brows came together, forming a two-fold pleat between his eyes. ‘Is that how you see yourself?’
It was how others saw her. She had been the victim of classism since she’d been old enough to know what it was. Having a charwoman and barmaid for a mother didn’t exactly get her high enough on the social ladder to suffer vertigo. ‘I know what side of the tracks I come from,’ Kat said. ‘It’s certainly not the same side as you.’
His frown was still pulling at his brow, as if invisible stitches were being tugged beneath his skin. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’ Then after a slight pause he added, ‘I don’t actually know who my parents are.’
Kat frowned in confusion. ‘But you said your father is a builder and your mum is—’
‘They’re not my real parents.’
She looked at him blankly. ‘Not your real parents... Oh, are you adopted?’
Something in his eyes became shuttered. His mouth was flat. Chalk-white flat. I-wish-I-hadn’t-said-that flat. But, after a moment of looking at her silently, he finally released a breath that sounded as if he had been holding it a long time. A lifetime. ‘Yes. When I was eight weeks old.’
‘Oh... I didn’t realise. Have you met your birth mother?’
He gave a twist of a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘No.’
‘Have you gone looking?’
‘There’s no point.’
‘Why?’ Kat said. ‘Don’t you want to know who she is? Who both your parents are?’
He huddled further into his coat as the snow came down with a vengeance. Kat got the feeling he was withdrawing into himself, not because of the cold but because he’d obviously revealed far more than he’d wanted to reveal. ‘I’ve kept you long enough,’ he said. ‘Go inside before you catch your death. Good night.’
She watched him stride through the white flurry of snow back to his house. He didn’t look back at her even once.
He unlocked his front door and disappeared inside, the click-click sound of the lock driving home as clear as if he had said, ‘Keep Out.’
* * *
Flynn closed the door with a muttered curse. What the hell were you thinking? He wasn’t thinking; that was the trouble when he was around Kat Winwood. He didn’t think when he was around her. He felt. What was wrong with him, spilling all like that? He never talked about his adoptive family.
Never.
Cricket came slinking up on his belly as if he sensed Flynn’s brooding mood. He bent down to ruffle the dog’s ears. ‘Sorry, mate. It’s not you. It’s me.’
Even his friends Julius and Jake Ravensdale knew very little of his background. They knew he was adopted but they didn’t know he was a foundling. A baby left on a doorstep. No note pinned to him to say who he was and whom he belonged to. No date of birth. No mother or father to claim him. No grandparents.
Nothing.
That sense of aloneness had stayed with him. It was deeply embedded in his personality—the sense that in life he could only ever rely on himself.
Even his adoptive parents had lost interest in him once they had conceived their own biological children. Flynn remembered the slow but steady withdrawal of his parents’ attention, as Felix and Fergus had taken up more and more of their time. He remembered how on the outside he felt at family gatherings, where both sets of grandparents would dote on his younger brothers but pay little or no attention to him. The blood bond was strong; he understood it because he longed to have it. He ached to have knowledge of who he was and where he had come from.
But it was a blank.
He was a blank.
He was a man without a past. No history. No genealogy. No way of tracing the family he had been born into. In spite of extensive inquiries at the time of his abandonment, no one had come forward. He had spent years of his life wondering what had led his mother to leave him like a parcel on that doorstep. Why hadn’t she wanted to keep him? Why had she felt she had no choice but to leave him on a cold, hard doorstep of a stranger’s house? He had been less than a week old. His birth hadn’t been registered. It was as if he had come out of nowhere.
What had happened to his mother since? Had she had more children? Who was his father? Had his mother and father loved each other? Or had something happened between them that had made it impossible for his mother to envisage keeping the baby they had conceived? Did his father even know of his existence? The thoughts of his origins plagued him. He couldn’t look at a baby without thinking of what had led his mother to abandon him.
It was one of the reasons he hadn’t pursued a long-term relationship since Claire. Back in his early twenties he had wanted to fill the hole in his life by building a future with someone, by having a family of his own. When Claire had had a pregnancy scare a couple of months into their relationship, he had proposed on the spot. The thought of having his own family, of having that solid unit, had been a dream come true. But when Claire had found out she wasn’t pregnant a couple of days later she’d ended their engagement. Her rejection had felt like another doorstep drop-off.
He hadn’t been able to commit to another long-term relationship since. To have his hopes raised so high only to have them dashed had made him wary about setting himself up for another disappointment. Not knowing who he was made him worried about who he might become. What if he didn’t have it in him to be a good father? What if there was some flaw in his DNA that would make him ill-suited as a husband and father?
But now, as he was in his thirties and he saw friends and colleagues partnering and starting their parenting, he felt that emptiness all the more acutely. With Julius and Holly married now, Jake and Jaz engaged and Miranda and Leandro preparing for their wedding in March, he was the last man standing.
Alone.
Why had he told Kat Winwood, of all people? Or was it because he saw something in her that reminded him of himself? Her tough-girl exterior. Her take-no-prisoners attitude. Her steely self-reliance. Her feisty determination to win at all costs.
Everything about her stirred his senses into overload. Her sexy little body. Even her starchy stiffness when she was stirred up excited him. Her beautiful eyes, the colour of sea glass, fringed with long, black lashes that reminded him of miniature fans. Her pearly white skin, luminescent and without a single blemish, not even a freckle. Her rich dark-brown hair, with its highlights of burnished copper, that fell to just past her shoulders in a cascade of loose waves. Her flowery perfume—a hint of winter violets, lilacs and something else that was unique to her.
From the first moment he’d met her he had wondered what her lips would feel like against his own. He lay awake at night thinking about her. Imagining what it would be like to make love to her. He wasn’t being over-the-top confident to think she was attracted to him. He could sense it in the way she kept looking at his mouth, as if a force was drawing her gaze there against her will. Even when she looked at him with those intelligent, defiant eyes he could see the flare of her pupils and the way her tongue sneaked out to moisten her luscious mouth. He enjoyed making her blush. It showed she wasn’t quite as immune to him as she made out. He enjoyed sparring with her. The sexy banter was like foreplay. He got hard just thinking about it.
Every
