‘It’s clearly nonsense to imagine we could make something work with you living in London and me here. Now that I’ve met Sorcha, I know seeing her once or twice a month wouldn’t be enough. Which is more than likely how it would go if we continued to live in separate countries. Our only real solution to the problem is for you and my daughter to move back here.’

‘Back to Ireland?’

‘Clearly, the prospect doesn’t appeal to you.’ Flynn could not curtail his profound dismay. But he was not about to let a second child slip out of his life so easily. Even if the prospect of fatherhood daunted him more than ever because of what had happened between him and Isabel. ‘Have you forgotten who I am, Caitlin? What I can give her? Her situation would be much more secure…would you deny her a better start in life than she’s got now?’

Dear Reader

In one way it’s astonishing to learn that Mills & Boon is celebrating its 100th birthday, but in another it comes as no surprise! It simply proves that people will always be engaged and entranced by romance and falling in love. To love and be loved is really the essence of our human existence. Even when people act less than lovingly, at the root of their anger, unhappiness, despair, is the very human need to be accepted and loved no matter what. Just as we love our children unconditionally, I believe that adults want that more than anything else too.

Long before I became an author I avidly read romance novels, and discovering Mills and Boon® was like being let loose in the most wonderful confectionery shop and told to help myself to whatever I liked! There were so many terrific writers, telling the most wonderful stories, and not only that, they all had happy endings! Some people think that we’re wearing rose-tinted spectacles if we believe in the possibility of happy ever after. My answer to that is I am personally going to keep on wearing mine if it means that I see hope and joy in the world instead of just pain and disaster.

Anyway, I hope that you will continue to read and enjoy Mills & Boon for many more years to come. I feel extremely privileged to be a part of something that has clearly brought so much pleasure to so many people for such a long time! My own contribution this month is a story set in beautiful Ireland that is personally very dear to my heart. Flynn and Caitlin have a tempestuous relationship and a difficult history, but I hope you will agree that the ties of love that bind them together are very strong…

With much love

Maggie x

The Rich Man’s Love-Child
Maggie Cox

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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The day Maggie Cox saw the film version of Wuthering Heights, with a beautiful Merle Oberon and a very handsome Laurence Olivier, was the day she became hooked on romance. From that day onwards she spent a lot of time dreaming up her own romances, secretly hoping that one day she might become published and get paid for doing what she loves most! Now that her dream is being realised, she wakes up every morning and counts her blessings. She is married to a gorgeous man, and is the mother of two wonderful sons. Her two other great passions in life—besides her family and reading/writing—are music and films.

To James, a truly kindred spirit

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

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.

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?’

She looked as if she was struggling to answer him, and Flynn sensed the tension inside him build almost to the point of pain.

‘You—I didn’t think you’d understand. You always seemed so impervious to feelings. I was afraid you’d just try to brush my fears off…tell me not to be so stupid.’

‘I’d never have done that!’ He was genuinely shocked.

‘I’m just telling you how I felt.’

‘If you’d done that four and a half years ago, instead of just walking away like you did…out of the blue and without warning…we might have been able to salvage something out of the situation. Instead you left me with nothing, Caitlin! Nothing! And then to have your father gloat in my face that you’d finally come to your senses and realised you were better off elsewhere! A place he had no intention of giving me the location of! That I can neither understand or forgive!’

‘I—what can I say except that I’m very sorry? Sorrier than I can ever begin to tell you.’

Touching her hand to the large standing stone at her back, it seemed as if she was lost in some melancholic memory Flynn couldn’t share. He fought like a Trojan to keep the urge to shake her at bay, even as the scent of the sea filled his nostrils and more sleet settled in his hair.

‘So that’s it? That’s all the explanation I’m going to get?’

‘It’s—it’s freezing out here. We ought to go—’

‘Didn’t you hear what I just said?’

This time he completely failed to keep his frustration at bay. It didn’t seem enough somehow, what she’d told him. Surely there had to be something else to complete the puzzle of her desertion? And what did she mean by him seeming so impervious to feelings? Dear God! It was his feelings that had damn near crippled him these past few years with her gone!

But in the end Flynn knew that whatever embellishment Caitlin might come up with none of it would make him feel one damn bit better. He should accept that something about him hadn’t been enough to hold her and just forget her. Get on with his life as he had been doing until she had so unfortunately returned for her father’s funeral.

Now the chill in his bones was nothing to do with the sharp-bladed cruelty of the weather. It was just too bitter to see her again and watch her walk away a second time…

Staring at Flynn, at the dismay and disappointment etched into the haunting lines of his face as though they might take up permanent residence there, Caitlin didn’t have the courage to just come out and tell him about Sorcha…the beautiful child they had made together. She was frightened of how he would react, and was undone by the thought of him hating her worse than he must do already for her desertion. To learn that she’d had his baby and had kept the news from him for all these years would be far too devastating a blow for him on top of having to deal with her unexpected return.

It had stunned her to consider that he’d cared for her to such a degree that he was still furious at her leaving. The Flynn she remembered had not been a man who had readily or easily revealed much about what he was feeling. Except when he was making love to her…Then there had been no barriers to stop him from showing her exactly how he felt. Sometimes, alone in her bed at night in London, Caitlin had no difficulty in conjuring up the thrilling memories of how this man had loved her, and it had kept her warm even when she’d felt as if her heart was rent in two for ever.

There was no doubt she would have to tell him about Sorcha some time soon. But it just couldn’t be right now.

‘I know we have unfinished business, and there are things that I should say…things I should have told you before I left. Maybe when you’ve calmed down we can—’

‘Calmed down?’

She could see that wouldn’t be happening any time soon. She exhaled a resigned sigh into the frigid air. ‘I can see you’re still mad at me, but maybe that’s why we should both have some time to think things through before we meet again?’

‘Think things through? What the hell do you think I’ve been doing for these past four and a half years?’

He took a step towards her, put his face up close to hers—so close she could see every tiny grooved line and pore indenting his skin. She could see the midnight shadow that studded his well-defined jaw, and Caitlin’s heart thudded in shock at the barely contained anger that rolled off him towards her.

‘I thought—’ She took a nervous swallow. ‘I thought you might have married again or—or perhaps be living with someone by now?’

Oh, how she’d dreaded that. Even though there was no earthly or logical reason why Flynn shouldn’t be with someone else by now.

‘I’m no celibate priest, but I’m not in a relationship, no. Why, Caitlin? Did it make it easier for you all these years living in London to think of me being with someone else? Sorry to disappoint you. I guess betrayal leaves a nasty taste in the mouth that’s not easy to relinquish. These days I have only one real use for women, and I’m sure you don’t need me to go into details!’

‘No, I don’t.’

It was almost more than she could bear to imagine him for even one second with another woman, doing the things he had done with her. Oh, God…would this pain ever heal? This longing for him abate? Fixated on the beautiful sensual mouth that hovered so near, Caitlin could almost taste the kiss that her lips longed for. His kisses had been heaven and forbidden fruit all at the same time. Her knees went weak as water at the memory.

As if not trusting himself to be so close to her, Flynn moved abruptly away again—but not before his jade eyes made a blistering examination of her face.

‘And what about you, Caitlin? Do you honestly mean to tell me that there’s been no other man in your life since you left? That you’ve spent every night in your bed alone?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I say, does it? You’ll believe whatever you want to believe!’

‘Can you blame me?’

He strode right away from her then, driving his hand in mute outrage through his sleet-sodden black hair.

‘Flynn!’

She ran after him, cold to the bone and shivering uncontrollably.

‘Please don’t just walk away!’

‘Why not?’ he growled, his expression bleak. ‘Isn’t that what you do?’

‘Please, Flynn,’ she implored again, too weary in mind, body and spirit to argue any more—knowing whatever she said would likely be a red flag to a bull while he was in this frame of mind. ‘I don’t want us to be enemies. I know we can’t be friends, but don’t you think we could try and resolve our differences and at least be civil to each other?’

‘We’d better get out of here.’

Ignoring her plaintive question, Flynn pulled up his jacket collar as far as it would go, with freezing hands almost blue with cold. In spite of his animosity and anger towards her, he could see that Caitlin was in even worse straits. Her wheaten-gold hair was drenched and flattened to her head, and her lips were almost colourless…like wax. The last thing she needed after just burying her father was to come down with a bout of flu…or even…pneumonia.

‘This wind is getting worse and the light is going. Did you make your way here by yourself?’

‘I got a lift to the road and walked from there,’ she replied, her teeth chattering.

‘My Land Rover’s parked down at the bottom. I’ll run you home.’

For a moment she looked as if she might refuse the offer of a lift, but a second later she briefly inclined her head.

‘Thanks…Just halfway down the lane will do. I can walk the rest of the way from there.’

When Flynn pulled up in the lane that led to what had been Tom Burns’ old cottage, he switched off the ignition and turned in his seat to regard his now silent passenger.

‘We could meet at the house tomorrow at around ten. Do you want me to come and get you?’

‘No, it’s all right. I prefer to walk. Ten it is, then.’

She pushed open the door at her side and stepped down onto the snowy road without another word.

Flynn sat and watched her walk up the lane—a slender, duffle-coated figure with bright hair whipped by the wind—and he gripped the steering wheel as though he would break it, shuddering out a long, slow breath.

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