mother keeping such a secret from her for so long she wondered whether she had imagined their relationship to be something it was not in order to feel more normal. She was nothing like her mother in personality. Her mother had lacked ambition and drive. She hadn’t seemed capable of making a better life for herself. She’d had no insight into how she’d kept self-sabotaging her chance to get ahead. Kat was the opposite. She was uncompromising in the setting and achieving of goals. If she put her mind to something, she would let nothing and no one stand in her way.
‘I loved her, but she frustrated me because she didn’t seem capable of making a better life for herself,’ Kat said. ‘She didn’t even seem to want to. She cleaned hotel rooms or worked in seedy bars ever since she left home after a row with her parents as a teenager. She didn’t even try to move up the ranks or try to train for something else.’
What was she doing? She wasn’t supposed to be getting all chummy with him. What had made her spill all that baggage out? Was it because he had rescued her from the unwelcome visitor next door? Was it because he hadn’t made fun of her about her phobia? Unlike a couple of her mother’s dodgy boyfriends, who had found it great sport to see her become hysterical and paralysed with fear.
She rarely spoke to anyone of her background. Even her closest friend Maddie only knew the barest minimum about her childhood. Life had been tough growing up. Kat had always felt like an outsider. She had been the kid with the hand-me-down clothes; the one with the shoes that had come from a charity shop; the one with the home haircut, not the salon one. The kid who’d lived in run-down flats with lots of unwelcome wildlife. Money had always been tight, even though there had been ways her mother could have improved their circumstances. She sometimes wondered if her mother’s lack of drive had made her all the more rigidly focused and uncompromisingly determined.
Flynn still had that contemplative expression on his face. ‘You’re so much like your father it’s uncanny. He had his first start in theatre at the age of five too. Both he and Elisabetta talk of the buzz of being onstage in front of a live audience. It’s like a drug to them. They don’t feel truly alive without it.’
Kat wasn’t so sure she wanted to be reminded of how like Richard Ravensdale she was. She had his green-grey eyes and dark-brown hair, although her natural copper highlights were from her mother. She used to be quite pleased with her looks, thanking her lucky stars she had a good face and figure for the theatre. But now they felt more like a burden. It was a permanent reminder of how her mother had been exploited by a man who had used her and cast her away once he was done with her.
She didn’t fool herself that her mother had loved Richard and his abandonment had set her life on the self-destructive course it had taken. Her mother had already been well on her way down the slippery slope when she’d met Richard. It was more that Richard was one of many men who had used and abused her mother, fulfilling her mother’s view of herself as not worthy of being treated with respect and dignity—messages she had heard since childhood. Kat had asked her mother just before she died why she hadn’t made contact with Richard in later years to tell him he had a child. Her mother had told her it had never occurred to her. She had taken the money he’d offered and, as far as she was concerned, that was the end of it. It was typical of her mother’s lack of drive and purpose. She’d let life happen to her rather than take life by the throat and wring whatever opportunities she could out of it.
‘I’m not going to meet him, so you can put that thought right out of your mind,’ Kat said.
‘But he could help you get established in the theatre,’ Flynn said. ‘Why wouldn’t you want to make the most of your connection to him?’
‘It might be the way you lawyers climb the career ladder, by using the old boys’ network, but I prefer to get there on my own,’ Kat said. ‘I don’t need or want my father’s help. He wasn’t around when I needed it most and as far as I’m concerned it’s way too late to offer it now.’
‘What if it’s not help he’s offering?’ he said. ‘What if he just wants to get to know you? To have some sort of relationship with you?’
‘I don’t want to get to know him,’ Kat said. ‘I don’t need a father. I’ve never had one before so why would I want one now?’
‘Do you have any family now your mother’s gone?’
Kat didn’t like thinking of how alone in the world she was now. Not that she hadn’t always felt alone anyway; but somehow having no living relative now made her feel terribly isolated, as if she had been left on an island in the middle of a vast ocean with no hope of rescue. Her grandparents had died within a couple of years of each other a few years back and, as her mother had been an only child, there were no aunts, uncles or cousins.
The Christmas just gone had been one of the loneliest times in her life. She had sat by herself in a damp and cold bedsit eating tuna out of a can, trying not to think of all the warm, cosy sitting rooms where families were gathered in front of the tree unwrapping gifts, or sitting around the dining table to a sumptuous feast of turkey and Christmas pudding. To have no backup, no sense of a safe home-base to go to if things turned sour, was something she had never really grown up with, but it didn’t mean she didn’t long for it—that sense of belonging, the family traditions that gave life a sense of security, of being loved and connected to a network of people who would look out for each other.
‘There’s just me,’ she said. ‘But I prefer it that way. I don’t have to remember any birthdays or buy anyone expensive Christmas presents.’
The edge of Flynn’s mouth tipped up in a wry smile. ‘Always a silver lining, I guess.’
A small silence ticked past.
His eyes did a slow perusal of her face, finally lowering to her mouth and lingering there for an infinitesimal moment. The air felt charged, quickened by the current of sensual energy that arced between them.
Mutual attraction. Unmistakable. Powerful. Tempting.
Kat had been aware of it the first time they’d met. She was acutely aware of it now. She felt it in her body—the way her skin tightened and then lifted away from the scaffold of her skeleton; the way her breasts tingled as if preparing for his touch. Her insides quavered with a flicker of longing, shocking her because she had always been slow to arousal. She loved the intimacy of sex, of touching and being needed, but it always took her so long to get there.
But in Flynn’s presence her body went on full alert, every erogenous zone flashing as if to say, ‘Touch me!’ Even the weight of his gaze on her mouth was enough to set her lips buzzing with sensation. She sent the tip of her tongue out to try and damp down the tingling but his hooded gaze followed every millimetre of movement, ramping up the tension in the air until she felt a deep, pulsing throb between her legs that echoed in her womb.
‘Would you like to stay here tonight?’ he said.
Kat laughed to cover how seriously tempted she was. ‘I think I’ll take my chances with the wildlife next door.’
‘I wasn’t asking you to sleep with me.’
Kat wished she could control the blush that filled her cheeks. A blush not so much of embarrassment, but of wanting what she wasn’t supposed to want. And knowing he knew it. ‘I’m not interested either way.’
‘Liar,’ he said. ‘You were interested the moment I walked into that café that day with that cheque. That’s why you haven’t dated anyone since October.’
Kat wondered how on earth he had found out that information.
