Her One and Only Valentine

by Trish Wylie

  ‘The only thing we have in common now is our child.’

  His eyelids seemed to grow heavier on her use of the word ‘our’, his head lowering towards hers as he mumbled back, ‘Not the only thing, Mac. There’s still this.’

  The first touch of his mouth was heartbreakingly soft, almost reverent, as if he knew that anything more would have been too much too soon. But Rhiannon moaned low in her throat in protest at her need for more. In an automatic movement born of familiarity, her hand rose, smoothing her fingers into the hair at the back of his head.

  Just like she remembered it—a slight coarseness to the touch that made it so very male and yet soft enough to add to the sensuality as her fingers moved.

  He traced his mouth across hers from one edge to the other, slow, so slow, then he leaned his head a little closer to make the kiss firmer, deeper. While Rhiannon met each touch and mirrored it, her head spinning.

  The fingers that had traced her features turned over, brushed over her cheek, turned again, trailed softly over her jaw and along the arch of her neck to rest on the beating pulse below her ear.

  Her fingers tangled further into his hair, began a soft kneading at the back of his head that immediately relaxed his shoulders, and he sank his upper body tighter to hers. And somewhere in her mind she realized that she still knew what felt good for him every bit as much as he was showing her he still knew what felt good to her—because they had history.

  But not a future.

  She forced her hand out of his hair and went still. And Kane felt it the moment she did because he removed his mouth from hers and leaned back, looking down into her eyes with a silent intensity that tested her resolve to its limits. It would just be so very easy to give in to the temptation of him.

  But she couldn’t. Not again. Because unbridled passion may have been enough for a brief relationship when she was young and free, but it wasn’t enough for her now.

  ‘I should go get Lizzie from school.’

  Kane nodded, leaning back to allow her to scramble to her feet before he pushed off his elbow and stood up, raising his hands to brush the straw off his clothes. ‘You should get changed first.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ She stepped through the straw and headed out of the stable, not looking back. Because she really needed to stop looking back, didn’t she?

  CHAPTER TEN

  KANE had no idea why he’d let himself kiss her. Up until the very second he had, he most certainly hadn’t intended to. And he wasn’t best pleased with himself for it either.

  They were too tangled up in the past—that was all it was. It was an echo of the way they had used to be and he’d succumbed to that, when really, as a fully grown male, he should have had more self-control.

  That was just the thing, though, wasn’t it? Ever since he’d walked into the house that first night, his control over things seemed to have been taken from him—piece by piece. It was no wonder he was having difficulty with it.

  Being on such shaky ground might have explained why he’d told her the truth about his disappearance all those years ago. Every action has a reaction. That was what she’d said. Maybe that was part of the reason he’d told her too. Because she was right about that, wasn’t she? If he hadn’t got sick when he had, left when he had—

  But he’d been twenty-one, for crying out loud! He’d thought he was invincible. Finding out he wasn’t had been a lot to take in. And that was putting it mildly.

  Actually, all in all, he’d felt he’d coped with it well, dealt with it, put it to the back of his mind and got on with his life. Until he’d watched Mattie wage the same kind of war and lose…

  And that loss had made him re-evaluate just what he had done with his life so far—a natural reaction, he supposed, when he was hit with a case of guilt over why he was still here and Mattie wasn’t.

  The sight of Lizzie trying to wrestle a stuffed monkey from the jaws of her new ‘puppy’ dragged a smile on to his mouth. Just watching her lifted his spirits in a way he couldn’t remember them ever lifting before. And every day he spent with her—even if they talked complete nonsense or did nothing particularly exciting—had him more in love with her than he’d been the day before. She was a miracle after all, wasn’t she? The child he’d resigned himself to never having.

  And he knew he had Rhiannon to thank for that miracle and its associated joy. They had made this child together. And that bound him to Rhiannon for the rest of his life in a way that went beyond just the physical. The same physical he had given in to so damn quickly again after ten minutes rolling around in some straw.

  She’d always had that effect on him. From the first day she’d flashed a smile at him across the counter of the coffee shop facing Trinity. A smile, a sparkle in her eyes, a mild flirtation that he’d soon looked forward to every day. That was all it had taken for him to be drawn in until he was almost addicted to her.

  But he’d been a twenty-one-year-old typically hormone-driven male. He hadn’t thought about things like the future or how miscommunication would have a long-term effect on both of them and the child they made. Life had been an adventure, a game, with days to be filled with nothing more complicated than fun and laughter.

  It had taken the chance discovery of a lump for him to re-evaluate everything.

  He leaned back, resting his weight on his elbows as he stretched his legs out, crossing them at the ankles. Then he tilted his head back, eyes closing, as he allowed the imagined warmth of the late January sun to put a red glow on the backs of his eyelids while he took a deep breath of the crisp air.

  Knowing that Lizzie was a product of his time with Rhiannon was constantly pushing more and more of the memories into his mind from an earlier trouble-free time in his life. But there hadn’t been any point in remembering, had there? That time had been gone. Breaking up with Rhiannon had been on a long ‘to-do’ list that he’d made to break contact with a world where people didn’t have to face up to their own mortality.

  But again he wondered: if he hadn’t been sick, if he hadn’t broken up with her—if he’d waited to see where that first flush of purely sexual attraction had taken them in the long term…

  Kane hated ‘ifs’. And now he had dozens of the damn things. In business he always researched variables—but in his personal life? Well, not so much. Because in his personal life he made quite sure there were no variables to begin with. He was always careful not to get involved with the kind of women who wanted long term—things like marriage and two-point-four of the kids he couldn’t give them without the help of the medical profession.

  But to add to all the variables he now had, he had to add another; whatever physical attraction there had been between Rhiannon and him before—was still there.

  The kiss in the straw had proved that.

  It had probably been creeping up on him a little more with each day he spent near her. And when he had witnessed that look of distress on her face after he’d told her the truth, he’d wanted to kiss the pity out of her eyes, to prove to her that he was still very much alive, still very much one hundred per cent male even if he couldn’t ever make another Lizzie with her.

  Which begged the question of whether that could be the reason he’d kissed her this last time? Was there a part of him that felt it had to prove himself to her?

  Opening his eyes, he dropped his chin, automatically turning his head towards the French windows at the back of the house, beyond which Rhiannon had been spending more and more of her time since the day in the stable. Most likely hiding—well, that was what he’d guessed she was doing—at first.

  His gaze strayed back to Lizzie; her laughter echoed off the walls of the house, and he smiled again. But after a while he ended up looking back towards the windows, a breeze lifting the end of the long curtains out through a small gap that called to him.

  Come on in—you know you want to.

  He pursed his mouth in thought, because he was tempted. He wasn’t so sure any more that Rhiannon was hiding, not j
udging by the dark shadows in her eyes at dinner the last couple of nights. And if there was a problem, then he needed to know about it. Forewarned was forearmed…

  ‘Kane!’ Lizzie stopped tugging the stuffed monkey, waiting until Kane looked at her before she grinned and asked, ‘Can we take Winston up by the lake like we did yesterday? He loved it.’

  ‘All right.’ He uncrossed his ankles and pushed up on to his feet, lifting the jacket he had been sitting on and shaking it while his eyes strayed yet again to the open windows. ‘Give me a minute and we’ll see if your mum wants to come too. She might need some fresh air.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Rhiannon didn’t hear him come in. He knew that the minute he stepped past the curtain and saw her resting her face in her hands. As if somehow sensing his presence, she glanced up, her soft brown eyes widening a little in surprise while she pushed long tendrils of auburn hair that had escaped her pony-tail off her flushed cheeks.

  ‘Hello.’ The greeting was soft, maybe a little cautious, and Kane felt a momentary longing for the brief ease there had been between them before he’d kissed her. ‘It can’t be time for lunch already.’

  He watched as she glanced at her watch, her finely arched brows then rising in question. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Nope, we’re fine. Lizzie wanted to know if you fancied going for a walk, so I said I’d ask.’ He kept studying her, the changes in the tones of colour in her eyes as she thought, the way she moved her head, how her sweater rose and fell as she breathed.

  Then her eyes softened, a smile curling her lips upwards. ‘I could certainly do with a break.’

  Kane smiled back at her, glanced away when it felt awkward, even momentarily considered just staying in the open doorway where he could make a swift withdrawal to the safety of Lizzie. But instead he found himself drawn into the room and perching on the edge of the huge old leather-topped desk Mattie had once sat behind when they’d talked business and life in general.

  This had been the room where they could talk with ease and without boundaries—about the kinds of things Kane could never seem to talk to other people about—like being scared, which wasn’t something any man ever liked to confess to…

  He cleared his throat, then, with a quick glance down at the open books, paperwork and bills scattered over the surface of the desk, he risked looking back at Rhiannon’s face. And, unbidden, his earlier thoughts about Lizzie being the child they had made together slammed into the front of his skull, vividly this time, with Technicolor detailed memories of ‘how’ it had happened.

  Yep, and there it was again. That immediate physical awareness of her—even stronger now with the additional Technicolor details and the memory of their last kiss. Admittedly, Rhiannon may have been pretty when he had known her at eighteen, but she was an entirely different woman at twenty-nine. She’d blossomed into adult womanhood, with more lush curves than she’d had when he’d known her so intimately, curves he’d been all too aware of when he’d been lying with her on a bed of straw.

  That physical awareness had probably been there from the first night in the kitchen. And, before they had begun to communicate better, he’d been mad as hell at her for that, hadn’t he? He hadn’t wanted it to be there, hadn’t sought it out. It was another example of the lack of control he seemed to have when she was around. And now that he’d given in to it once already…?

  Well, now a part of him couldn’t help but wonder what she’d do if he pursued it…

  ‘You’re still working on the house accounts?’

  A shadow of doubt crossed her eyes, then she dismissed it with a sigh. And Kane knew how she felt. It wasn’t as if either of them were the open book type. But this whole ‘getting along for Lizzie’s sake’ had to be a two-way street, didn’t it? One little kiss couldn’t get in the way. And he was fully prepared to use that line of reasoning if he had to, especially having told her more than he ever intended to about himself already.

  But, before he could decide what route to take, she took a breath, her gaze dropping to where her fingers were shuffling papers back and forth for no apparent reason. ‘It’s a lot to take in. I mean, I’ve worked on accounts before but these…’

  He watched as she shook her head, loose strands of hair trailing over her shoulders. ‘It’s a large place.’

  ‘Yes and a huge responsibility.’

  ‘Mattie must have thought you were up to it.’

  Rhiannon surprised him by laughing softly as she leaned back in the large chair. ‘Well, he may possibly have got that one wrong.’

  The words surprised him again. From what he’d understood over the years, Rhiannon had been the only one who had understood Mattie’s passion for Brookfield. It wasn’t as if huge country estates were all that common any more and it took a particular personality to enjoy the constant upkeep a place like this would take. It was a lifetime’s work. At one time a legacy handed on from generation to generation—almost like a crown from one generation of royalty to another.

  And for a long time in Ireland, the people who’d owned a legacy like this one had been universally hated, to the extent of being run off the land before their homes were burned to the ground. But Brookfield had somehow survived all that and was now in the hands of an Irishwoman. It was Rhiannon’s legacy to hand on to Lizzie, wasn’t it?

  Which was another reason for Kane to be involved in any problem there might be, right? It had to do with Lizzie’s future—his daughter’s future—and her legacy. And that made it his business.

  A sudden thought brought a frown to his face.

  ‘What?’ Rhiannon leaned forward in her chair, resting her elbows on top of the papers.

  ‘I was right, wasn’t I? This place can’t look after itself without the income from the estate.’ He didn’t need an answer; he could see it on her face. ‘How long did Mattie know about Lizzie?’

  Rhiannon blinked in confusion. ‘I don’t see—’

  ‘How long?’ He leaned his upper body a little more in her direction and kept his voice calm. ‘I’m not trying to start another argument; I just need to know.’

  Recognition of the same words she’d used to coax his biggest secret from him seemed to persuade her to volunteer the information.

  ‘I think he probably knew early on. He kept coming into the coffee shop long after you’d gone and it was only then that we really became friends.’ She smiled at a memory. ‘He brought Lizzie her first teddy bear at the hospital. But he didn’t ask me outright until just before I married Stephen.’

  Kane nodded again. Yeah, that was what he’d figured.

  Rhiannon’s eyes narrowed a little. ‘Am I missing something?’

  ‘There was always method in Mattie’s madness. I should have known there was more to it.’ Kane shook his head this time, a wry smile crossing his lips. ‘He knew rightly what he was doing.’

  ‘All right—you’ve lost me.’

  He pushed up off the desk, glancing towards the open doors before he smiled and cocked his head in their direction. ‘Come for a walk and I’ll maybe tell you what I think.’

  He hit her with a raised brows silent challenge, and smiled more when she rolled her eyes and chuckled. All right, so maybe getting along better with Rhiannon wasn’t that bad a thing. And he felt a little more in control again, which felt good, if a little ironic considering he’d just realized that they’d both been manipulated to where they were.

  ‘All right then.’ She pushed back from the desk, still smiling as she walked past him. ‘You’ve got me. I’ll grab a coat. I’m a sucker for a mystery.’

  ‘Well, this one’s not my doing.’ He stood up, teasing her in a low voice, ‘You’ve already wheedled out all my darkest secrets.’

  She turned around and walked backwards for a few steps, her head tilting flirtatiously. ‘I doubt very much that I know them all.’

  Kane studied her for a long moment. ‘You know enough.’

  ‘Yes.’ The word was spoken softly, with a matching s
mall smile and a light in her eyes that he couldn’t quite read from across the room. ‘Enough to know what I need to know, I guess.’

  He stood in the empty room long after she’d left, not waiting for her but just thinking. What was it with him and this woman?

  They were halfway around the lake, their exhaled breath forming puffs of steam in the cold air before Rhiannon couldn’t take any more of the suspense.

  Not that walking side by side talking about nothing more difficult than Lizzie’s antics with Winston and pointing out wildlife as it appeared wasn’t a moment of acquiescence that she subliminally recognized as a rare experience of camaraderie. But she was still curious as all hell about what he’d figured out in the library.

  Just in case it was something that would lead them to awkwardness or harsh words again, she savoured the moment, tilting her head back to watch the breeze push the clouds by overhead before she closed her eyes and filled her lungs with a deep breath of cool winter air. And she smiled contentedly.

  ‘You really do love it here, don’t you?’ Kane’s deep voice sounded close by her shoulder.

  When she opened her eyes and lifted her gaze to his, she smiled a smaller smile, suddenly feeling shy again, which wasn’t really all that surprising, considering the last time she’d been ‘alone’ with him. And, even with Lizzie disappearing and reappearing out of the trees from time to time, they were still alone, weren’t they?

  The thought made her pulse skip. ‘Yep.’

  He nodded and stopped at the edge of the water, his gaze searching the ground while he spoke. ‘Did you know Mattie planned on leaving you this place?’

  ‘No.’ She frowned as he bent over and selected a few round, flat stones, tossing them into the palm of his other hand. Surely he didn’t think she’d done something to influence Mattie’s decision? They’d been friends, better than friends—more like brother and sister. Mattie had been her family when she didn’t have one any more. When her own family had turned her away—the ‘good child’ who had made a horrible mistake proving too difficult for them to even look at…