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“Yes, but so what? I applied over a year ago, and it’s finally come through. My flight to Dublin leaves this weekend, and I’ve already given notice to Cedar Hill that I won’t be returning for the fall term. I’ll take care of finding us a place to live,” he announced. “Then, when you’ve said your goodbyes here, you can join me, only don’t make it too long, darling.”
Cat listened to his voice brimming with excitement. Suddenly her hopes for the future, their future, were vanishing, washed away by the waves of his plans like grains of sand.
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“Just that,” Cat said, each word pulled from her like a layer of skin being removed. “I can’t give up my life and go to Ireland with you on a whim.”
“Whim? Is that what you think this is?”
“Maybe not for you.”
He stiffened beside her.
“This is obviously what you want.” She knew he was ambitious. She accepted that. Or at least she thought she had. But the idea of uprooting herself was unthinkable. Just pack up her life and go, without a care for her family, her friends, the business she loved and worked so hard to build? There were so many reasons why she couldn’t go, but he’d never thought to ask.
“I thought you loved me.”
“I do.” And she did, so much so that she felt sick at having to refuse him. Ireland? She wanted to go there someday. But she couldn’t go now. Couldn’t walk away from all she had here.
His voice was low and soft. “Then come with me.”
“And do what?”
“Be with me.”
She reiterated, “And do what?”
“Whatever you like.”
His arrogant words chilled her, sending icy tentacles to wrap around her heart.
“I can’t do that. I have a business to run.”
“It’s not like I’m asking you to forget about it,” he said. “Just set it aside for a little while. Get someone else, like Mary Alice, to handle it for you.”
Just set it aside. Like it was a toy or a game she could easily pick up later when the mood struck. “For how long?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. A year. Maybe more.”
“Then my answer is still no.”
Rory threw back the sheet and rose from the bed. He stood facing her, naked, like a Celtic warrior getting ready for battle. “You won’t change your mind?”
Sadness choked Cat’s voice. “No.”
She watched him dress with quick, economical movements, feeling her happiness wither inside her, shriveling in the sudden chill.
Rory walked back to where she lay. His eyes, once warm and tender, now resembled cold, frostbitten chips of dark blue ice. “I won’t ask again.”
“I know,” she admitted, holding back the tears until he left the room. Sobs shook her body repeatedly. He never once mentioned marriage. Stupidly, she assumed that he wanted it because she had. Couldn’t he understand that she couldn’t throw her dreams into limbo merely to be his live-in love with no guarantees? Her dreams were important to her. Foolishly, she’d believed that they were to him also. And, she was too proud to beg him to make the ultimate commitment when it was obvious that’s not what he had in mind.
Cat rinsed out her cup and set it in the sink, then wiped away the hot tears that welled in her eyes.
The secure world that she’d built for herself and her child was about to be invaded.
The man who’d broken her heart was coming back.
Chapter Two
Finally, he was, he believed, back where he truly belonged.
After almost seven years of voluntary exile in Ireland, Rory Sullivan had returned to the States. Returned not to the elegant four-story town house on the Upper East Side of New York City where he was born and raised and which he now owned, but instead to Cedar Hill, the small town in southeastern Pennsylvania where he had taught college. Back to a fresh start at a new life. Back to a place overflowing with memories.
He held one such in his hand, a slim volume of poetry. It was an old book, privately published and quite rare, bound in leather and stamped in gold, a find from an estate sale; it was a unique birthday gift he had cherished doubly because of the person who had given it to him. Contained inside the pages were poems of love and longing, of heartbreak and happiness, the work of an Irish woman in the late nineteenth century, simply titled To My Beloved.
He gently opened the book, read the inscription that he’d read hundreds of times before: Always and forever, Cat.
The irony of that phrase haunted him. Just because you left a place, or a person, didn’t mean they left you. Some memories were burned too deep to ever depart; they remained in your mind, constant reminders of what was.
What was, what is, what would always be for him—the woman whose memory he’d tried to ignore. A recollection he’d tried—but found impossible—to suppress. A woman that he tried his damnedest to erase from the deepest recesses of his mind and found she was unforgettable. The passion he tried to so hard to bury where he thought it belonged—in the over-and-done-with category—was ultimately unquenchable.
She was still there. In his heart. In his mind. In his past. A living ghost that had attached itself to him with ethereal chains stronger than any forged with steel.
One day several months ago, while surfing the Internet in his Dublin apartment, he’d stumbled upon her name quite by accident. He’d been checking a list of specialty Irish bookstores in the States, trying to locate an out-of-print research book. It was available in two places, one of which turned out to be hers. Cat’s bookstore had its own Web site, and it included a recent article from a local newspaper on her thriving business, along with a current photo that showed a beautiful woman who looked barely older than some of his undergraduate students. Even through the filter of a monitor screen her hair still gleamed that particular shade of reddish brown. A color he could never forget—gold-dusted cinnamon. He didn’t need a closer inspection to recall the exact shade of her eyes; their color was imprinted in his memory. Green. The green of a ripe lime in summer.
Once, while searching through an antiques shop in the Irish capital, he’d found two items that mirrored that shade. A lady’s antique-gold brooch that held a stunning emerald in the center and a pair of matching gentleman’s Edwardian cuff links, which he wore tonight with his tuxedo. He’d bought both items on the spot, unable to resist, because they reminded him of her.
Was there someone special in her life now? he wondered. Someone who’d replaced him in her heart, her mind, her bed? The article had given no personal details.
Who was he kidding? Rory thought. Of course there had to be someone else. He’d been gone a long time. Too long to believe he’d find her waiting patiently for a man who’d walked out on her.
And why should she? He’d foolishly slammed the door on their relationship. Forced her to make a choice.
And she had.
A choice he’d had to live with.
Until now.
Had she ever regretted that decision? Had she ever wished that she’d chosen a life with him instead of her business? Did she ever spare a random thought for what if?
Rory raked a hand through his fashionably cut dark hair, then loosened the black tie he wore and poured himself a whiskey, neat, from the Waterford decanter that rested on a small butler’s table in the living room of his rented condo. The strong taste was a sharp contrast to the two glasses of champagne he’d consumed at his welcome party, thrown in his honor tonight by university colleagues. A party he’d hoped she would have attended.
But she hadn’t. Throughout the night he’d watched and waited, in vain. Cat never showed, even after he’d made sure that she was invited.
Payback time?
No, the Cat he remembered wouldn’t have blown him off for petty reasons. That wasn’t her style.
Then why didn’t she attend?
Maybe she had better things to do, he mused as he prowled about the room. Better places to be. Or perhaps she didn’t want any part in this prodigal’s return.
That thought left a particularly bad taste in his mouth, so he poured himself another whiskey to wash it away.
Had he made a colossal mistake coming back here? Several other colleges and universities had wanted him to teach at their campuses. Had wooed him with fabulous promises and tempting offers.
But they lacked proximity to what he was seeking.
His friends and fellow professors in Ireland asked him to reconsider when he’d informed them he was leaving. Stay where you belong, they urged. Settle down with one woman and raise a family, a proper Irish family. Past time, they argued, that he had a wife and children.
But he couldn’t. Much as he loved Dublin and the country of his ancestors, it wasn’t truly home.
Home really was, Rory had found out in the ensuing years, where the heart resided. And his had been left behind, in the soft hands of one Miss Caitlyn Kildare. The time had come to see if it could be reclaimed, or if it was lost forever.
Reaching into his inside jacket pocket, Rory withdrew his wallet. He flipped it open, stared at the photo encased in soft plastic inside. It was an old picture, a worn, faded snapshot that showed signs of handling. A woman’s face.
Drawing it from its protective haven, Rory smoothed out the edges, his fingers caressing the picture.
Back then nothing had come between him and his ambition. He hadn’t needed anyone or anything in his life distracting him from his goal.
Or so he’d thought. Love was a name people gave to sugarcoat the intensity of physical desire. Love gave permission to act on those desires, to indulge without guilt. It was pleasant, but in most cases temporary. Enjoyable while it lasted, but nothing to take seriously.
That’s what he’d told himself.
He naively, or stupidly, believed that when he left Caitlyn for the life he wanted in Ireland she would eventually disappear from his thoughts, that his desire for her would evaporate with the distance and the years that separated them.
Rory’s mouth quirked into a mocking grin as he removed the tie and unfastened several buttons on his pleated white tuxedo shirt. Easy to think. Harder to accomplish.
Even with an ocean dividing them, she was constantly with him. He discovered that he carried her within his heart, and his heart refused to allow the memories to die. Instead, it constantly fed him slices of remembrances, doled out carefully at times when he least expected them. In the solitude of his apartment in Dublin, he found himself reaching for her at night, only to find empty space in his bed. Working on a manuscript, he would raise his head, ready to tell her something, to share a fact or an idea, to get her reaction. Only emptiness met his sweeping look. Silence and memories. Echoes of a time past.
Once he’d even attempted to eradicate the specter of her by sleeping with another woman. Deliberately, he’d chosen a woman who reminded him of Cat. A green-eyed, red-haired woman. So what if her eyes lacked the glowing polish of emeralds shot with sunlight? What did it matter if her hair didn’t possess the fire or scent of Cat’s? Lemon-scented, burnished flame belonged to Cat alone.
His experiment was a horrible failure. It wasn’t the woman’s fault, he admitted to himself. She had no way of knowing that she was only a substitute for the real thing, a copy that never quite measured up to the original.
With hindsight, Rory could admit that he’d put his body into the act of sex, but not his heart. His performance may have been instinctively accurate and consummately skilled, yet it lacked a certain fire, a brilliance that transcended the simple and made it sublime. It lacked what he’d had with Cat. Conviction. Rightness. Beauty.
Rory reflected on how much easier it was to analyze that now. Love was the missing ingredient, the special spice that elevated the giving of pleasure to the mingling of souls. It had taken him precious time to recognize and accept that fact.
But was it too late? Too late to return and recapture what he’d thrown away all those years ago? He stared at the face in the photograph, at the deep, delightful smile and the welcoming eyes.
Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe second chances did exist.
Always and forever.
He was damn sure going to give it a try. After all, he had nothing to lose. Nothing that he hadn’t already lost once before.
Rory smiled as he returned the photo to his wallet. If there was one thing he was good at, it was getting what he wanted when he set his mind to it.
And Caitlyn Kildare was what he wanted.
No doubts.
No hesitations.
No questions.
So, he wasn’t going to let a little thing like a no-show at his party deter him from pursuing his quarry. He’d come too far and waited too long.
Besides, he thought as he climbed the winding stairs that led up to his bedroom, tomorrow was soon enough to begin his campaign.
“A dozen roses in a Waterford vase. Someone’s sure got extravagant taste,” Mary Alice commented after the florist’s delivery van departed. She bent and sniffed the bouquet, which adorned the checkout counter. “Hmm,” she murmured, “a lovely scent.” She straightened and threw a questioning glance in Cat’s direction. “So, who are they from? The lawyer or the doctor?”
“Neither.”
“Someone new then?”
Cat shrugged. “I haven’t a clue.”
“No note?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Then how do you know that one of them didn’t send it?”
Cat moved from behind the counter and whisked the feather duster over a small spin-around display of postcards. “There’s no reason for either one to send me flowers,” she explained to her assistant. “I haven’t seen George since he was transferred to the D.A.’s office in Philly during the summer. Paul has such an erratic schedule at the hospital, and since I’m a mother with a young child I doubt we’ll be seeing much of one another in the future.”
“No sparks?’ Mary Alice asked.
Cat paused before she answered, choosing her words carefully. “They’re both nice guys, I enjoyed going out with them, and I like them. But it will never be anything more.”
“That’s too bad,” the older woman stated. “I know that your mom and brother will be disappointed, seeing how they both set you up with their colleagues.”
Cat smiled. “Mom and Brendan both want me to be happy, and neither like to take no for an answer, which is why I humored them. And it’s been a long time since I’d gone out on a date.”
“But they weren’t him.”
Cat stopped her dusting. “Him who?”
“Tara’s father.”
“He doesn’t enter into this at all.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
