Trish Wylie - Bride Of The Emerald Isle

But even so. It was bad form. And having had such a good impression of him so far, Keelin was disappointed, so she looked back at him and narrowed her eyes in warning.

His face stayed completely straight, as if he’d not meant anything by it at all. Mr Innocent.

Having had a moment to think, Terri looked back at her. ‘So, where are you from?’

‘Dublin, at the moment.’

‘Cool! I’m gonna live in Dublin when I finish school.’

‘Maybe.’

Terri scowled at the back of her father’s head. ‘Yes, I am. I’ve always wanted to live in the city.’ She leaned forwards again. ‘This place is so boring.’

Keelin could understand that to a teenage girl who had always lived there it would probably seem that way. She might even have felt the same way herself if the situations had been reversed. But to her, having a stable family life growing up, in somewhere as close knit as Valentia so obviously was, would have been heaven.

‘But it’ll be nice for you to have a home to come back to. I spent my whole childhood moving from one place to the next when all I really wanted was somewhere to call home.’

Had she just said that out loud?

She felt, rather than saw Garrett turning her way again, inwardly cringing at the bitter twist that might have come through in her voice.

But it wasn’t just the man who had caught it.

‘Didn’t you have a home?’

She focused all her attention on Terri, who was the safer option in her mind. ‘Oh, I had a home, lots of them, all over the place. Wherever we were my mother was always careful to give the appearance of it being a home.’

‘Where’d you go?’

‘London, New York, Paris, Rome, all the major cities at one time or another. Wherever my mother needed to be to promote her work or find her “muse”.’

‘Wow.’ Terri’s mouth formed a perfect circle for a second, her eyes wide. ‘That must have been amazing!’

Amazing would have been one word for it. Keelin had a list of other, more heartfelt adjectives. ‘It was certainly never boring.’

‘I’m so jealous. Why can’t we go to those places, Dad?’

‘Because I have work and you have school. And anyway, stop complaining, you’ve been to London.’

‘It’s not the same as living there.’

When Keelin looked at Garrett’s profile, she saw how his jaw clenched, just briefly. And she wondered why. Maybe his daughter’s lack of travel experience was a source of greater debate with them? But surely he had to understand that, to a fourteen-year-old girl, the world must have looked like an adventurous, magical place?

Still, when he shot a cool glance her way, she felt she had to make amends somehow, or at the very least not add fuel to Terri’s fire. So she looked for a safer topic instead and suddenly realized she’d been missing out on a major piece of information. And in not having asked had probably allowed Garrett his earlier, small indiscretion.

‘Did you go to London on a school trip or did your mum and dad take you? Will she be at home when we get there? I’m looking forward to meeting her.’

The atmosphere in the car changed immediately.

But before Keelin could discover what she’d done wrong, they were pulling up at the house and Garrett was switching off the engine.

Keelin frowned in confusion as he scowled in silence at the steering wheel. And when she looked back at Terri, she just caught the tail-end of the look of pain she gave the back of her dad’s head.

Before her eyes met Keelin’s and she took a breath. ‘My mum’s dead. She died when I was little.’

Keelin’s breath caught.

But before she could find something to say, Terri shrugged, unbuckling her seat belt before she reached for the door handle. ‘And Dad doesn’t like talking about her.’

‘Terri—’

The softly warning tone went unheeded with another shrug. ‘You can try if you like but I bet he won’t say much about her. He never does.’

When she slammed the door shut, Keelin looked back at Garrett’s profile, her voice low. ‘I’m so sorry—I had no idea.’

‘Why would you? It’s not like we run around wearing T-shirts with it written on the front.’ He shrugged in a similar way to his daughter. ‘It was a long time ago.’

She waited until his face turned towards her, his eyes searching hers for a brief second while she held her breath, exhaling it on a question. ‘You brought her up alone?’

‘No, I brought her up with Dermot’s help.’

‘That can’t have been easy.’

‘No worse than being dragged from pillar to post most of her life might have been.’

Keelin looked down at her lap, joining her hands and focusing on them. ‘We all have something to deal with.’

‘Yes.’ The word was low, intimate in the confined space of the car. ‘Yes, we do.’

Keelin’s eyes rose slowly, her gaze tracing up each of the buttons on his dark blue shirt, sweeping over the few dark hairs she could see at the open vee, and then up, past the sensual sweep of his mouth until it locked with his. The warm toffee melting as he blinked back at her.

And Keelin had never before been so knocked sideways. So aware of the steady sound of someone else’s breathing, or the way that his mouth parted slightly as he took each breath, of how the very space that he occupied seemed made more vibrant by the very fact that he was in it.

Oh, this could not happen! Not with him.

But even as she straightened her spine and leaned back towards the door he turned away, his voice suddenly cooler.

‘Dermot will be wondering what’s keeping us.’

‘WHY do you call your father by his first name so much? Is that an island thing?’

Garrett tried to focus his attention on the mist-covered lane as they left the house, his grip tighter than necessary on the steering wheel. But the tension he felt wasn’t linked to a fear of driving in such bad visibility. Oh, no. It had much more to do with being alone in Keelin’s company. Again.

No matter how he tried he couldn’t seem to stop himself from being abundantly aware of her, no matter how close or how far away she was from him. Even when she had sat on the far side of the living room after dinner, he had had to force himself to look away from her, to stop himself being consistently hypnotized by her smile or the golden sound of her laughter or her sweet scent when she walked by. A scent that now surrounded him inside his own car.

And he felt a growing resentment towards her for all those things. She had no damn business being so noticeable.

He frowned at her question. ‘Do I?’

‘Yes, I caught it a few times earlier but I guess I only really thought about it tonight.’

‘Well, it is his name.’

‘Would you like it if Terri called you Garrett?’

‘No, I’m her dad, and I work harder on six days out of every seven to live up to that title; especially since she hit puberty.’

‘You’ve earned it.’ Her voice was softer this time, like velvet almost, as it reached across the minuscule gap between them and caressed his eardrums.

She had the most gorgeously sexy, husky voice. A bedroom voice. The kind of voice that would have seduced even without the aid of the way she looked. And she’d almost floored him when she’d walked into the foyer earlier. With her almost ethereal beauty, and an innocence that belied the kind of worldly upbringing he now knew she’d had.

‘Don’t you feel that Dermot has, too?’

Garrett could have corrected her simply enough. Dermot had more than earned it, which was why Garrett had taken his name in the first place. But his resentment at how he had been feeling in Keelin’s company all evening, hell, since he’d first set eyes on her, translated as a lack of willingness to share any information with her.