“Three.”
Mia’s eyes snapped back to his face. He’d slung her small bag over his shoulder and his arms were folded in front of him. He looked obstinate, and determined to get her off the plane. And at the moment, Max Hamilton looked anything but tame. In fact, he looked pretty damn certain he was going to bend her to his will.
Okay…well…she could be just as pigheaded as he was being at the moment. “I’m not going, Max.” She crossed her arms, frowning.
“Four.” He reached down and flipped the latch on her seatbelt, opening it with a simple flick of his wrist.
“Don’t make this harder than it already is. Please.” Mia had lost all desire for pretense, her look beseeching him to cease. Blinking hard, trying to keep her tears of frustration from falling, she saw a dangerous glint in his eyes, a dogged stubbornness that warned her that he wasn’t going to relent.
“Ten.” The word had barely left Max’s lips before he snatched her bodily out of her seat and slung her over his shoulder.
Mia scrambled to hang onto her purse, her fists beating on Max’s back. “Let go. Dammit. What are you doing?” It was actually pretty obvious that he was bodily carrying her off the plane, his stride steady and even, as though he were trying not to jostle her around too much.
Mia decided at that moment that there was nothing more mortifying than being bodily removed from a full aircraft. Luckily, she was near the front of the plane, but Max never stopped to let her down, even after they’d exited and were heading down the ramp and into the main airport.
Exasperated, she said to his back, “What happened to counting to ten?”
“Took too long. You talked too much,” he answered abruptly, moving toward the airport exit, drawing looks from the people they were passing that ranged from amusement to alarm.
Max had parked in the loading zone, a completely illegal place to leave his car. “I bet I would have gotten a ticket,” she mumbled, irritated.
By the time he deposited her in the bucket seat of the sporty vehicle, she was shaking with frustration. He didn’t say a word as he calmly snapped her seatbelt, closed the passenger door and then jogged around to the driver’s side. He had the car in motion before she could get out, which she realized had been his intention.
“You do understand that you just kidnapped me. Last I knew, it’s illegal to take a woman without her permission,” she told him in a sharp tone. “How did you get through security, anyway?”
Max shrugged. “I bought a ticket on the flight.”
For a man who’d been completely drunk the night before, he looked pretty unaffected by the amount of alcohol he’d consumed. He handled the little sports car with confidence, steadily making his way to the freeway. “I do not want to go back to the ranch. I need to be on that plane.”
“No you don’t,” Max answered with irritating certainty. “Danny’s dead. And you’re never running away from me again. I’ll make sure to give you every reason to stay.”
Danny’s dead? Max knows about Danny? He knows—he has to—and he still came for me. Why?
Mia’s entire body suddenly relaxed, her panic completely deflated. “How do you know about him?”
“Travis,” Max answered with more than a little irritation in his voice. “Why didn’t you ever tell me, Mia?”
“I thought it was all over, and I wanted to leave it in the past. I didn’t think you’d understand a woman being that stupid. What did Travis tell you?” she asked quietly. It’s over. It’s really over. The reality that a man she had feared for so long was finally gone forever hadn’t quite sunk in for her.
“He told me everything. Your relationship in college and the abuse, Danny nearly killing me, you saving my life. And you are not stupid. Did Travis miss anything?” Max turned onto the freeway, glancing at her briefly with a frown.
“It’s over,” Mia whispered, wrapping her arms around herself, afraid to believe it was really true. She looked over at Max, studying his profile as she tried to make herself accept that she didn’t have to run anymore. Would Max ever forgive her now that he knew the whole truth? Or would he be repulsed?
I’ve dealt with those emotions. I’m not the woman I was two years ago. Maybe not, but she had to fight her insecurities where Max was concerned. There were some things she hadn’t told him, things he had a right to know.
“Your running days are over, sweetheart, but you and me…we’ll never be over,” Max told her dangerously. “Not unless you’ve really stopped loving me, and you really want it to be over.”
“But the woman you fell in love with doesn’t exist. She never really did,” Mia told him honestly.
“For me she did and she still does.” Max glanced over at her with a look of fierce possessiveness that made Mia practically melt into a puddle on the seat of the car. “I didn’t care about the superficial things. It didn’t matter what you wore, what you said to other people, or what was in your past. I fell in love with you, the you who was always there and still is, no matter how much you twisted yourself to fit an image I never really cared about.” Max turned off the exit for the ranch before adding, “I want to know everything about you now. Maybe it was my fault because I put you on a pedestal instead of treating you like my woman. I thought you were perfect, but I would have felt that way regardless. Even if I’d known about your past, your insecurities, your personal preferences, I still would have f**king worshipped the ground you walked on.”
“Why?” she asked curiously. “I was a screwed-up woman who put up with a highly abusive relationship for over a year. My self-confidence was nil, and I never felt like I was good enough for you, or enough of a woman to keep you.”
Max pulled into the driveway of the ranch as he answered, “I can’t be the same man I was before either, Mia. The love was real, but we were both pretending, hiding.”
“What now?” she whispered softly.
Reaching the end of the long driveway, Max stopped the car in front of the ranch house and turned to her. “Now I plan to show my wife exactly how I feel about her, love her the way I’ve always loved her but was too afraid to show it. We trust each other instead of running away. We strip each other bare in more ways than one.” His voice was bold, but still held a touch of vulnerability.
“I trust you. I always have. It was myself who I didn’t trust,” she answered, mesmerized by the covetous look in his eyes and the fierceness of his expression.