At the back of his mind, he knew that he had made inaccurate assumptions and even more badly judged comparisons. Whilst he had taken on board the weight of premature responsibilities when his parents had died, when he himself had been the same age as his sister now, they were different people with different life experiences and different goals. Izzy wasn’t him.
He had given her what he saw as a golden opportunity, and maybe it had been, but in all events it had been too soon for her.
She’d wanted to live her life on her terms. She hadn’t wanted his interference then and she didn’t want it now.
But introspection wasn’t something he liked to indulge, and it had kick-started his day on a bad footing.
He’d hit the boardroom an hour and a half before Mia was due to show up, ample time to discover that conversations he had had with Izzy about the hotel and suggestions he had put her way because this was his third foray into the hotel business, albeit on a much, much smaller scale, had been largely ignored.
He’d taken his eye off the ball for the very first time when it came to work and he could have kicked himself.
Yet, when he had turned to see Mia framed in the doorway, all those feelings of edgy frustration had vanished.
He’d never seen anyone look so uncomfortable in his life before. She didn’t want to be there, and she’d weirdly decided to wear a strange, starchy suit—which, her expression had managed to convey, was all his fault.
Yet even in the discomforting get-up, and even with her disgruntled, struggling-to-be-polite expression, she was still so stunningly pretty.
Then she’d sat down, he had breathed in the light scent of whatever flowery perfume she was wearing and he’d had to back away from proximity to her. Two hours breathing her in and seeing the tantalising flash of leg so close to his might stretch his powers of concentration a little too much.
At any rate, it made sense to go to the hotel with her so that she could talk him through the finer points. Yet here, in the confines of the car, there was a sizzling awareness of her that he couldn’t seem to damp down.
‘Rustic mosaic tiles,’ he said flatly, angling his big body so that his back was against the car door and he could face her, legs sprawled apart. ‘An absurd amount of wooden planks… Four-poster beds…’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m giving you a taster of some of the unexpected items I came across, and I’ve only just begun my search. Since you seem to know quite a bit about the hotel, care to tell me if any of these items make sense to you?’
His eyes drifted to her full lips. It irritated and bewildered him that he couldn’t seem to focus when he was in her presence. Max knew that women behaved in a certain way when they were around him. Even the women he met on a business level. He was very much aware of the fact that they tailored their responses, aimed to please, strove to gain his attention.
He was used to that and he liked it. Life was pressured enough on the work front so, when it came to women, he liked things to be laid back and unchallenging.
Certainly, demanding women were a turn-off, so it was downright puzzling that he found himself so inexplicably drawn to the woman sitting next to him who had done nothing but bicker, argue and overreact from the very second he had announced who he was. Even before that, when he thought about it.
Hadn’t her opening words to him been, ‘Forget it’?
She was looking at him narrowly, striving to remember that she was his employee, whilst no doubt wanting to launch into another diatribe.
She’d tied her hair back and he wanted to tell her that, however hard she’d tried to look businesslike, she had failed miserably because she was still as sexy as Hell.
He wondered what she would say, how she would react.
He wondered…what it would feel like to unbutton the prissy blouse she had chosen to wear and slip his hand underneath the bra, which he imagined would be a no-nonsense white affair. What would she look like half-naked? She had small breasts and he had a graphic image of his hand covering one of them, playing with her, watching her scowling, defensive face soften with passion.
A dark flush stained his sharp cheekbones. His imagination was running away and he would have to rein it in. Not simply because he didn’t do loss of self-control but also because he didn’t do mixing business with pleasure. Delectable she might be, but she worked for him, and as his employee she stood on the opposite side of a very well-defined divide.
Mia met his eyes steadily. He was scowling, his face dark, already prepared to jump the gun and lay into her because he had given Izzy orders—no doubt camouflaged as suggestions—and she had chosen to bypass them. His default position was attack mode, and she would have to be careful to remember that and not be lulled into any false sense of security if he happened to lay on his natural charm now and again.
She inhaled deeply, counted to ten and then said calmly, ‘I do know some of the things Izzy had in mind for the hotel, as it happens, and I’m pretty sure you’ll get on board once I run through them with you.’
Mia was not at all sure of any such thing. He was so…rigid—so very different from his sister. She had never met anyone as tightly controlled as him and she wondered if some of her fascination stemmed from that.
‘This isn’t my first venture into the hotel business,’ Max informed her. He studied her from under the screen of sooty black lashes. ‘I know what works.’
‘What?’ Mia asked a little breathlessly.
‘Luxury. Unabashed luxury. People who pay big money want a certain level of indulgence.’
‘This is Hawaii…there’s more scope to be casual here.’
‘No matter if it’s Timbuctoo,’ Max said smoothly. ‘You’d be surprised how much the wealthy tend to follow a certain pattern of behaviour.’
‘You could be wrong.’
‘When it comes to making money, I’m never wrong,’ he said with a level of smooth self-assurance that was frankly mesmerising. ‘When our parents died, I was catapulted fresh from university into the family business. I went from dissertations on mergers and productivity in commercial markets to having to work out how to put that into practice. I took the family business from where it was, comfortable but stagnating in the bottom percentile, and hauled it into the millennium. I learned, every step of the way, where to look for opportunities and how to make the most of them. I also learnt fast that it’s not enough to have ideas or to put them into practice. It’s even more important to know the beast you’re dealing with.
‘When it comes to hotels, people want to feel that they’re being pampered, even if the pampering might be camouflaged. They don’t want to pay a fortune, Mia, and find themselves swimming in a real lake, with very real algae and mud at the bottom. What they want is a sanitised pool pretending to be a lake so that they can feel as though they’re in the middle of nature but without the tiresome, gritty lack of comfort.’
‘That’s so cynical.’ Mia looked at his tough, handsome face and then found that she couldn’t manage to tear her eyes away.
‘If you want to get on in life—’ Max shrugged ‘—you have to be cynical.’
Ten minutes later, Mia realised that they were pulling up outside her house.
She’d had no opportunity to talk about the hotel. She’d been sucked into frantic curiosity about his approach to life, had marvelled that he could be so world-weary when he was still in his mid-thirties. She’d found herself wondering how this all translated into his personal life and had blushed for ever letting her thoughts wander down that route.
If he hadn’t taken a call, she was afraid that she might have asked him personal questions that were none of her business. Now it was a relief to hop out of the car and head inside the coolness of her house, with Max safely still on his call and barely seeming to notice that the car had stopped and that she had left it.
Her house
was small with a wooden veranda at the back holding old wicker chairs and a bamboo table. It was her favourite spot to relax because her back garden, which was a mixture of earth and patchy grass, overlooked the sea, albeit the view was a distant one. She barely paused to gaze out at that view now, instead heading directly to her bedroom. Now that she was out of the air-conditioned confines of the Mercedes, she couldn’t wait to get out of the skirt and blouse, and she rid herself of both in record time.
She’d put a lot of thought into what she had chosen to wear to meet Max and, uncomfortable as it had been, the outfit had conferred some essential distance between them.
She would have to wear comfortable clothes to show him around the hotel, which was currently a building site, so she dressed accordingly in jeans, a tee shirt and her walking boots.
He was still on his call when she slipped back into the car a mere fifteen minutes after it had arrived at her house.
She was still clutching the backpack and now she extracted the sheaf of papers she had taken with her to the boardroom and which he had casually dismissed.
‘Ah.’ Max ended his phone call and shoved the mobile phone into his trouser pocket. ‘You decided to dump the office garb. Good. Feel a little less restricted?’
‘I didn’t feel restricted,’ Mia rebutted. ‘But this is more appropriate for looking around a building site.’
‘Which is going to be a more condensed visit, as it happens. I’ll have a quick look round, but I’ve scheduled a meeting with Nat for this afternoon to discuss various aspects of the costings that will have to be assessed before anything further gets ordered. If I don’t like the direction all of this is going, then everything gets halted, and I’ll make sure what I want is followed to the last letter.’
‘And what about when Izzy returns? She’s put her heart and soul into her plans for the hotel. I know they’re probably not what you had in mind, but she’s spent a lot of time coming up with ideas…’
‘That was then and this is now,’ Max imparted flatly. ‘I can’t hang around waiting for my sister to decide that she’s got her act together and is ready to return, and even if she does…’ He paused for a few seconds, then raked his fingers through his hair. ‘Then her role may need to be revisited.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If there are aspects of the job she doesn’t like, then there’s no point to forcing her to do them.’ He wearily pressed his fingers over his eyes but, when he looked at her, he was once more in complete control. ‘I intend to hire a full-time accountant to deal with the day-to-day financial running of the place and in time, when things start gathering momentum, I will ensure a team is taken on.’
In that moment, Mia felt all her prejudices against him slip and slide uneasily beneath her feet.
When it came to his sister, it was clear that underneath the hard, dictatorial exterior was a real well of love. He might have been too aggressive when it had come to directing her life, but it hadn’t been for a lack of strong, fraternal protectiveness.
Life experiences changed people, made them veer off in all sorts of directions that sometimes made no sense to the people around them.
Wasn’t she a victim of that herself?
She had married young in a subconscious desire to repeat what her parents had done, what her siblings had done. Marrying young, having a family and replicating what she knew had been a given when she and Kai had married. They had both gone into marriage blithely assuming a happy-ever-after ending, blithely assuming that they would slide seamlessly into the noisy, wonderful chaos of family life.
It had unravelled with speed. The easy familiarity they had always shared had very quickly become the tension of two very young people who had never had to put their relationship to the test. The business of sharing space had revealed flaws they had never noticed before.
But divorce had come at a price. She had retreated from the business of finding love and had made her checklist of required traits so meticulous that the years had gone by. With each passing year, Mia had known that her ability to feel was shrinking just a little bit more.
So who was she to point fingers at Max? He was as cold as ice, but having responsibility for two siblings when you were barely out of your teens yourself would have been punishing.
‘That’s probably a good idea,’ she agreed.
‘Any interest in applying for the job?’
Mia relaxed and laughed. ‘No chance. As it happens, I’m pretty good with the books, but I like the outdoor life.’
‘Change of plan.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You can sit in on my meeting with Nat. He’s the supervisor on the job and he will have a pretty good idea of the supply chain, because I know he’s been dealing with some of them, but if you’re good at accounts then your contribution might be useful.’
‘I’m not dressed for a meeting in that boardroom!’
She stared down at the casual clothes and then blushed as their eyes met and held.
Her bra was the thinnest of cotton, just a sliver of stretchy fabric. She felt the push of her nipples as they swelled and tightened under his leisurely appraisal. She was hot all over, her skin tingling. She followed the trajectory of his gaze when she licked her upper lip as it rested for a crazily long time on the innocent gesture.
She’d thought that her divorce had put her into a deep freeze but, if that was the case, she was certainly thawing out now, big time, and had been since she had first clapped eyes on him.
She whipped her gaze away but her breathing was laboured and her fingers were linked so tightly together that when she stared down she could see the pale brown of the stretched skin of her knuckles.
‘I wouldn’t worry about whether you’re over-dressed or under-dressed when you’re with me,’ Max murmured lazily. ‘You could wear a bin bag at a Michelin-starred restaurant and no one would dare raise an eyebrow.’
He paused for so long that eventually she got up the courage to look at him, while her heart thumped like a runaway train inside her.
‘At any rate,’ he added, dropping his eyes and shifting his big body in the seat next to her, ‘you look pretty damn good whatever you decide to wear.’
CHAPTER FOUR
HAVING ONLY EVER worked for herself since she had left college, it was something of a shock to the system to discover that working for Max involved jumping at his command and keeping pace with the speed of his intellect as he went through every detail of the hotel, from the amount of nails ordered, to the teams on standby for when the bulk of the work was to begin.
Their scheduled trip to see the hotel had been put on hold but she knew that he had gone there briefly with Nat the day before. It was the first time in the four days since he had commandeered her life that she had busied herself on a couple of the other small projects she’d had in the mix which required face-to-face meetings and brief land surveys.
Not that she worked with him every minute of the day. He worked in the boardroom, which he seemed to have appropriated for his needs and his alone, and much of the time he was involved in all sorts of conference calls to who knew how many people scattered across the globe. But, when it came to the hotel, he expected her to be at hand, ready to answer any questions he had.
He’d had no problem in telling her that whatever other jobs she had would have to be put on ice, because time was money, and he didn’t have a lot of time to sort out the unfinished business his sister had left behind.
‘But,’ she had told him on day one, ‘my job at the hotel has to be taken a step at a time. I’ve done all the drawings and plans for what I would like to do with the surrounding land, but actual purchasing and planting will have to be done in stages, and can’t reasonably begin until work on certain parts of the hotel are underway.’
‘And?’ Max had quirked a questioning eyebrow. He had been sitting in front of his computer,
a commanding presence at the long table in the boardroom, his body language telling her that he wasn’t expecting a long-winded conversation with her, because he had things to do, so could she make it brief.
Standing to one side, she was awkwardly conscious of her crisp, clean clothes that were somewhere between the prissy starched outfit she had worn that very first time she had gone to see him, and the outdoor gear she spent most of her days in. Neat shoes, a pair of grey cotton mid-calf trousers and a tee shirt tidily tucked into the waistband of the trousers.
‘And in my spare time I focus on a few other jobs. None of them are particularly big but I need all the work I can get.’
‘Why?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re generously paid by me.’
‘Yes, I know that, but in this line of work it’s not just about the money. This job will finish in under a year and I need to have other things in the pot that I can turn to. I give one hundred and ten percent when it comes to the hotel and that includes all the extra duties I’ve taken on over the past few months…’
‘Okay, spare me the highlights and lowlights. You’re not auditioning for a job. Fact is, I won’t be setting aside dedicated time for hotel business. I have a lot of other deals going on, deals that I should be handling back in London, but which I now have to handle here because Izzy’s done a runner.’
He had let that settle into the silence between them, a reminder that he was there because he had chosen to give his sister the benefit of the doubt and leave her be until she sorted herself out. A reminder that he had chosen to listen to what she, Mia, had advised rather than following his natural instinct to bypass her when he hadn’t got what he had come for and hire someone to locate his sister.
‘What are these other jobs?’ he had demanded.
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