Yet now, as he stared into the wide grey eyes which were fixed on his, he found himself wanting to tell her stuff. Nothing too deep. No, definitely not that. But it would amuse him to reveal his beginnings to her, to show her some of the real man beneath the fancy patina. Would take his mind off the persistent urge to pull her into his arms and start kissing her, which would complicate his life in a way it didn’t need complicating.
‘Yes, I was a labourer,’ he said. ‘And if you know my roots you might be able to understand why. I was the only child of a single mother, and money was scarce. I remember being hungry—always hungry. My need to get food took precedence over schoolwork and the local school wasn’t up to much anyway. And when I was fourteen, I started working on the roads.’
‘Fourteen?’ she breathed, her eyes growing even wider. ‘Wow. Is that even legal?’
‘I doubt it.’ He shrugged. ‘But there weren’t so many checks back then. It was a different kind of world. The guy who owned the construction site didn’t know how old I was and if they had, they probably wouldn’t have cared.’
‘You mean you lied about your age?’ she questioned, as if that were important to her.
‘I let them believe what they wanted to believe. That’s mostly what people do in life, Hollie—haven’t you discovered that by now? I was big and strong for my age and looked much older than I was, and it was easy to let my work speak for itself. I started out with a pick and shovel. Breaking up rocks with a big hammer and trying not to inhale the dust. I learnt a lot about construction.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘But I learnt plenty more about human nature.’
‘In what way?’
Her voice was soft. Way too soft to resist—and for some reason, Maximo didn’t even try.
‘I learnt how to fight,’ he admitted. ‘I learnt how a man can lose everything through drink, and that gambling is nothing but a short journey to ruin. But mostly I learnt that I didn’t want to hang round doing that kind of work for ever.’
‘No, I can imagine you didn’t. So how did you make the leap, from being a—?’
‘Labourer?’ Her head was bent as she traced all the scratches on the table with the tip of her finger, as if she were trying not to meet his gaze. And wasn’t there a bit of him which was glad about that? Because those beautiful grey eyes were cool and searching and it wasn’t easy to ignore their candid gaze.
‘It wasn’t rocket science,’ he continued. ‘I made sure I was always the first to arrive and the last to leave and I saved every euro I could to buy my first digger. Eventually that one digger became five, and then twenty—and soon I was the sub-contractor of choice for the big boys.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Until I became one of the big boys myself. I started building roads and then railways, and I never really looked back.’ Most emphatically he had not looked back.
She absorbed all this in silence for a moment. ‘It’s not—’
‘Not what you expected?’ he supplied acidly. ‘You imagined I was born with the Spanish equivalent of a silver spoon in my mouth? Nacer en cuna de oro. That I grew up with money?’
‘Something like that. You seem very comfortable with your wealth. Comfortable in your own skin.’
‘Thank you,’ he said gravely, and was aware of the warm approbation in his voice as he said it. Her look of surprise indicated she’d heard it too, but then she was unaware that she had just paid him a great compliment—perhaps the greatest compliment of all. For hadn’t that been what he had strived for above all else? To feel comfortable in his own skin.
But then she ruined it.
‘And you have a kind of—I don’t know.’ She wriggled her shoulders. ‘A kind of aristocratic look about you.’
Maximo’s lips clamped shut, telling himself to be grateful that her perceptive observation had brought him to his senses at last. What was the matter with him? Hadn’t he been just about to tell her the rest of his pitiful story, lulled by her soft voice and seeking eyes? And why—just because his estranged mother was dead and his equilibrium had temporarily been disturbed?
Hadn’t he spent the last two decades eradicating those memories—only to almost blurt them out to a woman who already had too much power over him? Because her pregnancy gave Hollie Walker undue influence in his life, he recognised suddenly—and she could use that influence any way she saw fit.
He gave the pot another stir. He had carefully controlled his image for most of his life. He never gave interviews, never let people too close. He worked hard and played hard and donated generously to charity—and for these qualities he was mostly admired and envied in equal measure. But of himself he gave nothing away. Even during his longest relationships—and none of those had ever been what you’d call lengthy—he had never been anything less than guarded. Hadn’t that been part of his appeal—that women saw him as an enigma and a challenge and themselves as the one who would break down those high barriers with which he had surrounded himself?
But Hollie was different. She couldn’t help but be different. She was carrying his baby and, inevitably, that was going to cause ripples of curiosity in the circles in which he moved. Sooner or later people were going to find out that this unknown Englishwoman was pregnant with his child. She would be able to present herself to the world however she saw fit. As a victim, if she so desired. And he would have absolutely no control over that.
He felt the sudden knot in his stomach. He had already told her plenty about himself, but of her he knew nothing. Nothing at all. Wasn’t it time he did? Not because he particularly cared what made her tick, but because he needed to redress that balance of knowledge.
He pulled out the stool opposite hers and sat down. ‘What about you?’ he questioned, carelessly.
‘Me?’
‘I’ve told you how I started out. Now it’s your turn.’
Hollie hesitated. He had divulged much more than she’d expected, though she’d noticed that his story had stopped very abruptly. But he had still surprised her and maybe if he hadn’t been so forthcoming she might have brushed over her own background, because it wasn’t much to write home about, was it? Even so, it was more than a little distracting to have him sitting so close, making her acutely aware of all the latent power in his muscular body and the devilish gleam of his ebony eyes.
‘I was the only child of a single mother, too,’ she began and saw a muscle begin working at his temple, as if he thought she was grasping for things they had in common and was irritated by it. Instantly, she sought to emphasise the differences between them. ‘We weren’t exactly poor, but we weren’t exactly rich either. My father...’
‘What about your father?’ he probed.