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‘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.
