And just as Tia had taken charge of her life nine months earlier she recognised that she had to come out of hiding now and face the music. It was time for her to stand up and deal with the challenges she had been avoiding. The very first step of that process, she acknowledged ruefully, would be contacting Max.
While Hilary was enjoying her tea, Tia pulled out her phone and before she could lose her nerve she accessed Max’s phone number on her phone, attached a photo of Sancha to it and texted him her address as well as the name she had been using to avoid detection. For the sake of anonymity, she was known as Tia Ramos locally. Ramos had been her mother’s maiden name.
Max received that text in the middle of a business meeting and his rage knew no bounds as he scrutinised his first blurry picture of his daughter, Sancha. She looked at the camera with big dark eyes, her tiny face astonishingly serious for a baby. Sancha Leonelli, Max was thinking in wonderment, until he read the full text message from his runaway wife and registered on a fresh tide of threatening fury that Tia had cast off the Leonelli name as entirely as she had cast off her husband. A blasted text! Not even a phone call. Was that all he rated after a nine-month silence? Nine months of unceasing worry that would have slaughtered a lesser man? A text... Max gritted his even white teeth, launched upright and strode out without even an apology for his departure. He had a wife to deal with.
Tia was slightly surprised when Max did not respond to her message. Had he changed his number? Moved on from their marriage to the extent that he did not feel her text required an immediate response? Common sense kicked in, reminding her that Max had only just received his first glimpse of his baby daughter. More probably Max was furious with her. Anxiously mulling over those possibilities, Tia kept herself busy once she had put Sancha down for the night. The tea-room kitchen where she did all her baking was linked by a door to her house and, as long as she set up the baby monitor while she worked, she could hear her daughter if she wakened, but during the day she kept Sancha tucked in her travel cot and within easy reach.
She was busy packing an Anthill cake, which was stuffed with chocolate chips, when she heard her house doorbell ring and she sped back next door before the noise could waken Sancha. When she opened the door to Max she was knocked for six because the very last response she had expected from him was an instant unannounced visit.
‘Oh, it’s the kitchen fairy,’ Max derided, running gleaming dark eyes down over her flour-smudged nose to her full ripe mouth and the shapeless chef’s overall she wore. He had checked her out before his arrival and he knew all about the cakes she was baking. It irritated him that, not only had he not known that she could bake, but she had also not once made the effort to bake anything for him.
Tia went red, grateful she had removed her kitchen hat before she answered the door, but her fingers lifted to self-consciously smooth the hair braided neatly round her head. Poised below the porch light, Max looked amazing, blue-black hair glossy, his lean dark angel features smooth over his high cheekbones while a shadow of dark stubble roughened and accentuated the contrast between his angular jaw line and his wide, full modelled mouth. Her mouth ran dry.
‘Or maybe it’s Heidi and you’re about to start yodelling,’ Max breathed between gritted teeth.
‘Heidi?’ Tia frowned, not having come across that book as a child, staring up at him, frantically wishing she were dressed and wearing proper shoes with heels instead of clad for comfort and warmth in jeans, a winter sweater and flatties.
‘It must be the cute little-girl braids,’ Max extended sardonically, moving forward to force her to move back, a waft of cold air eddying into the house with him. ‘Makes you look about ten years old.’
Tia backed several steps and thrust the door shut behind him. ‘You should’ve told me you were coming,’ she protested defensively, feeling menaced by the intimidating size of Max in the confined area of her small hallway.
‘My apologies,’ Max intoned softly. ‘Your nine months of silence killed any manners I ever had stone dead.’
Tia’s colour flared again because there wasn’t much she could say to that in her own defence. She had speculated so many times about what seeing Max again would be like and now she was appreciating that she had got it wrong every time. She was all flustered, every sense on overdrive. She had forgotten his sheer physical impact on her, the heightened heart rate that dampened her skin, the challenge to breathe evenly, the surge of helpless excitement when she collided with his brilliant dark golden eyes. Feeling weak and uneasy with that least allowable sensation, she hastily thrust open the lounge door.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch sooner,’ Tia murmured tautly. ‘I didn’t know what to say. I know that’s no excuse but—’
‘You’re right. It’s not an excuse. If it was I’d have first call on it,’ Max sliced in without warning. ‘I didn’t know what to say when you told me that you were pregnant...and, Dio mio, haven’t you made me pay for that lack of verbal dexterity?’
Wrong-footed once again, Tia clasped her hands together tightly in front of her. ‘I didn’t want my child to have an uncaring father.’
‘On what grounds did you assume that I would be uncaring?’ Max shot back at her. ‘And where is my daughter? I want to see her.’
‘She’s asleep.’ Tia swallowed hard, unaccustomed to being under attack by Max, feeling the novelty of that unexpected experience like a sudden blow, her skin turning clammy and cold.
Max planted himself expectantly back by the door into the hall. ‘I can be very quiet,’ he told her.
‘Max, I—’
‘I’ve waited months. I won’t wait any longer,’ Max informed her impatiently. ‘When was she born?’
Tia gave him the date of their daughter’s birth.
‘Naturally I’ve been worried sick about you all this time,’ Max pointed out curtly. ‘I wondered if you were ill, whether you were in hospital, seeing a doctor regularly for check-ups... I even wondered if you could have lost the baby.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think my silence through,’ Tia countered stiltedly, mounting the narrow stairs and then stepping back from the doorway of Sancha’s little bedroom to let him precede her, if anything grateful for the distraction from the hard questions he was shooting at her and the guilt he had awakened.
Max had believed his rage would ebb once he entered the house but being greeted by his wife as though everything were normal when it was as far from normal as it was possible to be had grated on him. Being forced to ask to see his own daughter didn’t help and the suffocatingly small bedroom sent another biting surge of fury through him. As a child he had had so little. Now that he had a child of his own he wanted his child to have everything, and everything encompassed space and comfort and every material advantage he could provide. Now he stood in a small slot of a room only just big enough for a cot and a chest of drawers. It was clean, adequate but not sufficient to satisfy him.
‘The courts take a very dim view of mothers who deny fathers all right of access to their children,’ he heard himself impart grimly.
The blood chilled in Tia’s veins because what she heard was a threat. ‘I thought I was doing the best thing for all of us when I left. I thought you didn’t want her, didn’t want the responsibility.’
‘But I never said that, did I? Nor did I ever suggest that you terminate the pregnancy or indeed anything of that nature,’ Max reminded her fiercely, finally approaching the cot with somewhat hesitant steps and looking down to see what he could of the sleeping baby. The light from the landing illuminated her little face, the sweet sweep of lashes on her flushed baby cheeks, the fullness of the little rosebud mouth she had definitely inherited from her mother. The sudden tightness in his chest forced Max to drag in a long, deep, steadying breath. Sancha was very small and the short tufts of her tousled dark hair stuck up comically in