Bride Of The Emerald Isle

Keelin gaped at his profile. ‘You have a daughter?’

‘Yes, that I most definitely do.’

‘What age is she?’

‘Fourteen.’

She gaped even more. He was obviously ageing better than she’d given him credit for.

When she didn’t say anything, he glanced across at her, chuckling at her expression. ‘Why do you look so surprised?’

Maybe because she was. ‘You just don’t look old enough to have a fourteen-year-old.’

‘Careful now, that’s almost a compliment.’

‘What age are you?’

‘Why is it women are always so quick to ask that question and never that keen on having it asked?’

‘Twenty-seven in two months’ time.’ She smiled sugary-sweet when he glanced her way again. ‘See, I have no problems with my age.’

‘That’s because you’re only twenty-seven.’

‘Still twenty-six, thank you.’

He chuckled again. ‘Yep, no hang-ups about age there at all.’

She lifted her chin when he glanced across after turning onto a narrow lane. ‘Spoken by the man who still hasn’t fessed up to his. Having a fourteen-year-old ages you, you see.’

‘More than you’ll ever know.’

They made a right-handed turn and he slowed down to get through a set of gates. While Keelin smiled wistfully at his confession. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a teenager. Or a child, for that matter.

Even though for a while she had ached for one, so that she could do a better job with it than her mother had with her. But having a child involved a father in Keelin’s mind. One that was there to watch his child grow.

And Keelin had never cared about any man enough for that to happen. To commit herself to a lifetime in his company. Which was the way she still believed it should be. Maybe that made her old-fashioned. But having grown up without one, with only the odd ‘uncle’ as a stand-in…

And Keelin didn’t believe she should even start to look for a suitable candidate until she had sorted out her own life. It would hardly be fair on him, would it? No one should rely on someone else to sort out their problems, to take on their responsibilities for them. Not in this day and age. No, she would walk into a relationship a whole person or not at all. That way she would have equal footing with the man who would be a father to her children.

It took two people to make a marriage work.

They pulled up in front of a two-storey red-brick house and Garrett sounded the horn as he swung the Range Rover around.

‘I was twenty when she was born.’

Keelin looked at him in surprise, again. Her mind immediately thinking back to the person she had been at twenty. She’d had enough of a problem dealing with herself without the added responsibility of a baby.

His eyes flickered briefly over her face again as the front door of the house opened. ‘I’ll let you do the maths.’

But, even while she worked it out, Keelin was already looking out of the side window to catch a glimpse of his daughter. She was the walking female version of her father. No denying her parentage. And she was tall, even for her age. Not quite as tall as her father, but certainly taller than Keelin. Not that that was difficult.

Though she had felt a little better in the hotel foyer, that, wearing heels, she at least made it to Garrett’s shoulder. He just had a way of making her feel small and feminine that went way beyond her height and build.

‘You’re late, Dad.’

‘No, I’m not. I just decided to get Keelin first so I could warn her about you.’

‘Ha, ha.’ She leaned between the seats and smiled at Keelin, her warm brown eyes lit with interest. ‘Wow, you’re beautiful! I love your hair. I’d like to go blonde.’

‘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—’

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.’

CHAPTER FOUR

‘WHY do you call your father by his first name so much? Is that an island thing?’

Garrett tried to focus his attention on the mist-covered lane as they left the house, his grip tighter than necessary on the steering wheel. But the tension he felt wasn’t linked to a fear of driving in such bad visibility. Oh, no. It had much more to do with being alone in Keelin’s company. Again.

No matter how he tried he couldn’t seem to stop himself from being abundantly aware of her, no matter how close or how far away she was from him. Even when she had sat on the far side of the living room after dinner, he had had to force himself to look away from her, to stop himself being consistently hypnotized by her smile or the golden sound of her laughter or her sweet scent when she walked by. A scent that now surrounded him inside his own car.

And he felt a growing resentment towards her for all those things. She had no damn business being so noticeable.

He frowned at her question. ‘Do I?’

‘Yes, I caught it a few times earlier but I guess I only really thought about it tonight.’

‘Well, it is his name.’

‘Would you like it if Terri called you Garrett?’

‘No, I’m her dad, and I work harder on six days out of every seven to live up to that title; especially since she hit puberty.’

‘You’ve earned it.’ Her voice was softer this time, like velvet almost, as it reached across the minuscule gap between them and caressed his eardrums.

She had the most gorgeously sexy, husky voice. A bedroom voice. The kind of voice that would have seduced even without the aid of the way she looked. And she’d almost floored him when she’d walked into the foyer earlier. With her almost ethereal beauty, and an innocence that belied the kind of worldly upbringing he now knew she’d had.

‘Don’t you feel that Dermot has, too?’

Garrett could have corrected her simply enough. Dermot had more than earned it, which was why Garrett had taken his name in the first place. But his resentment at how he had been feeling in Keelin’s company all evening, hell, since he’d first set eyes on her, translated as a lack of willingness to share any information with her.

‘He’s never complained, so maybe he’s happy with it.’

With his eyes still fixed on the grey blanket beyond the wind-screen, he couldn’t attempt a look sideways to see her expression. But he felt the change, heard the slight whisper of the material of her dress against the seat as she straightened. And when she eventually spoke, her voice told him even more.

‘Do you want to tell me what it is I’ve done wrong? Or should we just play twenty questions ’til I hit it? You can give me yes or no answers if that’s easier for you.’

Her tone was cool, but there was an underlying edge to it that translated to him as hurt. Which brought an unwelcome wave of guilt washing over him.

‘Is it because I mentioned Terri’s mother earlier?’

‘No, it’s not because you mentioned Terri’s mother.’

‘Then what is it?’

His fingers flexed around the steering wheel. ‘What makes you so sure you’ve done something wrong?’

‘Maybe the fact that you’ve been staring at me with a scowl on your face for the last half an hour? You need to work some on your polite face, just for future reference.’

‘Not all of us find it easy to bury things so deep that people can’t see them. Or feel the need to try.’

He heard her sharp intake of breath and knew he’d hit a nerve. Well, at least all of his silent observation hadn’t brought him to false conclusions, then…

Another risked, split-second sideways glance found her staring straight ahead, her full mouth pursed in a tight line. ‘Which is what you try doing, isn’t it? It’s what you’ve been doing since I met you this morning.’

Keelin didn’t answer him.

‘I’m not the only one that needs to work some on their polite face. Just for future reference.’

She was silent for another long moment, then. ‘And this isn’t because I made the mistake earlier about your wife—you’re quite sure about that? Because if it is then I apologize again, I had no way of knowing—’

‘It isn’t about that. And she wasn’t my wife.’

‘You didn’t get married?’

‘She wouldn’t marry me. Marrying me would have involved her settling down and she wasn’t ready to do that.’ Now why had he just told her that? She didn’t need to know. No matter how he tried he couldn’t seem to stop himself talking around this woman. Or saying or doing something inappropriate, like offering a hug of comfort or his earlier comment about how ‘good’ he was…

And in telling her this latest piece of information he’d opened a doorway for further conversation on the subject, which was the last thing he wanted. ‘It’s about Terri if you really must know. I’ve spent all of her life making sure she had a secure home and firm foundation to build on. The last thing I need is for a stranger to come in and help feed her obsession with running off to the big city for a life of adventure.’

There was a long pause. Then. ‘And you think one night with me will have her running off?’

‘Well, you sure as hell didn’t help. She’s fourteen! She doesn’t need some complete stranger making it out that the city is all things bright and shiny. And that’s precisely what you did. It’s tough enough keeping young people on the island as it is.’

‘I had no intention of—’

‘Maybe not, but you did.’

Another long pause, then. ‘I see.’

Her voice was cooler this time and Garrett’s resentment grew. This time because she was trying to hide the fact that she was hurt by his words. ‘I don’t expect you to understand my reasoning. I just ask that while you’re here, you try and avoid the subject of how fantastic the city is—’

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