Page 35 of Contracted and Claimed By The Boss

‘Celibate?’ he prompted in a stage whisper, so Paige quickly looked around and ascertained they were out of earshot.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not embarrassed by that, Paige. It’s not for lack of opportunity.’

Heat flooded her cheeks. ‘Okay, Mr Ego. No need to go into what a desirable bachelor you are.’

His eyes crinkled at the corners with a suppressed smile. ‘I only mean that I have made a choice and I have no issues with it.’

‘And this? You and me?’

‘Lightning,’ he responded, then leaned closer, beneath the table his palm grazed her knee and goosebumps danced across her skin. ‘Of a purely sexual kind.’

Her heart fluttered, her stomach tightened, but in the back of her mind there was something else, something sharp and a little uncomfortable.

‘I suppose it was the same with Lauren,’ he said, frowning, and that uncomfortable feeling grew bigger. ‘She was very beautiful and quite...intriguing at first. She was—fun. Always the centre of the party, laughing, dancing, carefree, quite free-spirited. I suppose I wanted her,’ he said, sipping his wine, lost in reflection. ‘Because everyone else did.’ His frown deepened. ‘Back then, I always had to win at everything.’ The final statement was muttered, an indictment against himself. ‘It’s how I was raised.’

‘I guess a lot of people in your position have that mindset. Most of the successful directors and financiers I got to know were similarly driven.’

He was quiet, considering that.

‘So you wanted Lauren and...?’

‘And we got together. It was a short relationship. We dated for a couple of months, but a lot of that was spent with me travelling. We weren’t exclusive.’

Paige leaned closer, fascinated.

‘Do you know anything about my brother?’

‘I know you have one,’ Paige said with a lift of her shoulders.

‘He’s a few months younger than me. Our father had an affair with his mother—she was a cleaner at his hotel in Rome.’

Paige blinked.

‘He claims he didn’t know about Luca, that she never told him, so until Luca was twelve, we never met. Then his mother passed away, and in the will instructions were left that he was to be sent to my father, with a copy of his birth certificate. After the requisite genetic testing, Luca came to live with us. My mother left the same week.’

It was all said so matter-of-factly, but Paige’s heart, which in fact had not been rendered completely offline, gave a thud of pity. ‘How absolutely awful, for everyone.’ Beneath the table, she laced her fingers through Max’s. ‘You must have resented him at first.’

‘Naturally. I went from being an only child to losing my mother and suddenly having a brother, a brother who was almost the same age and who was of great interest to my father. He pitted us against one another and my anger over what his arrival had done to my family meant I was, initially, more than willing to fight Luca. To try to beat him at everything, all the time.’

‘To need to win,’ she repeated gently.

He nodded, fingers tracing the bottom of his wine glass distractedly. The waitress appeared with garlic bread and some olives, placing the little platter between them on the tabletop and disappearing again. Another couple of people came through the door; Paige turned to look at them, blinking. She’d almost forgotten where they were.

‘Eventually, we stopped competing. We became friends and finally, brothers. We were a team, too, united against our dad.’

‘What was he like?’

Max’s hand tightened momentarily on the stem of the wine glass then released, but with visible effort. ‘An acquired taste.’

Paige’s smile was a flash on her face. ‘Oh?’

‘I spent my teenage years hating him—with Luca. But as I got older and things got a little more complicated, I saw how nuanced life can be. I hate so many of the things he did, the decisions he made, the way he was with Luc and me, but at the same time, nobody’s perfect. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life hating him.’

‘So you forgave him?’

‘It’s not quite so clear-cut. I just...came to enjoy the parts of our relationship that worked. He was good at what he did professionally. I respected him for how he grew the business, and for how he let me step into his role when he realised I could do it better.’

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