To the Max (40 page)

“Okay.”

She’d started moving the rest of her things to Max’s, spending evenings at her former place after work, packing and discarding stuff. “I’ll wait for you there.”

They’d just come back from their little trip to Florida, where Max had been shooting for a commercial, and she looked gorgeous and relaxed, her nose and cheeks still red from the sun. A couple of days at the beach and away from Boston’s miserable weather had done a world of good to her. And to him, seeing as he would have lost his ever-loving mind if she’d stayed.

“See you in a couple of hours.” He brushed his lips with hers. “Love you, Ace.”

“Love you too,” she whispered.

He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, the light getting caught in her sparkling emerald earrings.

He’d bought those for Valentine’s. He knew very well the rules of engagement; giving such a present for a first Valentine’s was a big, kind of risky statement, but he didn’t give a fuck. He knew very well what he wanted.

“They look good on you,” he said, glancing at the earrings.

“Thank you. I had a blast. I’ve had all sorts of Valentine’s dates, from the totally awesome to the totally horrendous. Nothing compared to that. It was off the charts,” she replied.

“I’m glad you liked it.”

They’d finished shooting on Valentine’s Day, and although the kick-ass hotel where they’d been staying was paid until the next morning, he knew where they would spend an unforgettable Valentine’s. So they’d ended up dancing in the Eternal Sun Resort, surrounded by couples who’d averaged forty years of marriage.

They had played bingo, danced, and laughed their heads off. Everyone had loved her.

Max kissed her again. “Remember, no lifting boxes.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes.

He watched as she left the gym. He loved her in her accountant power suits, but he loved her just as much in her maternity clothes, her hair loose. She must have felt his gaze on her, because she turned around and winked at him.

“Snap out of it,” Mike whispered to him. “You’re staring at your woman’s ass. All your students are too.”

Max worked them extra hard because of that. In fifteen minutes his class was finished, and he headed for the dressing room.

He heard the explosion. Felt it too, and the hair on his neck stood up. He rushed out of the gym and looked in the direction of the smoke. It was coming from Annie’s complex. Fuck.

With his mind racing a thousand miles a second, he burst into a run. When he arrived, there was a big, smoking hole where her condo had been. The building’s roof was gone, and the wall bowed outward.

Max’s heart stopped. Then started thumping at triple speed.

“Annie!”

There was a lot of commotion, and someone tried to stop him, but Max steamrolled over him. While he was jumping the fence, he noticed Annie was standing on the lawn, rubble all around her, the carton box she’d been holding at the gym still in her hands. Staring at the smoke coming from her former condo.

Alive. She was alive. Max felt like crying.

“Annie, baby, you okay?” he asked, his voice shaky, his body too, as he enveloped her in his arms.

She turned to him, her expression confused, her eyes big and unfocused. “Max?”

Thank God she was in one piece. It took no more than five minutes to walk from the gym to the condo. By all rights, Annie should have been in there, sorting her things, long before the explosion. “You okay, baby? Did you get hurt?” He examined what he could see of her. She had a couple of small cuts on her hands and face from the flying debris and exploding glass, but otherwise she was okay.

She frowned, and he noticed she was looking at his lips like she was trying to read them. “Can’t hear too well. My ears are ringing.”

Shock wave.

Now that he knew she was unharmed, his legs buckled, but he locked them. “Come on, baby. Let’s get out of here.” She was too close to the smoking windows for his comfort.

He made it to the edge of the lawn before he fell on his knees. His legs were trembling too badly.

* * * *

Annie was still a bit disoriented when the EMTs and firefighters arrived, but having Max by her side made a world of difference. She sat in the back of the open ambulance, along with two of her neighbors who also had minor injuries. Fortunately nobody had been seriously hurt.

Cole and a firefighter approached. “Gas lines couldn’t have caused the blast, not unless they were sabotaged. They were tested two months ago during the renovation, and no leaks were found,” Cole explained. “There was damage to the neighboring units, but Annie’s condo was obliterated. If the cause was an explosive device, it’s going to take a while to find traces of it.”

Max faced Annie. “You going to believe me now?”

“Believe what?” Adrian, Alden’s sheriff, asked as he reached them.

“Are you going to tell him or should I, Ace?”

She sighed. “In the last months, I’ve had several accidents. A small scuffle with a car—”

“She was almost run over,” Max grumbled, giving her the evil eye.

“Then a mugger robbed me—”

“She got shot at.”

“And now my condo…”

“Exploded,” Max pointed out.

She frowned at him, but he ignored her. “I thought the car and the mugger were accidents. This,” she said, gesturing toward her destroyed condo, “is too much of a coincidence.”

She’d been going to her place for several days on a row, spending whole evenings there. If this was a bomb, then it was meant for her.

“Coincidences do not exist,” Max muttered.

Adrian agreed. “In my world they don’t either. Who would want to kill you, Annie? Would it have something to do with being a Vaughan?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “How do you know?”

“It’s my job to know. I spend a humongous amount of time dealing with the messes of the OGs, but I still remember how to do my job.”

“I’m sure my grandmother has a list of people ready to whack her, but not me. I’ve got a situation at work, though. I’m auditing a major company, and I’ve been uncovering lots of irregularities.”

“How big are those irregularities? Big enough to justify this level of hostility?” Adrian asked.

She pondered for a second. “We’re talking millions diverted to private accounts. Fraudulent auditing for the last four years.”

“I’d go with yes, then,” Adrian stated. “I think we’re going to need you to come down to the sheriff’s department.”

* * * *

“Go on, open it,” Holly said to Annie as the women from the book club sat in the diner, several days later. “It’s your birthday present.”

Annie looked at the package. “My birthday was almost a month and a half ago. You’ve already bought me something.”

“Not us,” Penny chimed in, and the other assented. “Impromptu birthday present.”

When she opened it, she found a brand-new e-reader. Her old one had been in the condo, where she’d forgotten it the afternoon before the whole place went up in smoke. “You guys bought me an e-reader?”

“Everyone pitched in. We couldn’t have one of the founding members of the club e-readerless. Especially now that we are hitting military men,” Christy said, wiggling her eyebrows. “We considered buying you clothes or something more practical, but every time we tried to make a list of necessaries, the e-reader kept ending up in first place.”

“And we got a high-end one,” Holly added. “We’re hoping it has a 3-D function in the near future and we can share.”

Annie dissolved into laughter at the same time that her eyes welled.

“Thank you, guys,” she said, wiping the tears from her face. Between the whole condo thing, her hormones playing havoc with her system, and Max going all out overprotective, she was an emotional wreck.

She kissed and thanked everyone. After a while the women dispersed, leaving only Annie, Christy, and Holly.

“You didn’t have to. This must have cost a mint,” she reprimanded.

“Max pitched in too,” Christy explained.

“My boyfriend gave you money for me to read cliterature?”

Holly and Christy nodded, amused. “He is clearly not intimidated.”

Nope. Max didn’t intimidate easily. Beside, heroes in books had nothing on him.

He’d been so out of his mind on the day of the explosion. It had almost been a week, and he was still a bit on edge.

Annie looked through the window. She could see from here the hole where her condo used to be.

“You should have let us find the people behind the accounts,” Christy said, following her gaze.

Well, considering the state of her condo, that would have been a clever choice. “I couldn’t believe someone was trying to off me.” Still couldn’t. This was so surreal.

As soon as the police had gotten involved, the whole thing had cracked wide open. Benito Hayes and one of the members of the board of directors had been detained and charged with fraud, embezzlement, and a long list of other financial crimes. The investigation was still ongoing, and the authorities expected to make other arrests as information from the Cayman Islands came in.

Benito Hayes had been accused of attempted murder for the explosion in Annie’s condo as well. So far he’d admitted to taking money regularly in exchange for giving positive audit reports and turning a blind eye to all the irregularities, but he’d denied having anything to do with the explosion, pointing the finger at other people involved in the fraud. All and all, a mess.

“Let’s not dwell on the past,” Christy interrupted Annie’s thoughts. “We have a baby shower to get ready for.”

“Barbara is throwing it.”

Holly grinned. “Look at it this way: you won’t get any more prepper baby stuff.”

* * * *

Annie was lying in bed. A certain too-tall PI sat in a far too low Ferrari, while a crazy Englishman in shorts scolded him and threatened him with two enraged dogs. She always had a smile on her face while watching that show. Not now. Now she was frowning.

“I can’t see my feet. This is worrying. My stomach almost covers the TV mounted on the wall.”

“Scared?” he teased, caressing her belly.

“Honestly? Terrified.”

No shit
. He was terrified too and didn’t have to give birth. The thought that something could happen to her or the baby during delivery was more than he could handle. He’d already had a taste of that, the day the condo exploded, but he didn’t want to scare her more. “We’ll start birthing classes soon. That will help. And I’ll be there.”

“I really hope it goes fast. With lots and lots of epidural.”

The doctor had mentioned drug-free childbirth once, but Annie had given him such a hard glare he’d never brought it up again.

“In your books it says having sex regularly in the last trimester accelerates the whole process.”

She smiled. “
That
we have down pat.”

“It also says that if you keep giving your woman clit orgasms during dilatation, the contractions are less painful.”

“Yeah, right. What’s your plan? Keep me orgasming for hours? They’ll kick us out of the hospital for being perverts. I don’t want to give birth in jail.”

“I think we could make it work. You sit between my legs, like in those pictures when they practice the breathing exercises, and under the sheets I could be playing with your clit. Like this,” he said, reaching for her. “Open up for me, love.”

She obeyed, and he knelt in front of her, staring at her core. “You’re so beautiful. Your pussy too. All flushed and puffy. Fucking perfect.”

“I’m just going to have to take your word for it. It has been months since I’ve been able to see it.”

Max chuckled softly at her resigned tone. “Baby in the way, huh?”

“Yep.”

He caressed her distended stomach. She was seven and a half months pregnant, starting her thirty-fourth week, and she was the most beautiful woman in the world to him.

“Do you want to hear something extremely kinky? I found out my boyfriend chipped in for my new e-reader so that I could continue enjoying smut.”

“Did he?” She nodded and he smirked at her. “Well, I guess he isn’t afraid of book boyfriends. He knows he can compete with them. That nothing beats the real thing. His touch. His kisses. His cock. Besides, I’m sure he doesn’t object to something that puts you in the mood.”

He had no problem with her reading smutty books. No problem whatsoever.

He loved her with his mouth until she came on his tongue. Then he lay on the bed, on his back, and put Annie on top of him, his chest to her back.

“Max…”

“Relax, baby,” he whispered, hooking his feet around her calves and opening her legs. Her back had been bothering her, and being on top, riding him, had begun to be difficult. “This will work perfectly. You don’t have to do anything. I will. You just lie back and enjoy.”

He moved her hips and poised the head of his cock at her entrance. Then, little by little, he slid into her, keeping himself reined in while she whimpered and her pussy swallowed him. He would cut off his own dick before hurting her. Even do without intercourse if that was what it took, never mind how much he wanted her, but her sex drive hadn’t diminished in this past month. The other way around. She needed him inside her often and when she came—wow. She blew his mind. She was extremely tight, tighter with every passing week, and her pussy felt plushier and more swollen. He’d read it had to do with the pressure the baby put on the vagina and the blood vessels. Whatever the fuck it was, it was driving him insane. He hadn’t been able to hold off for weeks now. When she exploded, she always dragged him with her.

He moved in and out of her, relishing her moans, the way she trembled and thrashed in his arms.

“You’re so fucking beautiful, and I want you so much.”

He caressed her distended belly, then her breasts, pinching and rolling her stiff nipples.

“Oh God,” she panted, her breath choppy, her pussy clamping around him. Sucking him in.

Fuck, so hot. She’d just come and was ready to go again.

“I love fucking you in any position,” he said in her ear, his voice rough, holding her hips to keep their lovemaking slow and gentle, “but I can’t wait for the baby to be born and for you to recuperate so that I can have you on your back under me again. Give you all my weight and pound into you while you hold on to me with arms and legs. Not an inch of space between us. Dying for it, baby.”