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Claimed For The Leonelli Legacy
LYNNE GRAHAM
An innocent…Tia Grayson has never known life outside the Brazilian convent she calls home. Until Max Leonelli arrives with the shocking news that she is heiress to an English fortune – and ignites a burning need for his touch…A billionaire…Tia’s grandfather expects a match between his protégée and his heir – but Max is not a marrying man. Until the sight of Tia’s ravishing beauty has him reconsidering…A baby?Max must escort Tia home, but desire soon overtakes them. After one incendiary night, the potential for consequences gives Max the perfect opportunity to claim Tia as his bride!Conveniently wedded, passionately bedded!
An innocent...
Tia Grayson has never known life outside the Brazilian convent she calls home. Until Max Leonelli arrives with the shocking news that she is heiress to an English fortune—and ignites a burning need for his touch...
A billionaire...
Tia’s grandfather expects a match between his protégée and his heir—but Max is not a marrying man. Until the sight of Tia’s ravishing beauty has him reconsidering...
A baby?
Max must escort Tia home, but desire soon overtakes them. After one incendiary night, the potential for consequences gives Max the perfect opportunity to claim Tia as his bride!
Max stiffened, squaring his wide shoulders, flattening his handsome mouth. If he did marry Tia, as Andrew had urged him to do, no actual wedding would take place for months. Max refused to rush into anything. Max liked structure, order, strategic planning. He didn’t do impulse or invite disruption in any field, and would never have scaled the heights he had without serious self-discipline.
The limo drew up outside the brightly lit hotel. Max sprang out first, and then disconcerted her by peeling off his suit jacket and draping it round her shoulders as she emerged from the car.
‘Is that really necessary?’ Tia enquired, reeling a little and struggling to find her balance in the ridiculous heels as fresh air engulfed her.
‘Sì... If you can turn me on this hard and fast, when I’m striving to stay cool, I imagine other men will stare too, and I am assuming you would prefer not to be stared at and lusted after,’ Max murmured in a raw undertone, astonishing her with the abrupt and unexpected admission. ‘On the other hand, if you enjoy being the centre of male attention, give me my jacket back... It’s entirely your decision.’
She turned him on. Tia was exhilarated by that grated confession and clutched self-protectively at his jacket, revelling in the intimacy of the silk lining, still warm from his skin, and the faint evocative fragrance of his cologne that still clung to the fabric. She breathed that fragrance in like an addict. The attraction was mutual.
Wedlocked! (#u17065e01-2b01-54eb-af46-1b191c46ad8c)
Conveniently wedded, passionately bedded!
Whether there’s a debt to be paid, a will to be obeyed or a business to be saved...she’s got no choice but to say “I do!”
But these billionaire bridegrooms have got another think coming if they think marriage will be that easy...
Soon their convenient brides become the objects of an inconvenient desire!
Find out what happens after the vows in:
Baby of His Revenge
by Jennie Lucas
A Diamond for Del Rio’s Housekeeper
by Susan Stephens
Bound by His Desert Diamond
by Andie Brock
Bride by Royal Decree
by Caitlin Crews
Claimed for the De Carrillo Twins
by Abby Green
The Desert Kings Captive Bride
by Annie West
The Sheikhs Bought Wife
by Sharon Kendrick
Wedding Night with Her Enemy
by Melanie Milburne
Look out for more Wedlocked! stories coming soon!
Claimed for the Leonelli Legacy
Lynne Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. She is very happily married to an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, who knocks everything over, a very small terrier, who barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.
Books by Lynne Graham
Mills & Boon Modern Romance
Bought for the Greek’s Revenge
The Sicilian’s Stolen Son
Leonetti’s Housekeeper Bride
The Secret His Mistress Carried
Brides for the Taking
The Desert King’s Blackmailed Bride
The Italian’s One-Night Baby
Sold for the Greek’s Heir
Christmas with a Tycoon
The Italian’s Christmas Child
The Greek’s Christmas Bride
The Notorious Greeks
The Greek Demands His Heir
The Greek Commands His Mistress
Bound by Gold
The Billionaire’s Bridal Bargain
The Sheikh’s Secret Babies
Visit the Author Profile page at millsandboon.co.uk (http://millsandboon.co.uk/) for more titles.
In memory of all the great Mills & Boon authors who went before me and inspired my stories.
Contents
Cover (#u6698ef62-dc49-5c82-a15c-2db660ac4190)
Back Cover Text (#u4d3cbf90-20b7-5743-aefb-62588b7ce20e)
Introduction (#u0ba4f310-e086-5c06-a9cf-4e735372625c)
Wedlocked! (#u580584b4-cf9b-56d0-ae32-bcd5faeccfca)
Title Page (#u62c3f162-5b24-550b-bd24-1f8de4118467)
About the Author (#ud95cafbf-9612-52a1-94a7-fb70c4813271)
Dedication (#u34b9af96-d44b-56c9-b765-383ed4a81c60)
CHAPTER ONE (#u9508a481-8200-5d4b-bc74-4f5effb3d1df)
CHAPTER TWO (#u0d2fcea0-d5e1-5111-9277-5168f34a29d4)
CHAPTER THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u17065e01-2b01-54eb-af46-1b191c46ad8c)
‘IT’S A VERY big favour and I have no right to ask it of you,’ Andrew Grayson admitted ruefully, angling his wheelchair closer to the fire, his pale worn face taut.
Max Leonelli, a multimillionaire financier at the age of twenty-eight, who had known Andrew since he first entered his household at the age of twelve, frowned. ‘Anything,’ he declared, without hesitation in making that pledge.
Andrew surveyed the younger man with quiet pride. It was way too late to admit that he should have married Max’s aunt and adopted him. His housekeeper’s nephew had come into his life as a homeless adolescent, traumatised, frightened and distrustful. No sign of those traits was to be seen in the powerful and sophisticated businessman Max had become.
Women, furthermore, were mad for Max. The beautiful boy with wounded eyes had grown into a striking man with olive-toned skin sheathing spectacular bone structure and a hard, challenging gaze. Max was tough and his humble beginnings and horrible childhood had merely made him tougher but he was also fiercely loyal. And since Andrew’s failing health had removed him from the daily stresses of his international business empire, Max had been at the helm of it in firm control. While it had been Max’s baptism of fire he had proved to be more than equal to the challenge.
‘This goes beyond anything and you won’t like it,’ Andrew warned him.
Max was confused because Andrew usually came straight to the point. ‘OK...’
Andrew breathed in, his breath rasping in his struggling lungs. ‘I want you to marry my granddaughter.’
Black-lashed dark eyes flaring bright as topaz in the firelight, Max stared back at the older man in sheer bewildered disbelief. ‘Your granddaughter lives in a convent in Brazil.’
‘Yes and I want you to marry her. It’s the only way I can protect her when I’m gone,’ Andrew declared with conviction. ‘I should have fought her father when he refused to let her visit me but up until last year I still hoped that Paul would come home and step into my shoes and I didn’t want to alienate him. After all, she was his daughter, not mine. It was his right to decide how he wanted her raised.’
Max released his pent-up breath slowly. Marry a girl he had never met? A convent-bred female oddity who had not returned to the UK since she was born? It was an utterly extraordinary request but it was also the only serious sacrifice Andrew had ever asked of him and would inevitably be a last request because Andrew was dying. At that thought, Max’s eyes burned as though he had got too close to the fire, his sleek, strong, bone structure tightening into disciplined rigidity because Andrew’s quiet dignity demanded that restraint.
‘Tia is all I have left, my only surviving blood relative,’ Andrew reminded him heavily, his shadowed eyes veiling at the acknowledgement as he turned his greying head away, momentarily sidetracked by the grief of having lost both his sons.
Three years had passed since his elder son, Steven, had died childless, but it was only two months since Andrew had received word that his younger son, Paul, had succumbed to a sudden heart attack in Africa where he had been buried without fanfare and without ever properly mending fences with his estranged father. Tia was Paul’s daughter, the result of his short-lived marriage to a Brazilian fashion model.
‘She should have been made a part of our lives long ago,’ Andrew sighed.
‘Yes,’ Max agreed, reflecting on what little he had learned about Tia’s father, Paul. A generation younger than both of Andrew’s sons, Max had only ever known Steven. Steven had worked for his father for years, a conscientious plodder who lacked initiative. Paul, so Max had been told, had been far brighter and more promising, but he had walked out of his job in his mid-thirties and gone off to become a missionary, severing his ties with his father and the business world and ultimately losing his wife in the process. On Paul’s first posting to Brazil, his wife had gone off with another man, leaving her husband and her infant daughter behind her. Paul had dealt neatly with that unwelcome responsibility by placing the little girl in the care of the local nuns and continuing his travels to work with and preach to the poor in the world’s most troubled places.
‘Why would you want me to marry her?’ Max asked gently.
Andrew groaned. ‘Think about it, Max. She knows nothing about our world and she’ll be a substantial heiress. It would be like throwing a newborn baby into a shark tank. She will desperately need someone to look after her and guide her until she finds her own feet.’
‘She’s not a child, Andrew,’ Max pointed out wryly. ‘She’s...what? Twenty-one?’
‘Almost twenty-two,’ the older man conceded grudgingly. ‘But she still needs a safe harbour until she can learn her way in this cut-throat world.’
