One-Night Love-Child

But Flynn didn’t seem to notice. He was rummaging inside his jacket, pulling a small manila business envelope out of an inner pocket. He opened the envelope and extracted a dirty creased faded blue one. Wordlessly he held it out to her.

Sara stared at it. Then, slowly, she reached out and took it from him with nerveless fingers.

The paper looked as if it had been trampled by a herd of buffalo. She turned it over and saw at least half a dozen addresses printed and scrawled and scratched out, one on top of another. One word caught her eye: Ireland.

That was a surprise. Six years ago he’d been delighted to be out of the land of his birth.

“Nothing for me there,” he’d said firmly.

Like her ancestors 150 years ago, she’d supposed. Her dad had often told handed-down stories about their own family’s desperate need to leave and find a better future for themselves. Though Flynn had never said it, she had no trouble believing it had been true of him, too.

Now, curious about his change of heart, she glanced from the envelope to the man. But his green eyes bored into hers so intently that her own skated away at once back to the envelope.

It had originally been a pretty robin’s-egg blue, part of a set with her initials on it that her grandmother had given her at high school graduation. Sara hadn’t had the occasion to write many letters. She still had some sheets of it left.

But this letter she remembered very well.

She had written it only hours after Liam was born. She had known that there was little chance Liam’s father would heed it. He hadn’t paid any attention to her previous two letters, not the first one telling him she was pregnant, not the later one telling him again in case he hadn’t got the first one.

He’d never replied.

She’d understood—he wasn’t interested.

But still she’d felt the need to write one last time after Liam’s birth. She’d given him one last chance—had dared to hope that news of a son might bring him around. She wasn’t proud. Or she hadn’t been then.

Now she was. And she was equally determined. He wasn’t going to hurt her again.

“I didn’t know, Sara,” he repeated. He met her gaze squarely.

“I wrote you,” she insisted. “Before this—” she rattled the envelope in her hand “—I wrote. Twice.”

“I didn’t get them. I was…moving around. A lot. I wasn’t writing for Incite anymore. They sent it on. So did others. It kept following, apparently. But I didn’t get it. Not until last week. Then I got it—and here I am.”

Sara opened her mouth, then closed it again. After all, what was there to say? He’d come because he’d discovered his son. It still had nothing to do with her.

It shouldn’t hurt after all this time. She’d known, hadn’t she, that she didn’t matter to him the way he’d mattered to her. But hearing the words still had the power to cut deep.

But she was damned if she was going to show him her pain. She crossed her arms over her chest. “So? Should I applaud? Do you want a medal?”

He looked startled, as if he hadn’t expected belligerence. Had he thought she’d fall into his lap with gratitude, for heaven’s sake?

“I don’t want anything,” he said gruffly, “except the chance to get to know my son. And do whatever you need.”

“Go away?” Sara suggested because that was definitely what she needed.

Flynn’s scowl deepened. “What? Why?”

“Because we don’t need you.”

But even as she said it, she knew it was only half-true. She didn’t need him. But Liam thought he did.

“Where’s my dad?” he’d been asking her for the past year.

If he wasn’t dead, why didn’t he come visit? Even divorced dads came to visit, he told her with the knowledge of a worldly kindergartner. Darcy Morrow’s dad came to see her every other weekend.

“He can’t,” Sara said. “If he could, he would.” It wasn’t precisely a lie. Even though she’d believed Flynn had deliberately turned his back on them, she knew telling Liam that would be absolutely wrong. It wouldn’t be wrong to say his father would come if he could. He simply couldn’t—for whatever unknown reason. End of story.

Fortunately, Liam hadn’t asked why. But when told at school that Thanksgiving was a family holiday, he’d wondered again why his dad wasn’t there. And then he’d said, “Maybe he’ll come at Christmas!”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Sara had cautioned. But telling Liam that was like telling the sun not to rise.

“I’ll take care of it,” he’d said, and when they went to the mall in Bozeman, mortified Sara by marching right up to Santa, telling him that for Christmas he wanted his father to come home.

Sara had been prepared for tears on Christmas morning when no father appeared. But Liam had been philosophical.

“I didn’t get my horse at Grandma and Grandpa’s right away, either,” he’d said. “I had to wait till spring.”

Because, of course, the colt hadn’t been born till spring. And now? Sara could just imagine what Liam would say when he came home this afternoon.

“He should have a father,” Flynn said now. “A father who loves him.”

There was something in his voice that made Sara look up. But he didn’t say anything else.

“He’s fine,” she insisted. His life might not be perfect, but whose was? “You don’t need to do this.”

“I do,” he said flatly.

“He’s not here.”

“I’ll wait.” He looked at her expectantly. She didn’t move.

He cocked his head and studied her with a look on his face that she remembered all too well. A gentle, teasing, laughing look. “You’re not afraid of me…are you, Sara?”

“Of course I’m not afraid of you,” she snapped. “I’m just…surprised. I assumed you didn’t care.”

The smile vanished. The look he gave her was deadly serious. “I care. I mean it, Sara. I would have been here from the first if I’d known.”

She didn’t know whether to believe him or not. She did know she wasn’t going to be able to shut the door on him. Not yet. She was going to have to let him in, let him wait for Liam, meet his son.

And then?

He was hardly going to be much of a father if he was in Ireland. But at least Liam would know he had one who cared.

But first she would need to set some ground rules. So, reluctantly, she stepped back and held the door open. “I suppose you might as well come in.”

“And here was I, thinking you’d never ask.” He flashed a grin, the one that said he knew he’d get his way.

Sara steeled herself against it—and against the blatant Irish charm. She stepped back to let him pass—and to make sure not even his sleeve brushed hers as he came in.

But as he passed through the doorway, he stopped and turned towards her. And he was so close that she stared right at the pulse beat in his throat, so close that it wasn’t his sleeve, but the chest of his jacket that brushed against the tips of her breasts, so close that when she drew in a sharp breath, she caught a whiff of that heady scent of woods and sea that she remembered as purely and essentially Flynn. Her back was against the wall.

“Did you miss me, Sara?” he murmured.

And Sara shook her head fiercely. “Not a bit.”

“No?” His mouth quirked as if he heard the truth inside her lie. “Well, I’ve missed you,” he said roughly. “I didn’t realize how much until right now.”

And then quite deliberately he bent his head and set his lips to hers.

Flynn Murray had always known how to kiss. He had kissed her senseless time and time again. She’d tried to forget—or at the very least tried to assure herself that it was only her youthful inexperience with kissing that had made her body melt and her knees buckle.

She’d told herself it would never happen again.

She’d lied. And this kiss was every bit as bad—and as marvelous—as she had feared.

It was a hungry kiss, a kiss determined to prove how much he’d missed her. And it was—damn it all—mightily persuasive. It tasted, it teased, it possessed.

It promised. It promised moments of heaven, as Sara well knew. But she wasn’t totally inexperienced now. She knew it also promised years in the aching loneliness of hell.

She lifted her hands to press against his chest, to push him away, and found her hands trapped there, clutching at his jacket, hanging on for dear life as every memory she’d tried so hard to forget came crashing back, sweeping her along, making her need, making her ache, making her want.

Exactly as she had needed and ached and wanted before. Only, then she’d believed he felt the same.

Now she didn’t. Couldn’t. Not and preserve her sanity. Not if she didn’t want to be destroyed again.

Flynn had come, yes. But he’d come because of his son—not because of her.

And despite his kiss—the sweetness, the passion, the promise—and because of his kiss—its ability to undermine her reason, her common sense, her need for self-preservation—she had to remember that.

She’d loved him six years ago, and he had left her.

He’d made no promises, but she’d trusted. She’d given him her heart and her soul and her body. He had known her on a level no one else ever had. She’d believed he loved her, too. She’d believed he’d come back.

He never had.

Not until today. Not until he’d found out about Liam.

He wanted his son. Not her.

Finally she managed to flatten her hands against his chest and give a hard, furious shove.

He stumbled backwards awkwardly and, to her amazement, fell against the nearest chair. “Damn it!”

But it wasn’t her he directed the words at. He muttered them to himself as he staggered, then winced and shifted his weight onto his left leg. Sara didn’t know which stunned her more—the kiss or the fact that he was clearly favoring one leg and moving with none of his customary pantherlike grace.

Still trembling from the kiss, she asked, “What happened?”

“I got shot.” The words were gruff and dismissive.

She felt as if they’d gone straight to her heart. “Shot?” She gaped, then told herself it probably served him right. Maybe he’d played fast and loose, loved and left a woman who got angrier even than she had. “Take advantage of one too many women?” she asked. Given the fast-lane celebrities he wrote about, it seemed all too likely.

“Assassin.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t trying to kill me.” He shrugged. “I was in his way.”

Sara swallowed, then shook her head. “I don’t understand.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to, but it was better to be distracted by assassins than kisses. She shut the door and stepped around him into the room.

“I was in Africa.” He mentioned a small unstable country she’d barely heard of. It made Sara blink because there certainly weren’t any celebrities there. “He was trying for the prime minister. He missed. At least he missed the prime minister. Gave me a little souvenir to remember him by.” His mouth twisted in a wry smile.

None of it made sense to Sara.

The Flynn she’d known went to New York and Hollywood and Cannes, not Africa. And even if he had gone there, prime ministers were hardly the sorts of celebrities he wrote about. He wrote features about starlets and rock stars, actors like her stepdad and, at a stretch, soccer stars and tennis pros.

But she didn’t have a chance to ask anything else.

She hadn’t heard the back door open, hadn’t heard the footsteps pound across the kitchen floor, hadn’t heard anything until the door into the living room and dining room flew open.

And Liam burst into the room.

CHAPTER THREE

DEAR God, the boy was Will all over again.

And the sight of him would have sent Flynn reeling if kissing Sara hadn’t already done so.

She’d given him a shove, of course, and, with his bad leg, that had been enough to send him off balance literally. But emotionally just the sight of her had already rocked him. And the kiss, well…Flynn had kissed his share of women over the years, but none of them had been like kissing Sara.

He wanted to think about his reaction—and hers—analyze it, understand the effect she had on him. But there was no time. Not now.

Now he stood stunned and staring at this vital bouncing ball of energy, this miniature version of his dead brother.

Intellectually Flynn had known that his son would likely resemble his Murray forebears. But actually seeing it was astonishing.

The boy—Lewis, if she’d named him after her father—was the spitting image of his brother. The same black unruly hair, same fair skin, same spattering of freckles, same thin face and pointed chin. Same build, too. Wiry. Slender. There was a coltish boniness even beneath the boy’s winter jacket and jeans.

The boy didn’t spare him a glance. He came hurtling into the room, with no regard for the stranger in the living room. His eyes—as green as Will’s and Flynn’s own—went straight to his mother.

“Look!” He wriggled off his backpack at the same time he was thrusting a white box covered with hearts into his mother’s hands. “I musta got a skillion Valentines! An’ I got a real fancy one from Katie Setsma. She must like me!” He flung his backpack onto a chair, then scrambled up on it to pull off his boots.

Sara shot Flynn a quick glance, as if she were trying to gauge his reaction to this astonishing little person. The words in a crumpled letter and the living breathing bouncing reality were two entirely different things. He wondered if he looked as dazed as he felt.

“Of course she likes you, Liam,” she said to her son.

And that nearly did Flynn in.

“Liam?” he said hoarsely. The Irish shortened form of William? Flynn’s hand groping blindly for the back of a chair to steady himself.

At his voice, the boy stopped jerking off his boots and, for the first time, looked at Flynn curiously.

Instantly wary, Sara stepped between them. “That’s what we call him,” she said firmly. “I told you I named him after my father, Lewis William. But he’s not my father. He’s his own person.” She said this last fiercely as if defying him to argue.

He didn’t. Couldn’t. Could barely find his voice—or words. “I…yeah. I’m just…surprised.” He sucked in a hard breath and tried again. “It was my brother’s name—William. Will. We called him Will.”

Sara caught the operative tense. “Called? Was?”

“He died.” Flynn ran his tongue over suddenly parched lips. “Almost six years ago.”

Their gazes met, locked. Sara looked shocked then, too. And there were a thousand unasked questions in hers. He couldn’t answer them. Not now at least.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. And there was the sound of real regret in her voice. “I didn’t know.”

It made Flynn’s throat tighten. He gave a jerky nod. “I know that. It’s just—” he gave his head a little shake “—one more surprise.”

And then the room went silent. No one moved. No one spoke. Finally he grew aware of the sound of Liam sliding off the chair and coming around by Sara. He stopped and looked up at his mother, as if trying to figure out what was going on, as if hoping she would tell him. But she didn’t speak, didn’t even seem to see him, and her gaze never left Flynn.

The boy’s gaze followed hers. Will’s eyes—Dear God, they really were—fastened on him, then narrowed a little in the same way Will’s always did when he assessed something or someone new.

There was no doubt the boy had picked up on the current of apprehension that pervaded the room. He was like a fox scenting danger, Flynn thought.

And then, apparently deciding what was necessary, he deliberately moved in front of Sara, his back to his mother’s legs as if he would protect her. His chin jutted out as he contemplated Flynn. There was no sparkle now. Just the hard unwavering green gaze that generations of Murrays wore when protecting their own.

“Who’re you?”

It was the question Flynn had been anticipating since he’d made up his mind to come to Montana. It was the question he’d been longing to answer.

And suddenly he found the words stuck in his throat. After a hundred—hell, after a thousand at least—visualizations of the moment when he would meet his son, he didn’t have the spit to say a word.

He opened his mouth and nothing came out. For the first time in his entire life, Flynn Murray had no words.

Sara, too, was staring at him expectantly, waiting for him to say something. He couldn’t. He shook his head.

Maybe she realized he couldn’t—or maybe she simply decided that taking charge herself was a better idea. Her hands came down to rest on the boy’s shoulders and squeezed lightly. When she spoke, her voice was soft.

“He’s your father, Liam.”

Liam’s eyes flew wide open. So did his mouth. He stared at Flynn, then abruptly his head whipped around so he could look up at his mother. His whole body seemed quiver with the unspoken question: Is that true?

Sara’s smile was faint and a little wary. But she gave the boy’s shoulders another squeeze, then nodded.

“He is. Truly,” she assured him. “He’s come to meet you.”

For a long moment Liam still searched her face. But then, eventually, he seemed satisfied with what he saw there. He turned back to Flynn. His gaze was steady and level and curious as he stared at his father in silence. The silence seemed to go on—and on.

And then, finally, in a slightly croaky but determined voice, Liam asked, “Where’ve you been?”

Absolutely mundane. Absolutely reasonable.

Absolutely devastating.

Flynn swallowed. “I’ve…I’ve been a lot—” he cleared the raggedness out of his throat, glad he at least had a voice now. He started again “—a lot of places. All over the world. I’d have been here sooner. But…I didn’t know about you.”

Liam’s gaze jerked around to challenge his mother’s. “You said you wrote to him.”

“She did,” Flynn answered for her. This wasn’t Sara’s fault. “Your mother wrote me before you were born. She wrote me later when you were born…but I didn’t get the letter. Not for a long time. Years.” He picked the envelope up from the top of the bookcase where Sara had set it and held it out. “Take a look. It’s been everywhere. But I didn’t get it until last week.”

Liam’s gaze shifted from Flynn’s face to the letter in his outstretched hand. But he stayed where he was, so Flynn moved closer.

Still the boy didn’t reach out right away. But finally he plucked the envelope from Flynn’s fingers and turned it over in his hands, then studied the multiplicity of addresses on it.

“I was working a lot of different places all over the world,” Flynn explained awkwardly. “It must have missed me everywhere I went. It finally caught up with me back home. In Ireland.”

Liam didn’t look up. He was rubbing his thumb lightly over the words on the envelope, staring at the writing, which, Flynn realized suddenly, he wouldn’t be able to read yet. He wasn’t old enough. “All those addresses are places I was,” he explained.

Then Liam looked up at him. “You live in a castle?”

Flynn blinked. He could read?

Apparently so, for Liam was pointing at the one address on the envelope that hadn’t been scratched out. “That’s what it says.” He scowled at it, then sounded out, “Dun-more-ee castle.” Liam read it out slowly then looked up again. “That’s your house?”

“No, dear,” Sara began, but Flynn cut in.

“It is. Dunmorey Castle.”

He heard Sara’s sharp intake of breath. Liam’s eyes went so wide that his eyebrows disappeared into the fringe of black hair that fell across his forehead. “You live in a real castle? With a moat?”

“I live there. And it is a real castle in name,” Flynn qualified, looking at Sara for the first time, seeing accusation in her gaze. “Mostly it’s a huge drafty old house,” he went on. “Over five hundred years old. Mouldering. Damp. And it does have a turret and some pretty high walls. But it doesn’t have a moat.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess,” Sara muttered.

“No moat?” Liam’s face fell. His brows drew down. “What makes it a castle then?”

“It was a stronghold. A really old fort,” Flynn explained. “Where people could go if they needed to defend themselves against invaders. And it was where the lord of the lands lived. The boss,” he added in case that made more sense. “That’s what makes it a castle.”

Liam digested that. “Can I see it?”

“Of course you can.”

“A picture, he means,” Sara said hastily. “Can he see a picture? Of your castle.” Her tone twisted the word as if she were blaming him for it.

The damn place was no end of trouble. Flynn shook his head. “Not with me,” he told Liam. “But I can get you some. Even better, I can take you there. You can see it in person.”

Liam gaped. “I can?”

“No!” Sara said sharply.

Liam twisted around to look up at her. “I can’t?”

“It’s in Ireland,” she explained, shooting Flynn a furious glance. “That’s clear across the ocean. Thousands of miles.”

“I could fly on a plane.” Liam was undaunted. “Couldn’t I?” He glanced around at Flynn for confirmation.

“You could,” Flynn agreed. “Best way to get there, in fact. We’ll talk about it.” He smiled at Sara.

Sara’s mouth pressed into a tight line. “I don’t think we’ll be talking about it anytime soon.” She turned to her son and said firmly, “He can tell you all about his castle, Liam. But do not expect to go zipping across the ocean.”

“But I’ve never seen a real castle.”

“You’re five. You have plenty of time,” Sara said unsympathetically. “And in the meantime you can make them out of Legos.”

Liam brightened. “I already did.” He spun towards Flynn. “It’s sort of real. But it doesn’t have a moat either. Wanna see it?” He was all eagerness now, hopping from one foot to the other now, looking up at Flynn.

The expression on his face now didn’t remind Flynn so much of Will as it did of the young Sara—when he had first met her. She’d had that same sparkle, that same eager, avid, intense enthusiasm.

Right now she was glaring at him, her jaw locked.

He had made a living out of reading people, picking up their body language, understanding when to move in, when to back off. He had no trouble reading Sara. She wasn’t thrilled to see him and, he supposed, he didn’t blame her. He hadn’t been here when she needed him.

But he’d come when he found out, hadn’t he? They’d get it sorted. They had to. But they weren’t going to do it now in front of their five-year-old son. So he gave Sara a quick smile that, he hoped, appeased her for the moment, then turned to Liam. “I’d like that.”

“C’mon, then!” And Liam was off, pounding up the stairs.

Flynn looked at Sara. She glared. Then she shrugged. “Oh, hell, go with him. But don’t you dare encourage him to think about jetting off to Ireland!”

“It’s possible, Sar’. Not immediately but we should discuss—”

“No, we shouldn’t! Damn it, Flynn, you can’t just pop up and disrupt our lives. It’s been six years!”

“I didn’t know—”

“And you didn’t want to know,” Sara said, “or you’d have come back.”

“I thought—”

“I don’t care what you thought. You knew where I was. I didn’t leave! If I’d mattered at all, you’d have come back. You never came!”

“You were going to med school.”

She stared at him. “Do I look like I went to med school?”

He blinked, then shook his head, dazed. “What do you mean? How should you look?”

“I got pregnant, Flynn. I had two and half years of university left for my bachelor’s. I had a baby. It was all I could do to get through that. I didn’t go to med school.”

“But—”

“Circumstances change. Plans change.”

“Yes, but—” He couldn’t believe it. She’d been so driven. “Is that why you’re so ticked at me?”

She stared. “What? Because I couldn’t go to med school? Of course not! I don’t care about that. I got my degree. I have my own business. I’m a CPA—certified public accountant. I like my work. I like numbers in boxes. I like adding things up and having them come out right. I like knowing the answers! Speaking of which, what the hell is this about you living in a castle?”