Max, who didn’t embarrass easily, in fact who would have said he was impervious to embarrassment, could feel his face heating up. ‘Yes,’ he pronounced flatly, reasoning that, as she had waited, it was not impossible that he could have been the sort of rare male who waited too for that one special experience. And unfortunately, that set off a whole train of conjecture in his head about what Tia might want from a man. An innocence that matched her own? A guy who went to mass? A perfect shining angel of a male, who was honest and decent and religious? He didn’t think he was any of those things.
‘A lot?’ Tia could not resist prompting uneasily. ‘I mean...er, have you had a lot of women in your life?’
Wide, sensual lips compressing, Max simply jerked his head in acknowledgement, wishing that the heat in his face would subside.
Her own face warming, Tia closed her eyes but still saw the troubled dark gold of his gleaming eyes below the black fringe of his lashes. She had embarrassed him and she shouldn’t have done that. At least he had been honest, though; at least he hadn’t lied about it, she reflected ruefully.
‘I think this would be a lot more challenging if we were both virgins,’ Max breathed curtly while thinking he had never thought to share such a conversation in his life with a woman. Then again, he hadn’t bargained on a Constancia Grayson figuring in his future, had he? And Tia was very much one of a kind.
‘You’re probably right,’ Tia conceded.
‘But you’re also probably disappointed,’ Max breathed and gritted his teeth, suddenly feeling furiously out of his depth, wondering where he was planning to go with the dialogue and finally registering just how off his game he was that he didn’t actually know.
‘No. I don’t think I am,’ Tia murmured, huge blue eyes opening to dreamily survey him, pale fingers smoothing from his shoulder down over his chest in a considering caress that blanked his mind and locked his tongue, because the one thing Max did know at that precise moment was that he wanted her hands all over him.
Max lowered his dark head, drawn by forces he didn’t even understand. She might want some ideal, perfect male but guess what? She was getting him and she could learn to deal, he thought, with the kind of raw aggression that powered him through the business world. He focused on that soft, pouty mouth and went back hungrily for more, smiling into the kiss as her spine arched and her whole body reached up to him, responding to his expertise, wanting him.
Long brown fingers smoothed along her thigh and when she emerged from that kiss he was working his sensual path down over her squirming length and at some stage of the proceedings her knickers had gone and she felt shockingly, wickedly naked. But before she could even process that discovery, Max parted her thighs and began to do something she had read about but had never dreamt she would actually experience.
The wave of heat and mortification that pulsed through her shaken body was intense. In an abrupt move, she reached down and snarled her fingers into the black luxuriance of his hair and then he licked her, there, where she had never dreamt she would be so intimately touched, and such a pulse of shattering excitement gripped her that she fell back helpless against the pillows.
He did it again and she gasped, neck lifting, breasts straining, suddenly in the hold of something seemingly much stronger than she was. Her body writhed of its own volition, a crazy pressure building at her aching core, and her nails dug into his shoulders. He was ravishing her, tormenting her with pleasure, she thought wildly, in thrall to pure sensation. She trembled, shook, emitted muffled cries, utterly out of control, her entire being locked to the feeling of his fingers entering her previously unbreached body. His tongue flicked across the tiny bundle of nerves he had exposed and it was as though her body detonated, the pressure peaking and the aftershocks passing outward, sending a coiling energy blast of delight to pull at her. Sated, dazed, she fell back against the pillows in wonderment at what sex was all about.
‘No, you do not get to go to sleep now, bella mia,’ Max warned her thickly, sliding up her relaxed body to gaze down at her with molten golden eyes awash with hunger and need.
And Tia realised for possibly the first time that it wasn’t all about her and guilty colour washed her face, a new tenderness sliding in its wake as she noticed the tension etching his lean, darkly handsome features. As he lifted her legs and tilted her up to him, she only just restrained herself from wrapping her arms round him and hugging him for giving her a superlative introduction to the physical that bore no resemblance to the sexual horror stories she had been subjected to earlier that evening.
‘I hope this doesn’t hurt much but it might,’ Max breathed in a driven undertone. ‘I haven’t been with a virgin before.’
‘That’s all right,’ Tia framed in a rush, stretching up her head and claiming a kiss from that wide, sensual mouth that had taught her the meaning of pleasure.
As Max kissed her back, doing that flick of the tongue thing again that enthralled her and reanimated the heat in her pelvis, she felt him push against her tender flesh, inch by inch pushing for entry into her untested body. She was insanely conscious of his every tiny movement, equally aware that he had prepared her as well as he could. And it seemed to work until he drove deeper and there was a sharp pinch of pain that forced an involuntary gasp from between her parted lips. And he stopped.
‘No...go on,’ Tia urged, gritting her teeth, her body even more primed than she was for the great reveal, indeed the churning liquid heat in her pelvis craving exactly that development.
Max thrust home, crazily aware of her lush inner walls clenching round him. ‘So good,’ he ground out helplessly, revelling in every tight, hot, wet atom of her welcome and somewhere around then he lost himself as he had never lost himself in a woman before.
Hands clenched on her hips, he pulled back and then plunged into her again, hard and fast. The shock of it thrilled through her tender body like a storm warning. It was the most extraordinary pleasure she had ever experienced. As he pounded into her, her hands clawed in his hair and then into his shoulders and then down his back, the excitement and the pressure rising and rising until she could no longer contain it. Her heart thundering in her ears, her head jerking back and forth on the pillows, she felt that mighty surge of sensation gripping her womb and throwing her high as outer space again. She thrashed beneath him, unable to contain the ecstasy as convulsions quaked through her satiated body.
In the aftermath she felt so heavy, so languorous, she was bemused. ‘That was...don’t have the words...’
In bed or out of bed, Max rarely had words with women, preferring to escape intimacy with silence on the sensible grounds that what wasn’t said couldn’t be misinterpreted. But Tia had both arms and both legs wrapped around him and he was trapped. ‘That was the best sex I’ve ever had,’ he mumbled thickly, his head now aching so badly he couldn’t think straight.
In consternation at that awareness, Max reeled out of bed, as dizzy and disorientated as a drunk, and he finally appreciated that there was something badly amiss with him, something worse even than his usual punishing migraines. ‘Sorry, feeling weird,’ he framed with difficulty. ‘Think I must be overtired...’
Tia leapt out of bed as he sank down on the rug. ‘You need a doctor,’ she gasped.
‘Don’t want a doctor,’ Max told her predictably.
Fortunately, Tia discovered that a doctor was easily obtained by the helpful hotel staff. The minutes that followed her call were frantic. Between fetching Max a glass of water and finding and getting some clothes on her naked body before registering that Max was naturally
