‘Relieved?’ he verified incredulously.
She swallowed and nodded. ‘Maybe it suited me to believe that all men were fundamentally liars and you could never trust any of them because that way...’ Her eyes had suddenly become very bright and her words tailed off as she looked at him.
‘That way you’d never get hurt?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes. I didn’t want to get hurt and I didn’t want my baby—’
‘Our baby.’
She bit her lip as if she was about to cry. ‘I didn’t want our baby to grow up the way I did,’ she said huskily. ‘In a world of broken promises and no real love. Or one-sided love. I thought it would be easier to go it alone than to do that. Because I want a real family, Maximo—not something which just looks like it from the outside—and I’m not going to accept anything less than that.’
This still sounded like bargaining to him and was not the instant capitulation Maximo had expected to hear. It still felt as if someone were squeezing his heart with their fist—and it hurt. It really hurt. He’d spent his whole life avoiding emotional pain and maybe that was why he had built up no resistance against it. Because suddenly he realised that if he wanted Hollie, he needed to really put his feelings on the line. To say things he’d never expected to hear himself say and make sure she knew he meant them.
‘I’ve never told you that I love you, have I, Hollie?’ he questioned unevenly. ‘I’ve never told you that first time I lay with you, it felt as if you were touching me with flame? As if you’d unleashed the lick of a potent fire which threatened to melt the coldness deep inside me, which I’d lived with for so long? I’d never felt that way before and it made me feel vulnerable. That’s what made me want to push you away.’
‘Maximo—’
But he silenced her with a shake of his head because he couldn’t allow her forgiving nature to let him off the hook. Not this time. ‘You withstood my appalling attitude when I discovered you were pregnant—as if I had nothing to do with it!’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘And then you created the kind of Christmas I’d never had and never thought I’d wanted, but it seems I did. For the first time in my life, I discovered what people meant when they talked about coming home. You are my home and I love you, Hollie, and I want to share my life with you and our baby.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s as complicated and as simple as that.’
‘Oh, Maximo,’ she said, so quietly he could hardly hear her.
He opened his arms to her and she went straight into them, like a bird arriving back on the nest after a long flight away. She buried her head against his shoulder and he held her until she had stopped crying and then he turned her face up towards him, tracing his fingertip over the tracks of her tears. ‘But I’ve been thinking about my bachelor apartment in Madrid and I’ve recognised it isn’t really suitable for a baby,’ he mused.
‘But it’s right next to that beautiful park.’
‘Sí, it is, but I got the distinct feeling that you’re not much of a city girl, which was one of the reasons you left London, wasn’t it?’
She shrugged. ‘I guess.’
‘When I took you there, I felt as if I had plucked a wildflower from a country meadow and transplanted it into a hothouse. Which is why I’m planning to fit into your world from now on.’
Her brow creased into a frown. ‘Now who’s talking in riddles?’
‘There’s something else you need to know,’ he said suddenly. ‘Something I should have told you a whole lot sooner. I was never planning to turn the castle into a luxury hotel. That was just an assumption local people made and I didn’t bother to correct them. I had planned to demolish it and turn it into a quarry—to use the valuable stone it was built on to build a railway track.’
‘You...you were planning to destroy hundreds of years of history just to build a railway?’
‘Don’t knock railways, Hollie, because we need them—now more than ever.’
‘Why didn’t you say something before? Why didn’t you tell anyone?’
‘Because I knew if that fact got out, it would drive up the purchase price.’
She punched a half-hearted fist against his chest. ‘That is the most hard-hearted thing I’ve—’
‘I’m a businessman, Hollie,’ he interrupted gently. ‘And that’s what businessmen do. I’d planned to stay there over Christmas because I knew it would provide the solitude I was seeking, and then to sell it in the new year. I wasn’t expecting to meet a woman in this one-horse town, and have my life turned upside down by her. You were the reason I couldn’t go through with the sale, not when I saw how much the place meant to you. I realised I couldn’t take a wrecking ball to the heart of this little community in order to steamroller another money-making scheme.’
‘Oh, Maximo,’ she said, lifting her left hand to her heart, making him notice she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring.
‘I have been thinking that we could keep the castle and turn it into our family home, if that’s what you wanted. Or maybe turn it into a hotel and buy a big house and garden for our family instead, if that’s what you’d prefer. I was waiting for the perfect moment to tell you, only perfect moments have a habit of being elusive. But those things could only happen...’ His words tailed off and somehow he was finding it impossible to keep the sudden break from his voice. ‘They could only happen if you still wanted me. If you still wanted to be my wife.’
Hollie put her arms around his neck and pressed her face very close to his as a powerful shaft of joy and gratitude shot through her. ‘Of course I still want to be your wife. Because I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I love you in a way I never thought possible, but I never believed you might feel the same way about me.’
‘Believe it now.’
‘I do.’ She looked into his black eyes and saw a look of true understanding, but she knew there was more to tell him. ‘When I thought you’d lied to me, I took the coward’s way out. I was trying to protect myself against hurt and pain. That’s why I sent you that text instead of waiting until you got here and talking it out with you, face to face.’
‘Querida—’
‘No, let me finish.’ That was easier said than done when tears were starting to stream down her cheeks—big and wet and salty and dripping on her sweater. ‘But the worst hurt and pain I’ve ever experienced was imaging a life without you...’ Once again her words tailed off and it took a couple of moments before she could catch her breath to speak. To articulate the emotion which Maximo had never been shown as a child and convince him that she meant every single word. They had both been damaged in the past, yes, but love was the true healer. Some might say the only healer. ‘I love you with all my heart, Maximo Diaz,’ she whispered. ‘And I’ll never stop loving you. Believe me when I tell you that, my darling.’