‘Of course you do.’ Max compressed his wide sensual mouth. ‘But I don’t need to marry her to fulfil that wish.’
‘It’s unlike you to be so slow on the uptake,’ Andrew murmured wryly as he frowned at the younger man with shadowed blue eyes. ‘Obviously I want to leave everything to you and Tia together.’
‘Together?’ Max repeated in a stunned undertone.
‘As a couple. If you marry Tia you become family and my empire will become absolutely yours. I know that, no matter what happens between you, when I am gone you will continue to look after her interests as well as your own. I trust you to do that,’ Andrew completed with satisfaction. ‘That’s what’s on the table, Max. This arrangement would greatly benefit you as well.’
Max stared back at him in shock for it had never once occurred to him that he would inherit anything from Andrew. ‘You can’t be serious...’
‘I’m very serious,’ Andrew assured him. ‘I have already had my will redrafted to allow for that development.’
‘You’re prepared to try and bribe me into marrying her?’ Max breathed in consternation.
‘It’s not a bribe. I prefer to call it a realistic incentive. After all, giving up your freedom would be a big sacrifice for you. I know that. I also appreciate that you have no current plans to marry and settle down,’ Andrew stated grimly. ‘And goodness knows what Tia will be like after the strange cloistered upbringing she’s had. She certainly won’t be like the sort of women you usually take out and about.’
Max stared down into his glass, reluctant to comment because he didn’t usually take his women out and about, he simply took them to bed. He didn’t do girlfriends and dates. He kept his affairs much looser than that, never offering flowers or explanations or exclusivity. That way there were no misunderstandings, no expectations and no dangerous routines or suggestion of permanency established. There was nothing complex about his attitude. He liked sex and he didn’t need or want to commit to any woman to enjoy it.
‘On the other hand, I can say upfront right now that I understand that this may be simply a starter marriage for you both. Isn’t that what they call it these days? A starter marriage? You and Tia may not get on and one of you may eventually want your freedom. I’m not unreasonable. I have faith that you would do right by Tia even if you separate. That said, what do you have to lose?’
‘You’ve given me a lot to think about. I can see you’ve considered this from every angle,’ Max conceded, the smooth planes of his lean, strong face tight and unrevealing.
‘And you haven’t outright refused,’ Andrew pointed out with satisfaction.
‘You’re assuming that Tia would be willing to marry me. That’s a pretty big assumption.’
‘Max, you’ve been romancing women since you were fourteen years old.’
Max winced. ‘I don’t do the romantic stuff and I’m not prepared to lie to her. I’ll consider the idea. I can’t promise more than that.’
‘Time’s ticking on,’ Andrew reminded him heavily. ‘I’ve told the Mother Superior that I’m ill and that you’ll be flying out there to collect Tia and bring her back here. She was very protective of Tia, demanded a lot of details from me and a character reference for you.’
‘Right,’ Max sighed, a steel band of tension tightening round his head, that and the occasional nightmare the only hangover from his dysfunctional childhood. He got nasty migraines and he could feel the approach of an oncoming attack.
‘Tia could be the love of your life,’ Andrew remarked in an upbeat tone. ‘Stop being such a pessimist.’
Having notified Andrew’s live-in nurse that he was leaving his patient alone, Max mounted the stairs of the big house. Love, he thought with rampant incredulity. Only Andrew, the veteran of a long and happy marriage and a wife who had died long before Max’s arrival, could talk so knowledgeably and confidently about love.
Max had never experienced love. His parents hadn’t loved him and his Aunt Carina, Andrew’s former housekeeper, who had given Max a home when he’d needed one, hadn’t loved him either. Neither a sentimental nor child-hungry woman, Carina had done her duty by her dead sister’s son, nothing more, nothing less. And bearing in mind his sordid childhood, Max didn’t blame his aunt for her coldness. If he too struggled with memories of his dark past to the extent that he had never yet discussed it with anyone and hated even to think about it, how much harder must it have been for his mother’s sister to feel any genuine warmth towards him? After all, nothing could ever change the reality that he would always be his father’s son.
Even more pertinently, Max had good reason to distrust love and the damage it could do. He had become wildly infatuated with a girl in his teens and it had been a disaster. His supposed best friend at the time and the girl Max had loved had schemed against him, hoping to destroy him and cover their own sins. He had seen first-hand the harm that trusting and loving the wrong person could unleash.
So, no, Max didn’t seek love in his life. Even so, he had dimly assumed that it would sneak up on him again some day and catch him when he wasn’t protecting himself from its treacherous influence. But that hadn’t happened either. He was entirely heart whole and rather ashamed that the women in his life were all but interchangeable, not one more memorable than the last. He went for identikit brunettes with a sexual confidence to equal his own. He didn’t daydream about them, didn’t miss them when they were absent, indeed he reckoned that they were purely a selfish means to an end. He gave them jewellery and they gave him sex and if he stopped to think about that exchange it left a nasty aftertaste in his mouth.
A wife, however, was something else entirely and the very concept of a wife brought Max out in a cold sweat. A wife would be around all the time, particularly a clingy, dependent one, who needed support.
Of course, he could say no...couldn’t he?
Unfortunately, Max was ruled by two very strong drives. One was loyalty, the other an equally fierce streak of ambition. Andrew had presented him with the perfect package deal calculated to tempt. Andrew had been his mentor and the closest thing Max had ever had to a father. Everything that he had achieved he owed to Andrew, who had paid for the expensive education that had propelled Max and his razor-sharp wits straight into the heady realms of meteoric business success. Yes, Andrew had had motives of his own for that generosity, he conceded wryly, but that did not change the fact that Max had profited greatly from his support and advice. How could he possibly refuse to offer that same support to Andrew’s last living relative?
In addition, Andrew had mentioned that all-encompassing word, family. Max would become family if he married Tia. The word, the very connotations of the word harboured a mysterious allure for Max that increased his discomfiture. All his life in one way or another Max had been an outsider. He had wanted to belong and he never really had—not within any group—because he was very much a self-made man. His dirt-poor repugnant background, which Max himself could never forget, kept him isolated in many ways. At his exclusive school the other pupils had been from privileged backgrounds and he had naturally kept his childhood miseries a secret for fear of being pitied. His birth family had not been a family in the normal sense of the word and Andrew’s careless reference to Max becoming one of his small family had made much more of an impression on Max than the older man could ever have guessed.
* * *
The rain was torrential and like no rain Max had ever seen in his life. The downpour that had already reduced the road to a dangerous mud bath still bounced in shimmering noisy sheets off the windscreen and bonnet of the heavy-duty four-by-four he had hired to convey him from Belém to the Convent of Santa Josepha.
Through the flickering vehicle lights ahead he saw, not the established mining settlement he had dimly expected to