‘I’m going out for a walk.’ That got his attention. He looked up from his desk as she stood in the doorway, not trusting herself to get closer as the need to stand behind him and wrap herself around his shoulders in a loving embrace surged forward.
‘It’s snowing.’ The sharpness of his retort only fired the anger within her, but he hadn’t taken his gaze from her. She could feel it burning into her.
‘I’m not asking you to come, just telling you I’m going.’ Instantly she became defensive. It was her default protection mode and right now she needed it more than ever. She needed to protect her heart.
Without another word she turned and left him to his brooding, grabbing her coat as her defensive barrier folded around her, around her heart. He might have a penthouse apartment with views of the Thames, but she needed fresh air and freedom. Was he this controlling with Angelina? As that thought settled in her mind like the tiny flakes of snow drifting in the air, trying hard to be something more than the light dusting of sparkly white on the ground, she burst out of the tall and commanding apartment block he called home and took in a big lungful of cold air.
‘Damn you, Lisa, I haven’t got time for this.’ Max’s curse sounded behind her and she turned to see him, buttoning up his coat as he walked toward her, looking anything other than happy to be out in the cold winter evening.
‘Then don’t,’ she retorted hotly, adamant this was one thing she was going to get her way with. ‘I grew up in London. I’ll be fine.’
‘I am not about to allow my pregnant wife to walk around alone in this weather. In the dark. What kind of husband do you think I am?’
‘One who doesn’t love his wife.’ She threw the accusation back at him so quickly she didn’t even have time to think it through first.
She didn’t wait for a reply and began to walk along the embankment pathway, the trees twinkling with lights and the glow of lights from the city reflected in the water. Beneath her boots the snow was slippery and in her haste she briefly lost her footing and slid but quickly regained her balance.
Max was beside her in an instant, taking hold of her arm. ‘I suggest you slow down if you must continue with this madness.’
She walked a few more steps and stopped, looking from the white pathway as it sparkled under the lamplight to Max. ‘And what would that madness be? Taking a walk in my condition?’
He spoke over her before she had a chance to finish. ‘Of course it would.’
‘Or is that madness loving you?’ The words came hurtling out, dragging out all her pain on a cold breath, which seemed to linger in the air between them, waiting for an answer.
‘I have told you, Lisa, I can’t love. It’s not you, it’s me.’
‘Oh, isn’t that the perfect excuse? One every man who doesn’t want to be with a woman uses.’ Anger sizzled in every word.
‘It’s not an excuse,’ he said wearily. ‘It’s the truth.’
‘The truth?’ she fumed. Did he even know what that was?
He moved closer to her, his height towering over her, dominating everything. ‘I don’t want to be the man my father was. I don’t want to risk hurting you—hurting our child.’
Lisa’s heart thumped in her chest, so loud she was sure it was echoing around London, sure everyone would hear it. She’d found a chink in Max’s tough armour and he’d let her slip through, opened up and was finally on the brink of admitting what his demons were. Demons that made loving impossible for him.
She moved closer to him. ‘Just because your father did that to you, to your mother, it doesn’t mean you will be like him.’
* * *
The softness of Lisa’s voice nearly killed Max as he stood looking at her, vaguely aware of other people walking in the early evening darkness passing with a cursory glance at them but he couldn’t take his eyes from Lisa’s.
‘This hasn’t got anything to do with my father.’ Even now when she was making it all so easy for him, he couldn’t truly own his failings, couldn’t admit that unlike Raul, who had found love and happiness, he never would. He was cast from the same mould as his father.
‘You have to let the past go, Max. You can’t live within its shadow for ever and I more than most know that. There are plenty of shadows in my past, plenty I’d like to ignore or run from, but I can’t, because I love you.’
He moved away from her, needing the space to think, to gather the turmoil of emotions that had somehow escaped. He crossed the footpath to lean on the stone wall, looking out over the darkness of the moving water. ‘You can say it as many times as you like, but it won’t change anything, Lisa. I am who I am because of my past and I can’t change that.’
She joined him by the wall, looking at him, trying to force him to look at her. He didn’t want to, didn’t want to look into her gorgeous green eyes and see the love in them. Keeping himself at an emotional distance had worked while he was bringing up Angelina. He’d never admitted to himself or his sister that he loved her. That was what had kept her safe, kept her in his life.
But Lisa wasn’t Angelina. She wasn’t the baby sister he so wanted to hate for being his mother’s choice in a decision that she later paid for with her life. Lisa was his wife, the woman he’d thought he could enjoy passion and desire with, be a husband to, all without giving his heart. That fatal commitment that always made a person leave him, his life. He’d long since been secure in the notion that if he didn’t engage his emotions he couldn’t be hurt—couldn’t hurt anyone.
‘It doesn’t have to define you, Max,’ she said softly, too softly. He looked down at her, noticing she wore less make-up than usual. She’d stepped out from behind the façade of bright, bubbly and in-control Lisa to tell him how she really felt and he’d thrown it back at her—again.
‘We never talked of our past before we married, did we?’ He turned his attention back to the water and somewhere in the distance the eerie sound of sirens pierced the night, as if the truth of all she’d said was piercing his armour, cracking it open and exposing the young child who still lingered within, hurt and afraid.
‘Maybe neither of us were ready to share those secrets.’ She spoke so softly that he almost didn’t hear her. He sensed her moving closer, felt her arm against his and he clenched his jaw hard as need for her began to bubble to the surface once more. ‘But it’s not too late.’
Was she right? Could he do that, tell her why he’d been a hard and dominating brother to Angelina and why he could no longer look his stepfather in the eye, knowing he’d been the one to stand back and allow his mother to make such a momentous decision? Could he tell Lisa that he wanted to love her, wanted to love his child, but that he didn’t trust himself not to hurt her? That he couldn’t stand it if she left him once he’d opened his heart to her.
‘It won’t change anything, Lisa.’
‘But I’m willing to take the chance, Max—for our baby, not for me.’
He turned to face her once more. ‘Why would you do that? Why stay with a man who can’t love you and maybe can’t even love his child?’
‘You know my past now, Max. You know why I want a father for my child, one who will always be there, not one who turns up and uses his child to get at me. I would rather be a single mother, completely on my own, than put my child through that.’
She was doing what his mother had done. Sacrificing herself, her needs for those of her child, albeit for very different reasons. ‘Why? You saw where I grew up when my mother and I moved to Madrid after my father walked out.’
‘It has nothing to do with where I’d live.’ She looked at him, imploring him to understand. ‘It’s because I want to be a better mother than mine was. I want to care and love my child, to give it all it needs and that includes a permanent father. But only you know if I can manage that last part.’
He looked at Lisa, at the way her lovely red hair moved in the light wind, at the rosy glow the cold was bringing to her pale cheeks. He knew so little of her past. Was that where everything had started to go wrong? They’d allowed passion to rule, never words.
‘You’ve never really mentioned your mother.’
‘Because she never wanted me, never cared for me in any way. I was completely left to my own devices and if one good thing has come out of seeing my older stepbrother constantly being sought out by the police, it’s that I decided to lift myself out of that rut. Not to be the girl from the wrong side of town. I studied hard at school and later got my degree with honours in physiotherapy. My mother hates that I did well in life. She is constantly looking for ways of bringing me back down.’
His heart ached for Lisa, who like Angelina hadn’t known a mother’s love, but it still didn’t make it any easier for him to let go of his emotions, to feel love, much less show it. If anything the expectations she’d just heaped on made it harder.
‘She would really do that?’ He thought of the hard and unyielding woman he’d met just one week before he’d married Lisa and knew without a doubt that she was capable of that. Life had made her tough, taught her to inflict hurt, but how far would she go to teach her daughter a lesson for bettering herself? How could any mother want to do that?