‘What does it say on her birth certificate?’ Max prompted tautly.
‘Sancha Mariana Leonelli. I didn’t know any of your family names so I couldn’t include any,’ Tia told him. ‘And the sisters were the only family I ever knew.’
‘I wouldn’t have wanted my family names included,’ Max admitted in a raw undertone, striding back to the door. ‘There are no good memories there that I would want carried on into the next generation.’
Tia chewed uncertainly at her lower lip and then glanced at him at the top of the stairs, clashing involuntarily with glittering dark eyes of challenge. ‘I kind of suspected that,’ she confided.
‘That’s why I found it so challenging to imagine becoming a father,’ Max revealed, clattering down the stairs, using the activity as cover to make himself force out that lowering admission of vulnerability. ‘Actually I couldn’t imagine it... I found the concept too frightening.’
‘Oh... Max,’ Tia whispered, her eyes burning with a sudden rush of moisture and regret. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that? I was nervous of becoming a mother too. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to cope or that I wouldn’t be able to feel attached to my baby because...for whatever reasons... Inez never got properly attached to me.’
‘Even so, my background is considerably less presentable than yours,’ Max volunteered diffidently. ‘I have never discussed that reality with anyone, which only makes it more difficult for me to talk about it. But my aunt didn’t want to know and Andrew said my past was better left decently buried, so I kept my experiences to myself.’
Tia was aghast that a clearly damaged child had been forced to keep his ordeal a secret that decent people needed to be protected from. ‘I don’t think that was the right approach.’
‘I don’t know,’ Max conceded with a grim shake of his arrogant dark head. ‘Perhaps if I’d been encouraged to talk and think about what happened I would have wallowed in it, which would have been worse. I had nightmares at first and they still come occasionally.’
‘I remember you dreaming,’ Tia remarked uncomfortably.
Max nodded confirmation. ‘But aside of that I did manage to move on without looking back, but my own experiences ensured that I had no plans to ever have kids. There’s bad blood in me and I didn’t want to pass it on—’
‘There’s no such thing as “bad blood”,’ Tia interrupted, angry on his behalf. ‘Who used that expression?’
‘My aunt. Carina was always waiting for me to reveal some violent, criminal tendency that I had inherited from my father. She never trusted me and never let me forget the fact.’
Seeing no point in sharing her poor opinion of his aunt’s attitude towards the child in her care, Tia breathed in slow and deep. ‘Your father was violent?’
‘Very violent. An alcoholic tyrant. He didn’t start out that way though. He was from a decent family and the son of a well-respected businessman but he became a drug-dealing thug at a young age. His family threw him out and he took up with my mother, who was equally wayward in her youth. She once told me that I was the child of his rape,’ Max breathed curtly. ‘But I suspect that that was her excuse for getting involved with a vicious loser. I’ll never know because they are both dead now and the truth died with them.’
‘Oh, Max,’ Tia muttered, tormented on his behalf. ‘What a truly awful thing to tell an innocent child.’
Max froze by the window, bold bronzed profile set, wide shoulders rigid. ‘He killed her when I was twelve years old, during one of their frequent rows about money. I was there when it happened. He went to prison for life, which is why I ended up in England with my aunt. He died in prison a few years ago.’
And there was so much revealed in those few clipped sentences that Tia reeled, her every expectation trounced by his brutal honesty. She was very much shocked. He had seen his father murder his mother and had then become his aunt’s responsibility. ‘You must’ve been traumatised,’ she framed shakily.
‘Completely but I got over that and learned how to function in my new life,’ Max countered briskly to discourage her sympathy. ‘To be frank, that new life was one hell of a lot better than my old life. Plenty of food, a comfortable bed, no beatings, no police harassment, no bullying at school. It was a cakewalk compared with what I had been used to.’
‘I’m so sorry, Max,’ Tia breathed tautly. ‘I had no idea.’
‘How could you have had? It’s not information I share and it’s my past, not my present, Tia,’ he declared with forbidding finality. ‘I’ve only trailed all this out now so that I can try to explain to you why I was less than enthusiastic about the idea of becoming a father. There are no male role models in my background. My only role model came when I was older and it was Andrew, and even he turned out to be not quite the man I believed him to be. I was afraid that I’d be a useless father.’
‘But you’re not your father. You have none of his violence in you. Even tonight when you’re so angry with me I have not once felt physically threatened by you,’ she pointed out, wanting to ask him how her grandfather had disappointed him, but reluctant to demand too much at once from a man who was only telling what he had so far told her because he felt he had no other choice. ‘You’re also honourable and honest, responsible and law-abiding.’
‘Yet my wife walked out on that honest, honourable, non-violent man and hid herself from me and stayed away as long as she could,’ Max retorted with crushing dismissal. ‘So, where does that leave us?’
Tia flinched from that sardonic reminder. ‘That’s a whole different story,’ she argued in consternation. ‘The leaving was about me, not you. I was so unsure and confused about everything in my life. Everything changed so fast and then Andrew died and you freaked out about me being pregnant—’
‘I didn’t freak out,’ Max broke in angrily.
‘In silence, you freaked out,’ Tia rephrased. ‘A first baby is a huge life change for a woman. I needed you to want our baby as much as I did because neither of us were wanted children and that didn’t turn out well for us. I wanted our baby to have everything we didn’t have, starting with caring, involved parents.’
‘But you didn’t give me a chance,’ Max argued vehemently, dark eyes shimmering pure gold condemnation in the lamp light. ‘Andrew had just died. I didn’t want to lay my sordid background on you on top of everything else you were already going through. You were pregnant and I tried to deal with that as best I could without involving you.’
‘Which meant you acted like it hadn’t happened,’ Tia slotted in ruefully. ‘I couldn’t handle that. We’d got married in a hurry. I’d got pregnant in a hurry. I had to put my child first and I knew I needed to be stronger. I couldn’t get stronger with you because you were too busy looking after me to let me learn how to do things for myself. And I thought of Inez, who’s spent her whole life needing a man to lean on and provide for her...and I was determined that I wasn’t going to be that kind of weak woman.’
‘Leaning on me isn’t a weakness,’ Max growled as the door bell sounded. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Probably my customer wanting to pick up his party order,’ Tia recalled belatedly. ‘You stay here and I’ll sort him out.’
But Max was too curious about the life that Tia had built away from him to keep his distance. He watched her greet a man in his thirties and walk through to a spacious catering kitchen to lift a set of cake boxes. Max’s lean, strong face clenched as he listened to them banter like two old friends and he stepped back into the lounge while she showed her customer out again.
‘Who is he?’ he asked baldly when she reappeared.