‘Max.’ She said his name softly and he turned to look at her.
‘Don’t.’ That one word was a feral growl and she looked deep into his eyes, wondering if he was teasing her. The glittering hardness within the depths of his eyes scored her heart, singed her love and sent a shiver down her spine.
‘But...’ she began again.
He turned and lay on his back, his hands behind his head, his biceps tense and solid as he looked up at the ceiling. ‘Don’t say anything, Lisa. It’s better that way.’
Better for whom? she wondered and hid her confusion by moving close to him, laying her arm across his chest and pressing her body against his. She trailed her fingertip lightly over the defined muscles of his abdomen, desperately fighting to control her emotions, to become as detached as he was.
‘You’re right,’ she whispered as she kissed his chest. He lifted her face up, forcing her to look at him. She smiled as power slipped into her domain. ‘It’s better this way.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
LISA OPENED HER eyes and looked around the dimly lit room, acutely aware of Max’s body wrapped around hers as she lay with her back to him. She knew without a doubt that she still loved him. There had been a moment last night when she had briefly thought he was fighting it too, trying not to admit he felt the same way, but those hard words after the first time they’d made love had chilled that notion. Yet still she hadn’t been able to resist him. How could she when he was the father of her child and the man she would always love, no matter what?
She stirred against the warmth of his body and hers leapt to life once more. The hungry longing within her for him was far from sated. Last night’s lovemaking had only intensified it. As the lateness of Christmas Eve had slipped into the early hours of Christmas Day they had alternated between making love and sleeping. Now the grey light of a winter’s morning seeped around the edges of the thick curtains Max had drawn across the small window of the cottage late last night.
It was Christmas morning and she’d never expected to be waking up in Max’s arms or in such a wonderfully festive cottage. Suddenly her excitement couldn’t be contained any longer. Fate had brought them together and he’d given her the kind of Christmas she’d always longed for and she wasn’t going to ruin it now by dwelling on what was or wasn’t between them, trying to give it a name. She turned and faced Max in the bed, the covers sliding from her as she did so.
‘Happy Christmas.’ His eyes opened as she whispered the words.
‘Now I know what would have been missing from my Christmas morning.’ His dark eyes held the promise of more passion as he pulled her closer to his naked body. ‘You.’
‘But you don’t like Christmas,’ she whispered as memories ofhow this time last year, he had suggested they delay their honeymoon several weeks to avoid the festivities, convincing her that he wanted only to be with her. Instantly she regretted saying anything as the shutters of steel came down over his eyes, suffocating the passion she’d seen brewing there again.
‘I was simply referring to the fact that Christmas morning isn’t the same in Spain. We traditionally give gifts, but on Fiesta de Los Tres Reyes early in January. Twelfth Night here.’ She knew he was hiding something, holding back on her as he’d always done. Everything he’d just said was a cover for what he was really feeling—or not.
‘So why have you done all this?’ She looked around the room, at the subtle decorations that left her in no doubt she was in a cottage decked out for Christmas. She’d thought he’d done it to bring them together—and it had achieved that in the most spectacularly passionate way—but not in the way she really wanted. Perhaps she should do as she’d thought last night and accept that the man whose child she carried wasn’t capable of emotions and that nothing would change that, just as he’d told her when he first walked out on their new marriage.
He hadn’t wanted her to say what she felt, hadn’t wanted to hear those words spoken aloud.
‘Because it would make you happy, because even though I can’t say what you want me to say, I care about you.’
It wasn’t what she wanted to hear right now, but she certainly wasn’t going to spoil Christmas Day. Not when the things he’d done, the way he’d been last night, gave her hope.
* * *
Max could almost hear a pin drop in the room as Lisa listened then thankfully accepted what he’d said. He got up, enjoying the way her gaze lingered on his body, which still wanted her despite their night of passion.
He pulled on some jeans and a sweater. ‘The surprises aren’t over yet.’
‘They aren’t?’
‘No, I have arranged for us to have Christmas dinner at a nearby hotel, where, I’m reliably informed, we can relax afterward in comfort in front of a large open fire.’
She 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.’