The Rumours Collection

‘Have you always wanted to be an actor?’

‘Ever since I was old enough to know what acting was,’ she said. ‘I was cast as a donkey in a nativity play in primary school. I’ll never forget the feeling I got when I looked out at that sea of faces. I felt like I had come home. They had to drag me off when it was over. I didn’t want the play to end. Of course, my mother would’ve known why it was such a passion in me, but she never told me, not until a couple of days before she died. If anything she tried to discourage me from acting. She didn’t even let me take dancing classes. Not that we could’ve afforded them, of course.’

Flynn was looking at her with a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘It must have come as a big shock to find out who your father was. How had she settled your curiosity before then about who had fathered you?’

‘She told me she didn’t know who he was,’ Kat said. ‘When I was old enough to understand, she said she’d had a one-night stand with someone and never saw or heard from him again. I believed her because she kind of lived like that while I was growing up. She had men come and go all the time. None of her relationships lasted that long. She married at eighteen soon after she left home but they divorced before she was twenty. She wasn’t all that lucky in the men department. She attracted the wrong sort of guy. She wasn’t a great judge of character.’ Not that I can talk.

‘Were you close to her?’

Kat liked to think she had been to a point, but with her mother keeping such a secret from her for so long she wondered whether she had imagined their relationship to be something it was not in order to feel more normal. She was nothing like her mother in personality. Her mother had lacked ambition and drive. She hadn’t seemed capable of making a better life for herself. She’d had no insight into how she’d kept self-sabotaging her chance to get ahead. Kat was the opposite. She was uncompromising in the setting and achieving of goals. If she put her mind to something, she would let nothing and no one stand in her way.

‘I loved her, but she frustrated me because she didn’t seem capable of making a better life for herself,’ Kat said. ‘She didn’t even seem to want to. She cleaned hotel rooms or worked in seedy bars ever since she left home after a row with her parents as a teenager. She didn’t even try to move up the ranks or try to train for something else.’

What was she doing? She wasn’t supposed to be getting all chummy with him. What had made her spill all that baggage out? Was it because he had rescued her from the unwelcome visitor next door? Was it because he hadn’t made fun of her about her phobia? Unlike a couple of her mother’s dodgy boyfriends, who had found it great sport to see her become hysterical and paralysed with fear.

She rarely spoke to anyone of her background. Even her closest friend Maddie only knew the barest minimum about her childhood. Life had been tough growing up. Kat had always felt like an outsider. She had been the kid with the hand-me-down clothes; the one with the shoes that had come from a charity shop; the one with the home haircut, not the salon one. The kid who’d lived in run-down flats with lots of unwelcome wildlife. Money had always been tight, even though there had been ways her mother could have improved their circumstances. She sometimes wondered if her mother’s lack of drive had made her all the more rigidly focused and uncompromisingly determined.

Flynn still had that contemplative expression on his face. ‘You’re so much like your father it’s uncanny. He had his first start in theatre at the age of five too. Both he and Elisabetta talk of the buzz of being onstage in front of a live audience. It’s like a drug to them. They don’t feel truly alive without it.’

Kat wasn’t so sure she wanted to be reminded of how like Richard Ravensdale she was. She had his green-grey eyes and dark-brown hair, although her natural copper highlights were from her mother. She used to be quite pleased with her looks, thanking her lucky stars she had a good face and figure for the theatre. But now they felt more like a burden. It was a permanent reminder of how her mother had been exploited by a man who had used her and cast her away once he was done with her.

She didn’t fool herself that her mother had loved Richard and his abandonment had set her life on the self-destructive course it had taken. Her mother had already been well on her way down the slippery slope when she’d met Richard. It was more that Richard was one of many men who had used and abused her mother, fulfilling her mother’s view of herself as not worthy of being treated with respect and dignity—messages she had heard since childhood. Kat had asked her mother just before she died why she hadn’t made contact with Richard in later years to tell him he had a child. Her mother had told her it had never occurred to her. She had taken the money he’d offered and, as far as she was concerned, that was the end of it. It was typical of her mother’s lack of drive and purpose. She’d let life happen to her rather than take life by the throat and wring whatever opportunities she could out of it.

‘I’m not going to meet him, so you can put that thought right out of your mind,’ Kat said.

‘But he could help you get established in the theatre,’ Flynn said. ‘Why wouldn’t you want to make the most of your connection to him?’

‘It might be the way you lawyers climb the career ladder, by using the old boys’ network, but I prefer to get there on my own,’ Kat said. ‘I don’t need or want my father’s help. He wasn’t around when I needed it most and as far as I’m concerned it’s way too late to offer it now.’

‘What if it’s not help he’s offering?’ he said. ‘What if he just wants to get to know you? To have some sort of relationship with you?’

‘I don’t want to get to know him,’ Kat said. ‘I don’t need a father. I’ve never had one before so why would I want one now?’

‘Do you have any family now your mother’s gone?’

Kat didn’t like thinking of how alone in the world she was now. Not that she hadn’t always felt alone anyway; but somehow having no living relative now made her feel terribly isolated, as if she had been left on an island in the middle of a vast ocean with no hope of rescue. Her grandparents had died within a couple of years of each other a few years back and, as her mother had been an only child, there were no aunts, uncles or cousins.

The Christmas just gone had been one of the loneliest times in her life. She had sat by herself in a damp and cold bedsit eating tuna out of a can, trying not to think of all the warm, cosy sitting rooms where families were gathered in front of the tree unwrapping gifts, or sitting around the dining table to a sumptuous feast of turkey and Christmas pudding. To have no backup, no sense of a safe home-base to go to if things turned sour, was something she had never really grown up with, but it didn’t mean she didn’t long for it—that sense of belonging, the family traditions that gave life a sense of security, of being loved and connected to a network of people who would look out for each other.

‘There’s just me,’ she said. ‘But I prefer it that way. I don’t have to remember any birthdays or buy anyone expensive Christmas presents.’

The edge of Flynn’s mouth tipped up in a wry smile. ‘Always a silver lining, I guess.’

A small silence ticked past.

His eyes did a slow perusal of her face, finally lowering to her mouth and lingering there for an infinitesimal moment. The air felt charged, quickened by the current of sensual energy that arced between them.

Mutual attraction. Unmistakable. Powerful. Tempting.

Kat had been aware of it the first time they’d met. She was acutely aware of it now. She felt it in her body—the way her skin tightened and then lifted away from the scaffold of her skeleton; the way her breasts tingled as if preparing for his touch. Her insides quavered with a flicker of longing, shocking her because she had always been slow to arousal. She loved the intimacy of sex, of touching and being needed, but it always took her so long to get there.

But in Flynn’s presence her body went on full alert, every erogenous zone flashing as if to say, ‘Touch me!’ Even the weight of his gaze on her mouth was enough to set her lips buzzing with sensation. She sent the tip of her tongue out to try and damp down the tingling but his hooded gaze followed every millimetre of movement, ramping up the tension in the air until she felt a deep, pulsing throb between her legs that echoed in her womb.

‘Would you like to stay here tonight?’ he said.

Kat laughed to cover how seriously tempted she was. ‘I think I’ll take my chances with the wildlife next door.’

‘I wasn’t asking you to sleep with me.’

Kat wished she could control the blush that filled her cheeks. A blush not so much of embarrassment, but of wanting what she wasn’t supposed to want. And knowing he knew it. ‘I’m not interested either way.’

‘Liar,’ he said. ‘You were interested the moment I walked into that café that day with that cheque. That’s why you haven’t dated anyone since October.’

Kat wondered how on earth he had found out that information. Did he have someone tailing her? Keeping tabs on her? The last thing she wanted was anyone to find out she had mistakenly dated a married man. Her fledging career would be sabotaged if her affair with Charles Longmore were leaked in the press. Thankfully her partner in crime and grime was too frightened of his wife finding out to do his own press leak and cash in on her newfound fame as Richard Ravensdale’s love child. ‘I haven’t dated because I made a celibacy pact with my best friend. We’re off men until February.’

His eyes smouldered. ‘I’ll wait.’

Kat arched her brows. ‘You don’t strike me as a particularly patient man.’

‘I know how to delay gratification,’ he said. ‘It makes the final feast all the more satisfying.’

No wonder he was a force to be reckoned with in court. He had a way with words that would leave most people’s heads spinning.

But Kat was not most people. She too could delay gratification. Not only delay it but postpone it indefinitely. ‘Don’t set the table too early,’ she said. ‘Your guest might not show up.’

‘Oh, she’ll show up,’ Flynn said with another glint in those bedroom eyes. ‘She won’t be able to stop herself.’

CHAPTER FOUR

IT WAS SNOWING in earnest when Flynn walked Kat back to the house next door. Even though it was only a few metres, she was conscious of his tall, warm body walking beside her along the footpath. In her flat shoes she barely came up to his shoulder. She didn’t like admitting it but their playful banter was something she found intensely stimulating. Sparring with him was like being involved in a fast-paced fencing match. She had to be on her guard every second.

She wondered if he would come into the café tomorrow. A little spurt of excitement flashed through her at the thought of seeing him again. She didn’t want to be attracted to him, or to even like him, but the way he had handled the ‘rodent-ectomy’ as he called it had lifted him in her estimation. She still couldn’t get over the fact he hadn’t mocked her for her phobia. It had been a perfect opportunity to tease her. But instead he had simply dealt with the problem with surprising expertise and tact, as if it were perfectly normal for her to be squeamish about removing an unwanted creature from beneath the sofa.

Kat unlocked the door and turned to look up at him through the falling snow. ‘Thanks for tonight.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said. ‘I closed the cat flap, by the way. I put some duct tape over the catches. I think Monty must’ve worked them loose. He’s a smart cat.’

Kat couldn’t stop looking into his dark brown eyes with their thick fringe of lashes. Every now and again his gaze would flick to her mouth, the contact of his gaze making her lips feel tingly. ‘Thanks for not making fun of me.’

His brow furrowed like a series of tide lines on a seashore. ‘About what?’

‘My silly phobia.’

He blinked away some snow and smiled, the flash of his white teeth making her stomach do a jerky little somersault. ‘I used to be scared of the dark when I was kid. I slept with a night-light on for years. I got an awful ribbing about it at boarding school but eventually I got over it.’

‘I can’t imagine you being scared of anything.’

There was a long beat of silence.

Kat looked at his mouth—the way it was curved, the way his dark stubble surrounded it, the way his lean jaw with the sexy cleft in his chin made her ache to trail her fingertips over its rough surface. She sent the tip of her tongue out over her lips, watching with bated breath as his eyes tracked its journey. Her awareness of him sharpened. His stillness. As if he were waiting for her to make the first move. It had been months since she had felt a man’s lips on hers. Months since she had felt a man’s arms gather her close and remind her of how good it felt to be wanted. Needed.

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 had more children? Who was his father? Had his mother and father loved each other? Or had something happened between them that had made it impossible for his mother to envisage keeping the baby they had conceived? Did his father even know of his existence? The thoughts of his origins plagued him. He couldn’t look at a baby without thinking of what had led his mother to abandon him.

It was one of the reasons he hadn’t pursued a long-term relationship since Claire. Back in his early twenties he had wanted to fill the hole in his life by building a future with someone, by having a family of his own. When Claire had had a pregnancy scare a couple of months into their relationship, he had proposed on the spot. The thought of having his own family, of having that solid unit, had been a dream come true. But when Claire had found out she wasn’t pregnant a couple of days later she’d ended their engagement. Her rejection had felt like another doorstep drop-off.

He hadn’t been able to commit to another long-term relationship since. To have his hopes raised so high only to have them dashed had made him wary about setting himself up for another disappointment. Not knowing who he was made him worried about who he might become. What if he didn’t have it in him to be a good father? What if there was some flaw in his DNA that would make him ill-suited as a husband and father?

But now, as he was in his thirties and he saw friends and colleagues partnering and starting their parenting, he felt that emptiness all the more acutely. With Julius and Holly married now, Jake and Jaz engaged and Miranda and Leandro preparing for their wedding in March, he was the last man standing.

Alone.

Why had he told Kat Winwood, of all people? Or was it because he saw something in her that reminded him of himself? Her tough-girl exterior. Her take-no-prisoners attitude. Her steely self-reliance. Her feisty determination to win at all costs.

Everything about her stirred his senses into overload. Her sexy little body. Even her starchy stiffness when she was stirred up excited him. Her beautiful eyes, the colour of sea glass, fringed with long, black lashes that reminded him of miniature fans. Her pearly white skin, luminescent and without a single blemish, not even a freckle. Her rich dark-brown hair, with its highlights of burnished copper, that fell to just past her shoulders in a cascade of loose waves. Her flowery perfume—a hint of winter violets, lilacs and something else that was unique to her.

From the first moment he’d met her he had wondered what her lips would feel like against his own. He lay awake at night thinking about her. Imagining what it would be like to make love to her. He wasn’t being over-the-top confident to think she was attracted to him. He could sense it in the way she kept looking at his mouth, as if a force was drawing her gaze there against her will. Even when she looked at him with those intelligent, defiant eyes he could see the flare of her pupils and the way her tongue sneaked out to moisten her luscious mouth. He enjoyed making her blush. It showed she wasn’t quite as immune to him as she made out. He enjoyed sparring with her. The sexy banter was like foreplay. He got hard just thinking about it.

Every cell in his body delighted in the challenge she was laying before him. He thrived on the chase. The conquest was his lifeblood. It energised him. It excited him to think she was playing so hard to get. He was tired of the easy conquests. He could pull a date with just a look. It had lost its appeal. He wanted more. More depth, more intellectual stimulation, more time to explore the chemistry that sizzled and crackled between them.