Claimed for the Leonelli Legacy by Lynne Graham

Author:Lynne Graham [Graham, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarlequinUKLtd
Published: 2017-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘DOUG AND I attended the same boarding school as teenagers,’ Max divulged reluctantly. ‘I didn’t know him then the way I do now. I trusted him as a friend. It didn’t occur to me that he already saw me as competition and thought Andrew took too much interest in me. In my own eyes I was the housekeeper’s nephew and I didn’t ever expect to be anything more. I was staff, Doug was family.’

Tia rested her tousled head back on the pillows and reached for a bronzed masculine hand, lacing her fingers into his without any help from him. ‘Go on...’

Max retrieved his hand. ‘Doug’s family lived nearby and he was a frequent visitor. His mother was on her second marriage and he had a stepsister, a very pretty redhead called Alice. We were only seventeen. Doug brought Alice here repeatedly that summer and I fell in love with her. Only a few weeks after I began seeing her she announced that she was pregnant and that I was the father of her child,’ he revealed grittily. ‘I was surprised because I had only slept with her on one occasion and I had been...careful.’

Tia sat up to study him in consternation. ‘And?’ she pressed.

‘There was a huge family row. Doug’s stepfather stormed over here and tried to beat me up, and then in the midst of all that, with Alice’s mother and my aunt screaming in the background and Andrew calling for order, Alice took fright and finally told the truth. The baby was Doug’s. She and Doug had been having sex for months and when she realised she was pregnant she panicked because they had been expressly warned by their parents that they were expected to think of each other as brother and sister. Together, she and Doug decided that I should be set up to take the blame, which is why she slept with me in the first place...’

‘And you loved her,’ Tia muttered unevenly, her nails digging into the palms of her hands to enable her to listen to the tawdry tale without making tactless comments. Max had been the fall guy in a nasty set-up, his conviction betrayed by a boy he had believed to be his friend and a girl whom he had learned to care about.

‘Yes, but I got over it,’ Max completed with a brisk lack of sentiment that did not impress her in the slightest. ‘However, Doug’s mother and stepfather’s marriage broke down because of that pregnancy and, sadly, Alice miscarried a few weeks later, so everyone lost out.’

‘At least she told the truth in the end,’ Tia sighed.

‘Can we please drop the subject now?’ Max murmured, his stunning heavily lashed dark eyes welded to her troubled gaze. ‘I was a boy and now I’m a man but I still don’t like remembering that hellish affair.’

Inside her chest, Tia’s heart ached for him and she reached for his hand again.

Max snaked his fingers free a second time. ‘You asked me and I told you.

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