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He was just about to knock when an elderly woman who had been watching him from her own front gate called out to him.
‘You’ll have to go round the back, young man.’
Young man! Sean grimaced. He didn’t think he had ever been young—he had never been allowed to be young! And as for being a man…Something dark and dangerous hardened his whole face as he obeyed the elderly woman’s instructions.
It took him several minutes to find the path which ran behind the back gardens of the cottages. The gate to Kate’s wouldn’t open at first, and then he realised that it was bolted on the inside and he had to reach over to unbolt it. Hardly a good anti-thief device, he reflected, giving it a frowning and derisory look as he unfastened it and walked up the path.
He frowned even more when he realised that the back door was slightly open. If Kate had had his upbringing she would have been a damn sight more safety conscious!
His hand was on the door when he heard her cry out his name.
He reacted immediately, thrusting open the door and striding into the kitchen, then coming to an abrupt halt when he saw her lying in the chair asleep. He felt as though all the air had been knocked out of his lungs, his chest tightening whilst he tried to draw in a ragged breath of air.
He had always loved watching her as she slept, absorbing the sight of her with a greedy secret pleasure—her long dark lashes, lying silkily against her delicate skin, her lips slightly parted, her face turned to one side so that the whole of one pretty ear was visible. The very fact that she was asleep made her so vulnerable, showed how much she trusted him, showed how much she was in need of his protection…
Without thinking Sean stepped forward, his hand lifting to push the heavy swathe of hair off her face, and then abruptly he realised that this was the present, not the past, and he stopped.
But it was too late. Somehow, as though she had sensed he was there, Kate cried out his name in great distress. For a second he hesitated, and then, taking a deep breath, he put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a small squeeze.
Immediately Kate woke up, and as she opened her eyes he demanded brusquely, ‘Sean, what?’
Kate stared up at him. Her dream was still fogging her brain, and it took her several valuable seconds to wake up fully, incomprehension clouding her eyes.
‘You were crying out my name,’ Sean prompted softly.
Kate felt a prickle of awareness run over her. And then the reality of what she had been dreaming hit her. Her face started to burn. All at once there was a dangerous tension in the small room.
‘I was dreaming, that’s all,’ she defended herself sharply.
‘Do you often dream about me?’
The danger was increasing by the heartbeat.
She could feel her skin tightening in reaction to his taunt. ‘It was more of a nightmare,’ she retaliated quickly.
‘You haven’t remarried.’ He said it flatly, like an accusation, in an abrupt change of tack.
Clumsily Kate got to her feet. Even standing up she was still a long way short of his height. She cursed the fact that she was not wearing her heels, and felt the old bitterness mobilising inside her
‘Remarry? Do you really think I would want to risk marrying again after what you did to me?’ she demanded hotly. ‘No, I haven’t remarried, and I never will.’
And there was also a very good reason why she wouldn’t, but she had no intention of telling him so. It was her son. Her precious Ollie was not going to be given a stepfather who might not love him. Kate had firsthand knowledge of what that felt like, and she was not going to subject her son to the same misery she had known whilst she was growing up.
‘Why did you change your name?’
So he still had that same skill at slipping in those dangerous questions like a knife between the ribs. She wanted to shiver, but she folded her arms instead, not wanting him to see her body’s betrayal of her anxiety.
‘Why shouldn’t I? I certainly didn’t want your name, and I didn’t want my aunt and uncle’s either, so I changed my name by deed poll to my mother’s maiden name. What are you doing here anyway?’ she demanded angrily. ‘You have no right—’
‘I’ve come round here because of this,’ Sean said curtly, stopping her protests as he removed her letter of resignation from his jacket pocket, and with it another fat white envelope.
‘This is your contract of employment,’ he announced. ‘It binds you to working a statutory notice period of four weeks. You can’t just walk out on your job, Kate.’
Kate’s mouth had gone dry, and she knew that her eyes were betraying her shock and her chagrin.
‘You…you can’t hold me to that,’ she began valiantly. ‘You—’
‘Oh, yes, I can.’ Sean stopped her swiftly. ‘And I fully intend to do so.’
‘But why?’ Kate demanded wildly, stiffening as she heard in her own voice how close she was to the edge of her self-control. ‘I should have thought you’d want me gone as much as I want to go, given the speed with which you ended our marriage! You can’t want me working for you. Your ex-wife, the woman you rejected? The woman you—’
‘Rules are rules—you are legally obliged to work your notice and I want you back at your desk so that you can hand over your responsibilities to your replacement.’
‘You can’t make me!’ Kate protested. Her voice might sound strong and determined, but inside she was panicking, she recognised. She did, after all, have a legal obligation to work her notice period, and if she didn’t it could cause other employers to think twice about taking her on. With Oliver to bring up she just could not afford to be out of work.
‘Yes, I can,’ Sean corrected her. ‘You may have walked out on our marriage, but no way are you walking out of your job!’
Kate’s shock deepened with every word he threw at her.
‘I left because you were having an affair—you know that. You were the one who ended our marriage, Sean.’
‘I’m not interested in discussing the past, only the present.’
His response left her floundering and vulnerable. It had been a mistake to refer to their marriage, and even more of a mistake to mention his affair. The last thing she wanted was to have him taunt her with still suffering because of it.
‘I like value for my money, Kate. Surely you can remember that?’
His comment gave her a much needed opportunity to hit back at him, and she took it.
‘I don’t allow myself to remember anything about you.’ The angry, contemptuous words were out before she could stop herself from saying them. She could feel the tightening of the tension between them, and with it came dangerous memories of a very different kind of tension they had once shared.
‘Anything?’ Sean challenged her rawly, as though he had somehow read her thoughts. ‘Not even this?’
The feel of his hands on her arms, dragging her against his body, the heat of his flesh, the feel of his body itself against her own, was so shockingly and immediately familiar and welcome that she couldn’t move.
Somehow, of its own volition, her body angled itself into Sean’s. Somehow her hands were sliding beneath his jacket and up over his back. Somehow her head was tilting back and her eyes were opening wide, so that she could look into the familiar hot, passionate blue of his.
Shockingly, it was as though a part of her had been waiting for this, for him, and not just waiting but wanting, longing, needing.
The steady tick of the kitchen clock was drowned out by the sound of their mingled breathing: Sean’s harsh and heavy; her own much lighter, shallow and unsteady.
The touch of his hand on the nape of her neck as his thumb slowly caressed her skin sent a signal to her body which it immediately answered.
Now she had to close her eyes, in case Sean could read in them what she could feel—the small, telling lift of her breasts as they surged in longing for his touch, the tight ache of her nipples as they hungered for his mouth, the swift clench of her belly and, lower than that, the softening swelling moistness of her sex.
She felt the hard warmth of his mouth and her own clung to it, her lips obediently parting to the fierce thrust of his tongue—a feeling she remembered so well.
Her fingers clenched into his shoulders beneath his suit jacket as the familiar possessive pressure of his kiss silenced the moan of pleasure bubbling in her throat.
When his hands dropped to her hips, and his fingers curled round the slenderness of her bones, Kate went weak with longing. Soon he would be touching her breasts, tugging fiercely at her clothes in his hunger to touch her intimately. And she wanted him to. She wanted him to so much.
Fine shudders of eager longing were already surging rhythmically through her. If she slid her hand down from his back she could touch the hard readiness of him, stroke her fingers along it, tormenting him, tormenting them both until he picked her up and—
‘Mummy…?’
The sound of Oliver’s voice from the other side of the back door jolted her back to reality.
Immediately Kate pulled back from Sean, and equally immediately he released her, so that when the door opened and Oliver came in, followed by Carol, they were standing three feet apart, ignoring one another.
‘Ollie wanted to come home, so—’ Carol came to a halt as she saw Sean, and looked uncertainly at Kate.
‘Thanks, Carol.’ Kate bent down to receive the full weight of Oliver’s compact sturdy little-boy body as he ran towards her, only too glad of an excuse to conceal her face. Picking up Oliver, she avoided looking at both her neighbour and Sean.
‘Er…I’ll be off, then,’ she heard Carol saying hurriedly as she backed out of the door.
Sean stared at the child in Kate’s arms in shocked disbelief. She had a child—it was her child; he knew that. She had a child, which meant…Which meant that some other man must have…
Oliver was wriggling in her arms and demanding to be put down. Reluctantly Kate gave in and did so. The moment his feet touched the floor he turned to look at Sean, and Kate felt as though her heart was being clenched in a hard, hurting fist when he demanded, ‘Who are you?’
‘Ollie, it’s bedtime,’ she told him firmly, and without looking at Sean she added, ‘I would like you to leave.’
‘I meant what I said about working for me, Kathy,’ Sean responded grimly.
‘Don’t call me Kathy!’
Too late Kate realised that Oliver was reacting to the anger in her voice. His eyes rounded and he put his hand in hers and stared at Sean. But her distress at upsetting him was nothing compared to the rage she felt when Sean told her curtly, ‘You’re upsetting the boy!’
To her shock, and before she could voice her fury, Sean bent down and picked Ollie up in his arms.
Kate waited for her son to struggle, as he always did when anyone unfamiliar touched him, but to her chagrin, instead of pulling away from Sean he leaned into him, looking at him gravely in silence before heaving a huge sigh and then saying determinedly, ‘Story, please, man!’
Kate felt as though her heart was going to break. Her ex-husband was holding their son, and Oliver was looking at his father as though he were all of his heroes rolled into one. The pain knifing into her was unbearable. She wanted to snatch Oliver out of Sean’s arms and hold him protectively in her own. Her poor baby didn’t know that his father had rejected the very idea of him even before he was born!
‘Oliver’s friend’s father reads him a story when he comes home from work,’ she told Sean in a stilted voice, in explanation of her son’s demand.
Oliver! She had even called the child by the name he had…And yet as he looked into the little boy’s solemn eyes Sean found it impossible to resent or hate him.
‘Story?’ he enquired, smiling at him and ignoring Kate.
Oliver nodded his head enthusiastically. ‘Mummy—book,’ he commanded imperiously, turning his head to look at Kate.
‘Please use proper sentences, Oliver,’ Kate reminded him automatically.
‘Mummy, give me book for man to read, please.’ Oliver smiled winningly and Kate could feel her whole body melting with love.
‘Sean has to go,’ she informed Oliver, automatically using Sean’s name without thinking. ‘I will read you a story later.’
‘No. Sean read Oliver story!’
The frowning pout he was giving reinforced Kate’s awareness that her son was overtired, and all too likely to have one of his rare tantrums if he was thwarted—the very last thing she wanted him to do in front of Sean, who would no doubt enjoy seeing her in such an embarrassing situation.
‘Why don’t you just give me the book?’
The quiet voice and its soft tone made Kate turn her head and stare at Sean in surprise. Oliver was already lying against Sean’s shoulder.
‘It isn’t really his bedtime yet,’ she said.
‘Is there a law which says he can only have a story at bedtime?’
Mutely Kate shook her head, too caught up in the heart-wrenching sight of her son in his father’s arms to protest any further as she went to get Oliver’s favourite story book.
Half an hour later Sean nestled Oliver deeper into his arms and told Kate, ‘By the looks of him he needs to be in bed.’
‘Yes. I’ll take him up.’
Automatically she moved to take Oliver from him, but Sean shook his head.
‘I’ll take him up. Just tell me which room.’
Weakly, she did so.
As he laid Oliver down on his small bed Sean felt the ache of an old and powerful emotion he had thought safely destroyed. Kathy’s child. He could feel his eyes starting to blur and he blinked fiercely.
As he left the room he hesitated outside the other bedroom door, and then quickly opened it.
‘Where are you going? That’s my bedroom!’
He hadn’t heard Kate come up the stairs, and they confronted one another on the small landing.
‘And you sleep there alone?’ He couldn’t stop himself from asking the question he knew he had no right to ask.
‘No. I don’t!’ Kate turned her head, not wanting him to see the expression in her eyes and therefore missing the one in his. ‘Sometimes Oliver comes in and gets into bed with me,’ she continued.
He had no valid reason to feel the way he did right now, Sean acknowledged, and no valid right either!
‘How do you manage on your own? I know you work full-time.’ He was frowning, looking as though he was genuinely concerned, and Kate turned away from him quickly and hurried towards the stairs. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again—thinking that Sean had real feelings.
‘I manage because I have to, for Oliver’s sake. I’m all he’s got—’
‘You mean his father abandoned you?’ His voice was harsh and almost condemning. ‘He left you?’
Kate could hardly believe the censure she could hear in his voice. ‘Yes, he did,’ she agreed as calmly as she could, once they were both back downstairs. ‘But personally I think that Ollie and I are better off without him.’
She walked purposefully to the front door and unlocked it, pulling it open and making it clear that she wanted Sean to leave.
‘I want you back at your desk tomorrow morning,’ Sean warned her curtly.
‘Well, I’m afraid I’m not going to be there,’ Kate responded, equally curtly.
