The Rich Man's Love-Child

‘What is it I want to do?’ His green eyes narrowed to icy slits. ‘You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to cross back over the road the way I came and pretend I hadn’t seen you! Why couldn’t you have just stayed in London and not cursed me with the sight of you again? Why did you have to come back at all?’

She’d never heard him sound so frighteningly bitter. His tongue lashed her like a whip, almost cutting her knees from under her and making her shake. Her blue eyes watered alarmingly.

‘My father died…I told you. I only came back for the funeral.’

‘I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you, and it had better be soon! You’re damn right you owe me an explanation, and I’m not letting you run away from me again without it!’ Letting out a harsh breath, as though every word he’d uttered had caused him some considerable pain, Flynn raked her from head to foot with his burning stare, as though daring her to even think of defying him.

‘The standing stones at the top of Maiden’s Hill.’ Her voice sounded as if it had been dragged through gravel. ‘I’ll meet you there tomorrow afternoon at three. I want to sort through some of my father’s belongings in the morning and decide where they’re going to go.’

‘Three it is, then. And, Caitlin?’

Her heart slammed like a wrecking ball against her ribs at the look he was wearing. ‘Yes?’

‘Don’t let me down. If you do…I’ll come and find you.’

And with that he left her there on the pavement, her legs shaking so hard and her heart beating so fast that she couldn’t move for several minutes, until she had calmed down sufficiently again to think what she was doing. By which time she was numb with cold and desperately in need of some warmth.

Seeing the little blue and yellow sign above Mrs O’Callaghan’s bakery swinging back and forth in the wind, Caitlin headed over there—to the prospect of a steaming mug of milky coffee to help thaw the chill and the dread from her bones.

CHAPTER TWO

CAITLIN arrived at the standing stones early, bundled up warmly in corduroy jeans and a chunky knitted sweater beneath her coat, to stave off the relentless slicing wind that was already making her face burn with cold. Standing on the edge of the ridge with the stone circle behind her—all six-feet-high shale stones erect, apart from one recumbent in the middle—she stared out at the stormy Irish Sea, smashing wildly onto the rocks hundreds of feet below, and sensed a small flame of pleasure light inside her. It was a breathtaking location, and one she’d often yearned to go back to when she was far away in the busy traffic-jammed streets of London.

A magical haunt, with or without the numerous legends that surrounded it, it had taken on an extra enchanting quality after many times spent there with Flynn. They had even made love there one warm midsummer’s night, with the moon’s shining face showering them with its silvery light…as if it approved of their being there together.

Her blood throbbed with a primitive and powerful need at the recollection. Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea after all that this be the place they meet? There were too many memories that lingered here…stirring, soul-ringing memories of love that were only taunting shadows of a path not taken. And now Flynn wanted answers…answers that behoved Caitlin to tell him that she’d had a child, and that he was the father.

She knew exactly the moment he arrived, because there was a frisson of electricity running through the air that made her scalp tingle in alert. It was ever thus that she had been so psychically attuned to his presence. As if they’d had some strange other worldly bond that mysteriously linked them together.

Wrenching her hypnotised gaze from the commanding sight of the foaming white-capped sea below her, Caitlin turned and saw his masculine dark figure striding towards her over the brow of the hill. The savage wind that was swiftly gathering force was now accompanied by spots of sleet that flattened his clothing against his lean hard body and turned his gleaming black hair to wet silk. Her violent shiver wasn’t just because of the icy cold that seemed to penetrate her own clothing and lay its death-like fingers on her bare flesh. A powerful swathe of want and need throbbed through her, and—too swept up in its passionate grip to move—she remained where she stood, a prisoner to its force, nervously watching him approach.

‘You came.’

Flynn didn’t smile as he released the words that were swiftly borne away on the soughing wind. Instead, he stared at her like a man possessed by a dream. Sleet clung to his ebony lashes and made the fascinating jade of his remarkable eyes glitter like flawless gemstones.

‘It’s bitter.’ Her teeth chattering and her boots shifting on the slippery frost beneath her, Caitlin wrenched her gaze free from his unsettling, diverting glance and started to move past him. ‘It’s a day for staying by the fire…not freezing to death!’

‘Let’s go over by the stones,’ he sombrely suggested. ‘It might shelter us a bit.’

Trying to brush back the windblown hair from her face, Caitlin glanced up into his solemn visage as she stood with her back to one of the standing stones, its dark companions making up a loose enclosure around them. Closely observing the way the taut skin stretched over his hollowed-out cheekbones, she saw how it rendered the implacable bones of his jawline rigid as iron. There was no spare flesh there. None. Its stark and fascinating definition could have emerged out of granite or marble, it was so faultlessly constructed. There was a fair smattering of dark growth shadowing the mainly smooth surface, though it was likely he had probably shaved only that morning, and his face reflected an austere and sombre beauty that seemed to come from the earth herself. It was no wonder that he seemed to blend so well into this wild and rugged landscape.

While Caitlin was so earnestly examining him, Flynn wasted no time in doing the same to her. Her chest tightened as she became weakly, stunningly aware of the raw need that was reflected back at her. To be observed in such a primal, voracious way by him snatched the breath from her lungs, made her feel as if she was drowning in a sensual aquamarine sea that commanded the total surrender of all her senses.

‘We’d better get this over with,’ she heard herself say, and there was an emotional catch in her voice as her hand moved to restrain the dancing wheat-coloured strands of hair that the wind was buffeting around her frozen face.

She realised in that moment the devastating extent to which she had missed him. As though Flynn was the absent part of her soul that she’d always ached for—a silent, hurting emptiness that never diminished. Only Sorcha had made her life worth living again since she couldn’t be with him.

‘Why?’ he murmured gruffly as his hands dropped loosely to his hips. Then, before she could answer, ‘Why?’ with all the primitive force of a glacier splitting open. His expression was savage.

Flynn’s heart was pounding with more force than a blacksmith’s hammer as he searched Caitlin’s shocked white face for an answer. Did she have any idea of the wasteland of misery and pain she had consigned him to when she’d left? Did she know how it felt to have every day of your life since feel as if it were a hundred years long? Without love, without warmth. Winter, spring, summer and autumn—all had turned into one long, never-ending season of darkness and unhappiness.

Only his work gave him any solace. His writing career had really taken off after Caitlin had left—but then how could it not have when he’d made it his sole driven focus? His dedication to learning his craft, to improving and refining the books that had university professors and television producers alike clamouring for him either to lecture or make programmes about Ireland’s Celtic mythological legacy, had become vitally important to his psychological survival, and took up a large proportion of his time. But other than that time hung about like stale cobwebs in an empty, long-disused room.

Flynn had good people to help him run Oak Grove—the impressive MacCormac estate—and it had not been that difficult for him to pursue his chosen career. Even though his family still believed that looking after the estate should be more than enough…

Now, as he considered the brilliant sapphire-blue eyes and the beguilingly shaped lips before him, he realised that no matter how much his heart was secretly thrilled to see Caitlin again forgiveness would be no easy matter after what she had done. There was no excuse on earth that he would accept for her deserting him like that. None. And that included her father persuading or bullying her into break off their relationship, people gossiping about them, and the difficulties they’d faced in trying to be together in the face of their families’ hostility to the idea. Clearly, whatever feelings Caitlin had harboured for him, they hadn’t been strong enough to persuade her to stay.

Flynn knew his shortcomings where relationships were concerned, and he was quite aware that he wasn’t an easy man to love or to be with. Hadn’t Isabel already proved that? He could be both taciturn and morose, and the tendency to both had worsened after his ex-wife had so sorely deceived him. But when he’d met Caitlin he had started to hope that the trust Isabel had violated might one day be tenderly reinstated. But it was not to be…

In search of the peace of mind that so eluded him, Flynn had renovated an ancient cottage in the mountains and turned it into a writing retreat. Pretty soon it had turned into a retreat per se. It was simply easier not to be around people sometimes, and it helped to have a place to escape to. Once upon a time Caitlin had managed to come somewhere close to penetrating the hard shell he’d built around himself, but when she’d gone he had strengthened it doubly.

Now—and not for the first time in all the years they’d been apart—Flynn mused on whether he had imagined her tenderness and affection towards him. Could her seeming attraction for him have been just a product of a young girl’s fickle nature? An attraction for an experienced older man that had been there one minute and gone the next? What if she’d had a better offer of a more tantalising future somewhere else, and she’d been unable to resist and couldn’t bring herself to tell him? Was that why she had left?

Flynn deliberately slowed his breathing in a bid to calm himself down, even though his hands had clenched into fists of bitter frustration by his sides.

‘My reasons aren’t—they aren’t easy to explain,’ she said now, reluctantly answering his question.

The wind tore at her lovely yellow hair, and Flynn longed to grab a handful of its spun silk and submerge his senses in the wild, rain-washed scent of it. He intimately knew her body’s perfume, and time had not dulled it in his mind. But his fury hadn’t abated, and he clung onto its force to ground him, to try and kill the almost painful desire that was surging through his bloodstream just because he was near her.

‘I’ve got all the time in the world, darling,’’ he mocked, his glance hard and impervious as the standing stones that encircled them. ‘If it means we stand here and freeze to death until I get a satisfactory answer then…so be it.’

‘Well, I don’t want to stand here and freeze to death!’ Caitlin retorted with some spirit. ‘I want to get home. I have a lot to do to sort my father’s house out before I go back to London, and there’s only me to do it!’

‘So you’re going back to London?’ he ground out through gritted teeth. ‘I suppose you can’t wait to leave? Once upon a time you said you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world but here…that you loved the landscape, the weather and the wildness…that it was in your soul. Clearly the temptations of London held far more allure for what I now know to be your true fickle nature, Caitlin.’

‘I’m not fickle! And I still love it here! In London it’s hard to breathe sometimes…too many people, wall-to-wall traffic and everyone on a treadmill they can’t get off! If it’s got a soul at all I never came close to finding it…not in all the time I was there. Not like this place.’

‘But the fact still remains that something lured you there!’ Flynn shook his head, still fighting to hold onto his temper. ‘What was it? Another man?’

‘No!’ She looked aghast, the gusting wind turning her corn-coloured hair into a gilded fan across her face. She pushed it impatiently away. ‘How could that have been possible? I spent all my spare time with you, Flynn! I only wanted to be with you!’

‘You’re lying. You must be! You forgot this place—this land you purport to love so much—as easily as you forgot me!’

‘I didn’t forget you. I never—’ She stopped, her expression bleak.

Fighting a dangerously treacherous urge to hold her, Flynn deliberately took a step back—as if afraid his body would act of its own volition without his strict and guarded control.

‘Nobody wanted us to be together, Flynn…Can you remember how difficult it was?’ Her voice was too soft, and he almost had to strain to hear the words beneath the howling of the wind. ‘My father…your family…they kept trying to keep us apart.’

‘Not good enough, sweetheart. Try again.’

‘I was only eighteen! What could I do? I had no power, no say in anything! And it was always perfectly obvious that your family wanted you to be with someone much more suitable, from your own class and background, not some farm labourer’s daughter like me! Did you think I wanted to hang around and eventually see that happen? I know I should have told you that we should finish and that I was going away, but—but when it came down to it I just couldn’t face you. You probably think I’m a terrible coward, but everything was just getting me down back then. Including the way my dad was with me.’

‘You should have told me that! Not left me in the dark about how you felt!’

‘It wasn’t so easy for me to talk to you about personal things back then.’

‘Why not?’