out-of-the-blue statement flabbergasted her would be like saying that Mount Everest was a molehill.
Her mind emptied. There was just nothing possible to think—or to say—to what he’d just stated.
He went on, in that same inanimate voice. “It probably goes back to the beginnings of my lineage, but I only know for a fact that my great-grandfather was one, and that the disorder got worse with every generation, reaching its most violent level with my father. I believed it ran in my blood, that once I manifested it, I would be the worst of them all. That was why I never considered having any relationship. Until you.”
She could only stare at him, quakes starting in her very essence, spreading outward. She’d lived for a year going crazy for an explanation. Now she no longer wanted to know. Not if the explanation was worse than his seeming desertion itself.
But she couldn’t find her voice to tell him to stop. Not that he would have stopped. He seemed set on getting this out in the open once and for all.
“From that first moment,” he said, his voice a throb of melancholy, “I wanted you with a ferocity that terrified me, so when you stipulated the finite, uninvolved nature of our liaison, I was relieved. I believed it would be safe as long as our involvement was temporary, remained superficial. But things didn’t go as expected, and my worry intensified along with my hunger for you. I lived in fear of my reaction if you wanted to walk away when I wasn’t ready to let go. But instead, you became pregnant.”
She continued to stare helplessly at him, legs starting to quiver, feeling he hadn’t told her the worst of it yet.
He proved her right. “As you blossomed with Leonid, I was more certain every day I’d been right to tell you I’d withdraw from your life eventually and never enter his. I found myself inventing anxieties every second you were out of my sight, had to constantly struggle to curb my impulses so I wouldn’t smother you. I even tried to stay away from you as much as I could bear it. But I only returned even hungrier, feared it would only be a matter of time before all these unprecedented emotions snapped my control and manifested in aggression. That was why I forced myself to leave you before you had Leo. Before I ended up doing what my father did after my sister was born.”
He had a sister?
His next words provided a horrific answer to her unvoiced surprise. “He’d been getting progressively more volatile. There were no longer days when he didn’t hit my mother or me or both of us. Then one night, when Ana was about six months old, he went berserk. He put us all in the emergency room that night. It took my mother and I months to get over our injuries. Ana struggled for a week before she...succumbed.”
Three
Maksim’s words fell on Cali like an avalanche of rocks.
She stood gaping at him, buried under their enormity.
His father had killed his sister. His baby sister.
He feared he suffered from the same brutal affliction.
Was that what had overcome him back there in Leo’s room? This “unreasoning” aggression toward the helpless?
Sudden terror grabbed her by the throat.
What if he lost control now? What if— What if...
As suddenly as dread had towered, it crashed, deflated.
This man standing across her living room, looking at her with eyes that bled with despondence she recognized only too well, having suffered it for far too long, wasn’t in the grips of uncontrollable violence. But of overwhelming anguish.
He feared himself and what he considered to be his legacy. That fear seemed to have ruled his whole life. He’d just finished telling her it had dictated his every action and decision in his interactions with her. The limits he’d agreed to, the severance he’d imposed on them, had been prodded by nothing else. He’d thought he was protecting her, and Leo, from his destructive potential.
And she heard herself asking, “Did you ever hurt anyone?”
“I did.”
The bitten-off admission should have resurrected her fears. It didn’t. And not because she was seeing good where there was none, as her mother had done with her father. As his own mother must have done with his father, to remain with an abusive husband.
She only couldn’t ignore her gut feeling. It had guided her all her life, had never led her astray.
The one time she’d thought she’d made a fundamental mistake had been with him. But his explanations had reinstated the validity of her inner instincts about him.
From the first moment she’d laid eyes on Maksim, she’d felt she’d be safe with him. More. Protected, defended. At any cost to him. That nobility, that stability, that perfect control she’d felt from him—even at the height of passion—had led her to trust him without reservation from that first night onward. It all contradicted what he feared about himself.
She started walking toward him and he tensed. It was clear he didn’t welcome her nearness now, after he’d confessed his shame and dread to her. What must it be like for him to doubt himself on such a basic level? What had it been like for him believing he had a time bomb ticking inside him?
She had to let him know what she’d always sensed of his steadiness and trustworthiness. That it had been why it had hit her so hard when he’d left. She hadn’t been able to reconcile what she’d felt on her most essential levels with his seemingly callous actions. Thinking she’d been so wrong about him had agonized her as much as longing for him had.
But she’d been right about him. As misguided as his reasons had been, he’d only meant to protect her and Leo.
He took a couple of steps back as she approached, his eyes imploring her not to come any closer, not just yet. “Let me say this. It’s been weighing on me since I met you. But if you come near me, I’ll forget everything.”
In answer, she stopped, sank down on the couch where he’d ravished her with pleasure so recently and patted the space next to her. He reluctantly complied.
“Those you hurt were never weaker than you are.” It was a statement, not a question.
His hooded eyes simmered. “No.”
“They were equals...” her gaze darted over the daunting breadth of his shoulders “...or superior numbers.” His nod was terse, confirming her deduction. “And you never instigated violence.”
“But I didn’t only ward off attacks or defend the attacked. I was only appeased when I damaged the attackers.”
“Were those times so frequent?”
He nodded. “My father left another legacy. A tangled mess in our home city. In the motherland, some areas are far from the jurisdiction of law, or the law leaves certain disputes to be resolved by people among themselves. The use of force is the most accepted resolution. I became an expert at it.”
“So those times you hurt others, you were not only defending yourself but others. You did what had to be done.”
“I was too violent. And I relished it.”
She persisted. “Did you lose control?”
“No. I knew exactly what I was doing.”
“A lot of men are like you.... Soldiers, protectors—capable of stunning violence, of even killing, for a cause, to defend others against aggressors. But those same men are usually the gentlest men with those who depend on them for protection.”
His eyes grew more turbid. “I understood that mentally, that I had good cause. But with my family history, I feared it meant I had it in me...this potential for unprovoked violence. My passion for you was intensifying by the hour...but my fear of myself came to a head one specific night. It happened when I was waiting for you in bed and you were walking toward me in a sheer turquoise negligee.”
Her