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
