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snappy jaws. For a tiny dog, he was ridiculously aggressive. ‘It’s all right to be upset at leaving. As you said, this has been your home for a long time,’ he murmured soothingly.
The dark rich tenor of his voice shimmied up and down Tia’s spine like a caress and she scolded herself, for she had lain awake more than she had slept the night before. She was attracted to him, of course she was, because he was young and gorgeous and kind. But she had sworn she would not make a fool of herself over him by staring and acting foolishly as she had often seen some of the teenage schoolgirls doing over a handsome young gardener who had worked at the convent for several months. Tia told herself that she was old enough and mature enough to know better.
But meeting Max’s glorious black-lashed dark eyes only a couple of feet away convulsed her throat and unleashed the butterflies in her tummy again. She could feel the colour and the heat of a blush building in her cheeks, and as his gaze lowered to her mouth even her lips seemed to tingle with responsiveness. Never had Tia felt so out of her depth as she did at that moment or more aware of her own deficiencies. The teenagers she had once felt superior to had known much more about how to talk and behave with a man than she did. When Max got close and she looked at him, she felt almost choked by shyness and awkwardness and every feeling, every sensation she felt was magnified to quite absurd proportions.
For a very experienced man, Max was strangely exhilarated by that blush and he studied her with a weird sense of achievement. She was not indifferent, not unaware of him. And she was doing what women had done decades before equality transformed the dating scene and waiting for him to make the moves. Flowers, Max thought for the first time in his life in a woman’s radius. She would like flowers, being old-fashioned and all that, he decided vaguely.
‘We’re being picked up in an hour.’
‘Mother Sancha has asked us to join her for coffee before we leave but I’ll get you breakfast first.’
Max gritted his teeth as Teddy glowered at him over Tia’s shoulder and bared his own in a silent snarl of warning. Hate at first sight, Max conceded with sardonic amusement. ‘If you could have one special thing, Tia...anything, what would it be? There must be things you want—’
‘A mobile phone,’ Tia told him with a haste that embarrassed her, worried that she sounded greedy.
‘You don’t have one?’ Max queried in disbelief.
‘Mother Sancha banned them. She won’t allow the girls in the school to have them here. I should explain...’ Tia hesitated. ‘When I was at school here it was a normal boarding school but that changed as the number of boarders went down. The girls who stay here now are more transient and don’t stay for as long. Their parents send them here because they’re...troubled,’ she selected uncomfortably. ‘The sisters have a good record for straightening out troubled teenagers.’
His mouth quirked at that information. ‘Yes, I imagine being sent out here to the back end of nowhere and being deprived of even a phone would have a sobering effect on most adolescents.’
‘The school fees keep the orphanage going and fund the community work the sisters do!’ Tia exclaimed repressively.
‘I wasn’t mocking the system. I was merely making an observation,’ Max challenged.
‘You sounded sarcastic,’ Tia countered.
‘I often am,’ Max admitted equably. ‘You’ll have to get used to nuances like that with people. People don’t all think and speak and act the same.’
Tia rounded on him at the foot of the stairs, her ready temper roused at being patronised as if she were still a young girl when she was a grown woman and proud of the fact. ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she questioned fierily, an angry tightness marking her small face.
‘I think you live in an institution where being different is frowned on and probably have little experience of what life is really like beyond the convent gate.’
‘Well, then you’d be wrong because I have often seen the consequences of alcoholism and addiction, domestic abuse and prostitution. There can be few evils that I have not some knowledge of,’ Tia argued furiously, hotly dismissing his apparent conviction that she was some naïve little flower. ‘Maybe you thought you’d find me on a hill somewhere singing among the wild flowers? Yes, I am acquainted with sarcasm, Max!’
Max was taken aback by the display: she had gone from zero to ninety in seconds and lost her temper. ‘Does that also mean you need to start shouting at me?’ he shot back at her.
Recalled to her wits but still trembling with annoyance, Tia stilled and sucked in a steadying breath, appalled at the rude way she had attacked him. ‘I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that rant. I suppose I’m worrying about how I will appear to you and to my grandfather and that I won’t suit.’
‘You needn’t worry about that. If you had horns and a tail, Andrew would welcome you. You’re his only relative,’ he responded wryly.
‘I have a terrible temper. I’m supposed to go for a walk and practise breathing exercises when I get mad, so that I don’t lash out at people,’ Tia confided guiltily.
‘I’m pretty tough, Tia. I can take hard words,’ Max countered.
Shame engulfed Tia because this was the person trusted by her grandfather to take her to England, the man who had already ensured Teddy’s continuing health. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again gruffly.
Max closed a hand on her arm to prevent her from walking away. ‘It’s OK,’ he breathed more forcefully. ‘You’re right in the middle of a huge upheaval in your life.’
Tia blinked back the tears that had been gathering in hot, prickly discomfort behind her eyes. ‘Don’t make excuses for me. I was horribly rude.’
‘You have fire. I like that, bella mia,’ Max admitted huskily, his dark deep intonation somehow rousing a curl of heat low in her pelvis. ‘I was being patronising and you were right to call me on it.’
‘You’re very...understanding,’ Tia breathed soft and low, locked into his stunning dark eyes as he bent towards her, Teddy’s feisty warning growls at her feet ignored by both of them.
And for a split second she actually thought he was going to kiss her and she craved that kiss as she craved water on a hot day, needing somehow to know if that soft, full lower lip of his would be hard or gentle on hers. Hard, she decided, lost in a sensual daydream for the first time in her life.
‘I have Mr Leonelli’s breakfast waiting,’ Sister Mariana called down the corridor, and Max jerked back, releasing her wrist, lifting his head again, a telling gleam of feverish colour accentuating his high cheekbones.
Nearly forgot yourself in a convent, Max derided for his own benefit, fighting his arousal with all his might while wondering how she would react if she noticed. He was discovering that when Tia looked at him as though he could walk on water, he liked it, and that astonished him.
Tia was in a daze over breakfast. She knew all the facts about sex and had always thought the actual mechanics of the act sounded fairly disgusting: what the man did, what the woman had to allow. But Max had walked into her life the night before and even her outlook on that had changed because she was now putting Max into that couple equation and found that she was madly curious and shockingly excited by the concept. What startled her the most was the deep current of desire rippling through her whenever she looked at him, whenever she even thought about him. In his radius her body no longer felt like her own and was certainly no longer fully under her control.
‘So, where do we fly from?’ she asked as she settled into the four-wheel drive. Teddy was not impressed to be confined in the pet carrier inside it and whined in complaint but his new official owner didn’t want him biting Max and she was rather afraid that he might if given even the smallest chance. The little dog she had quietly adored for so long was revealing unexpected traits now that he was being forced to mix with other people.
As for Tia, her eyes