Читать книгу One-Night Love-Child - Anne McAllister - Страница 7

SARA’S jaw set. She steeled herself against his words, his intent and, mostly, against the green magic of his eyes.

“You’re a little late,” she said through her teeth. About five and a half years.

“I am.” He nodded gravely. “I just found out.”

Just found out? She blinked her disbelief. “Yeah, right.” There wasn’t enough sarcasm in the universe to flavor her response.

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.