More importantly, Max was demanding full access to Sancha and she could hardly criticise him for that. Their daughter would benefit from a normal relationship with her father. And Tia, who didn’t want to picture a future empty of Max, wanted that as well.
‘Is there a shower I can use?’ Returned to the present, Tia showed Max the bathroom, which was perfectly presentable because she had had to have it replaced soon after moving in.
He had arrived with an overnight bag. The significance of that when there was little accommodation to rent in the village outside the tourist season made Tia’s lips quirk. Max had never planned to take no for an answer. Max had come prepared with an ultimatum.
He would take her any way he could get her.
Which was pretty much the same as he had said the day of the funeral.
Somehow in a very short space of time you became both the icing and the cake... I’m possessive.
Caveman-speak for love? Whatever he felt for her, time hadn’t changed him in the essentials and she was suddenly awesomely grateful for that reality. He didn’t have a collection of sweet words or compliments to offer her but he was very honest and she loved him for that quality.
As Max emerged from the bathroom, his shirt loose and unbuttoned to display a slice of bronzed chest, Tia slid past him, clad in a robe, and stepped straight into the shower. He was right: she had run away from Redbridge, using the belief that he didn’t want their child as an excuse. But she had needed that breathing space, that time alone to be independent and self-sufficient so that she could think for herself and finish growing up. She knew now that she could live her dream but that her dream would not be perfect in the starry way she had imagined it. And in truth she no longer wanted that original dream if it didn’t contain Max. Most probably she did not figure in any of Max’s dreams, but perhaps she would have to settle for that because half a loaf was better than no bread at all, particularly when it meant she could live with the man she loved and give her daughter the father she deserved.
Tia brushed her hair. It rippled in snaking waves across her shoulders, volumised by the braiding she used to confine it every day. Her heart beating very fast, Tia walked back into the bedroom.
‘You’re not allowed in the bed,’ Max was telling Teddy grimly as he tried to stop the terrier from tunnelling under the duvet to take up his favourite position.
‘He’s a great foot warmer on a cold night.’
‘No,’ Max told her forcefully as he straightened, a lithe bronzed figure clad only in silk boxers, his muscular abs rippling with his movement.
Tia’s breath escaped in a faint hiss as she averted her eyes and scooped Teddy off the bed to stow him in his basket. ‘He can be very pushy. He’ll just wait until we’re asleep and sneak back in,’ she warned him.
Max slid back into the bed while she watched dry-mouthed, as impressionable as a teenager with a first crush. His biceps flexed as he tossed the duvet back out of her way and looked expectantly at her. One glance and he froze. Honey-blonde swathes of hair foamed round her heart-shaped face, framing her mesmerising blue eyes and soft, full mouth. She shed the robe to reveal a vest top and shorts with a cutesy dog print. He breathed in slow and deep to restrain himself but he still wanted to grab her and fall on her like a hungry, sex-starved wolf.
‘Why did you pack an overnight bag?’ Tia murmured. ‘How did you know you’d be staying?’
‘I knew I couldn’t risk leaving you once I actually found you. It would be too easy for you to disappear again,’ Max breathed curtly.
Tia looked at him in astonishment. ‘But I bought this place. I couldn’t just pull up sticks and walk out of here on a whim.’
‘You did before and you have the resources to stage a vanishing act any time you want,’ he reminded her. ‘I won’t risk losing you and my daughter again.’
Shame gripped Tia as she scrambled below the duvet. ‘I wouldn’t do that to you again.’
Blonde hair brushed his arm and she turned over to look at him, cornflower-blue eyes full of regret. ‘I promise I won’t leave like that ever again.’
Max’s gaze dropped to her soft, full mouth and he tensed, dense black lashes lifting on burning golden eyes, fierce sexual energy leaping through him in a stormy surge. The chemistry got in the way of his brain, he finally acknowledged. That intense pull had clouded his judgement from the first moment he saw her. He was determined not to let it happen again.
Tia lifted a hand that felt detached from her control and stroked her forefinger very gently along the sensual curve of his lower lip and she shivered, hips squirming, the heat at the heart of her making her press her thighs together for relief. Max stared down at her and the silence throbbed and pulsed, the atmosphere so tense it screamed at her.
And then he took the bait that she had only dimly recognised was bait and his mouth came down so hard on hers she couldn’t breathe. His lips pushed hers apart and his tongue delved and her spine arched and all of a sudden she couldn’t speak because her body was doing the talking for her, lifting up into the hard, muscular strength of his, legs splaying, breasts peaking. A powerful hunger was unleashed in both of them and it swept them away. He came down on her, flattening her to the bed, crushing her breasts, and he kissed her until her mouth was swollen and reddened.
‘You want this...?’ he husked, giving her that choice at the last possible moment.
‘Want...you,’ Tia protested, her back bowing and her legs rising and locking round his lean hips as he pushed into her yielding flesh with a hungry groan of need.
And it was wild and rough and passionate and exactly what they both needed, a release from the shocking tension that had built throughout the evening. Afterwards, Tia lay slumped in Max’s arms, utterly drained but happy.
Max was already wondering if he had got it wrong again, feeling like a man who had a very delicate glass ornament in his hand and who had accidentally damaged it. He never knew what to do with Tia; he never knew what to say to her. What he did say when he was striving to be honest tended to come out wrong, so he knew that his silence was a necessary precaution. Even so, the knowledge that he would wake up with her in the morning brought a flashing smile of relief to his lips. She had both arms wrapped around him and he decided he liked it. Teddy regarded him balefully from his basket but nothing could dull Max’s mood.
Max knew nothing about love. He hadn’t grown up with that example to follow, Tia was musing, and the one time he had surrendered to that attachment he had been deceived and hurt. But she knew as sure as God made little apples that the look in Max’s eyes when he’d first held Sancha had been the onset of love. If he could love their daughter, he could learn how to love Tia. Baby steps, she told herself soothingly, baby steps.
Max woke up in the morning with his wife and a terrier. Said terrier had sneaked into the bed during the night and, far from settling in the location of a foot-warmer, had instead imposed himself between Max and Tia like a doggy chastity belt. Max’s phone was buzzing like an angry bee and his daughter was crying and he eased out of bed, leaving Tia soundly asleep.
He was thrilled with his achievement when he contrived to make up a bottle for Sancha by following the very precise instructions. He gave Teddy a large slice of cake, which hugely boosted his standing in the dog’s eyes, and Teddy stationed himself protectively at his feet while he fed his daughter. That done, he carried the little girl back upstairs to find clean clothes for her. Changing her and dressing her was the biggest challenge he had ever met because she wouldn’t stay still and her legs and arms got lost in the all-in-one garment he finally got her dressed in. But she was clean and warm and that was all that mattered, he told himself while he made arrangements on his phone to have Tia’s possessions moved to Redbridge Hall.
Tia