Czytaj książkę: «The Rich Man's Love-Child»

CHAPTER ONE

‘OH, WHAT a beautiful house!’

‘Yes, darling.’

‘And look at the lovely horses, Mummy!’

‘Yes…they’re grand too.’

‘Can we ride them?’

‘No, sweetheart.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they don’t belong to us.’

Caitlin wrapped her daughter’s warm palm into her own icy one and squeezed it. Outside Mick Malone’s cab, which had picked them up from the airport and was taking them to her childhood home, the usually verdant but now snow-covered pastures sped past—all part of a vast country estate.

Glancing beyond the horses that were attempting to crop the frozen grass, Caitlin spied long low roofs and high hedges, and in the distance a large Georgian house, bordering on the palatial. Its long sweeping drive fanned out from a pair of massive stone pillars and black wrought-iron gates tipped with gold, and was lined with frosted conifers, sparkling in the cold January light. To a little girl raised in a cramped terraced house in a busy South London suburb Caitlin didn’t doubt it must resemble something out of a fairytale, and the scene was made even more enchanting by the low orange globe setting in the west behind it.

‘Who do they belong to, then?’

The child was leaning across her mother’s lap to try and get a better view of the creatures that had so captivated her, her soft moss-green eyes full of hope and yet disappointment too, because she hadn’t managed to procure the promise of a ride.

‘They belong to a family called MacCormac.’

Her glance suddenly collided with the too-interested gaze of the florid-faced driver in front of them, and Caitlin squirmed a little in her seat as a wave of uncomfortable heat assailed her.

‘I’m sure they’re very nice people to have such nice horses,’ the little girl chattered. ‘Perhaps if we ask them ever so nicely they might let us ride them. What do you think, Mummy?’

‘I think you’re asking far too many questions just now, Sorcha,’ Caitlin admonished her daughter, not unkindly.

Whether the MacCormac family were ‘nice’ people or not was hardly on her agenda right now…even if the very name was apt to deluge her stomach with wild butterflies. Not when she’d come home for the first time in four and a half years for the sole distressing purpose of attending her father’s funeral.

‘Kids! They drive you mad, but you wouldn’t be without them,’ Mick Malone cheerfully observed, determinedly catching Caitlin’s eye in his mirror. ‘And sure she must be a great comfort to you, now that both your parents are gone, God rest their souls.’

‘Yes, she is,’ Caitlin murmured, silently wishing that the man—a long-time friend of her father’s—would not try and engage her in any more conversation until they pulled up in front of the small farm cottage where she’d grown up.

She was almost too weary and heartsick to talk to anyone. It simply took too much energy to respond to polite and well-meant niceties when she felt so drained and hopeless inside. Both her parents gone…it didn’t seem possible.

Deliberately withdrawing her glance, she threaded her fingers distractedly through her daughter’s fine wheaten-gold hair and prayed for the strength to deal with whatever must come in the days ahead. As well as her grief at losing her father there was another shadow looming on the horizon, and she was more than anxious at the prospect of facing it. It was one that had been weighing down on Caitlin’s heart for four and a half long years, dogging her every waking moment. She was going to need all the help she could get to deal with that particular daunting spectre.

* * *

It was a throwaway remark made by one of the farmers at the local inn, while Flynn was supping his pint and wrestling with the intricacies of a legendary chieftain’s battle plan for his latest book on mythological Ireland, that made him suddenly concentrate with razor-sharp acuity on the conversation being conducted at the bar.

‘Tommy Burns’s daughter came home for his funeral, so I hear. She was a fine-looking girl, that one…must be a grand young lady now.’

‘Must have broke his heart when she took off like that. No doubt he wanted her to marry one of the local lads and stay close to home. Being as though she was his only child an all.’

‘Wasn’t there a rumour going round that she had a thing for that MacCormac fella? You know? The one that inherited the estate and practically half the county?’

‘Aye, there was.’

Flynn froze in his seat, the blood raging so hotly inside him that he sensed sweat break out on his skin, then chill again so that he was almost shivering. He couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d just heard that World War Three had been announced. Caitlin was home and her father was dead? Staring at the two thickset farmers perched on their barstools as they mutually paused in their conversation to drink their pints of Guinness—both of them clearly having no idea that he was sitting in a booth not far behind them—he grimaced and shook his head. They could not realise what a bomb they had just detonated.

Setting his own half-drunk pint down on the deeply grooved and scarred wooden table, he found that all desire to finish it had abruptly deserted him. He tugged the collar of his battered leather jacket up around his ears, then stalked from the near empty bar out into the bitter wintry afternoon. His lean face with its hollowed out cheekbones was sombrely set—as if he was preoccupied with a battle plan of his own.

As his booted feet hit the deep, impacted snow that blanketed the narrow pavement and he headed towards the corner where he’d parked the Land Rover Flynn wondered how it had not reached his ears until now that Tom Burns had died and Caitlin had returned for his funeral. Someone known to him—either family or friend—would surely have heard and told him? Nothing much went unreported in their small rural community. Was there some kind of unspoken conspiracy going on amongst the people who were close to him?

Caitlin’s return had always promised to be a potential minefield after what had happened—even though he had long-ago given up hope that he might ever see her again. Certainly his family hoped he would not. The way they saw it, she came from poor farm labourers’ stock and inhabited a very different world from the rich and powerful MacCormacs and their ilk…Theirs was a world that didn’t willingly invite or encourage integration. They certainly hadn’t been happy when Flynn had started an affair with the girl.

But Flynn had been in no mood to entertain so much as one single complaint from any of them at the time. Not from his mother, his uncles, his brother or his brother’s wife…Not when he’d already buckled under familial pressure once before, when he’d been young, and had married a girl from the ‘right end of the social spectrum’ who’d then ended up pregnant with another man’s baby while still wed to Flynn. What had sickened him the most was that he hadn’t discovered that the child—a boy they’d named Danny—wasn’t his until he was six months old and his wife had finally confessed to both the affair and her desire to be with her lover rather than Flynn. She’d only stayed because of the privileged lifestyle that he had been able to provide for her—apparently her lover was not quite so well off.

Devastated, Flynn had been deeply humiliated and hurt. He’d grown to care for the child. But, having no choice other than to give Isabel the freedom she’d asked for, he’d ended his travesty of a marriage and filed for divorce. But, God, how he’d missed the boy! To all intents and purposes, until he’d discovered the truth, he’d been his son. After that, Flynn had vowed that he would never leave himself wide open to deceit again.

It had been so refreshing to meet a girl as sweet and uncomplicated as Caitlin after that painful and bitter episode in his life. Yes, she’d been young—only eighteen at the time they’d met—but Flynn had fallen for her hard. She’d completely swept him away with her beauty and innocence…so much so that he hadn’t had the slightest suspicion that she too would eventually betray him. Not with another man, but by leaving him high and dry when he’d just started to believe they might have something worth holding on to.

Flynn had never dreamed Caitlin would act so cruelly. Her feelings had always been written all over her face, and he’d had no clue that she might make such a devastating move. To be treated with such contempt by someone you were falling in love with burned worst than corrosive acid. He would have given her the sun, moon and stars if she’d stayed with him—even if he’d never got round to telling her so.

It hadn’t helped his case that her father had despised him with a passion. Tom Burns had never hidden his dislike. He’d scorned Flynn at every turn, even once telling him that he wasn’t good enough for his daughter and who did Flynn think he was using his position to take advantage of her? Flynn didn’t doubt that Tom had encouraged Caitlin to leave. It was clear that her father’s continual besmirching of Flynn’s character had influenced her in the end. So she’d left, and Tom had refused point-blank to tell Flynn where she’d gone. In contrast, Flynn’s family had breathed a collective sigh of relief at the news…

Reaching the snow-laden Land Rover, Flynn imagined his blood pressure rising to dangerous levels if he didn’t soon have some outlet for the rage that was brewing inside him.

Caitlin was home again. The pain jack-knifing through his taut hard middle almost doubled him in two. It might have been only yesterday she’d walked out, instead of almost four and a half years ago. Wasn’t time meant to be the great healer? What a joke that had turned out to be! Jamming his key into the lock of the driver’s door, he cursed the air blue as, in his haste to turn it, his numbed fingers slipped and he almost ripped off a thumbnail.

* * *

It was two days after her father had been buried when Caitlin first set eyes on Flynn again. She’d sensed his gaze on her long before she’d turned in the street and had her intuition confirmed.

Leaving Sorcha at home with a kindly neighbour who had offered to sit with her for a while, she’d come into town for some groceries, welcoming the chance to have a few moments to herself outside all the grief and sadness that lingered back at the cottage. It felt like cloying ghostly cobwebs clinging to her very skin. Her progress from shop to shop had been unexpectedly impeded—not just because of the snow that dictated she walk more slowly, but because she’d found herself stopped every now and then by people offering condolences. It seemed that she hadn’t been forgotten, even though she’d moved away.

And then there had been that intense warning prickle at the back of her neck that had alerted her to the fact she was being watched. Her heart jolted hard against her ribs as she moved her head to the side and saw Flynn MacCormac, standing there on the other side of the street. For a moment the whole world seemed to turn on its head, and then in a split second was transformed by complete and utter stillness…as if everything around her was holding its breath.

A small gasp—a sound only Caitlin heard—eased out slowly from between her lips. Straight away she detected a disconcerting change in him. Not a physical one, but one more psychologically rooted. Her intuition told her that he’d closed in on himself even more than before, and the knowledge sent her stomach plunging to her boots. It was as though an impenetrable glass wall now isolated him and his feelings firmly away from the rest of the world.

He’d ever been reclusive—keeping his deeper emotions and thoughts mostly hidden and resisting anyone getting too close—but he was so beautiful he was like a burning flame to a moth. His very presence elicited excitement and a forbidden sense of danger too. Tears burned in Caitlin’s eyes, and although the fabric of them was deeply sewn with unbreakable threads of sorrow for what she had lost, they were also shot through with a fierce, almost violent joy at seeing him again.

She barely moved as he crossed the road to join her—a tall, broad-shouldered figure, dressed from head to foot in black, moving with the predatory, almost feral grace of a creature. She couldn’t take her eyes off him…

‘I heard you were back.’ His voice sounded slightly rough—as though some unexpected emotion had partially locked his throat.

Caitlin’s own mouth was so dry she could barely get a word past its arid landscape. His jade thick-lashed eyes were intense and hungry. ‘My father died…I came home for the funeral.’

His hard jaw seemed to tighten, but there were no immediate condolences forthcoming. She hadn’t expected there would be. He would have nothing good to say about her father, and although it grieved her she couldn’t really blame him.

‘So I see,’ he said instead, and then, before Caitlin could reply, ‘I won’t ask how you’ve been keeping because you look well enough…but you might tell me where you’ve been living all this time?’

She put a shaky gloveless hand up to her straight blonde hair and the edge of her palm glanced against her cheek. Right at that moment she was convinced that there was not a scrap of difference in the temperature of her skin and the hard-packed ice covering the pavement.

‘London…I’ve been living in London. With my aunt.’

‘That’s where you went when you left?’

Beneath his harsh, accusing glare, Caitlin felt like the worst criminal in the world. ‘That’s right.’

‘So you didn’t fall ill, get abducted by aliens or lose your memory?’

‘What?’

‘How the hell would I know what happened, seeing as though you never even thought to tell me you were going?’

She flinched as though he’d slapped her hard. It took her a few moments to recover. ‘Must we discuss this in the street? If you want to talk, I’ll talk…but not here.’

Glancing across Flynn’s broad shoulder, Caitlin’s blue eyes briefly scanned the snow-covered street that was dotted with mid-morning shoppers. She felt suddenly intensely vulnerable. She’d already discovered that there were people here who knew her, and some of them had no doubt heard about what had happened between her and Flynn. The idea that people were watching them made her skin crawl. All the odds had been stacked against their relationship from the outset. Nobody had wanted them to be together, and nearly everyone had disapproved. But none of that would have mattered if Flynn had truly let Caitlin into his heart…and if she had allowed herself to fully trust him…

‘Tell me something. Would you have come to see me at all if I hadn’t bumped into you like this?’ he demanded.

‘I was intending to do so…yes.’

‘I wonder when that would have been, Caitlin? After all, you must have such a busy life…so busy that you couldn’t even pick up the phone and ring me! Not even once in four and a half years!’

‘I know it must have seemed heartless what I did, but—’

‘Heartless?’ he mocked. ‘Sweetheart, that doesn’t even come close!’

‘What I mean is—’ She faltered, her heart going wild. ‘You obviously want an explanation, and you have every right to one, but this is hardly the right time or place, Flynn.’ Knowing that her eyes must convey at least some of the tremendous guilt that was churning her up inside, Caitlin frowned. ‘We haven’t seen each other for years, and believe me—I deeply regret that everything went so wrong in the end.’

‘Do you?’ Flynn’s glance was unflinching in its raw intensity. ‘And why did it go wrong, Caitlin? I’ll tell you why! Because you ran away! You ran away without even having the damn decency to tell me why!’

Shivering, Caitlin lowered her gaze. What could she tell him? He no doubt believed that it had been her father who had influenced her decision to leave and end the relationship. God knew Tom Burns had made his dislike of Flynn and his family only too clear. His antagonism had gone deeper than mere dislike…he had actively resented the MacCormacs with a vengeance—despising their wealth and the influence they had in the community. But if Caitlin’s only hurdle in being with Flynn had been her father’s temper and his aversion to the match she could have got over it. She’d loved Flynn with all her heart. He had become as essential to her as her own breath. But she hadn’t left him because of her father…It had been much more complicated than that.

There’d been that humiliating conversation she’d overheard between Flynn and his mother, during which Estelle MacCormac had been so unstintingly cruel in her summation of Caitlin’s motives for seeing her son. ‘She’s only sleeping with you for what you can do for her and that dreadful father of hers! Don’t kid yourself that a girl like that cares a fig about you personally! Next thing you know she’ll be trying to trap you into marriage by telling you that she’s pregnant!’

Hearing herself spoken about as if she were the most awful little trickster, Caitlin had reeled away in shock and horror. After that, coupled with her father accusing her of bringing ‘shame and disgrace’ on him, by behaving like a little slut with Flynn MacCormac of all people,’ she’d had no choice but to phone her aunt Marie in London and ask if she could go and stay there for a while. Especially as she had also just found out that she was indeed pregnant with Flynn’s baby…

It would have done no good trying to talk to him and explain. He would hardly have been likely to believe anything she’d said after his mother had done her worst. And, although Flynn had passionately demonstrated that he wanted to be with her, he’d never actually said that he loved her. In fact he’d hardly ever opened up to her about his personal feelings at all. Consequently Caitlin had found herself unable to trust him with her doubts and fears. So, instead of screwing up her courage and confronting him, she had fled to London.

She hadn’t meant to make it a permanent move, but time had overtaken her and, consumed by her new parental responsibilities, she had had no choice but to stay and try and make the best of it. Every day she’d been away from her homeland…away from Flynn…her heart had grown heavier. But how could she ever have gone back when her news might only have confirmed to him his mother’s belief in her motives? She’d had no choice but to let him go.

As the years had passed and she’d made a life for herself and Sorcha it had grown ever harder for Caitlin to contemplate returning home. She’d always known Flynn must despise her by now, and she’d been heartbroken at the thought of facing his contempt…as she was facing it right now. And he didn’t even know about the child they had made together yet…

‘So, what is it you want to do now, Flynn?’ Her heavy sigh made a plume of steam as it hit the near freezing air, and Caitlin at last lifted her gaze to face him again. The formidable chill in his glance had not lessened any.

‘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.