‘Kids! They drive you mad, but you wouldn’t be without them,’ Mick Malone cheerfully observed, determinedly catching Caitlin’s eye in his mirror. ‘And sure she must be a great comfort to you, now that both your parents are gone, God rest their souls.’
‘Yes, she is,’ Caitlin murmured, silently wishing that the man—a long-time friend of her father’s—would not try and engage her in any more conversation until they pulled up in front of the small farm cottage where she’d grown up.
She was almost too weary and heartsick to talk to anyone. It simply took too much energy to respond to polite and well-meant niceties when she felt so drained and hopeless inside. Both her parents gone…it didn’t seem possible.
Deliberately withdrawing her glance, she threaded her fingers distractedly through her daughter’s fine wheaten-gold hair and prayed for the strength to deal with whatever must come in the days ahead. As well as her grief at losing her father there was another shadow looming on the horizon, and she was more than anxious at the prospect of facing it. It was one that had been weighing down on Caitlin’s heart for four and a half long years, dogging her every waking moment. She was going to need all the help she could get to deal with that particular daunting spectre.
* * *
It was a throwaway remark made by one of the farmers at the local inn, while Flynn was supping his pint and wrestling with the intricacies of a legendary chieftain’s battle plan for his latest book on mythological Ireland, that made him suddenly concentrate with razor-sharp acuity on the conversation being conducted at the bar.
‘Tommy Burns’s daughter came home for his funeral, so I hear. She was a fine-looking girl, that one…must be a grand young lady now.’
‘Must have broke his heart when she took off like that. No doubt he wanted her to marry one of the local lads and stay close to home. Being as though she was his only child an all.’
‘Wasn’t there a rumour going round that she had a thing for that MacCormac fella? You know? The one that inherited the estate and practically half the county?’
‘Aye, there was.’
Flynn froze in his seat, the blood raging so hotly inside him that he sensed sweat break out on his skin, then chill again so that he was almost shivering. He couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d just heard that World War Three had been announced. Caitlin was home and her father was dead? Staring at the two thickset farmers perched on their barstools as they mutually paused in their conversation to drink their pints of Guinness—both of them clearly having no idea that he was sitting in a booth not far behind them—he grimaced and shook his head. They could not realise what a bomb they had just detonated.
Setting his own half-drunk pint down on the deeply grooved and scarred wooden table, he found that all desire to finish it had abruptly deserted him. He tugged the collar of his battered leather jacket up around his ears, then stalked from the near empty bar out into the bitter wintry afternoon. His lean face with its hollowed out cheekbones was sombrely set—as if he was preoccupied with a battle plan of his own.
As his booted feet hit the deep, impacted snow that blanketed the narrow pavement and he headed towards the corner where he’d parked the Land Rover Flynn wondered how it had not reached his ears until now that Tom Burns had died and Caitlin had returned for his funeral. Someone known to him—either family or friend—would surely have heard and told him? Nothing much went unreported in their small rural community. Was there some kind of unspoken conspiracy going on amongst the people who were close to him?
Caitlin’s return had always promised to be a potential minefield after what had happened—even though he had long-ago given up hope that he might ever see her again. Certainly his family hoped he would not. The way they saw it, she came from poor farm labourers’ stock and inhabited a very different world from the rich and powerful MacCormacs and their ilk…Theirs was a world that didn’t willingly invite or encourage integration. They certainly hadn’t been happy when Flynn had started an affair with the girl.
But Flynn had been in no mood to entertain so much as one single complaint from any of them at the time. Not from his mother, his uncles, his brother or his brother’s wife…Not when he’d already buckled under familial pressure once before, when he’d been young, and had married a girl from the ‘right end of the social spectrum’ who’d then ended up pregnant with another man’s baby while still wed to Flynn. What had sickened him the most was that he hadn’t discovered that the child—a boy they’d named Danny—wasn’t his until he was six months old and his wife had finally confessed to both the affair and her desire to be with her lover rather than Flynn. She’d only stayed because of the privileged lifestyle that he had been able to provide for her—apparently her lover was not quite so well off.
Devastated, Flynn had been deeply humiliated and hurt. He’d grown to care for the child. But, having no choice other than to give Isabel the freedom she’d asked for, he’d ended his travesty of a marriage and filed for divorce. But, God, how he’d missed the boy! To all intents and purposes, until he’d discovered the truth, he’d been his son. After that, Flynn had vowed that he would never leave himself wide open to deceit again.
It had been so refreshing to meet a girl as sweet and uncomplicated as Caitlin after that painful and bitter episode in his life. Yes, she’d been young—only eighteen at the time they’d met—but Flynn had fallen for her hard. She’d completely swept him away with her beauty and innocence…so much so that he hadn’t had the slightest suspicion that she too would eventually betray him. Not with another man, but by leaving him high and dry when he’d just started to believe they might have something worth holding on to.
Flynn had never dreamed Caitlin would act so cruelly. Her feelings had always been written all over her face, and he’d had no clue that she might make such a devastating move. To be treated with such contempt by someone you were falling in love with burned worst than corrosive acid. He would have given her the sun, moon and stars if she’d stayed with him—even if he’d never got round to telling her so.
It hadn’t helped his case that her father had despised him with a passion. Tom Burns had never hidden his dislike. He’d scorned Flynn at every turn, even once telling him that he wasn’t good enough for his daughter and who did Flynn think he was using his position to take advantage of her? Flynn didn’t doubt that Tom had encouraged Caitlin to leave. It was clear that her father’s continual besmirching of Flynn’s character had influenced her in the end. So she’d left, and Tom had refused point-blank to tell Flynn where she’d gone. In contrast, Flynn’s family had breathed a collective sigh of relief at the news…
Reaching the snow-laden Land Rover, Flynn imagined his blood pressure rising to dangerous levels if 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