The Most Scandalous Ravensdale. Melanie Milburne

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.