Flynn’s hands came down on the tops of her shoulders as softly as the snow cascading around them. His head came down, his foggy breath mingling with hers in that infinitesimal moment before contact. And yet, he didn’t make that final contact. He hovered there as if he knew she would be the first to break.
If you kiss him, you lose.
But I want to kiss him.
Yes, but he knows that, and that’s why he’s waiting.
I haven’t been kissed in months.
He probably knows that too.
But it’s been so long, I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to be a woman.
If you kiss him, you might not be able to stop.
Back and forth the battle with Kat’s conscience and her flagging willpower went. And the whole time Flynn waited. She put a hand on his chest, then both hands. His coat was soft and warm to touch, but then, who could go past cashmere? Beneath the luxurious fabric she could feel the outline of his toned muscles. If she took a step, even half a step, she would be flush against his pelvis.
Even without closing that tiny distance she knew he was aroused. She sensed it. His body was calling out to hers, signalling to her, stirring hers to send the same message back. She became aware of her breasts, the way they seemed to swell, to prickle, to tingle. She became aware of her breathing; the way it stopped and started in little hitches and flows, swirling in a misty fog in front of her face, mixing intimately with his. She became aware of the pulsing throb between her legs, that most secret of places that ached for fulfilment. Baboom. Baboom. Baboom. The blood in her veins echoed the frantic need coursing through her.
‘If you don’t make up your mind soon, we’re both going to freeze to death on this doorstep,’ Flynn said.
Kat dropped her hands from his chest and stepped back. ‘You thought you’d won that, didn’t you?’
His glinting eyes and crooked smile made her insides twist and coil with lust. ‘It’s only a matter of time before I do.’
She gave him a scornful look. ‘Dream on, Carlyon.’
His eyes darkened as if the challenge she’d laid before him privately excited him. ‘Something you should know about me—I always win.’
Now it was Kat getting excited. She loved proving people wrong. It ramped up her determination. It fuelled the fire in her belly. If anyone said she couldn’t do something, she made it her business to do it. If anyone said she would do something, she made sure she didn’t.
Although there was a part of her that recognised the challenge of resisting Flynn Carlyon was right up there, as far as difficult challenges went. But as long as she kept her distance she would be home free. ‘I’m sure that arrogance works well for you in court but it makes absolutely no impression on me,’ she said.
He reached out his gloved hand and traced a fingertip along the surface of her bottom lip. ‘I’ve thought about kissing you since the first day I met you.’
Me too! Me too! Kat kept her features neutral in spite of the excited leap of her pulse. ‘I wouldn’t have thought I was your type.’
His gaze went to her mouth as if savouring the moment when he would finally claim it. ‘You’re not.’
Why the heck not? ‘Not used to slumming it, then?’
His brows came together, forming a two-fold pleat between his eyes. ‘Is that how you see yourself?’
It was how others saw her. She had been the victim of classism since she’d been old enough to know what it was. Having a charwoman and barmaid for a mother didn’t exactly get her high enough on the social ladder to suffer vertigo. ‘I know what side of the tracks I come from,’ Kat said. ‘It’s certainly not the same side as you.’
His frown was still pulling at his brow, as if invisible stitches were being tugged beneath his skin. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’ Then after a slight pause he added, ‘I don’t actually know who my parents are.’
Kat frowned in confusion. ‘But you said your father is a builder and your mum is—’
‘They’re not my real parents.’
She looked at him blankly. ‘Not your real parents... Oh, are you adopted?’
Something in his eyes became shuttered. His mouth was flat. Chalk-white flat. I-wish-I-hadn’t-said-that flat. But, after a moment of looking at her silently, he finally released a breath that sounded as if he had been holding it a long time. A lifetime. ‘Yes. When I was eight weeks old.’
‘Oh... I didn’t realise. Have you met your birth mother?’
He gave a twist of a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘No.’
‘Have you gone looking?’
‘There’s no point.’
‘Why?’ Kat said. ‘Don’t you want to know who she is? Who both your parents are?’
He huddled further into his coat as the snow came down with a vengeance. Kat got the feeling he was withdrawing into himself, not because of the cold but because he’d obviously revealed far more than he’d wanted to reveal. ‘I’ve kept you long enough,’ he said. ‘Go inside before you catch your death. Good night.’
She watched him stride through the white flurry of snow back to his house. He didn’t look back at her even once.
He unlocked his front door and disappeared inside, the click-click sound of the lock driving home as clear as if he had said, ‘Keep Out.’
* * *
Flynn closed the door with a muttered curse. What the hell were you thinking? He wasn’t thinking; that was the trouble when he was around Kat Winwood. He didn’t think when he was around her. He felt. What was wrong with him, spilling all like that? He never talked about his adoptive family.
Never.
Cricket came slinking up on his belly as if he sensed Flynn’s brooding mood. He bent down to ruffle the dog’s ears. ‘Sorry, mate. It’s not you. It’s me.’
Even his friends Julius and Jake Ravensdale knew very little of his background. They knew he was adopted but they didn’t know he was a foundling. A baby left on a doorstep. No note pinned to him to say who he was and whom he belonged to. No date of birth. No mother or father to claim him. No grandparents.
Nothing.
That sense of aloneness had stayed with him. It was deeply embedded in his personality—the sense that in life he could only ever rely on himself.
Even his adoptive parents had lost interest in him once they had conceived their own biological children. Flynn remembered the slow but steady withdrawal of his parents’ attention, as Felix and Fergus had taken up more and more of their time. He remembered how on the outside he felt at family gatherings, where both sets of grandparents would dote on his younger brothers but pay little or no attention to him. The blood bond was strong; he understood it because he longed to have it. He ached to have knowledge of who he was and where he had come from.
But it was a blank.
He was a blank.
He was a man without a past. No history. No genealogy. No way of tracing the family he had been born into. In spite of extensive inquiries at the time of his abandonment, no one had come forward. He had spent years of his life wondering what had led his mother to leave him like a parcel on that doorstep. Why hadn’t she wanted to keep him? Why had she felt she had no choice but to leave him on a cold, hard doorstep of a stranger’s house? He had been less than a week old. His birth hadn’t been registered. It was as if he had come out of nowhere.
What had happened to his mother since? Had she