Flynn knew his shortcomings where relationships were concerned, and he was quite aware that he wasn’t an easy man to love or to be with. Hadn’t Isabel already proved that? He could be both taciturn and morose, and the tendency to both had worsened after his ex-wife had so sorely deceived him. But when he’d met Caitlin he had started to hope that the trust Isabel had violated might one day be tenderly reinstated. But it was not to be…
In search of the peace of mind that so eluded him, Flynn had renovated an ancient cottage in the mountains and turned it into a writing retreat. Pretty soon it had turned into a retreat per se. It was simply easier not to be around people sometimes, and it helped to have a place to escape to. Once upon a time Caitlin had managed to come somewhere close to penetrating the hard shell he’d built around himself, but when she’d gone he had strengthened it doubly.
Now—and not for the first time in all the years they’d been apart—Flynn mused on whether he had imagined her tenderness and affection towards him. Could her seeming attraction for him have been just a product of a young girl’s fickle nature? An attraction for an experienced older man that had been there one minute and gone the next? What if she’d had a better offer of a more tantalising future somewhere else, and she’d been unable to resist and couldn’t bring herself to tell him? Was that why she had left?
Flynn deliberately slowed his breathing in a bid to calm himself down, even though his hands had clenched into fists of bitter frustration by his sides.
‘My reasons aren’t—they aren’t easy to explain,’ she said now, reluctantly answering his question.
The wind tore at her lovely yellow hair, and Flynn longed to grab a handful of its spun silk and submerge his senses in the wild, rain-washed scent of it. He intimately knew her body’s perfume, and time had not dulled it in his mind. But his fury hadn’t abated, and he clung onto its force to ground him, to try and kill the almost painful desire that was surging through his bloodstream just because he was near her.
‘I’ve got all the time in the world, darling,’’ he mocked, his glance hard and impervious as the standing stones that encircled them. ‘If it means we stand here and freeze to death until I get a satisfactory answer then…so be it.’
‘Well, I don’t want to stand here and freeze to death!’ Caitlin retorted with some spirit. ‘I want to get home. I have a lot to do to sort my father’s house out before I go back to London, and there’s only me to do it!’
‘So you’re going back to London?’ he ground out through gritted teeth. ‘I suppose you can’t wait to leave? Once upon a time you said you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world but here…that you loved the landscape, the weather and the wildness…that it was in your soul. Clearly the temptations of London held far more allure for what I now know to be your true fickle nature, Caitlin.’
‘I’m not fickle! And I still love it here! In London it’s hard to breathe sometimes…too many people, wall-to-wall traffic and everyone on a treadmill they can’t get off! If it’s got a soul at all I never came close to finding it…not in all the time I was there. Not like this place.’
‘But the fact still remains that something lured you there!’ Flynn shook his head, still fighting to hold onto his temper. ‘What was it? Another man?’
‘No!’ She looked aghast, the gusting wind turning her corn-coloured hair into a gilded fan across her face. She pushed it impatiently away. ‘How could that have been possible? I spent all my spare time with you, Flynn! I only wanted to be with you!’
‘You’re lying. You must be! You forgot this place—this land you purport to love so much—as easily as you forgot me!’
‘I didn’t forget you. I never—’ She stopped, her expression bleak.
Fighting a dangerously treacherous urge to hold her, Flynn deliberately took a step back—as if afraid his body would act of its own volition without his strict and guarded control.
‘Nobody wanted us to be together, Flynn…Can you remember how difficult it was?’ Her voice was too soft, and he almost had to strain to hear the words beneath the howling of the wind. ‘My father…your family…they kept trying to keep us apart.’
‘Not good enough, sweetheart. Try again.’
‘I was only eighteen! What could I do? I had no power, no say in anything! And it was always perfectly obvious that your family wanted you to be with someone much more suitable, from your own class and background, not some farm labourer’s daughter like me! Did you think I wanted to hang around and eventually see that happen? I know I should have told you that we should finish and that I was going away, but—but when it came down to it I just couldn’t face you. You probably think I’m a terrible coward, but everything was just getting me down back then. Including the way my dad was with me.’
‘You should have told me that! Not left me in the dark about how you felt!’
‘It wasn’t so easy for me to talk to you about personal things back then.’
‘Why not?’
She looked as if she was struggling to answer him, and Flynn sensed the tension inside him build almost to the point of pain.
‘You—I didn’t think you’d understand. You always seemed so impervious to feelings. I was afraid you’d just try to brush my fears off…tell me not to be so stupid.’
‘I’d never have done that!’ He was genuinely shocked.
‘I’m just telling you how I felt.’
‘If you’d done that four and a half years ago, instead of just walking away like you did…out of the blue and without warning…we might have been able to salvage something out of the situation. Instead you left me with nothing, Caitlin! Nothing! And then to have your father gloat in my face that you’d finally come to your senses and realised you were better off elsewhere! A place he had no intention of giving me the location of! That I can neither understand or forgive!’
‘I—what can I say except that I’m very sorry? Sorrier than I can ever begin to tell you.’
Touching her hand to the large standing stone at her back, it seemed as if she was lost in some melancholic memory Flynn couldn’t share. He fought like a Trojan to keep the urge to shake her at bay, even as the scent of the sea filled his nostrils and more sleet settled in his hair.
‘So that’s it? That’s all the explanation I’m going to get?’
‘It’s—it’s freezing out here. We ought to go—’
‘Didn’t you hear what I just said?’
This time he completely failed to keep his frustration at bay. It didn’t seem enough somehow, what she’d told him. Surely there had to be something else to complete the puzzle of her desertion? And what did she mean by him seeming so impervious to feelings? Dear God! It was his feelings that had damn near crippled him these past few years with her gone!
But in the end Flynn knew that whatever embellishment Caitlin might come up with none of it would make him feel one damn bit better. He should accept that something about him hadn’t been enough to hold her and just forget her. Get on with his life as he had been doing until she had so unfortunately returned for her father’s funeral.
Now the chill in his bones was nothing to do with the sharp-bladed cruelty of the weather. It was just too bitter to see her again and watch her walk away a second time…
Staring at Flynn, at the dismay and disappointment etched into the haunting lines of his face as though they might take up permanent residence there, Caitlin didn’t have the courage to just come out and tell him about Sorcha…the beautiful child they had made together. She was frightened