Best Modern Romances Of The Year 2017

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 came racing downstairs in a panic when she found Sancha missing from her cot, and Max looked forgivably smug when she stared in surprise at her daughter slumbering peacefully in her travel cot, utterly lost in an outfit at least two sizes too large for her.

‘You should’ve wakened me,’ she told him in discomfiture.

‘No. I want to be involved whenever I can be.’ Gleaming dark golden eyes locked to her, Max slid upright and stretched indolently, long sleek muscles flexing below his shirt as he reached for his jacket. ‘You need to see that we can do this better together and that I can be as committed to Sancha as you are. I don’t plan to work eighteen-hour days any more, not now I have both of you back in my life. That is a fair assumption, isn’t it?’ he pressed tautly. ‘You are...back?’

‘Yes, I’m back,’ Tia murmured, torn up inside by the sudden flash of insecurity she read in his strained gaze. He wasn’t sure of her yet, didn’t quite trust that she would go the distance, and she didn’t think she could blame him for that.

It was two days before they got away from her house, two days of frantic packing and planning with Hilary, who would manage Salsa Cakes and in due course open the tea room with Tia’s financial backing. Max made himself very useful thrashing out the business details.

Late season snow was falling softly as they drew up outside Redbridge Hall. The trees were frosted white and the air was icy cold. When Tia walked into the spacious hall where a fire was burning merrily in the grate, she felt as if she was coming home for the first time.

‘It’s our first wedding anniversary,’ Max reminded her with satisfaction.

‘My goodness, is it?’ Tia exclaimed, mortified that she had forgotten.

‘I’m afraid that because I didn’t know you would be here I haven’t made any special preparations.’

‘That’s OK. Just us being here together is enough,’ Tia whispered as they went upstairs with Janette, the housekeeper, to see the room that had been prepared for their daughter.

‘It’ll need decorating,’ Max grumbled.

‘It’s perfect,’ Tia insisted, able to see how much work the staff had put in trying to make an adult bedroom look suitable for a baby. A very large and handsome antique cot had been refurbished with a new mattress and, laid on it, Sancha looked little bigger than a doll. Tia rummaged through her bags of baby essentials until she had located everything she needed to make her daughter feel comfortable.

‘We should hire a nanny to help out,’ Max suggested. ‘We stayed home every evening while Andrew was ill because we didn’t want to leave him alone but I’d like to get back to having a social life and sometimes you’ll be staying in my London apartment. We need that extra flexibility.’

Tia nodded thoughtfully. While she couldn’t imagine having a nanny, she did want to spend as much time as possible with Max. The life they had led during the first months of their marriage had been limited by her grandfather’s infirmity and they had rarely gone out.

Max dropped a hand to her spine and walked her into their bedroom. ‘I had this room updated. It was dark and dreary before.’

‘But very grand,’ she conceded, scanning the lighter colour scheme with approval. ‘This is an improvement.’

‘I do have one gift for you,’ Max murmured, indicating the wrapped package on the bed.

Tia smiled and began to rip the fancy paper off to expose an exceptionally pretty framed picture.

‘It’s the Grayson family tree,’ Max murmured. ‘I thought you would enjoy seeing exactly where you come from and who your forebears were.’

The names had been done in exquisite calligraphy, and hand-painted flowers decorated the borders. It was a thoughtful, meaningful gift and her heart turned over inside her because the information on her own family tree was exactly the kind of information she had been denied all her life when her father had insisted that her curiosity was foolish because she would never even travel to England.

‘It’s really beautiful, Max. Thank you,’ she whispered sincerely. ‘This means a lot to me. I like what you’ve had done to this room as well.’

‘I haven’t used it since you left. I came back here every weekend. It gave the staff a reason for being here.’

Tia studied his lean, strong face. ‘I haven’t thanked you for that yet...for looking after things for me.’

‘That’s my job. That’s what I do. All my working life I have taken care of stuff for other people...their money, their businesses. But when it’s for you, it’s a little bit more special and it doesn’t feel like work,’ Max volunteered.

‘Why is that...do you think?’ Tia prompted hopefully.

Max glanced at her in surprise. ‘You’re my wife and this is your home.’

‘This is your home too,’ Tia reminded him. ‘When we got married I had nothing and you’re not the housekeeper’s nephew any more. You’re the man Andrew chose to run Grayson Industries and the man he asked to marry me.’

‘No regrets there,’ Max breathed. ‘Not now I’ve got you back again.’

‘You honestly don’t regret marrying me?’

‘How could I regret it? There is some stuff I regret,’ Max admitted reluctantly, his lean, darkly handsome face grave. ‘Mainly that I had to rush you into marriage, but I hate that I missed out on you being pregnant and that I wasn’t by your side when you had Sancha.’

‘I thought you’d be very uncomfortable with all that,’ she confided.

‘Why would I be when you were carrying our child?’ Max asked simply. ‘Maybe some day you’ll consider having another baby and we’ll share everything then right from the start.’

‘Maybe in a year or so... I think I would find it all a lot less scary with you by my side,’ Tia admitted, touched by the source of his regret and his evident hope that they would have another child. ‘You know, it may not seem like it but... I love you very much, Max.’

‘You already know how I feel about you and it didn’t keep you with me, amata mia,’ Max murmured in a roughened undertone.

‘What do you mean, I already know?’ Tia asked in bewilderment.

‘I told you the day of the funeral that there would never be another woman for me, that you were “it” for me, as it were,’ he completed very awkwardly.

‘You said I was the icing and the cake,’ Tia recalled abstractedly, totally thrown by what he was saying. ‘Did you mean that you had fallen in love with me?’

‘What else would I mean by that?’ Max demanded, as if she were the one with faulty understanding. ‘Dio mio, I admitted that I couldn’t stand the thought of losing you, that I didn’t want any other man to have even a chance to take you from me. What else would I have meant?’

Tia gave him a tearful appraisal. ‘I didn’t get it...don’t you understand? If I’d known you loved me, I would never have left. I thought you were talking about sex.’

‘The sex is spectacular but nothing is as spectacular as just having you in my life, having you to come home to and having you smile at me. Are you sincerely saying that you wouldn’t have left if I’d used the word “love”? I gave you a pendant with a diamond for every day we’d been married. Didn’t that say it for me? Surely it was obvious how I felt?’ Max was studying her with rampant incredulity. ‘I could feel you slipping away from me that week. I was panicking and then the will was read and Andrew had stabbed me in the back and made everything impossible.’

A sob convulsed Tia’s throat. ‘Oh, Max, I don’t care about the money. I never cared about the money. I don’t even know what to do with it or how to take care of Grayson Industries. All I ever wanted was you and I’ve spent months breaking my heart for you and trying to have a life without you...and I hated my life without you! But I wouldn’t admit that even to myself.’

‘Tia... Tia...’ Max framed her distressed face with trembling hands. ‘It was love at first sight for me. I had no control over my feelings. I wanted you at any cost but I felt like a bastard for taking you to bed so quickly and then pushing you into a marriage you weren’t really ready for. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to make you happy and persuade you to stay with me. I need you.’

‘I need you too,’ Tia said chokily and flung herself into his arms. ‘Love at first sight and you never even mentioned it!’

‘I don’t talk about stuff like that. You’d have thought I was mentally unstable if I’d told you at the time because we hardly knew each other,’ Max argued vehemently.

‘Then I was mentally unstable too!’ Tia told him, covering his disconcerted face with kisses. ‘I felt the same. Max... Max, I love you to the moon and back.’

‘Loved you through all nine miserable months of your absence,’ Max confessed grittily. ‘Thought...just my luck to fall for a bolter.’

‘I swear that I will never leave you again!’ Tia told him passionately as he settled her down on the bed while Teddy scratched unavailingly at the door.

‘You love me...and yet you still left me,’ Max marvelled in bewilderment. ‘How is that possible?’

‘I wanted our baby to have a loving father and I didn’t think you wanted to be one. I also thought that possibly you felt trapped, getting married at Andrew’s instigation and then me falling pregnant immediately.’

‘I wouldn’t have married you if I hadn’t fallen for you like a ton of bricks. I knew what Andrew wanted but I’m my own man and I make my own decisions...and then I met this incredible Brazilian angel...well, angel-like,’ Max adjusted as she wrestled him out of his jacket. ‘And the writing was on the wall from that moment. One look and you owned me body and soul. One look and I knew I’d never want another woman again.’

‘But you didn’t show it and you didn’t say it either,’ Tia lamented. ‘You’ve got to say the words for a woman to hear.’

Max said it in Italian because she startled him by ripping his shirt open.

‘No, I don’t know Italian. Say it in English,’ she urged.

‘You’ve come over all bossy,’ Max commented warily.

‘Please say it...’ Tia urged, stroking a long muscular thigh encouragingly.

‘I love you.’ Max kept on saying it because the reward was Tia’s full attention and her desire to incessantly touch him where he was very keen to be touched. ‘But I didn’t recognise that what I felt was love until it was too late.’

Teddy slept outside their bedroom door that night because his humans didn’t emerge. The next night he sneaked in and slept under the bed until his snoring alerted Max to his presence and he got thrown out in the early hours. The third night he sat outside the door crying and gained entry by taxing Max’s patience. He was satisfied with that advance in his campaign but his ambition was set on regaining his rightful place back in the bed and he was a very determined little dog.

* * *

Two and a half years later, Tia studied the traditional Brazilian Christmas cake she had baked for Max. It was his favourite and that was saying something because he liked all her cakes. She had started up another branch of Salsa Cakes at Redbridge and it was thriving and providing more employment on the estate. Her cousin, Ronnie, had become her closest friend and, keen to have a job now that her children were all at school, she did the accounts for Salsa Cakes.

Tia was always very busy, but then she liked to be busy if she could take time off when she needed it to be with Max. And now that they had a wonderful nanny, time off was no longer a problem. She had done a part-time course on estate management to help her to run Redbridge but she had taken up other interests as well. She raised funds for the convent orphanage and did community work at various charitable events and, with Max as an advisor, had set up a workshop at the settlement for handicrafts and toiletries made from Amazonian plants. The convent was thriving and she made regular visits back to her former home. As a rule, she and Max ended those trips with a self-indulgent few days relaxing in Rio.

In a few weeks, her mother, Inez, was marrying for the third time and Tia was attending the wedding. She was looking forward to spending some time with her two half-brothers and her half-sister. Inez had finally agreed to tell her children about Tia’s existence and that had considerably enhanced Tia’s attitude to her mother. Since then she had met her mother’s second family on several occasions and they all got on well. As for her mother, well, she knew she was never going to be close to the older woman for they had nothing in common but at least they were now on relaxed and friendly terms.

Of course, Tia already had her own snug little family with Max and Sancha. Sancha was a lively toddler on the brink of starting nursery school and Tia had decided that it was finally time to think of having another child. A baby was now on the way, the well-defined bump of her pregnancy reminding Tia of that fact every time she bent over a table and found her stomach was in the way. The new addition to the family would arrive in the new year. Max was very excited. He said there was more of her to hold and he seemed to like that. In fact, Tia thought cheerfully, Max seemed to relish every change that signified her advancing pregnancy. Where she saw fat, Max saw voluptuousness and he couldn’t keep his hands off her.

Not that that was anything new in their marriage, Tia reflected with a heightening of colour in her cheeks. Sometimes she wondered if it was because they had come so close to losing each other that they never dared to forget how lucky they were to be together. And these days she could think without the smallest resentment that her grandfather had picked a very fine husband for her. Max was a terrific father, a great husband and a real family man, which was a wonderful trait to find in a male who had never enjoyed a proper family of his own.

The past no longer bothered Max. He had moved on from his sense of secret shame, learning that he could be whatever he wanted to be if he worked hard enough at it. He had set up an executive team to help him run Grayson Industries and was no longer so constantly on call. Unlike his mentor, Andrew, who had never spent much time with his two sons and whose relationship with them had suffered accordingly, Max put family first and work second.

It was Christmas Eve and Tia twitched the nativity scene in the hall into place with care. She had incorporated some Brazilian traditions into their Christmases. Now she sat down by the fire to await Max’s return, Teddy at her feet and Sancha pretending to read very importantly from one of her picture books.

Max breezed through the front door festooned with packages. Sancha dived at him, telling him about her day while Teddy bounced at his feet, joining in the excitement but not actually greeting Max. Max smiled at her, his wide charismatic smile that never failed to light her up like a firework inside. Her beautiful Max.

‘You look...amazing,’ Max told her truthfully, because she did and he could never quite believe that she was his, his to hold and keep. In a black stretchy dress that hugged her shapely form, blonde hair bouncing on her slim shoulders, cornflower eyes sparkling, she took his breath away.

There was no end to the advantages of being married to Tia, Max thought complacently. There were the cakes, cakes to die for. There was Sancha and a second child on the way. There was the sheer joy of living with Tia’s sunny, positive nature and her boundless energy. Sometimes he couldn’t credit that one woman could transform his life as much as she had and he was tempted to pinch himself to be certain he hadn’t dreamt his perfect woman up. There was something wonderfully reassuring about the arms Tia wrapped round him while the enthusiasm of her response to his kiss travelled straight to another spot.

Max surfaced abstractedly from that kiss to see their nanny taking Sancha off for her tea and Tia clasped her hand in his and led him up the stairs. ‘I thought we were having Christmas cake,’ he said weakly.

‘After supper,’ his wife told him repressively. ‘We’re on a timetable. We’re going to Midnight Mass later.’

‘And after...?’ Max ran glittering dark golden eyes over her lovely face and exhaled with pleasurable anticipation. ‘I love you, Mrs Leonelli...even when you dictate when I can eat cake.’

‘The rules are for Sancha. You can eat cake whenever you like.’

‘Only if I can bring it up to the bedroom with us. Teddy will take care of any crumbs,’ Max bargained.

But Teddy wasn’t falling for that unlikely offer. He knew Max wasn’t a messy eater. Teddy’s beady eyes were locked to the currently untended cake on the low coffee table.

Tia laughed and tasted Max’s mouth again, sinuously, sensually, revelling in the knowledge of his arousal. He scooped her up into his arms on the landing, pretended to stagger at her increased weight, got mock-slapped for his teasing and totally forgot about his craving for cake. Tia told him how much she loved him and it all got very soppy, and then sexy, and then soppy again.