They were good plans. Great, even. Brave courses set for the best of reasons. But what neither of them had factored in was the vulnerability of their plans to outside interference. As they strolled up the beach, both spotted the lone figure ahead at the same moment.
For Kara, there was no moment of instant horror and panic, but for Dylan there most definitely was as the man drew himself up to standing as they approached the pathway.
Dylan’s fingers bit suddenly into Kara’s waist, her first warning that something was amiss.
“About time too,” the man said, a triumphant grin on his face as his sly gaze moved between Kara and Dylan.
“What the fuck…?” Dylan ground out. Kara felt her world tip a little at his expression, at the rage in his voice.
“I told you never to come back here,” Dylan said, his voice low and full of menace as he stepped protectively in front of Kara.
“Extenuating circumstances, bro.” Justin shrugged his shoulders with the look of a man who knows he’s holding an ace.
Fear spiked through Dylan’s heart as he remembered turning off his phone earlier that day. Had Justin been trying to reach him? Had something happened to their mother?
Kara stood stock still, her mind reeling. Bro? This was Justin? This was Dylan’s surviving brother? There was little to link them, aside from their familiar accents and maybe their eyes. She made up her mind within seconds that Justin was a man with none of his brother’s virtues.
She placed her hand on Dylan’s arm as he moved threateningly towards the other man.
“Dylan…” she murmured, and Justin looked her straight in the eyes and laughed.
“Dylan?” He rolled his eyes. “Fuck, man!”
Dylan had his brother by the scruff of the neck within a second and had him pinned against the rocks.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” he growled. “Not like this.”
Kara’s world tilted even more queasily to the side. There was something very, very wrong. Dylan drew his fist back, but it stilled in mid air as Justin inclined his head towards someone new approaching the tense gathering. Kara swung around too, and they all watched as a woman headed towards them, stumbling awkwardly as she dragged a pushchair through the deep sand. Tall and skinny, her dark hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, her cotton dress was rumpled, and the tight, resentful look on her face spelled even more trouble.
“So you finally decided to show up,” she drawled, her eyes on Dylan as she came close to them.
Kara wrapped her arms around her midriff, an instinctively protective stance. She couldn’t speak. The look on Dylan’s face had again taken her breath. Whoever this woman was, she was no stranger to him.
Silence reigned for a few long seconds as the woman’s gaze shifted from Dylan to Kara.
“Looks like it’s down to me to make the introductions, darlin’,” she said, her eyebrows raised over her bitterly triumphant eyes.
Dylan let Justin go with a shove and turned to Kara. The look on his face broke her heart clean in two. Her world was about to turn upside down. She knew it in that split second as she waited mutely to hear what Dylan – or the woman - would say.
“Kara, please…”
“Oh, this is gonna be fuckin’ priceless,” Justin laughed. Without a second’s hesitation, Dylan swung around and punched him so hard on the jaw that he fell to his knees. Kara flinched, as much for the anguished, animal sound that left Dylan’s body when the blow struck its target as for the sound of knuckles smashing against bone.
“Some things never change, Matthew,” the woman said coolly, watching with apparent disinterest as Justin staggered to his feet, swiping blood from his mouth on the back of his hand.
Dylan’s heart was beating hard enough to give him a coronary. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.
“Kara…” he said, hating the hunted look in her eyes and wanting like hell to hold her.
“She called you Matthew,” Kara whispered, her face ashen even in the moonlight. “Why did she call you Matthew?”
The woman’s eyes widened and a small laugh escaped her throat.
“Oh my God,” she said, amused, furious, dangerous beyond reason. “She doesn’t even know your fucking name.”
“Shut the fuck up, Suzie,” Dylan said, never taking his eyes off Kara. He reached for her hands but she stepped backwards, out of his reach.
“Who is she?” Kara demanded, terrified of hearing his answer.
Suzie didn’t shut the fuck up. She stepped up alongside Dylan instead and stuck her hand out. Kara stared at it dumbly.
“I’m Suzie, honey,” she said, retracting her hand with a shrug, laying it on Dylan’s bicep instead. “His wife.” She glanced sideways and waved her other hand towards the pushchair. “And that’s his son.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Kara ran. She ran barefoot across the beach, as fast as she could without looking back. She heard Dylan call her name, once, and then again closer behind her. He caught her easily, his arms banding around her midriff, holding her against his chest as she struggled, throwing her elbows back into his body as hard and viciously as she could.
“Let me go,” she panted, fighting against him with every ounce of strength in her.
“She’s not my wife, Kara,” he said desperately, still holding her tight. “Not any more, I swear to you.”
She stilled in his grasp, winded by his words. He let go slowly, as if he feared she was preparing to run again. But she wasn’t. She didn’t want to run, suddenly. She wanted to hit him, to hurt him, to give him even the smallest taste of how much he was hurting her at that moment.
“But she was your wife, and you just conveniently forgot to mention her,” she spat. “I only ever asked you for one thing, Dylan.” She laughed, acid-harsh, as she said his name. “Or Matthew. Which is it?” She shook her head, and the icy revulsion in her eyes chilled his bones. “I only ever asked you for honesty.”
“I wanted to tell you, Kara,” he said hopelessly. “I wanted to tell you more than anything.”
“Well, you had plenty of fucking opportunities,” she threw back. “Months. Months of working alongside me, of screwing me all over this goddamn island, of listening to me spill my guts to you about fucking Richard, and my fucking dad.” She was crying now, big, heavy sobs dragging on her chest that made talking hard, but the words kept tumbling out regardless. “You really saw me coming, didn’t you?”
In the distance, the baby cried out.
“You’re not the man I thought you were,” Kara said, her voice broken and quiet. “I was going to tell you that I love you tonight. That I wanted to stay with you forever on that fucking boat.”
Dylan stared at her, hating himself, loving her so much it physically hurt. He could feel himself losing her and nothing he could say was going to make her stay.
“You’re someone else’s husband, and you let me fall in love with you,” Kara said. “She has your baby, and you pretend it’s never happened and let me fall in love with you.”
“It’s not my baby,” he whispered.
“You expect me to believe that?” Her eyes were daggers.
He didn’t. “Kara, we’re divorced. I have the papers on the boat…” Raw desperation hollowed his voice. He reached out for her and she backed away, shaking her head vehemently.
“I don’t want your papers, or your lies, or your fucking hands on me ever again.” Her voice shook with rage. “You make me feel dirty.”
It was the hardest thing anyone had ever said to him. She carried on retreating, watching him like a wounded animal, her furious face telling him how much she didn’t want him to follow. “I don’t know who you are,” she said flatly, a few metres away from him now. “I don’t know who you are.” She pressed her hands against her cheeks. Shock was setting in. She was cold, shivering despite the warmth of the evening.
“Yes you do,” he said softly, desperate to touch her, knowing she didn’t want him to. “You know me better than anyo
ne else has ever known me.” He glanced back up the beach. “I don’t belong with them, Kara. I belong here, with you. I love you.”
For the briefest of seconds he saw her falter, and hope flared bright in his heart. Would she stop? Would she come back? The truth was so dreadfully overdue, but he would tell it all, right now, if she gave him the chance. Please come back.
Pain etched lines across her forehead as she fought to make sense of the evening’s revelations, to pick the bones of truth out from amongst the lies.
Kara had made her mind up.
“Go.” she said, clearly. “Go back to your family.” She jerked her head towards the end of the beach, her expression determined. “I never want to see you again.”
Dylan watched her walk away, taking his heart with her. He didn’t try to stop her. How could he? He had no defence.
Every word she’d said was true. He had lied to her from the moment he’d met her. He had chosen not to take a single one of the many opportunities there had been to tell her the truth.
He watched her walk towards the Mustang, heard the hard slam of the door reverberate across the beach, stood bone still until he saw the tail lights had climbed the hill and disappeared around the curve of the road.
She was gone, and he was left there holding her silvery sandals, Prince Charming without his Cinderella. Except he wasn't the hero. He was the villain, the liar, the man who always lost in the end. He turned away and walked slowly towards the two people he hated most in the world, and the child he’d never laid his eyes on in his life.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Every dread-filled step back along the beach towards Justin and Suzie was a step back into his old shoes. He could feel Dylan Day dissolving into the Ibizan sand beneath his feet, leaving him exposed as Matthew McKenzie, the man who let his brother die.
“Leave us,” he snarled at Justin as he approached them. Justin shrank back into the shadows, presumably not wishing to have his face rearranged for a second time that evening.
Suzie sat on the rocks, disinterestedly feeding the baby in the pushchair in front of her from a plastic bottle.
Dylan sighed heavily and sat down a couple of feet away from her, his head in his hands. The sea washed unnoticed over his shoes.
“What the fuck is going on here, Suzie?” he said eventually.
She looked across at him. She looked worn out, more jaded than the last time he’d seen her.
“This is your kid.”
She set the baby’s almost empty bottle down on the rocks and reached into the pushchair to lean him forward, rubbing his back, his chin resting between her thumb and forefinger as she winded him. Dylan stared at him, his tiny face and startling mop of dark hair. How could that be his son?
“I was pregnant when I left you.” Suzie answered the question he hadn’t yet asked. She continued patting mechanically, not looking at the baby, her attention on Dylan.
“Yeah, and you’d been screwing Donovan for months before then,” Dylan reminded her, certain that he hadn’t fathered the child.
He’d barely had sex with Suzie in the last few months of their doomed-from-the-start marriage. Just once or twice, and unhappily, thanks to too much tequila when he’d been especially maudlin about Billy.
The discovery that Suzie had been screwing around behind his back had come as no great surprise. They’d married in Vegas not long after Billy had died, and neither of them had much recollection of the ceremony or of their reasons behind it. Billy had been their link. His brother, her ex-lover. He’d tried to lie in the bed he’d made for a while, but the truth was that it had been a cold and hard place. Numbed by so much unhappiness, he hadn’t been one bit sorry to see her pack her bags.
Suzie had been a symptom rather than the cause. It hadn’t even hurt that she’d left him to shack up with Donovan, the very guy to whom both of his brothers had gambled their lives away to, the very same guy who had taken everything Dylan owned beside the shirt on his back in recompense for Justin’s unpaid debts. It had been a stark choice. His club, or his brother. The fact that his wife had thrown herself into the equation too barely even registered. He’d made the choice he wished he’d been able to make for Billy. He did it for Billy, and to save his mother from the heartache of burying another son.
“He’s been tested,” Suzie said, nodding down at the baby. “He’s not Donovan’s. He even looks like a fucking McKenzie.”
Dylan digested her words, every one a death knell for him.
“So what… you’ve come here after money?” Dylan guessed. “If he’s my child then you know I’ll pay.”
“I don’t want your money,” she said. “And I don’t want your child, either.”
He jerked his head up, not understanding, and she shrugged.
“Come on, Matthew. Do you really think Donny’s going to raise a McKenzie brat?”
It had been a long night. Given time to absorb the facts and think about it, Dylan wouldn’t have wanted Donovan anywhere near his son either. But as it was, in his state of numb shock, he needed her to spell things out for him.
“Suzie… what are you actually saying?”
She stood up, and thrust the pushchair towards him. “He’s three weeks old. Everything you need for him is in his bag.”
“Suzie, for fuck’s sake!” Panic galvanised Dylan onto his feet, knocking into the pushchair handles. “You’re his mother, he needs you. You can’t just walk away from him.”
She was doing exactly that. She turned her back and set off across the sand.
“Suzie! Jesus, Suzie, stop! I don’t have the first fucking clue what to do with a baby.”
His former wife paused and turned around, her hands flung out to the sides.
“So learn. Or give him up. I don’t really care either way as long as I get on that plane without him.”
“You can’t mean that,” he said, appalled.
Suzie sighed and looked at him flatly. “Donovan loves me, Matthew. He takes care of me. He has money.”
Dylan laughed. “Yeah, my fucking money.”
Suzie shrugged, stony-eyed. “He has money,” she said again. “He doesn’t want your kid.” She glanced back at the baby, just once, but her expression didn’t change. “Feed him every few hours. Change his nappy. It’s not fucking rocket science.”
The baby stirred, opening his eyes and blinking up at Dylan. He had Billy’s eyes.
“What’s his name?”
Suzie paused, almost embarrassed. “He doesn’t have one.”
Dylan sighed heavily at Suzie's retreating back. "He does now."
She walked away without a backward glance, off towards Justin further up the beach, off back home without her ex-husband’s bastard child weighing her down.
Kara drove aimlessly, following the coast road. She couldn’t go back to the villa. It was Sophie and Lucien’s wedding night. If she went back now, they’d rally round her, enveloping her in hugs, wiping her eyes, plying her with brandy as she spilled the whole sorry tale of how she’d been deceived again. Sophie would comfort her, and Lucien would want to kill Dylan, and their wedding day memories would be forever tarnished. Kara had enough experience of that herself to know that she couldn’t and wouldn't inflict it on her best friends.
The traffic around her thickened, and she found herself amongst the brash lights and raucous revellers of San Antonio, otherwise known as party central. She could park up the Mustang and lose herself here amongst these people. Drink until she couldn’t remember who she was. Screw someone without even asking his name, and forget the man who hadn’t loved her enough to bother even telling her the truth about his own.
People spilled out onto the pavements from the neon-lit bars on either side of the road, laughing, shouting, kissing.
She drove on, leaden-hearted, until the lights thinned out again, and then on some more, meandering around the island until she found herself drawn to somewhere familiar. She swung the Mustang down a sandy lane, nosed through the fringe of pine
trees, and turned off the engine as her wheels touched the edge of the sand.
And there she stayed all night, dry-eyed and empty-hearted, overlooking the beach where she’d made love beside a campfire with a make-believe man called Dylan Day.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
One look at Kara’s pale face when she walked into the villa at just after seven the following morning was enough to tell Sophie that something was very, very wrong.
Why was she here at all? Sophie frowned, trying to make sense of it amongst the happy detritus of yesterday in her head. Kara was supposed to be with loved up with Dylan. All thoughts of the blissful wedding night she'd just spent with Lucien flew from her mind as she put the coffee cups down with a clatter and half-ran across the room.
“Kara,” she cried, taking in her best friend’s dishevelled bridesmaid dress and mascara-streaked cheeks. “What happened?” Her mind raced with disastrous scenarios. Had there been an accident? “Is Dylan okay?” she pressed. It had to be Dylan. Kara’s face was ashen as she put down her keys and shook her head.
“No.”
Kara’s expression was so foreboding that Sophie’s hands flew to her cheeks and tears spiked her eyelashes. “What’s happened? Tell me, Kara. What is it?”
Kara lifted her tired eyes, realising that Sophie had misunderstood.
“Don’t worry Soph,” she sighed. “He isn’t hurt.”
Relief unclouded Sophie’s features, followed swiftly by confusion and concern. “So… what is it, then?”
Kara flopped wearily on the sofa and Sophie followed her, tight with anxiety. At that moment, Lucien appeared up the stairs, his hair still mussed from Sophie’s fingers, naked aside from his oldest, most loved pair of jeans, T-shirt in hand. The honeymooner smile dropped from his mouth as he looked at their two faces: Sophie’s worried and Kara’s something far, far worse. In a moment he was hunkered down next to them, his senses on high alert, a feeling of apprehension chilling him and overriding the warmth of the morning.
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