smiled at him, a smile full of genuine warmth and pleasure. Finally he was uncovering the real Lisa, breaking down her barriers. She’d tried to do the same to him, but over the years he’d made his defence impenetrable. Would she tell him what it was that had happened in her past to have made Christmas a bad time for her and her family?
‘What happened?’ he asked, knowing full well he was taking advantage of the unspoken truce between them, but if they stood any chance of building some kind of future together for their child he had to know.
‘Happened? When?’ She stood by the bed, wrapped in the faux-fur throw from the end, looking deliciously sexy but also very scared. He was intrigued and now he had to know.
‘When you were a child? To make you miss out on Christmas?’
‘I think that is a question I should be asking you.’ She smiled at him, but he could see the defence barrier beginning to slip into place again. ‘You are the one who doesn’t like this time of year. I’ve just never experienced it like this.’
She was right. He was also well aware that if he wanted to find out what it was she was hiding from him, keeping locked away, then he too would have to reveal who he really was.
‘I have a very good reason for not liking this time of the year.’ How had this been turned around to be about him?
Lisa sat down on the side of the bed, her long legs on display as she snuggled in the throw. Her red hair was tousled and she looked as sexy as she ever had. But there was something different about her. She looked vulnerable in a way she’d never appeared before. He’d always thought she was tough, the kind of woman who never let things get to her.
As he stood there, looking at her, he knew it was time to be honest, to let her know exactly who he was, the kind of man the father of her baby really was. She’d made it very clear she wanted a full-time father for her child, not one who visited every month or so, and he still didn’t know if he could be that man, but he’d damn well try. He certainly didn’t want to be the same as his father.
He turned and looked out of the window at the white frosted grass of the cottage’s garden. ‘Everything bad that happened in my childhood happened around this time of the year.’
‘Your father?’ Her voice was soft and he could hear her get up and move across the room toward him. He braced himself for her nearness. He wasn’t ready for that kind of sympathy yet.
‘He walked out just weeks before Christmas. I was eight years old and convinced he was punishing me. I had no idea he had another family—another son.’
He could feel her warmth, smell her perfume as she moved closer to him. It grounded him, kept him in the present instead of being dragged back into the past. ‘Did you ever see him again?’
‘No.’ He couldn’t stop it and slipped back to that moment. He’d watched as his mother had stood proudly in the middle of the room and his father had opened the door of the apartment and looked back at her. She’d kept her chin up, defiance and anger in her stance that he’d recognised as pain, even as the young boy he’d been.
They’d said nothing to one another. All that had been done with an angry argument that he’d witnessed as he’d sat on the cool marble staircase, wishing they would stop, wishing it didn’t sound as if they hated one another.
He had come to stand by his mother, knowing even at that age that this was very real, very permanent. His father had looked at him for the briefest of seconds and the annoyed disgust in his eyes that day still haunted Max now, still made him feel insignificant and totally despised. He’d glared angrily at his father and now he knew that had been his first step toward becoming a man—challenging his father.
‘I wished mine had never come back, never used me as a weapon against my mother.’ Lisa’s words rushed him back to the present, away from the dark memories he’d successfully locked away until the newspaper headlines had freed the skeletons from the closet, allowing them to run wild. Uncatchable and untouchable.
He turned and looked down at her, but she was staring out at the frosty countryside, although he knew it wasn’t what she was seeing. The past had a hold on her too. It was pulling at her just as his was.
‘He left when I was five.’ She spoke softly, her voice almost a whisper but there was an undertone of anger swirling through it. ‘And I didn’t see him for two years. Two years of my mother struggling to make ends meet. Two years of wondering why, of blaming myself. I didn’t know the reasons at the time, of course, I just wondered why she was sad. Then he came back.’
A heavy silence fell in the room, as if snow were falling around them, covering everything, hiding the present so that only the past was there—for both of them. Max could feel her pain, her sense of rejection. He’d been a bit older, but it had still hurt and as a boy he’d had to be tough, had to man up and be there for his mother.
‘What happened then?’ He tried not to think about his past, how in some ways it mirrored Lisa’s, how they’d both tried to hide from it but for very different reasons.
‘He wanted to see me, wanted to play happy families and take me out.’ She turned from the window and he watched her as she walked back to the bed, sat down and drew her knees up to her chest, hiding her body from him with the throw, hiding from her past.
‘That was good,’ he said, but as she looked up at him, sadness in her eyes, he knew it wasn’t.
‘Not when you are a young child being used as a weapon to cause hurt and pain.’ The answer flew at him, the pain of her past echoing in each word. ‘He didn’t want me any more than my mother did. I was just an inconvenience, but when it suited them I was their weapon of choice. Other than that, they didn’t give a damn.’
‘Surely your mother—’ Max began, realising how lucky he was to have been kept out of his parents’ arguments apart from that very last day.
‘My mother didn’t want me, the baggage from her bad marriage, and my father walked out.’ Lisa wrapped her arms tighter around her and something clenched in his heart. She looked so lost, so vulnerable and now he was adding to her pain because of all that had happened in his past.
He wanted to go to her, to hold her, to make her feel better, to put everything right. How could he when he was in the same dark place, haunted by the rejection of his father?
‘At least he came back,’ he said as he sat on the edge of the bed, physically close to her but so far away. ‘At least he wanted to know you, see you grow up.’
The green of her eyes flared so bright with anger as she looked instantly up at him that he leaned back away from her. Her face was pale and he wondered if she was feeling ill because of what they were talking about or because of the pregnancy. Thoughts of his mother clouded in. She’d been ill carrying his little sister, Angelina. Very ill.
With a huff of angry irritation he pushed that thought away and marched back to the window. History wouldn’t repeat itself. Would it? He couldn’t take losing another person he was close to. That was why he kept himself as emotionally distanced from Angelina as he could. A tyrant of a brother, she’d called him last time they’d spoken on the phone, finalising the last-minute details of her party. What would she say to him about the baby? That he had no right to be a father when he was such a cold, hard brother? And wasn’t that the truth? He had no right.
‘So you would rather
