recall, it was around the same time that department store heiress walked out on you.”

      “She was boring, anyway.”

      “I thought she was nice. She was hunting for a husband, though.”

      “Yeah, and that ruled me out. I wouldn’t get married if the survival of the world depended on it.”

      “Me, neither. But what’s the likelihood of us ever having to do that, for saving mankind or any other reason?”

      “There isn’t. But I still say that you were drunk last New Year’s, and I was the gentleman—thank you very much—who tucked you into this very bed.” He patted her pillow for effect, putting a dent in it.

      “Oh,

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