Читать книгу Bride Of The Emerald Isle - Trish Wylie - Страница 7

KEELIN considered packing her bags and getting on the next ferry. But there was still a part of her that wanted to stay, to know, one way or the other. So she could put it behind her, close off another chapter before she moved on with her life.

She just hadn’t factored a Garrett into the equation.

He had to be, what, early thirties? Which meant Dermot Kincaid had to have been a married man when her mother had met him. And, despite her mother’s bohemian approach to life, that just didn’t sit well on Keelin’s shoulders.

Any more than being so attracted at first sight to someone who might be her half-brother did…

But then she had no way of knowing for sure that Dermot Kincaid was her father. Except that the dates were close enough to match. Well, at least that she could tell from his letters.

Her mother’s letters might tell a different story.

But even as she sat on a bench overlooking Valentia Harbour, the vast panorama of the lush green countryside laid out before her like a painting her mother might have created early in her career, she couldn’t bring herself to reach into her bag for them.

To have a direct line into a part of her mother’s life that she hadn’t known about.

It was just too glaring a reminder of how lacking their relationship had been while her mother was alive. Of what Keelin had missed out on by carrying around a sense of something major missing from her life, due to her mother’s lifestyle and ‘artistic’ temperament.

Keelin had been so angry at her growing up. But even though they had made their peace before she’d left, Keelin was left with a hole inside, a hole she had hoped to fill with the things she had never known. As if somehow that could make it easier to move on…

This journey had been her attempt at trying to put the pieces together. To try and make sense of everything that had gone before so she could put it aside and move forwards. So she didn’t feel as if she was drifting through life, filling in time, waiting for something she hadn’t put a name to. While not really living at all.

‘You’re more like your father than me,’ her mother would say to try and justify the glaring differences in their personalities when Keelin had been a rebellious teenager, determined her mother’s way of living had ruined her own life in some way.

‘How would I know that when you never talk about him?’ had been Keelin’s defence mid-argument.

She reached into her bag and took out the bundle of letters. They were her only chance to try and understand the woman who had never understood her, not really. And to try and put together the missing part of the puzzle that had led to her own existence.

She promised herself it didn’t matter what Garrett thought about how she looked that evening. Even though she had taken an inordinate amount of time getting ready.

Living up to the memory Dermot had of her stunning mother would be difficult enough.

But the glow in Garrett’s dark sable eyes when he turned to look at her in the tiny hotel foyer still brought a rush of welcomed self-confidence.

He didn’t make a comment, though. Just slowly looked her down and back up.

And in that second she sent up a silent prayer that she could manage to control how attractive she found him, how he could have such an effect on her with just a glance. He took her breath away. He really did.

‘I have to make a stop along the way.’

‘No problem.’ She pinned a bright smile in place as he eased his long legs in through the driver’s side door.

‘Just get ready for about a hundred questions.’

A rueful smile caused his dimples to flash briefly her way as he turned out onto the narrow street, executing a U-turn at the harbour. ‘Terri is going to find you fascinating as all hell.’

Meaning he didn’t? Not that it wouldn’t be better if he didn’t, but, surely, having been on the sidelines earlier, he couldn’t help but at least be curious?

As she was now about the mysterious Terry. ‘He doesn’t get off the island much more than you do I take it?’

‘She. And, no, she doesn’t. No matter how much she bugs me on a daily basis about it.’

Not Terry, then. Theresa.

Keelin was suddenly ragingly curious about the kind of woman that Garrett spent time with. She was probably some excruciatingly pretty island girl who loved the outdoors and had wellingtons in one of the prerequisite colours. At least if she was interested in city life Keelin would have something to talk to her about.

Keelin the outsider might find a way not to feel so awkward in the company of two enigmatic Kincaid men that way. And with a girlfriend in tow then she could concentrate on trying to view Garrett as a friendly brother-figure rather than anything even resembling gorgeous male.

‘You should take her for a nice romantic getaway in the city. She’d like that.’

Garrett laughed a low laugh beside her. ‘Somehow I don’t think dragging her old dad along on the trip would be part of the plan.’

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.’