‘You already think blonde.’
Keelin raised an arched brow at him and he grinned. ‘No offence meant.’
‘Well, I could take offence at that very easily.’ She swallowed a smile as she tried to appear offended. But his grin teased it out of her and, instead, she shook her head at him in mock chagrin.
‘Oh, don’t listen to what he says. I never do.’
Keelin laughed aloud as Terri sat back and buckled her seat belt. And Garrett gave her a sparkling-eyed look that told her his daughter spoke the truth.
‘I heard that Gramps knew your mum. They wrote letters to each other and everything. That’s so romantic.’
Garrett’s deep voice grumbled at Keelin’s side. ‘See? She does listen sometimes. Mostly when it’s none of her business…’
‘Like I wasn’t going to listen in on this one. This is the most interesting thing to happen since Sean Leary’s cow fell off the cliffs last winter.’
‘You’re kidding!’ Keelin turned round in her seat, staring at Terri with wide eyes full of disbelief and amusement. ‘It actually fell off the cliff?’
‘Told you I had to be responsible about where you went this morning.’
She glanced briefly at Garrett from the corner of her eye before her attention was brought back to Terri, who waved a hand in front of her body.
‘We had a stinker of a blizzard and the stupid thing forgot where it was. Sean said it looked like a fly on the windshield of a car.’
Garrett sighed. ‘Sean didn’t even see it. His father found it.’
‘Well, his dad said it was well squished.’
‘I’d imagine it would be.’ Keelin felt a constant smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. ‘I may not know much about cows, but I’m pretty sure they don’t have wings.’
Terri grinned. ‘Make them easier to milk if they could float over your head.’
Keelin laughed.
‘Where are you from, then?’
Garrett’s voice grumbled beside her again. ‘She’ll have you fill in a questionnaire before the end of the night.’
‘Well, it’s not like you were heavy on the details. I asked what you were like and he wouldn’t tell me anything.’ She rolled her eyes dramatically. ‘Men!’
‘Well, you can see me for yourself now.’
‘And you’d have thought he’d have mentioned how beautiful you are. It’s not like my dad hangs round that many good-looking women.’
‘That’s right, ruin my reputation as a lady’s man, why don’t you?’
Keelin couldn’t help but join in with the easy banter, feeling tension roll out of her for the first time in weeks. ‘I thought you said you were a good guy?’
‘Oh—’he stopped at the end of a road and looked directly into her eyes with a look that curled her toes ‘—I’m good all right.’
Keelin’s eyes widened in shock at the innuendo, said as it was with that low rumbling tone of his. Wasn’t he still a married man? What kind of married man flirted with another woman under his teenage daughter’s gaze? She glanced at Terri to see if she’d heard, but Terri was looking out of the side window, her forehead creased into a frown as she thought.
But even so. It was bad form. And having had such a good impression of him so far, Keelin was disappointed, so she looked back at him and narrowed her eyes in warning.
His face stayed completely straight, as if he’d not meant anything by it at all. Mr Innocent.
Having had a moment to think, Terri looked back at her. ‘So, where are you from?’
‘Dublin, at the moment.’
‘Cool! I’m gonna live in Dublin when I finish school.’
‘Maybe.’
Terri scowled at the back of her father’s head. ‘Yes, I am. I’ve always wanted to live in the city.’ She leaned forwards again. ‘This place is so boring.’
Keelin could understand that to a teenage girl who had always lived there it would probably seem that way. She might even have felt the same way herself if the situations had been reversed. But to her, having a stable family life growing up, in somewhere as close knit as Valentia so obviously was, would have been heaven.
‘But it’ll be nice for you to have a home to come back to. I spent my whole childhood moving from one place to the next when all I really wanted was somewhere to call home.’
Had she just said that out loud?
She felt, rather than saw Garrett turning her way again, inwardly cringing at the bitter twist that might have come through in her voice.
But it wasn’t just the man who had caught it.
‘Didn’t you have a home?’
She focused all her attention on Terri, who was the safer option in her mind. ‘Oh, I had a home, lots of them, all over the place. Wherever we were my mother was always careful to give the appearance of it being a home.’
‘Where’d you go?’
‘London, New York, Paris, Rome, all the major cities at one time or another. Wherever my mother needed to be to promote her work or find her “muse”.’
‘Wow.’ Terri’s mouth formed a perfect circle for a second, her eyes wide. ‘That must have been amazing!’
Amazing would have been one word for it. Keelin had a list of other, more heartfelt adjectives. ‘It was certainly never boring.’
‘I’m so jealous. Why can’t we go to those places, Dad?’
‘Because I have work and you have school. And anyway, stop complaining, you’ve been to London.’
‘It’s not the same as living there.’
When Keelin looked at Garrett’s profile, she saw how his jaw clenched, just briefly. And she wondered why. Maybe his daughter’s lack of travel experience was a source of greater debate with them? But surely he had to understand that, to a fourteen-year-old girl, the world must have looked like an adventurous, magical place?
Still, when he shot a cool glance her way, she felt she had to make amends somehow, or at the very least not add fuel to Terri’s fire. So she looked for a safer topic instead and suddenly realized she’d been missing out on a major piece of information. And in not having asked had probably allowed Garrett his earlier, small indiscretion.
‘Did you go to London on a school trip or did your mum and dad take you? Will she be at home when we get there? I’m looking forward to meeting her.’
The atmosphere in the car changed immediately.
But before Keelin could discover what she’d done wrong, they were pulling up at the house and Garrett was switching off the engine.
Keelin frowned in confusion as he scowled in silence at the steering wheel. 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—’