Bride Of The Emerald Isle. Trish Wylie

And when she looked back at Terri, she just caught the tail-end of the look of pain she gave the back of her dad’s head.

      Before her eyes met Keelin’s and she took a breath. ‘My mum’s dead. She died when I was little.’

      Keelin’s breath caught.

      But before she could find something to say, Terri shrugged, unbuckling her seat belt before she reached for the door handle. ‘And Dad doesn’t like talking about her.’

      ‘Terri—’

      The softly warning tone went unheeded with another shrug. ‘You can try if you like but I bet he won’t say much about her. He never does.’

      When she slammed the door shut, Keelin looked back at Garrett’s profile, her voice low. ‘I’m so sorry—I had no idea.’

      ‘Why would you? It’s not like we run around wearing T-shirts with it written on the front.’ He shrugged in a similar way to his daughter. ‘It was a long time ago.’

      She waited until his face turned towards her, his eyes searching hers for a brief second while she held her breath, exhaling it on a question. ‘You brought her up alone?’

      ‘No, I brought her up with Dermot’s help.’

      ‘That can’t have been easy.’

      ‘No worse than being dragged from pillar to post most of her life might have been.’

      Keelin looked down at her lap, joining her hands and focusing on them. ‘We all have something to deal with.’

      ‘Yes.’ The word was low, intimate in the confined space of the car. ‘Yes, we do.’

      Keelin’s eyes rose slowly, her gaze tracing up each of the buttons on his dark blue shirt, sweeping over the few dark hairs she could see at the open vee, and then up, past the sensual sweep of his mouth until it locked with his. The warm toffee melting as he blinked back at her.

      And Keelin had never before been so knocked sideways. So aware of the steady sound of someone else’s breathing, or the way that his mouth parted slightly as he took each breath, of how the very space that he occupied seemed made more vibrant by the very fact that he was in it.

      Oh, this could not happen! Not with him.

      But even as she straightened her spine and leaned back towards the door he turned away, his voice suddenly cooler.

      ‘Dermot will be wondering what’s keeping us.’