in the fact that Claire had been the one to walk out? Some men found rejection hard to take. Perhaps his being adopted had made him even more sensitive to it.
Kat came and sat on the edge of the bed feeling a bit like a kitten approaching a lion. ‘So, I take it Jaz struck a raw nerve?’
‘Not raw. Dead and buried.’ His tone was flat, emotionless, but she could hear a speed hump of hurt. ‘I hate having it exhumed. It stinks.’
Kat hadn’t realised how close her hand was to his where it was resting on the bed. If she moved her pinkie a few millimetres it would come into contact with his. Something shifted in her belly at the thought of his darkly tanned skin touching hers. ‘She’s quite a personality, isn’t she?’
He grunted something unintelligible.
‘I liked Miranda too,’ Kat said. ‘A lot. I didn’t expect to but she’s nothing like I expected. I thought she’d hate me, but she made me feel like she really wants us to have a connection.’
‘She’s a sweetheart. Leandro’s a lucky man.’
Kat looked at their hands again. Watched as the distance between their fingers got smaller. Was she moving her finger or was he moving his? ‘Were you in love with her?’
‘Who?’
‘Claire.’
His lips folded inward like he was filtering his response. Blocking it. Banning it. The silence boomed with the beats of the muscle flicking in his jaw. In. Out. In. Out.
‘If you’d rather not talk about it...’ Kat left the words hanging. Dangling like a dare.
His gaze hit hers. Hard. Two-can-play-at-that-game hard. ‘Do you want to talk about your affair with a married man?’
Shame turned Kat’s stomach sour and made her face burn. ‘You know about that?’
‘Men like Charles Longmore can’t help boasting about bedding a celebrity.’
Panic took an ice-pick to her spine and a sledgehammer to her heart. If Flynn knew then who else knew? Would her shame be splashed on every tabloid? Everyone would blame her. They always did. The Other Woman always got the blame. No one ever blamed the philandering husband. Kat would be cast in the role of home wrecker and there would be no way to defend herself. ‘Oh no...’
‘It’s all right.’ Flynn’s voice had a reassuring steadiness to it. ‘He and I have come to an understanding.’
Kat swallowed back bile, her hammering heart going back to where it belonged in her chest. ‘How do you know him?’
‘Mutual acquaintance.’
She looked down at her clenched hands. ‘I didn’t know he was married. He lied to me. Lie after lie after lie. I broke it off as soon as I found out. The worst thing was I’d always been so annoyed with my mother for getting involved with married men. I feel like such a hypocrite.’
Flynn put his hand over her white-knuckled ones and gave them a light squeeze. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. He was a jerk. A cheat. No one will believe him anyway.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You’re way out of his league.’
Kat cocked her head at him. ‘Is that a compliment, Mr Carlyon?’
His smile tugged on her resolve like a child pulling at its mother’s skirt. ‘Yes, Miss Winwood. It is.’
Another small silence ticked past.
Kat relaxed her hands and smoothed them against her bent thighs. ‘I guess I should let you rest...’
‘I wasn’t in love with Claire.’
Kat wondered why that should make her feel such an odd sense of relief. It wasn’t as if she was worried about whether his emotions had taken a battering. Why should she care if he’d had his heart banged up?
You do care. You like him.
No, I don’t. Well...maybe a little...but only because he was so good about that creep Charles.
‘Claire thought she was pregnant,’ Flynn said. ‘I wanted to do the right thing by her and our child.’
‘At least you didn’t pay her to have an abortion.’
He gave her a fleeting half-smile before his expression went back to neutral. ‘It was way earlier than I’d planned to settle down, but I thought it would work out if we both were committed to doing the best thing for the baby. But she found out a couple of days later it was a false alarm. She ended our relationship then and there.’
Kat searched his inscrutable face. What emotions was he screening from view? How had he felt at having the future he had planned with Claire cut so abruptly? Or had he been privately relieved he was off the hook, so to speak? Many young men would be terrified at the thought of fatherhood being thrust upon them before they were ready. ‘You weren’t relieved?’
He gave a soft laugh. ‘No. Maybe later, when I’d got over myself a bit. But not then.’
‘Why was doing the right thing by her and the baby so important to you? Because you were adopted?’
He met her gaze in a lock that made something in her chest ping. ‘I wasn’t a straightforward adoption.’
‘What do you mean?’
Kat saw his deepening frown, the slow blink, the tight swallow, the shadow of something pass through his gaze. Several somethings. It looked like he was shuffling through his thoughts, deciding whether he should reveal what he had stored inside the filing system of his mind.
‘I was a foundling,’ he finally said. ‘An abandoned infant with no name, no registration of birth or any other details pinning me to another soul on this planet. All I had was the ratty old bunny rug I was wrapped in and a soiled cloth nappy. And the worst case of nappy rash the authorities had ever seen.’
Kat stared at him in shock, her heart jolting at the thought of him as a tiny baby, suffering, abandoned, alone. ‘Oh dear, that’s so sad. Didn’t anyone ever come forward?’
‘Nope.’ The way he said the word made it sound as if he had long ago given up hope. Maybe he hadn’t had it in the first place.
Kat covered his hand with hers. Not that she did a great job of covering much of it, given her hand was so much smaller. He turned her hand over and entwined his fingers with hers. The heat from his hand warmed her body from her fingertips to her toes. ‘I can’t imagine what that must be like for you,’ she said. ‘Not knowing. Never knowing.’
His thumb moved back and forth against the fleshy base of hers. ‘Maybe it’s better not to know, or so I keep telling myself. I can’t see myself turning up any famous actors as my parents.’
Kat pulled her hand out of his. ‘I suppose you think I’m being petty about my father.’
‘He’s the only one you’ll ever have.’
‘He’s not the one I want.’
‘We don’t get to choose.’
She got off the bed and stalked to the window, folding her arms across her body. ‘I’m not ready.’
‘That’s another thing you might not have much choice over,’ he said. ‘What if you run in to him sometime?’
Kat swung back to face him with a look that would have curdled milk. ‘You mean with another impromptu dinner party at your house?’
‘I didn’t engineer the girls turning up.’
‘You engineered me house-sitting next door.’
‘So?’
‘So how can I trust you?’
He let out a long breath. ‘The question is, can I trust