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Rory glanced at the door that led to the back room, a smile tilting the corners of his mouth.
Cat imagined that she could still feel the tingling in her skin upon the contact with his. Handshakes. An everyday occurrence that she never even gave a second thought to.
Until today.
Until now.
Until him.
The brush of flesh against flesh had instantly summoned memories of other times, other caresses: his palms skimming lazily along her breast or thigh, a drift of his lean fingers along her neck or over her arm.
But she’d held on to her jolted emotions. Kept her cool.
Pleased with herself, Cat counted and signed for the shipment, happy that she had maintained her poise in dealing with Rory. Cat could never show him that he still had any influence on her emotions.
“Anything going out?” the UPS man asked, breaking into Cat’s thoughts.
“Yes,” she answered, retrieving the package that was being sent to a customer. Her back was to the stockroom door, so she didn’t see the man who entered behind her.
Rory quietly stepped into the room. While he understood that he had been dismissed by his former lover, he wasn’t ready to go. Not yet. Not until he had a chance to talk to Cat some more. He hadn’t come all this way to walk away now, not without a fight. Not without trying to get through to her. He still felt the pull, the burning, fire-in-the-gut attraction. If anything, it was stronger than ever. Hotter than before.
His glance fell on her desk, as cluttered as his own, littered with papers, books, various odds and ends. He stepped closer, picking up an item of stationery, one finger tracing the design of an embossed silver harp nestled in a bed of shamrocks on a notecard. Rory smiled. The artist had taken time, producing a fine product. Like Cat’s store, it was special, one of a kind, much like the lady herself.
He was just about to announce his presence, ask her if she’d consider coming out with him for a drink, anything to prolong the moment, when his eyes fell on a framed photograph on Cat’s desk. Reaching out his hand, he picked it up.
Cat turned around, having locked the back delivery door. She was startled to see Rory standing nearby; then it quickly occurred to her where he was and what he had in his hand. She saw the ready smile fade from his lips, replaced by a dawning comprehension at what he held.
Her feet were rooted to the spot, unable to carry her the few steps across the floor so that she could remove the object from his hand. Cat could only stare at him as he examined the photo. Damn, why hadn’t she thought to hide the picture in her desk drawer? Put it away until he was gone.
Because she thought she was safe. It never crossed her mind that he would follow her in here. Obviously he hadn’t taken her goodbye as final.
Rory raised his eyes from the photograph, meeting Cat’s across the room. “Who is she?” he asked rhetorically as his heart already knew the answer.
“My daughter,” she replied.
His response was immediate, cutting her to the quick. “And mine.”
“Yes.” Cat couldn’t deny the fact, especially since the truth was there to see.
That one word hung suspended in the air between them. It cut through years and memories like the snap of a whip.
Rory’s glance fell back to the photo. His daughter. His child. His fingers glided over the glass that protected the photo inside, as if he could somehow feel the warmth of the little girl underneath. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I had my reasons.” She couldn’t get into this with him here and now.
“Oh, did you?” he asked, his tone cool, shock at this turn of events suddenly invading him like the sharp pricks of a hot needle.
“Yes.” Again that single word crackled in the space that separated them.
Moments passed slowly with no words spoken, like thick syrup poured from a cold bottle, the silence broken only by the measured breathing of two people worlds apart.
Finally, the intrusive brrring of the phone snapped Cat back to reality. While she answered the call, Rory slipped the small framed photograph into his jacket pocket. He waited until Cat put the caller on hold and then said, “We’ll talk later.”
There was no mistaking the surety of his words, nor the determined look in his eyes before he left. Moving on autopilot, Cat went about her task, locating the book her customer wanted from a pile of special orders waiting to be called, and then setting it aside, all the while remembering the look in Rory’s eyes, the set of his face as he discovered the existence of his child.
Her child.
Their child.
“What’s wrong?” Mary Alice asked as soon as she was finished with her customer, following Cat into the back room. “Professor Sullivan walked out of here as if in a trance.” Her eyes shifted to the empty space on the desk. “He knows, doesn’t he?”
“Knows?”
“That he’s Tara’s father.”
Cat lifted her downcast eyes. “How—”
“Did I guess?” Mary Alice interjected, a knowing smile on her face. “It wasn’t all that hard, Cat. Your daughter resembles her father way too much. When you first told me that you were pregnant, I suspected the identity of your baby’s father, and when Tara was born, it was there on her face, the feminine version that decorates the dust jackets of his books.”
“Can’t deny the obvious then, can I?” Cat sank into her comfortable desk chair, idly running one hand through her hair.
“Certainly not the fact that he’s one handsome devil.” Mary Alice’s smile compressed as she asked her next question. “Tara doesn’t know, does she?”
“No. And why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“Wasn’t my place to.”
Cat acknowledged her friend’s discretion. “Thanks.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Cat shrugged her shoulders. “I wish I knew.”
“If I can be of any help, you’ve only got to ask,” Mary Alice offered. “I imagine it can’t be easy what with him just showing up again after all these years.”
“Thanks, but I got myself into this quagmire, so it’s my responsibility to get myself out.” Cat stood up, taking a few steps before stopping and perching on the stack of boxes the UPS man had brought. “I’ve been afraid that someday I might have to face this, even though I really didn’t think I’d ever see him again. When Rory left, I figured that that was it. I was safe with my secret as long as he remained in Ireland. It never occurred to me that he would ever come back here.” She stood up again. “But that was just a dream. An illusion that I chose to believe in.”
Cat gave a short snort of laughter. “Well, dreams don’t last, and illusions can sometimes become all too real.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell him about the baby, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Because she was my responsibility. I wanted her.”
Mary Alice pointed out, “You didn’t create her yourself.”
“No, but it was my decision to have her.”
“That really doesn’t answer my question.”
Cat paused a moment before speaking. “It’s not an especially original story.”
“What is?”
That remark brought a smile to Cat’s lips. “Rory didn’t want kids.”
“He told you that?”
Cat nodded her head. “In no uncertain terms. A few weeks after we started seeing one another, I ran into a college friend with her new baby. We stopped to chat for a few minutes and when she left, I mentioned to Rory that Nancy got what she’d always wanted, a child. I saw that chance meeting as an opening, to see what he thought about having kids. You know how important family is to me.
“Well, that was when he informed me they had no place in his future, in how he saw his life. They demanded too much time, too much energy, energy he could put to better use, he said, getting ahead in the academic world. So you see, a child would have been the last thing Rory would have wanted to know about.”
“He might have changed his mind if you had told him.”
Cat shook her head. “I doubt it. He wanted no ties, no commitments. Nothing to hold him back from where he was going and what he wanted to do.”
“But that was then.”
“And this is now,” Cat replied. “I know.”
“So what’ll you do?”
“Go home and think how I can best to tell my daughter that I have a surprise for her.”
Rory doffed his black leather jacket upon entering his town house, removing the photo from it beforehand. Walking to the butler’s table, he poured himself a stiff whiskey, took a seat and set the photo down where he could see it.
Sipping the potent liquid, Rory contemplated the truth that the picture contained.
A daughter. Flesh of his flesh. Blood of his blood. A part of him that he hadn’t known about until now. No clue. No inkling. No warning.
Children had never played an important part in his life, nor had he thought they ever might. He had other priorities, other interests in life.
Nice in theory.
But theory had been shot to hell less than an hour ago. Now he was faced with reality in the shape of a dimpled, black-haired little girl who smiled with his face.
And he didn’t even know her name.
“Rory knows.”
The man Cat addressed her words to hadn’t even joined her in the booth of the popular restaurant that catered to the legal crowd in Cedar Hill before she spoke. Bulging briefcases, three-piece suits, beepers and cell phones were de rigueur for all the attorneys present. The man who slid his tall, lean frame into the seat opposite her was no exception.
“And what’s he going to do about it?”
“How should I know, Brendan?”
“He gave you no hint of what he intends?” His tone was direct and to the point, the same way that he conducted himself in the courtroom.
Cat let out an exasperated sigh. Sometimes her big brother could be so infuriating with his cool, precise legal mind. “I wasn’t speaking to you as a client.”
“Sorry,” he said, extending his hand across the width of the table that separated them, giving hers a squeeze. “Force of habit.”
Cat suspected that it was just that, and maybe the influence of that overly cool woman that Brendan lived with. She often wondered how her brother, the warm and open man she knew and loved, managed sharing his life with someone who derived her greatest pleasure from her work, first and foremost. People came a distant second.
“I forgive you, but you know that already, don’t you,” she said.
Brendan gave her one of his lazy, winning smiles and held up his left hand toward her, fingers folded, thumb extended.
Cat smiled at the familiar gesture and held up hers, pressing it against her brother’s in an automatic response. Both carried a small scar from their childhood upon their respective thumbs when they decided to become what they called “double blood” brothers. To the five-and nine-year-old, that was a stronger bond than merely being brother and sister. This sharing and mixing was a sacred trust. It was a promise made and forever kept.
Their moment was interrupted by the arrival of the waitress, who served a mug of hot tea to Cat and a large glass of dark, imported beer to Brendan.
“I warned you that this might happen when he came back.”
“I know. It’s just that…”
“What?” Brendan probed, his handsome face reflecting his concern for his sister’s welfare.
“Rory’s changed.”
“How?”
“In subtle ways,” she explained. “I saw it in his eyes. Heard it in his voice.”
Brendan put his half-empty glass back on the table. “Maybe you were seeing what you wanted to see, sis. Underneath,” he said with a sharp, revealing tone, “he’s probably still the same selfish bastard that took advantage of your trust and your love.”
Cat smile at her brother’s staunch defense of her, but she couldn’t pretend that she had been a helpless victim in her affair with Rory. “I knew what I was doing.”
Brendan cocked his head to one side. “Did you? He was your first lover, someone a lot more experienced than you.”
Her first lover. Her only lover. “Yes. It wasn’t really his fault if I misunderstood what he wanted out of the relationship, if I fell in love and he didn’t.”
“He pursued you,” Brendan pointed out, the tactics he used every day in his job as an assistant district attorney slipping through once again. He was making a case, laying out the facts as he saw them.
“Because I wanted him to, Brendan.”
He rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe that you’re defending him.”
“I’m not,” Cat protested. “I’m merely stating how it was.”
“I know how it was,” her brother replied, concern for his younger sister evident in his long-lashed, hazel-green eyes. “I saw for myself that it damn near killed you when he walked away from the relationship.”
“But I survived.”
“Without him,” he said sharply.
“Yes, but with a part of him that grew inside me, the best part of him and me.”
“And now he wants what exactly? To take up where he left off? To try again to screw up your life?”
