‘So it’s going to be like that, is it? Well, you’d better get over yourself quick smart, as I’m the one in charge of feeding you.’
The cat slunk out of the room with its tail twitching like a conductor’s baton.
Kat rolled her eyes. ‘That’s why I prefer dogs. They’re not stuck-up snobs.’
The rain was coming down in icy sheets when Kat came back from picking up some shopping an hour later. There was food for the cat and some basic things in the pantry but she preferred to purchase her own food. She would have ordered it online but her credit card was still maxed out after her mother’s funeral. The thought of that big, fat cheque Flynn Carlyon had dangled under her nose when he’d come into the café a couple of months back was dismissed by her pride.
No way was she being bought.
No. Way.
If she wanted to speak to the press, she would. If she wanted to connect with her father, she would in her own good time. Not that it was going to happen any time soon, if ever. She couldn’t imagine a time when she would feel anything but disdain for a man who had used her mother so callously. Just because she shared some of his DNA didn’t mean she was going to strike up a loving, all-is-forgiven father-daughter relationship with him. Where had he been when things had been so dire growing up? He hadn’t contributed anything towards her upbringing. Not a brass razoo. He had paid off her mother and then had promptly forgotten about her. The money he had paid had gone before Kat was a year old. She and her mother had lived in hardscrabble poverty for most of her childhood.
The shame of not having enough, of wanting more but never having enough to pay for it, was not something she could easily forget. Her mother had worked a variety of cleaning and bar jobs, none of them lasting very long. Her mother would always have ‘an issue’ with someone in the workplace. Kat had felt utterly powerless as she’d watched her mother swing from manic enthusiasm for a new job to coming crashing down in a depressed stupor when she lost it and/or walked out. Her black mood would last for weeks, sometimes months, until the cycle would begin all over again.
Kat had decided as a young child she would do everything in her power to make life better for her mother. She’d thought if she could find a way to get her mum some help, to get her some financial stability and support, then her mother might magically turn into the mother she’d dreamed of having.
But in the end she hadn’t been able to do it. Her mother had died of cancer, perhaps not in dirt-poor poverty, but close enough to make Kat feel nothing but anger towards her biological father who could at the very least have made their lives decent instead of desperate.
It wasn’t just anger she felt. It hurt to think Richard Ravensdale hadn’t cared anything about her. His own flesh and blood had been nothing to him. Just a problem that had to be removed and then swiped from his memory. Permanently.
The parking space outside the Carstairses’ house was tight, especially with the rain obscuring her vision. Kat’s car wasn’t big by any means but trying to get it into the tiny space between the shiny black BMW and the silver Mercedes was like trying to squeeze an elephant’s foot into a ballet slipper.
Not going to happen.
She blew out a breath and tried again. But now a line of cars coming home for the day was banking up behind her. In spite of the biting cold, beads of sweat broke out over her brow. She put her foot on the accelerator and nudged the car backwards, but someone behind her impatiently tooted their horn and put her off her game. She slammed on the brakes and gripped the steering wheel even tighter. She was tempted to roll down the window and give the driver behind the finger, but then a tall figure appeared at her driver’s door.
Oh, God. A surge of panic seized Kat’s chest. Road rage. Was she to be beaten senseless? Dragged out of the car and kicked and shoved and stomped on and then thrown to the gutter like a bit of trash? She could see the headlines: Struggling actor beaten to a pulp over traffic incident. She could see the social media footage. It would go viral. Millions of people would view her demise. She would finally be famous but for all the wrong reasons.
Kat turned to face her opponent with a bravado she was nowhere near feeling. This was the upside of having gone to acting classes. She could do ‘affronted driver’ down pat. But the man wasn’t growling and swearing or shaking his fists at her. He was smiling.
She rolled down her window and glowered at Flynn Carlyon’s amused expression. ‘I would ask you what the hell you’re doing here but I’m not sure I want to know the answer.’
He leaned down so his head was on a level with hers. Kat dearly wished he hadn’t. This close she could see the bottomless depth of his glinting eyes. The cleanly shaven jaw of this morning was gone; in its place was the dark shadow of late-in-the-day, urgent male stubble peppered all over it. And, if that wasn’t enough to make her heart come to a juddering stop, some strands of his ink-black hair fell forward over his forehead, giving him a rakish look. ‘Want me to park it for you?’
‘No, thank you,’ Kat said, doing a prim schoolmistress tone straight out of her actor’s handbook. ‘I’m perfectly capable of parking my own car.’ Not quite true. She had always had trouble with reverse parking, especially in busy traffic. She had failed her driving test three times because of it.
His smile stretched to tilt one corner of his mouth. ‘It looks like it.’
Kat clenched her teeth hard enough to crack a walnut. And to add insult to injury two more cars tooted. Flynn straightened and turned, flattening his back against the side of her door as he waved the traffic through. The fabric of his coat—one hundred per cent cashmere, if she was any judge—was close enough for her to touch. She gripped the steering wheel like her hands were stuck there with superglue and wondered why the planets had conspired against her to have Flynn Carlyon witness her humiliation in a busy Notting Hill street.
He turned back and tapped the roof of her car. ‘Watch out for the car behind,’ he said. ‘It’s mine.’
She double-blinked. ‘Yours?’
‘Yeah, didn’t I tell you?’ That annoying smile again. ‘We’re neighbours.’
Later, Kat didn’t know how she’d parked that car without ramming into his. She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. Nothing would have given her more pleasure than to smash up his pride and joy. To reverse her car at full throttle time and time again.
Crash. Bang. Crash. Bang. Crash. Bang.
She got out of her car and pretended she didn’t notice how out of place it looked sandwiched between his showroom-perfect BMW and the silver Mercedes. It looked like a donkey at the starting gates at Royal Ascot.
Kat joined him on the footpath. ‘Just answer me one question. Did you have something to do with my appointment at the Carstairses’ next door?’
‘They were looking for a house-sitter. Your name came up.’
Kat narrowed her gaze. ‘Why me? You know nothing about me.’
‘On the contrary, Miss Winwood,’ he said with a slow smile that had a hint of imperiousness, ‘I know quite a lot about you.’
‘Like what?’
‘Your father is Richard—’
‘Apart from that.’
‘Why don’t you want to meet him?’ Flynn said.
‘The first time we spoke you wanted to stop me meeting him. Now you want me to come to his stupid party. How do I know what he’ll want tomorrow or the next day?’
He gave a loose shrug of a very broad shoulder. Did he row for England? Work out? Lift bulldozers in the gym? ‘He’s changed his mind since then,’ he said. ‘He wants to make amends. He feels bad about the way things turned out.’
Kat gave a scoffing laugh. ‘“Turned out”? Things didn’t “turn out.” He was the one who tried to get rid me as a baby. He treated my mother appallingly. The only thing he feels bad about