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‘Why?’
He finished his coffee, placing the small cup in the middle of the table then capturing her hands. ‘Because I would want any child of mine to know that I was willing to fight to be a part of their everyday life. Not their weekend life. Not their sometimes life. All their life.’
She considered that, his vehemence a little discordant. ‘Tell me about your father.’
As soon as she said it, she knew she’d struck a nerve. He flinched, almost imperceptibly, but her hand was held by his and she felt it, a little shock wave that passed through his body.
‘There is nothing to tell. I never knew him.’
She frowned. ‘Did your mother know? I mean—’
‘Yes, she knew who he was.’
‘And did she tell you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you knew of him, but simply never met?’
He nodded once, a tight shift of his head that many would have taken as a warning: stop asking questions.
‘Did he know about you?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because she told me.’ His eyes were hooded, his features locked in a mask of ruthless anger. A shiver ran down her spine. ‘And after she died, I found the letters.’
‘She wrote to him?’
‘A lawyer did. Some hack from the tenement. Still, the letter was sound. My father’s legal advice was better—he had a team of barristers at his disposal.’
‘He was well off?’
Alejandro lifted a hand in the air, silently signalling to the waiter that he’d like the bill—and, more importantly, signalling to Sienna that he wanted the conversation to be at an end.
‘You ask too many questions.’
He had inflected the words with a hint of humour but that didn’t matter. They hurt. They cut her to the quick. Criticism was something she’d thought she’d inured herself to—she’d learned to take it from her mother, but from Alejandro it was unbearable.
‘That was a joke.’ He sighed. ‘Not a good one.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I’m sorry.’
Apology. Another thing Sienna had never received—not from her mother, her father, and nor had she ever witnessed her father apologise to her mother. Alejandro might be six and a half feet of sheer alpha male, but he was also a decent, kind man, qualities her father lacked altogether.
‘Forget about it.’
But neither of them could. She felt the sting of his words and it silenced any more questions. A moment later, the waiter appeared, and Alejandro paid the bill, despite Sienna’s offer. ‘You came to Barcelona. I can buy the dinner.’
‘You’re also hosting me,’ she pointed out as they stepped out of the restaurant, into the balmy night air.
They walked in silence for several streets, moving towards the sea, the smell of salt growing stronger as they approached the water.
‘My father,’ he said, after so long a silence Sienna had presumed the conversation to be completely at an end, ‘was in his early twenties when he met my mother. She was working as a waitress. He was on vacation. He seduced her. He fed her lies, promised her things he never intended to give. She fell for him, believed him.’
Sienna’s eyes stung with indignant tears. ‘And she fell pregnant.’
‘She was sixteen. She told him she was pregnant, he disappeared. She informed him of my birth—nothing. He gave her not a single cent towards my upbringing, nothing to help support her when I was a child. He refused the request for DNA testing. He abandoned her.’
