Cinderella's Christmas Secret - Sharon Kendrick Page 0,38

up had been delayed even further. She had straddled him with abandon and afterwards they had shared a bath and stayed there until their fingertips were wrinkled, and she had squealed with delight when he’d wrapped her in a bathrobe and carried her back into the bedroom.

He couldn’t remember ever feeling quite so turned on by a woman and if she hadn’t gone to so much trouble with the meal, he might have suggested they postpone it in favour of a far more sensual feast.

But Maximo couldn’t shake off a lingering sense of disconnect as he sat down at the table. Because for some reason it felt as if ghosts were joining them and sitting at those empty chairs. The ghost of his mother, so recently dead. His father, too—though he’d only discovered his demise by reading about it in one of the national Spanish newspapers last year. He thought of Christmases past. He stared at Hollie’s belly. Of Christmases future.

‘There’s some of your Cantabrian mountain stew, which I’ve reheated,’ she was saying, shattering his troubled thoughts with her soft English chatter. ‘And lots of lovely cheeses and meats from those fancy hampers. Shall I cut you a slice of this Iberico ham, Maximo?’

His tongue felt as if it wouldn’t work, as if it were too big for his mouth. He shook his head, taking a sip of wine. Rich, red wine which warmed the blood like soup. He always drank this particular vintage during his preferred solitary Christmases, but tonight, he might as well have been drinking vinegar. Why was he so beset with the past tonight? he wondered with irritation—as if it were a heavy mantle around his shoulders which he couldn’t shake off?

‘Is something wrong?’ she said as he put the barely touched glass down.

He shook his head. ‘No, nothing’s wrong.’

‘Forgive me for contradicting you, Maximo, but something clearly is.’

‘Let’s eat,’ he growled. Remembering that they’d missed breakfast, he forced himself to work his way through some of the food, though he noticed that Hollie was tucking into her own meal with a healthy appetite and, on some level, that pleased him. Eventually, she looked up from her plate of cheese and crackers, putting her knife down with a thoughtful expression on her face.

‘You know, something has been puzzling me,’ she observed slowly.

‘Really?’ he questioned, injecting a deliberate note of boredom into his voice because her analytical tone suggested she was intending to take the conversation somewhere he didn’t want it to go.

‘Any ideas?’ she ventured.

‘I have many attributes, Hollie,’ he drawled, ‘but mind-reading has never been one of them.’

But his sarcasm didn’t deter her. She simply dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin.

‘When you told me about how you started in business, about breaking up big rocks in the road, there was something you failed to mention.’

‘There were probably plenty of things I didn’t mention.’

‘Your parents, for one,’ she said.

‘Maybe that was a deliberate omission.’

‘I mean, how did that happen?’ she mused, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Because fourteen is very young, no matter how old you looked. You haven’t explained what your parents had to say about you joining a construction team and working the roads.’

There was a pause. A pause which seemed to last for ever, giving him time to fall back on his familiar strategies for avoiding scrutiny. But something stopped him and he didn’t know what. Was it the clearness of her grey eyes—or an expression of something like compassion which had softened her lovely face, rather than judgement? Almost as if she had guessed at the truth. He thought about what she’d told him about her own father—about his failure to be there for her. Maybe he and Hollie Walker had a lot more in common than he’d previously thought, and was it really such a big deal for the mother of his baby to discover a few truths about him?

‘They didn’t know,’ he said.

‘But they must have known. How could they not?’

‘By that time in my life, my mother and I were estranged—’

‘At fourteen?’

‘Yes, Hollie. At fourteen. It happens.’

‘And your father?’

He shrugged. ‘He did not really deserve that title, for I only ever had the briefest of relationships with him.’

‘Why?’ she questioned quietly. ‘What happened?’

His mouth tightened because this was the part which was definitely off-limits. The part he had taken extra care to filter from his life and online presence—confident in the knowledge that nobody else in the picture would disclose it, because it didn’t reflect