Max was in the back of a limousine speeding through the Jardim Botânico area and he felt like the biggest bastard in the world. He was supposed to be taking care of Tia but he had no experience of looking after anyone and, clearly, he’d fallen at the first hurdle. Instead of accompanying her to her friend’s house, he had let her go alone and he had not even ensured that she had money with her. Admittedly he had first established that Madalena Perez was the daughter of a respected diplomat and seemed a safe companion. Although it hadn’t occurred to him that Tia could be going out on the social scene, it should have done and he should have been there. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, a minatory voice sneered in his hind brain. He had ducked his responsibility because he’d wanted to work.
What did that say about him?
After all, Tia was infinitely more precious to Andrew Grayson than his empire and Max knew it. As Max’s future bride, she should be equally precious to Max and deserving of special attention, but he had let her down. He had organised a spa grooming appointment for her the next day, not to mention a trip to see the giant religious statue on top of Corcovado Mountain, but those were superficial treats and would be of little consolation to her when she was as hurt and upset as she had sounded on the phone.
Max helped himself to a second drink, his inbuilt alcohol monitor screaming reproach at him for the choice. As the son of a violent alcoholic, Max usually only had one drink at a time, never more, fearful that he could have inherited a gene that could make him more likely to fall into his father’s addiction. Not that there was anything good to be said for any of the genes Max had inherited, he conceded with grim self-loathing. Not for the first time, he reminded himself that his mother’s sister, Carina, his aunt, had been a perfectly normal woman in decent employment and respected by all who knew her, but it didn’t remove the sting of shame that any recollection of his own seedy beginnings invariably unleashed.
Even in the surge of arrivals and departures that saw cars constantly moving up and down the driveway to the big villa, Tia was primed to recognise the one that contained Max and she had bounced up off her chair even before he appeared at the door, head and shoulders wider and taller than the two younger men who arrived there before him. When someone dragged open the door and her expectant gaze landed on his darkly beautiful features she felt ridiculously tearful and had to restrain herself from throwing herself at him like a child.
Max, for his part, was frankly shocked rigid by the vision of Tia in skin-tight red satin shorts, a silky, glittery, barely there top and Perspex stripper heels. He had relished the shape of her in the jeans she had worn earlier that afternoon, almost painfully aware of her long slender legs and her delicate but highly feminine curves at hip and chest. But braless and in shorts, everything was on view and he had an outrageous urge to yank his jacket off and drape it round her because the blatant sexuality of what she brandished in such an outfit was a very poor frame for the young woman she actually was.
‘Max...’ she breathed, hurrying towards him, her eagerness to leave the party unconcealed in the huge cornflower-blue eyes pinned to him.
Max herded her outside towards the limo, striving honourably to ignore the little bounce of her small firm breasts as she went down the steps and the flash of long creamy inner thigh that led up to her scarlet-defined crotch. But he was still a man and he got painfully hard just picturing that first full-frontal view of her again, his brain quick to conjure up the definition of thin satin over a woman’s most intimate area. And then the rage took a hold of him like a rejuvenating bolt of lightning that burned out all sexual response, which in the strangest sense was a relief for him.
As soon as the driver closed the passenger door on them, Max rounded on Tia, dark eyes flaming gold with instinctive fury. ‘You don’t ever go out dressed like that again!’ he thundered across the car at her.
Taken aback by that sudden attack, Tia bridled and her eyes flared a darker blue in angry confusion. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘You look like a pole dancer or a stripper. You’re showing too much skin. Where did you get those clothes? I can’t believe the stylist authorised those shorts.’
‘What’s a pole dancer?’ Tia enquired icily, her spine very stiff in her corner of the car because who did he think he was to tell her what he thought she should be wearing? He was a man and what she wore was none of his business.
‘Not the sort of woman you want to be mistaken for.’
‘Madalena loaned me these clothes and I wasn’t comfortable in them,’ Tia admitted grudgingly. ‘But her friends were wearing the same sort of thing. And the stylist didn’t authorise me to choose clothes today, I made my own choices and they were probably pretty boring choices because I didn’t pick any party stuff like this.’
‘People...men in particular will judge you by what you wear,’ Max bit out with a raw edge, his anger compressed but still burning like a solar flare inside his chest because every time he thought of the men who had enjoyed the same view of Tia that he had had, he got furious all over again.
‘That’s very old-fashioned,’ Tia replied without hesitation. ‘Anyway Maddie made sure our companions knew I wasn’t as sexy as I looked because she told them all that I was a virgin,’ she confessed boldly, far less embarrassed by that reality than she had been earlier that evening after Maddie had forced her to deal with that topic in public.
‘She told them?’ His nostrils flared with distaste, an ebony brow flying up in frowning query. ‘What the hell was she playing at?’
‘She tried to persuade me to lose my “V-card”, as she called it, by going into a bedroom with one of the men,’ Tia confided. ‘I refused and that’s why I got called a freak.’
‘She’s not a friend,’ Max pronounced, helplessly cast back to his own experience of betrayal by a friend he had trusted when he had been a teenager. ‘Definitely not a friend. Friends don’t try to harm or humiliate you.’
Tia winced. ‘Think I’ve kind of worked that out for myself, Max. I even suspect that dressing me up like this was part of the joke for her. She wasn’t the girl I remembered from school.’
Max closed a hand over hers where her small fingers were curling defensively against the leather upholstery. ‘Not your fault. It was mine. I shouldn’t have let you go alone. I didn’t even make sure you were carrying money.’
‘No, Max...’ Tia yanked her hand from beneath the comforting warmth of his although it took effort to voluntarily break that contact. ‘Don’t treat me like a child you have to take care of. I have to learn how to handle myself and not depend on others. I’ll find my way. I won’t be a freak for ever.’
‘You’re not a freak,’ Max growled, forcibly closing his hand over hers, all the more tense because he knew he had utilised that same word in his head when he’d first learned about her unusual background. ‘You’re only a little out of step with the modern world and given time that will quickly fade. Your father should’ve been shot for leaving you at the convent even after you finished school.’
‘He didn’t want to be bothered with me and out of sight was out of mind for him. My mother wasn’t much different,’ Tia sighed. ‘I think they were both a bit shallow and selfish when it came to personal relationships. With Dad, all his passion went into his missionary zeal and he didn’t really have room for anything that interfered with that. My mother, I think, is more driven by money and social position.’
His brows had drawn together. ‘You’ve met your mother? I assumed you hadn’t seen her since she left your father when you were a baby.’
Tia compressed her generous mouth and looked steadily back at him, for the first time striking him as being more mature than her age on paper. ‘Curiosity brought her to the convent. She visited me when I was thirteen to explain why she’d left me behind.’
‘Che diavolo...!’ Max exclaimed in surprise. ‘That must’ve been some explanation that long after the event.’
‘No,