Claimed for the Leonelli Legacy

‘Naturally I’ve been worried sick about you all this time,’ Max pointed out curtly. ‘I wondered if you were ill, whether you were in hospital, seeing a doctor regularly for check-ups... I even wondered if you could have lost the baby.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think my silence through,’ Tia countered stiltedly, mounting the narrow stairs and then stepping back from the doorway of Sancha’s little bedroom to let him precede her, if anything grateful for the distraction from the hard questions he was shooting at her and the guilt he had awakened.

Max had believed his rage would ebb once he entered the house but being greeted by his wife as though everything were normal when it was as far from normal as it was possible to be had grated on him. Being forced to ask to see his own daughter didn’t help and the suffocatingly small bedroom sent another biting surge of fury through him. As a child he had had so little. Now that he had a child of his own he wanted his child to have everything, and everything encompassed space and comfort and every material advantage he could provide. Now he stood in a small slot of a room only just big enough for a cot and a chest of drawers. It was clean, adequate but not sufficient to satisfy him.

‘The courts take a very dim view of mothers who deny fathers all right of access to their children,’ he heard himself impart grimly.

The blood chilled in Tia’s veins because what she heard was a threat. ‘I thought I was doing the best thing for all of us when I left. I thought you didn’t want her, didn’t want the responsibility.’

‘But I never said that, did I? Nor did I ever suggest that you terminate the pregnancy or indeed anything of that nature,’ Max reminded her fiercely, finally approaching the cot with somewhat hesitant steps and looking down to see what he could of the sleeping baby. The light from the landing illuminated her little face, the sweet sweep of lashes on her flushed baby cheeks, the fullness of the little rosebud mouth she had definitely inherited from her mother. The sudden tightness in his chest forced Max to drag in a long, deep, steadying breath. Sancha was very small and the short tufts of her tousled dark hair stuck up comically in all directions while her tiny starfish hand lay relaxed against the mattress.

‘She’s...gorgeous.’ Max almost whispered the word, what he had planned to say next flying back out of his head while he drank in his first glimpse of his daughter.

‘She looks just like you,’ Tia framed nervously, still reeling from that reference to the courts and parental rights because she knew what she had done and was bright enough to fear the consequences.

‘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.’