To the Max (28 page)

“Good,” he said, kissing her.

“So what do you think about, you know?” she asked, gesturing around.

“This place, wow. I feel like I’m inside an Agatha Christie novel. I’m actually expecting at any moment someone to drop dead. Everything and everyone sparkles. So much bling. Diamonds are a girl’s best friends, right?”

“I don’t think so. Diamonds are the hardest material on earth. Beautiful and sparkling but cold and unbending, not to mention all the illegal trade and the child slavery behind them.”

“Your stepmothers don’t appear to agree.”

No kidding.

As good a businessman as her father was, he always allowed his current wife administer the household budget. Bad, bad idea. He would have been better off letting his secretary do that. Barbara seemed to have a better handle on things, and she was trying to stop Rowena and Dee Dee’s money leakage, but obviously she still had some work to do.

“I might have worn the hair of a Russian prisoner,” Max pointed out, “but your dad’s wives? They’re wearing the whole D block.”

Her laugh was cut short by the clicking of high heels in the floor.

Speaking of the devil.

“How far along are you, darling?” Rowena asked as she and Dee Dee approached them.

Annie tried to extricate herself from Max, but he didn’t budge an inch. “Halfway.”

Dee Dee, holding rather precariously her fifth gin and tonic by Annie’s calculation, stared at Max approvingly. “You did well. Knocking her up before marrying her. Hell, even before meeting the matriarch. Great move. Whatever you do, don’t sign any papers from the old mummy or her lawyer.”

Annie felt the tension rolling off his body in waves, but he remained silent.

“How much younger than you is he?” Dee Dee continued. “After all your patronizing looks at me. Like father, like daughter.”

Annie was appalled that these women would think Max would knock her up for money. “Not that it is any of your business, but Max is not—”

“Going to put up with this,” he interrupted, stepping between the women and her. “I won’t allow you to speak to Annie like that. We’re leaving.”

Annie nodded. Yes, please; she needed out of there.

Although her father and Barbara looked disappointed to see them go, Annie made her apologies and they left, Max vibrating with anger.

“Jesus, Annie, why didn’t you tell me about all this shit?” he asked, starting the engine.

“You should have let me explain that you didn’t knock me up. It would have shut their mouths. You didn’t have to listen to their insults.”

He was holding the wheel so tight, his knuckles were white. “You’re talking with the wrong man if you think I would throw my woman under a bus to save my own skin or my reputation. Don’t give a fuck what they say about me. Why the hell didn’t you give me a heads-up?”

“I was embarrassed. I didn’t really want you to see all that. What I come from.”

He said nothing, his eyes stormy. As they were leaving the estate, she caught him looking in the rearview mirror at the main house. “Fuck, you’re beyond loaded.”

They were sitting side by side, yet there was a damn ocean between them. He was distancing himself from her; she could feel it. And it made her mad.

“What? Now that you know about the inheritance and those crazy people back there, I’m not good enough?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to. I can read between lines.”

His expression hardened. “Do you want to know what I come from?”

“I know what you come from.”

“No, you don’t,” he spat.

They rode in silence. Max’s expression was severe, his lips a tense, thin line. She hated seeing him like this, so withdrawn, and she turned her gaze to the road. They weren’t driving back to Alden, but she didn’t have the strength to ask where they were going.

After an hour, they reached a trailer park. Max stopped in front of a pretty decrepit one. “You see that shitty trailer? There lives Karl, my biological father, who beat the shit out of my mother on and off for the last twenty-seven years until she was lucky enough to die from cirrhosis nine months ago.”

ANNIE LOOKED AROUND. “How do you know this is the right place?”

“When I was six, my mother decided she was taking me to live with her. And I spent the worst evening of my life here.”

This was the first time in twenty-one years that he’d been there. The trailer and its surroundings were the same, only more run-down, something he had thought impossible. He remembered it being bigger and creepier, but that had probably been because he’d been a frightened kid who’d just been kidnapped by a mother he didn’t know and a man he feared.

He got out of the car. Fuck, even the smell was worse. It wasn’t so much the trash as the stink of desperation permeating the place, a rancid odor that got inside him and burned all the way in.

Annie got out of the car too and reached for him. “And your dad let her take you?”

“Fuck no; that’s why they never asked. They grabbed me after school and brought me here. Apparently they wanted to make my dad pay child support to my mother. I was just a kid, so I started panicking and asking for my dad. Then my biological father lost his patience, slapped my face so hard my lip split, and told me to shut up and stop whining, that he was my real father.”

No one had put a hand on him until then, and Max had been in shock. His mother had come to his defense, and as the two adults yelled and the pushing began, Max had crawled under a table and stayed there, trembling.

He had no clue how long it took, but at some point that bastard left and there was some commotion outside. Then the door of the trailer exploded open, and Max heard the voice of his dad.
“Where is Max?”

As much as he’d been dying to scream, Max hadn’t been able to move or utter a word.

His mother must have signaled where he was, because suddenly his dad was peeking under the table.
“Come on, Son. Let’s go home.”

Max had hugged his dad so hard he’d lost the feeling in his arms, his face buried in the man’s neck. If he closed his eyes, he could still remember his dad’s smell and the sense of security he’d gotten from him.

“You okay?”
Nate had whispered to Max, who had nodded. Yep, now he was okay.

Nate Bowen’s voice had turned hard when he’d addressed Max’s mother.
“Max is mine. You will never try to take him away from me or let anyone put a hand on him, because I will fight for him till the very end. He stays with me. Are we clear?”

Max hadn’t lifted his head, but he’d heard his mother’s feeble excuses. “
I’m sorry. I didn’t know this was going to get out of hand. I thought he really wanted Max here.”

Annie’s touch brought him to the present. “Oh my God. What happened?”

“My dad came for me. He’d been overseeing a project outside the county, but he’d traveled nonstop until he got me,” Max explained. “I don’t know how he found me. Probably my mother called, telling him she was going for child support.” Later on, Max found out his dad had always kept tabs on their mother and her whereabouts. “When we left the trailer, that piece of shit was scrambling up, blood coming from his nose. He spluttered some threats about taking my dad to court and whatnot.”

Nate Bowen had halted and turned around, never letting go of Max, his hand open on the back of Max’s head to keep him from seeing anything, his body tense with tightly reined anger.
“Had I known you put a hand on my son before I came here, you would not have a broken nose now. You would be dead.”

If Max hadn’t been in his arms, he was sure Nate Bowen would have obliterated that guy.

They had gotten in the car and driven away. When they were far enough from the trailer park, Nate had stopped on the shoulder of the road and hugged Max. Only then had Max found his voice and broken into sobs. When he’d calmed down, his dad spoke.
“Max, you are my son. You’ve always been and you will always be. Do you understand?”

“He took me to the hospital to make sure I was okay,” Max continued explaining to Annie, who was now hugging him hard, tears silently rolling from her cheeks. “That was the last time I saw either of my biological parents.”

From then on, his dad or Aunt Maggie had walked him to and from school, never mind how late they were for their own things. And then, when Max had joined the Marines and blood tests were run on him, he’d gotten physical evidence of what Karl had told him.

“Cole and James know about what happened here?” she asked in a trembling voice.

“I don’t think so. I never told them, and I doubt my dad did. James was twelve. Too young. But Cole was sixteen and very angry. If he had found out what my mother allowed to happen to me, he would have gone ballistic.”

Suddenly the door of the trailer opened and a man came out, stumbling a bit.

“What the fuck you doing standing on my property? What do you want?”

Max straightened and tensed. That was him. This old man wasn’t the monster he remembered; he was much smaller and fragile, with a receding hairline, a big stomach, and stained, worn clothes.

Karl kept coming at them, and instinctively, Max moved Annie behind him.

“Is that him?” she whispered.

“Yes.” He’d seen him only once in his life, but he would never forget that face.

“Who the fuck are you?” Karl glanced at their clothes and the car and chuckled. “Took a wrong turn, huh? Or are you hoping to invest in real estate? This is a real fixer-upper.”

He knew he should get in the car and leave, but he stood there, holding the man’s gaze. Max saw it in his eyes the second it dawned on him. “You are my boy, right?”

Max didn’t answer.

“What you doing here? Missed your old man?”

“You are not
my
old man.” He was just an old, pathetic sorry excuse for a person who had wasted his life.

He had Annie behind his arm, but Karl could still see her. “You’re…what? Fucking rich bitches for a living? Fuck, you’ve knocked her up. I’m impressed. You’re like me. Hell, even better.”

Fury coursed through his veins. Before Max could react, Annie stepped in front of him, confronting Karl. “He’s nothing like you. Nothing.”

His heart skipped. “Annie—”

“The lady knows how to talk, huh?” Karl interrupted, coming straight at her.

Without even thinking about it first, Max blocked him, stopping Karl’s advance. “You don’t address her. You don’t even breathe the same air as her. And God help me, if you touch her, even with your fingertips, I’ll kill you.”

Karl stumbled back. “What? You came to finish what that bastard you call Dad started?” he yelled belligerently.

He would have loved to level the son of a bitch, but Annie was hugging him now, and his first priority was to protect her.

“Out of here. Now,” he ordered, taking her elbow and getting her inside the car. He sat behind the wheel and sped out of there, his jaw so tense it was going to split.

Going there had been a fucking mistake. He hadn’t expected to find Karl, but he should never have risked Annie this way.

She was trembling, but not from fear. From anger. Some of the swore words coming out of her were pretty impressive.

Annie tried to engage him in the car, but he couldn’t unlock his jaw long enough to let out words. Hell, he was holding the wheel so fucking hard his knuckles hurt.

In the end, she sighed. “Max…”

“Quiet, Ace.”

“Fine. I’ll shut up.” She humored him but didn’t keep away. She scooted over to his side and leaned on his shoulder, her hand on his chest. Feeling her so close, her light weight nested against him, made him even more tense. What would he have done if that son of a bitch would have hurt her?

She reached for him once they entered the house and brought him to her. “You have a rain check to collect, remember?”

He knew what she was doing: she was managing him with sex. “Ace, I’m too wound up. I can’t be gentle.”

“I didn’t ask for gentle,” she said, one corner of her mouth tipped up, placing her hand on top of his hard-on.

His voice was a growl. “Don’t play with me. You may not like the result.”

“I want you. And I know you wouldn’t hurt me.”

Fuck, she had more faith in him than he had in himself. But then she kissed him, her hands holding his head, and he lost control. He roughly lifted her skirt to her waist and sat her on the table. Silk underwear. Garter belt.

“Ace—”

She silenced him with her hand on his lips. “I trust you.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He pulled her dress down, freeing her glorious boobs. She leaned back and strained her chest against him, opening her legs.

“Jesus Christ, you’re fucking killing me here.” He was past any soft touch. He spread her wider with his thighs, roughly stroking her breasts. Then he cupped her nape and kissed her. Hard. “Why did you do that?” he demanded against her lips.

“Do what?”

“Step in front of me. That fucker is a violent man.”

“You aren’t his; you’re mine.”

“You want me even after all I told you?”

She looked confused. “Of course. Why not?”

That did it. He freed his aching and already leaking cock and harshly pulled her panties aside. “No condoms. You claimed me when you stepped in front of me, pregnant, to protect me. I’m claiming you now.”

Max thrust inside her, her plushy insides hugging him. His body tensed, his senses right away on overload. “Ace, shit. Fuck.”

He would have loved to go slow his first time without protection, but there was nothing he could do about it. She was so hot and so damn tight, and he needed her so much. Gripping her hips, he started pounding into her with fast, hard strokes, any shred of control gone. “Can’t stop, baby,” Max said between clenched teeth.

He was being too rough, but she was wrapped around him, panting loudly into his mouth, her pussy holding him in a tight vise.

Annie clawed his shoulders. “Don’t stop. I’m coming too.”

He fisted her hair, locked his knees, and hiding his face in her neck, he exploded, shooting his cum deep inside her.

It took an eternity to come down from that high. His legs felt wobbly; his throat was raw. He tightened his embrace, his face buried in her hair.