Cinderella's Christmas Secret - Sharon Kendrick Page 0,40

memories of the past. He remembered being bemused by the amount of cutlery beside his plate, and cramming food in his mouth as if he were a street urchin. Which was exactly how he had felt. Like a poor boy who had wandered into a parallel universe. He remembered being amazed at marble-decked bathrooms the size of ballrooms and lavish dinners which could have fed a whole village. His stepsisters laughing because he didn’t know which knife to use. The servants looking at him with a scorn they hadn’t bothered to hide, as if recognising that he was an outsider. Un bastardo. And that was never going to change—he’d recognised that instantly. He’d stuck it out for as long as he could but it had felt as if he were trapped inside his own private hell.

‘I wasn’t made to feel welcome,’ he summarised acidly and although she looked as if she wanted him to elaborate, he was damned if he was going to do that, for any frailties he possessed, he showed to no one. Nobody would ever see him vulnerable—not even the mother of his child. ‘As dawn broke on Christmas Eve, I left to return to my mother and managed to hitch rides from Madrid to A Coruña. I arrived not long before midnight when the night was bitterly cold and the snow was falling. I remember seeing the Belen in the town square...the traditional nativity scene,’ he elaborated, when he saw her frown. ‘I thought my mother might be out—although I certainly didn’t think she’d be on her way to Mass. She was more likely to be drinking in a bar.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘But she’d gone.’

‘Gone?’ she echoed. ‘Gone where?’

‘I never found out. She had cleared out all her stuff the month before and left no word or forwarding address.’ It shouldn’t have come as a shock, but it did. Because deep down he had always believed that she loved him, because she was his mother. But she did not love him. She never had. He had fallen to his knees in the icy snow and wept and that was the last time he had ever wept. At least he’d had food in his rucksack—the only thing he had taken from his father’s house. And then he had begun to walk, though he didn’t know where. He had walked on through the night and on Christmas morning he had stumbled across the construction site and waited there for workers to return after the Christmas break. And he had vowed there and then that he would never let anyone close enough to hurt him again.

‘She wiped me from her life as if I had never existed,’ he continued, the words falling from his mouth like stones. ‘It was only much later, when I had started to make money, that she contacted me again.’

‘And were you ever...reconciled?’

‘We met,’ he said tersely, staring down at his fingernails. ‘But her main focus was on what I could buy for her, rather than making up for all those lost years. I provided for her throughout the rest of her life but I never saw her again until a couple of months ago.’

‘She...died?’

He looked up at her, feeling himself tense up. ‘How the hell did you know that?’ he demanded.

‘Something in your face as you said it. I could see your pain.’ Her voice was soft again. How did she make it so damned soft? ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Maximo. I know she was cruel to you, but she was still your mother.’

He wanted to deny that he felt anything but she was getting up from the table and walking round to where he sat, sliding onto his lap to face him, one bare leg on either side of his. She looked at him for a long moment before resting her head on his in an age-old gesture which had never come his way before. Maybe he’d never needed it before. It had nothing to do with sex—and everything to do with comfort. And it was powerful, he realised. Unbelievably...powerful.

He wanted to shrug her off, to tell her he didn’t need any clumsy attempts at sympathy—but the words remained unspoken, the gesture never made. He could smell her clean, soapy scent and right then she seemed to embody all the virtues he’d never really associated with the women in his life.

Innocence.

Decency.

Kindness.

Suddenly a tension which had been coiled so tightly inside him started unravelling, like a line spinning wildly from