less on edge, but after last night and then this morning’s discussion, which had felt at the time like an opening of hearts, she was wary.
‘This is my first taste of a British Christmas.’ He smiled at her and her heart flipped over. How could he melt her so easily?
Because you still love him.
‘Where do you normally spend Christmas?’ she asked, before realising that once again she was tempting open the box he had clearly marked do not disturb.
‘In Spain with my mother’s family. We would usually be out walking now. Christmas Day is not such a big day in Spain.’
‘A walk after Christmas dinner is pretty normal here too.’ She laughed and relaxed a little. She’d probably been reading too much into everything, as usual. ‘It would be nice to do that now. Is it too far to walk back to the cottage?’
The idea of being out in the crisp cold air of the afternoon was suddenly very appealing. She’d been inside for too long and needed the sense of freedom that came with a walk. It might also shake off some of the notions she was beginning to have that maybe Max did care, that he just wasn’t able to put it into words.
‘Are those boots up to the walk?’ He looked down at the long boots she’d put on with her deep burgundy dress, the only ones she’d packed, not being aware they were going anywhere else after Raul and Lydia’s wedding.
‘Of course they are, unless you aren’t?’ she teased, feeling the tension slip from him as she laughed at him.
‘A walk home it is.’ He took her hand and for a moment sat and looked at her, his dark eyes unreadable. She wanted to ask what he was thinking or, even more importantly, what he was feeling, but before she could form a sensible sentence he spoke again. ‘Shall we?’
* * *
Max could hardly fathom that he found pleasure in the simple action of walking along a country lane with Lisa. As they’d walked down the hotel driveway, enjoying the views, he’d taken her gloved hand, smiling to himself when she hadn’t resisted but had moved closer to him. He’d kept his pace slow as they’d continued the short distance to the cottage, despite the nearness of dusk, worried that anything faster would be too arduous for her in her present condition.
‘I’m pregnant, Max, not ill.’ She laughed at him in answer to his concern as they reached the gate of the cottage but her words took him straight back to the day his stepfather had broken the news that his mother had been told her cancer had returned and this time it was untreatable.
He remembered that day as if it were yesterday, felt the shock that he could lose his mother still icing his body. He’d looked at his stepfather and for the first time since his own father had walked he’d wanted to cry. He’d been barely a teenager and already he’d known the pain of watching his father reject him, reject his mother and walk away and now this.
‘Is she going to die?’ The forthright question had floored his stepfather, but he’d at least been honest in his reply. Too honest.
‘It is not good.’ Remembering the look of grief in his stepfather’s eyes sucked him deeper into the memories of the past. ‘She was diagnosed while she was expecting Angelina and refused any treatment until after she’d been born. She didn’t want to risk your little sister. She wanted her to live.’
‘But I don’t want my mother to die.’ The words had torn from him like the cry of a wolf calling to the moon and his stepfather had wrapped him in his solid embrace, trying to console him, trying to be there for him, but he’d had his own grief to nurse. Max had seen and felt how much love hurt, how much pain it caused when the person you loved left you, and had vowed then to shut that painful emotion out of his life for good.
‘Neither do I,’ his stepfather had said as he’d held him tight, being a better father than his real father had ever been. His mother had paid for the delay in treatment with her life. He wished he’d been told when she’d first found out, wished they’d considered him adult enough to know then. Maybe he could have talked her round, made her change her mind. By the time he’d finally been told the truth he’d formed a strong attachment to his baby sister, Angelina, and as much as he’d wanted to hate her he couldn’t, but he’d pushed her away emotionally. What if something happened to her too just because he’d loved her?
As the English winter winds blew around him, he remembered more, could see himself at sixteen, see the moment he’d stood watching his four-year-old sister hugging a kitten her father had given her.
‘Something for you to love, Lina,’ his stepfather had said as he’d placed the mewling scrap of fur in Angelina’s lap.
Max had looked at the kitten as it tried to nestle down on his sister’s lap and that first wave of bitterness that shaped the man he now was, fuelled by anger, had crashed over him. Love wouldn’t do the kitten any good, just as it wouldn’t do him or his sister any good. Love set you up for disappointment, rejection and worst of all heartache.
He’d loved his father and then had been forced to stand and watch him walk away. He’d called after him as he’d marched to his car, but he hadn’t looked back once. He’d just got in the car and had driven off, tyres spinning as he’d made his escape. Max had waited, hoped he would come back, but as his mother had veered from anger to crying and back to anger he’d accepted he wouldn’t, that he now had to be the man of the house. After all, he loved his mother and she wouldn’t leave him.
Then she had. Snatched in the cruellest way because she’d chosen her unborn baby over herself—over him.
Max shrugged the painful memory away. In rational moments he knew he would never have been able to help her. She’d had to make a terrible decision but done what any mother would and had protected her unborn child, but it still hurt like hell, that she’d risked leaving him—leaving his baby sister. Now here he was, a father-to-be, wanting to do anything that would make life better for his unborn child, including remaining married to a woman he’d once thought could change his life, change him. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t let go of the pain of the past and allow love back into his life.
‘Women have babies every day.’ Lisa’s words hauled him unceremoniously from the past and he blew out a breath into the cold air, seeing it form a cloud before slipping away. If only his childhood pain could evaporate so easily.
‘That may be so, but you must look after yourself.’ It came out as an angry growl as he wrestled with the past, insistently pushing it back where it belonged. He wanted to look after Lisa but was well aware that in doing so it was giving her false hope of a loving marriage. How could he, the son of a man like Maximiliano Valdez, be capable of such things as love and commitment? Hadn’t he already failed at that? He was certain Lisa wouldn’t even be here with him now if she weren’t carrying his child.
He took in a deep breath of cold fresh air and opened the gate, aware that Lisa was looking at him sceptically. Her cheeks were pink from the cold and the collar of her coat was pulled around her tightly, but all he could see was the image of her wrapped in the faux-fur throw as she’d sat on the bed this morning. Then it had slipped making her look so desirable yet so vulnerable and fragile that something had twisted deep inside him, something he’d never felt before. Something he didn’t want to feel.
Now it was happening again. That same twist of pain and pleasure as he looked into her eyes, resisting the urge to pull her against him and kiss her until the pain stopped, until only pleasure existed.
Yet
