Flynn’s gaze followed that deliciously pert behind until it disappeared into the servery.

The thrill of the chase had always excited him, but this chase was something else. Kat Winwood was hot. Flames and flares and hissing and spitting fireworks hot.

It was amusing to set the bait and sit back and wait for her to take it. She pretended to hate him. To loathe the ground he walked on, the space he occupied. The air he breathed.

But behind the fiery flash of her green-grey gaze he could see something else. Something she was at great pains to conceal. That betraying flicker of attraction. The way her pupils flared like spilled ink. The way she swept the tip of her tongue over her lips. The way her eyes kept tracking to his mouth, as if drawn there by an invisible, irresistible force.

He was a lower-case lover. The chase, the conquest, the don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you was the way he played things now.

And he wanted to play with Kat Winwood.

The Ravensdale Scandals

Scandal is this family’s middle name!

With notoriously famous parents, the Ravensdale children grew up in the limelight. But nothing could have prepared them for this latest scandal…the revelation of a Ravensdale love-child!

London’s most eligible siblings find themselves in the eye of their own paparazzi storm.

They’re determined to fight back—they just never factored in falling in love too…!

Find out what happens in

Julius Ravensdale’s story

Ravensdale’s Defiant Captive December 2015

Miranda Ravensdale’s story

Awakening the Ravensdale Heiress January 2016

Jake Ravensdale’s story

Engaged to the Ravensdale Enemy April 2016

Kat Winwood’s story

The Most Scandalous Ravensdale Available now!

The Most
Scandalous
Ravensdale
Melanie Milburne

www.millsandboon.co.uk

An avid romance reader, MELANIE MILBURNE loves writing the books that gave her so much joy as she was busy getting married to her own hero and raising a family. Now a USA TODAY bestselling author, she has won several awards—including the Australian Readers’ Association most popular category/series romance in 2008 and the prestigious Romance Writers of Australia Ruby award in 2011. She loves to hear from readers!

MelanieMilburne.com.au Facebook.com/Melanie.Milburne Twitter @MelanieMilburn1

To the First Sisters of Oz Immersion Class held in Melbourne 2015—Dorothy Adamek, Natasha Daraio, Wendy Leslie, Nas Dean and Kristin Meacham. And of course the amazing Margie Lawson, who taught us all so much. It was such a privilege to spend a week with such talented writers. xxxxxx

Contents

Cover

Introduction

The Ravensdale Scandals

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘I AM NOT serving that man on table nine,’ Kat Winwood said to her co-worker Meg on her way through to the café kitchen. Aspiring actor she might be, but being polite to that Savile Row–suited, silver-tongued smart ass was way outside Kat’s repertoire. She couldn’t afford to lose this job—not unless she got the dream part in the London stage play. The role that would launch her career so she would never have to wait on another table or do another crappy—no pun intended—toilet-paper advertisement.

Meg glanced at the man before looking back at Kat. ‘Isn’t that Flynn Carlyon? The hotshot celebrity lawyer to those famous theatre actors Richard and Elisabetta Ravensdale?’

‘Yes.’ Kat gritted her teeth and unloaded the tray, stabbing the knives into the dishwasher basket as if it were Flynn Carlyon’s eye sockets. How had he tracked her down? Again?

Kat didn’t want her co-workers or her new boss to know she was Richard Ravensdale’s scandalous secret. The secret child of his two-night-stand hotel barmaid.

His love child.

Ack. Thinking about the tacky words was bad enough. Seeing them splashed all over every London tabloid for the last three months had been nothing short of excruciating. Toenails-torn-off-with-pliers excruciating. What had love had to do with her conception? She was the product of lust. The dirty little secret Richard had paid to be removed. Obliterated.

So far no one at work had recognised her. So far. She had styled her hair differently so she didn’t look like the photos that had been circulated. She had even modified her name so the press would leave her alone. For the last couple of months Flynn had been doing his level best as Richard’s lawyer to get her to play happy families, but she wasn’t going to fling her arms around her biological father and say ‘I’m so glad I found you’ any time soon. Not in this millennium. Or the next. If Flynn thought he could wave big, fat cheques in front of her nose, or wear her down by turning up at her workplaces, then he had better think again.

Meg was looking at Kat with eyes as wide as the plates on the counter. ‘Do you know him? Personally, I mean?’

‘I know enough about him to know he drinks a double-shot espresso with a glass of water—no ice—on the side,’ Kat said.

Meg’s eyebrows lifted. ‘You sure you don’t want to...?’

‘No.’ Kat slammed the dishwasher shut. ‘Absolutely not. You take him.’

Meg walked somewhat timidly towards Flynn’s table where he was sitting alone with one of the daily broadsheets spread out in front of him. They exchanged a few words and Meg came back with brightly flushed cheeks and a wincing don’t-shoot-me-I’m-the-messenger look. ‘He said, if you don’t serve him in the next two minutes he’s going to speak to the manager.’

Kat glanced at her boss, Joe, who was behind the hissing, steaming and spluttering coffee machine working his way through a list of early morning orders. If this job went kaput, she wondered how long she could couch surf in order to get enough money together to get a place of her own. At least she had the house-sitting job in Notting Hill starting this evening. The money was good, but it was only for the next four weeks. Come the first of February, she would be homeless, unless she could find another dirt-cheap bedsit. Preferably without fleas. Or bedbugs.

Any wildlife.

Kat sucked in a steadying breath, aligned her shoulders and walked to table nine with her best be-polite-to-the-annoying-customer smile stitched in place. ‘How may I help you?’

Flynn’s molasses-black gaze surveyed her tightly set features and lowered to the name badge pinned above her right breast. ‘Kathy is it, now?’ His smile was slow. Slow and deliberate. Amusement laced with mockery and a garnish of ‘got you.’

Kat tried to ignore the faint prickle in her breast where his gaze had rested. ‘Would you like the usual, sir?’

His eyes gleamed. ‘In a cup, preferably. It doesn’t taste quite the same when it’s poured in my lap.’

He was baiting her. Goading her. She. Would. Not. Bite. ‘Would you like anything with your coffee?’ she asked. ‘Croissant? Muffin? Sour dough toast? Eggs? Bacon? No, perhaps not bacon. We can’t have you being a cannibal, can we?’

Damn it.

She’d bitten.

The corner of his mouth tilted in a smug smile, making him look like he thought he’d won that round. ‘What time do you finish work?’

Kat gave him a brace-yourself-for-round-two look. ‘I’m here to serve you coffee or a meal or a snack. I’m not here to give you details about my private life.’

Flynn glanced towards the coffee machine. ‘Does your boss know your true identity?’

‘No, and I’d like to keep it that way.’ Kat gripped her pen to stop herself from holding it to his throat to make him promise not to tell. ‘Now, if you’ll just give me your order...’

‘Richard’s agent has organised a Sixty Years in Showbiz celebration for him later this month,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a This Is Your Life format. I want you there.’

His tone suggested he was used to getting what he wanted. Every. Single. Time.

But Kat hadn’t been cast in her kindergarten nativity play as a donkey for nothing. The most intractable mule had nothing on her. ‘Why would I want to go to some ghastly, alcohol-soaked bragging fest about his theatre career when he paid my mother to get rid of me before I was born?’

Just like he’d tried to pay Kat to keep away once the news had first broken of her existence. Where had her father been when she’d needed a father? How many times during her childhood had she prayed for a dad? Someone to provide for her. Someone to protect her. Someone to love her.

Someone.

Richard hadn’t even had the decency to come to see her face-to-face, but had sent his arrogant, up-himself lawyer Flynn Carlyon.

‘You’re being unnecessarily stubborn,’ Flynn said.

Unnecessarily? Of course it was necessary. Her pride was necessary. It was all she had now her mother was dead. Kat leaned down so the customers at the nearby tables couldn’t hear. ‘Read my lips. N. O. No.’

His hooded gaze went to her mouth, his face so close to hers she could smell his aftershave, a citrus blend with an undertone of something else, something that reminded her of a cool, dark pine forest where secrets lurked in the shifting shadows. He had recently shaved but she could see every tiny dot of stubble along his lean jaw and around his nose and mouth, the signal of potent male hormones surging through his blood.

His eyes dipped to the open V of her shirt. Only the top two buttons were undone, revealing little more than the base of her neck, but the heat in his gaze made her feel as if she was standing there bare breasted. She straightened as if someone had fisted the back of her shirt and pulled her upright.

Do. Not. Look. At. His. Mouth. Kat chanted it mentally while her eyes continued their traitorous feasting on the contours of his lips. He was smiling again as if he knew exactly the effect he had on her. How could a man she hated so much have such a gorgeous mouth? He had the sort of mouth you could only describe as sinful. Smoking-hot, sex-up-against-the-kitchen-bench sinful. Sex-with-the-curtains-wide-open sinful. The upper lip was straight across the top, but the lower lip more than made up for it. It was full, sensual. The midpoint in perfect alignment with the sexy shallow cleft in his chin.

The only reason she was obsessing about his mouth was because she was doing ‘Winter Deep Freeze’ with her best friend, Maddie Evans. Their celibacy pact had started in November and, with only a month to go, Kat was determined to win. She had to prove a point, not just to her best friend, but also to herself. No way was she going to play out the script of her mother’s life. Bad date after bad date. Sex that scratched an itch but left filthy finger marks on the fabric of her soul.

Who said Kat couldn’t go three months without sex?

She could. And she damn well would.

One of the customers tried to move past, bumping against Kat so she had to suck in her stomach and press herself against Flynn’s table. The brush of his trouser leg on her knee sent a lightning zap of heat through her body. Hot. Searing. Scorching. So scorching she expected to look down and see a singed and smoking hole in her thick black tights.

She stepped back once the customer had gone, pen poised pointedly. ‘Espresso? Water no ice?’

‘He’s your only living parent,’ Flynn said.

Kat sent him a look that would have frozen mercury. ‘So? With relatives like him, lead me to the nearest orphanage. I’m checking in.’

Something moved in his gaze as quickly as a camera-shutter click. But then his lazily slanted smile came back. ‘Are you going to get my coffee?’

‘Are you going to take no for an answer?’

His eyes beneath those dark, winged brows roved her lips. Did he feel the same flicker of animal attraction deep and low in his belly? Kat could feel it now. The pulse of lust thrumming in her blood every time his dark eyes trapped hers, as if he too were thinking of what it would feel like to have her stripped naked and pinned beneath his body.

Or against the kitchen bench.

Be still her heart, her pulse, her giddy-with-excitement girly bits.

Another customer came past, but this time Kat turned so her back was to Flynn. Big mistake. She could sense his gaze on her bottom, burning through the layer of her boring black uniform to the satin and lace secrets beneath. She turned and carefully masked her features, but even so she could feel the warmth glowing in her cheeks.

‘What are you doing for dinner this evening?’

Kat put her hands on her hips, anchoring her resolve in case it took it upon itself to quit its shift. ‘I suppose this is a rarity for you? A woman actually having the willpower to say no to you?’

The glint in his eye made something in her stomach swoop. ‘Nothing I like more than a challenge. The harder, the better.’

Joe came up carrying a tray of coffees. ‘Kathy, are you working the floor or flirting with the customers?’

‘Sorry, Mr Peruzzi,’ Kat said. ‘This customer has a...a complicated order.’

‘Tables seven and ten are waiting for their bills,’ Joe said. ‘And tables two and eight need clearing and resetting. I’m running a café, not a freaking dating agency.’

Kat smiled sweetly even though her back teeth were glued together. ‘There isn’t a man inside this café I would be even remotely tempted to date.’

Joe hustled past and Flynn said, ‘Would you be remotely tempted to serve them some coffee?’

She held his mocking look with steely intent. ‘You won’t win this, Mr Carlyon. I don’t care how many jobs you make me lose. I will not be told what to do.’

He leaned back in his chair as if he had all the time in this world and the next. ‘By the way, you were great in that toilet-paper ad,’ he said. ‘Very convincing.’

Kat could feel her back molars grinding down to her mandible. At this rate, her dental hygienist would be charging a search fee. The only thing more humiliating than doing a job like that toilet-paper gig was having your worst enemy see it. ‘So, just the coffee, or would you like a full breakfast to clog your arteries?’

He gave a low, deep chuckle that made the backs of her knees shiver. ‘I’ll have some cake.’

Kat frowned. It was seven thirty in the morning. Who ate cake at that hour? ‘Cake?’

‘Yep.’ He winked at her. ‘And I’m going to eat it too.’

* * *

‘What was that all about?’ Meg asked when Kat came back to the servery. ‘You’re so red I could cook table four’s buckwheat pancakes on your cheeks.’

‘I swear to God I’m going to explode if I have to go anywhere near that man,’ Kat said. ‘I seriously do not get what women see in him. So what if he’s good looking? He’s an arrogant jerk.’

‘I think he’s gorgeous.’ Meg’s expression had that whole star-struck thing going on. ‘He has such dark-brown eyes you can’t tell where his pupils begin and end.’

Kat got out a large slice of devil’s food cake and liberally coated it with cream. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That should fix him. If that doesn’t give him a heart attack, nothing will.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with his heart,’ Meg said. ‘He looks like he seriously works out. And he’s so tall. Did you see him stoop as he came in?’

‘I suppose he has to be that tall to allow room for all that ego,’ Kat muttered, picked up the coffee and made her way back to his table.

‘Here you go.’ She placed the plate, the coffee and the glass of water in front of him.

Flynn cocked an eyebrow. ‘Aren’t you going to give me a cake fork?’

Kat rounded her eyes in mock surprise. ‘Oh, you actually know how to eat with cutlery, do you? I would never have guessed.’

His lopsided smile did that swoop and dive thing to her belly. ‘You should be onstage.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the plan.’

‘So how’s that going for you?’

Kat wasn’t going to tell him anything about her audition in a few days’ time in the West End. The AR Gurney play Sylvia couldn’t have come along at a more opportune time. It was one of her favourite plays and she knew deep in her bones she was right for the part of the dog Sylvia. Audiences worldwide loved the notion of a human playing a dog. If she landed the role and did it well, it could launch her career. She wanted the part on her own merit, not because of whose DNA she shared. She didn’t trust Flynn not to leak something to Richard Ravensdale, who might then open doors she wanted to open with her own talent.

‘I’ll go and get that fork for you.’ She gave Flynn a tight smile. ‘Or would you like a shovel?’

His eyes held hers with implacable intent. Hinting at an iron will that was energised, excited, exhilarated by the mere whiff of a challenge. ‘I’d like to see you tonight.’

‘Not going to happen,’ Kat said. ‘I have an appointment with a cat and a fur ball.’

That glint was back in his eyes. ‘I didn’t know you had a cat.’

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve picked up a new house-sitting job. The agency I work for occasionally rang me this morning. The person they had for the post had to pull out at short notice due to a family crisis. Apparently the cat is one of those ones that are too precious to go to a boarding centre. It has—’ she put her fingers into air quotes ‘—issues.’

‘How long will you be house-sitting?’

‘A month.’

‘Where in London?’

Kat gave him a cynical look. ‘Why would I tell you? You’d be on my doorstep day and night pestering me to meet my sperm donor.’

The corner of his mouth tipped up in an enigmatic smile. ‘So, I guess I’ll see you when I see you.’

Not if I can help it. She swung around and stalked back to the kitchen.

* * *

Flynn’s gaze followed that deliciously pert behind until it disappeared into the servery. The thrill of the chase had always excited him but this chase was something else. Kat Winwood was hot. Flames, flares, and hissing and spitting fireworks hot.

It was amusing to set the bait and sit back and wait for her to take it. She pretended to hate him. To loathe the ground he walked on, the space he occupied. The air he breathed.

But behind the fiery flash of her green-grey gaze he could see something else. Something she was at great pains to conceal. That betraying flicker of attraction. The way her pupils flared like spilled ink. The way she swept the tip of her tongue over her lips. The way her eyes kept tracking to his mouth as if drawn there by an invisible, irresistible force.

He felt the same stirring in his body whenever he was near her. Lust rumbled and rolled through his body like a cannonball. It was taking longer than usual to get her to admit her interest. But that was what made him all the more determined. The challenge made his blood tick and flick with excitement. He was used to having anyone he wanted. Dating had become almost boring. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had said no to him.

Not since Claire had walked out on their engagement.

He ducked back out from under the crime-scene tape in his mind that blocked him from thinking of how desperate he had felt back then. Desperate to be with someone. To have a family. To have a future to make up for the blank space of his past.

He wasn’t that commitment-with-a-capital-C man now.

He was a lower-case lover. The chase, the conquest, the ‘don’t call me I’ll call you’ was how he played things now.

And he wanted to play with Kat Winwood.

He wanted to feel her sexy little body gripping him like a clamped fist. To feel her mouth breathing fire over his skin. To feel her tongue twisting, twirling and tangling with lust around his. He wanted to hear that cute little Scottish accent screaming out his name as she convulsed around him.

Kat might be playing it cool, but how long could she ignore the heat that flared between them?

Especially when he was going to be a lot closer to her than she’d bargained for.

A whole lot closer.

CHAPTER TWO

OKAY, THERE HAS to be catch. Kat unlocked the door of the Notting Hill Victorian mansion the house-sitting agency had assigned her. Call her a pessimist, but she knew from experience that anything that looked too good to be true usually was. But so far all she could see was luxury. The sort of opulent luxury she had dreamed of since she was a kid growing up on a council estate in Glasgow. Even the air inside the house smelt rich. The grace notes of an exclusive perfume and the base note of some sort of essential oil made her nostrils quiver in sensory delight. She closed the door and the stunning crystal chandeliers overhead tinkled against the bitter early January wind, as if disturbed by the whispery breath of a ghost.

Kat ignored the faint shiver that crept over her scalp. She was being ridiculous. Of course she was. It was her nerves because of the audition next week. She could feel the moths fluttering in her belly even now. Big, winged ones, beating against the walls of her stomach like razor blades. If she got the part in the West End play and her career finally took off she would never have to waitress or house-sit again. She would be able to buy her own luxury mansion, have her own space instead of borrowing a stranger’s.

Usually the houses she looked after were a little more modest than this. But she wasn’t complaining. Although, four weeks of living with such decadence was going to make it hard to adjust once she went back to a poky little bedsit—if she was lucky enough to secure one.

Someone had kindly left the heating on...or maybe that was because of Monty, the cat Kat was supposed to be minding along with the house. Kat wasn’t a great fan of cats. She was more of a dog person. But apparently Monty was a delicate ‘inside’ cat, which meant there wouldn’t be any nasty unmentionable creatures to deal with because he wouldn’t be out at night hunting.

Anyway, turning down a job because of a bit of a feline prejudice wasn’t an option just now.

Besides, she was an actor, wasn’t she? She would pretend to like the cat.

Kat wandered through the house looking for the cat...or so she told herself. What she was really looking at were all the photos of the couple that lived there. The Carstairses were both professionals—the wife was a GP and the husband a barrister, and they had two gorgeous kids, a boy and a girl who were both under five. They had taken the kids to Australia to see relatives—or so the agency lady had told her.

It was hard to look at those photos and not feel a little twinge of envy. Well, maybe not just a little twinge. More like a large fist grabbing at her innards and twisting them until the blood supply was cut off.

Kat’s childhood hadn’t looked anything like these kids’ childhoods. Firstly, she hadn’t had a father. She had one now but that was another story. Secondly, her mother hadn’t looked as relaxed and content as the mother in the photos. Her mother had spent most of Kat’s childhood inviting the wolf at the door in for sleepovers. And as for any exotic holidays abroad...the only ‘overseas’ holidays she’d had with her mother had been to visit her grandparents in the Outer Hebrides on the Isle of Harris. But typically those visits had only lasted a couple of days before her mother had got tired of the I-told-you-so lectures from her strict Presbyterian parents.

Kat found more photos in the gorgeous sitting room that overlooked the even more gorgeous garden. Even though it was back to its bare bones, being the first week in January, it would be the perfect place for a couple of kids to play on long summer afternoons, or for two adults to sit out there with a glass of chilled wine and chat about their day while they watched the children gambolling about.

Funny, but at her last damp and mouldy bedsit the rain had looked every bit as bleak and dismal as winter rain could be. It would drip down the panes of glass...on both sides, unfortunately. But at the Carstairses’ house the droplets trickled down—thankfully on the outside only—the triple-glazed windows like strings of glittering diamonds.

Kat shifted her gaze to a photo in a frame on a mahogany drop-sided table next to the window. It was a Christmas photo: she could see a brightly decorated Christmas tree with heaps of beautifully wrapped presents underneath its branches. The same tree was still in situ—it was on her lists of tasks to pack it away before the family returned. There were ten or twelve people in the photo, the children in the front, the shorter adults at the sides and the tallest at the back. But there was one man who stood head and shoulders over everyone else. She picked up the photo with a hand that wasn’t quite steady.

What was he doing there?

Kat clenched her teeth so hard she could feel the tension turning the muscles in her neck and shoulders into boulders. She put the photo down before she was tempted to smash it against the wall. She swung away from the window, pacing the carpeted floor like a swordfish in a salad bowl.

What was Flynn Carlyon doing in the bosom of the family she was house-sitting for?

The sticky feet of suspicion crawled up her spine and over her scalp. She had thought it a little odd that the people hadn’t wanted to speak to her on the phone, especially since there was a pet involved. People were sometimes fussier over who minded their pets than their kids. But her supervisor had said another client had recommended her. Not just the agency, but her. By name.

Which client?

Kat was starting to smell a six-foot-four, Savile Row–suited rat with sooty black hair and eyes the colour of the espresso he drank.

What was Flynn up to?

Kat had told him in no uncertain terms she wanted nothing to do with her father.

No contact. No favours. No money.

She hadn’t spoken to the press even though they had hounded her for weeks. She had gone underground to escape them. She kept a low profile when she was out and about. She wore her hair under a beanie or wore sunglasses. It might be considered a little crazy in the dead of winter, but at least she was able to avoid eye contact. She was even auditioning under a false name in order to distance herself from the Ravensdales. She couldn’t win either way. If she auditioned under her real name, Katherine Winwood, everyone would know she was Richard Ravensdale’s love child, so she might be given the part for all the wrong reasons. Everyone would be crying nepotism. She wanted the part because of her talent, not because of her bloodline. A bloodline she was intent on ignoring, thank you very much, because her father hadn’t wanted her in the first place. Why on earth would she want to connect with the man who had not only insisted on her mother having an abortion but had paid her to do it?

What was it about the Ravensdales and money? Did they think they could pay her to go away one minute and then lure her back the next?

Why couldn’t they accept she wanted nothing to do with them?

Kat had been tempted to meet Miranda, her half-sister. It felt a little weird to think she had half-siblings—twin brothers ten years older, Julius and Jake, and then Miranda who was only two months older than Kat. Two months. Which just showed what a jerk Richard Ravensdale was because he had still been seeing Kat’s mother while he’d been reconciling with Elisabetta Albertini, his then ex-wife. His soon-to-be ex-wife again if the tabloids were to be believed.

But, in spite of her longing for a family to belong to, Kat wanted nothing to do with any of them. Not even Jasmine Connolly, the bridal designer who had grown up at Ravensdene with Miranda. Jasmine was the gardener’s daughter and had recently become engaged to Jake Ravensdale. She seemed a nice, fun sort of girl, someone Kat would like to be friends with, but hanging out with anyone who had anything to do with the Ravensdales was not on.

Kat was used to being an only child. She was used to being without a family. She was still getting used to being without her mother. Not that they’d had the best mother and daughter relationship or anything. Kat always felt a little conflicted when it came to days like Mother’s Day. Somehow the pretty pink cards with their flowery and sentimental verses and messages didn’t quite suit the relationship she had with her mother. Growing up, she’d felt unspeakably lonely because of it.

If you couldn’t talk to your mother, then who could you talk to?

Kat certainly didn’t need a rich and famous family to interfere with her life and her career. She was going to make it on her own. She didn’t need any favours, leg-ups or red carpet invitations. And she certainly didn’t need any hotshot, too-handsome-to-be-trusted London lawyers manipulating things in the background. What was his connection with the Carstairs family? Was Mr Carstairs a work colleague? What did Flynn hope to achieve by having her mind a colleague’s house? Did he think it would give him a better chance of ‘accidentally’ bumping into her so he could flirt and banter with her?

Over her dead and rotting body it would. There was no way she wanted anything to do with Flynn Carlyon. He was exactly the sort of man she avoided. Too good-looking, too sure of himself, too much of a ladies’ man.

Too tempting.

There was the sound of a miaow and Kat turned around to see a large Persian cat the colour of charcoal strutting in as if he owned the place. Which he kind of did. ‘Hello, Monty.’ She reached down to pat him. ‘I believe we’re going to be housemates for a few weeks.’ Monty gave her a beady look from eyes as yellow as an owl’s and shrank away from her outstretched hand with a hiss and a snarl that sounded scary enough to be in a horror movie. A Stephen King movie.

She straightened. ‘So it’s going to be like that, is it? Well, you’d better get over yourself quick smart, as I’m the one in charge of feeding you.’

The cat slunk out of the room with its tail twitching like a conductor’s baton.

Kat rolled her eyes. ‘That’s why I prefer dogs. They’re not stuck-up snobs.’

The rain was coming down in icy sheets when Kat came back from picking up some shopping an hour later. There was food for the cat and some basic things in the pantry but she preferred to purchase her own food. She would have ordered it online but her credit card was still maxed out after her mother’s funeral. The thought of that big, fat cheque Flynn Carlyon had dangled under her nose when he’d come into the café a couple of months back was dismissed by her pride.

No way was she being bought.

No. Way.

If she wanted to speak to the press, she would. If she wanted to connect with her father, she would in her own good time. Not that it was going to happen any time soon, if ever. She couldn’t imagine a time when she would feel anything but disdain for a man who had used her mother so callously. Just because she shared some of his DNA didn’t mean she was going to strike up a loving, all-is-forgiven father-daughter relationship with him. Where had he been when things had been so dire growing up? He hadn’t contributed anything towards her upbringing. Not a brass razoo. He had paid off her mother and then had promptly forgotten about her. The money he had paid had gone before Kat was a year old. She and her mother had lived in hardscrabble poverty for most of her childhood.

The shame of not having enough, of wanting more but never having enough to pay for it, was not something she could easily forget. Her mother had worked a variety of cleaning and bar jobs, none of them lasting very long. Her mother would always have ‘an issue’ with someone in the workplace. Kat had felt utterly powerless as she’d watched her mother swing from manic enthusiasm for a new job to coming crashing down in a depressed stupor when she lost it and/or walked out. Her black mood would last for weeks, sometimes months, until the cycle would begin all over again.

Kat had decided as a young child she would do everything in her power to make life better for her mother. She’d thought if she could find a way to get her mum some help, to get her some financial stability and support, then her mother might magically turn into the mother she’d dreamed of having.

But in the end she hadn’t been able to do it. Her mother had died of cancer, perhaps not in dirt-poor poverty, but close enough to make Kat feel nothing but anger towards her biological father who could at the very least have made their lives decent instead of desperate.

It wasn’t just anger she felt. It hurt to think Richard Ravensdale hadn’t cared anything about her. His own flesh and blood had been nothing to him. Just a problem that had to be removed and then swiped from his memory. Permanently.

The parking space outside the Carstairses’ house was tight, especially with the rain obscuring her vision. Kat’s car wasn’t big by any means but trying to get it into the tiny space between the shiny black BMW and the silver Mercedes was like trying to squeeze an elephant’s foot into a ballet slipper.

Not going to happen.

She blew out a breath and tried again. But now a line of cars coming home for the day was banking up behind her. In spite of the biting cold, beads of sweat broke out over her brow. She put her foot on the accelerator and nudged the car backwards, but someone behind her impatiently tooted their horn and put her off her game. She slammed on the brakes and gripped the steering wheel even tighter. She was tempted to roll down the window and give the driver behind the finger, but then a tall figure appeared at her driver’s door.

Oh, God. A surge of panic seized Kat’s chest. Road rage. Was she to be beaten senseless? Dragged out of the car and kicked and shoved and stomped on and then thrown to the gutter like a bit of trash? She could see the headlines: Struggling actor beaten to a pulp over traffic incident. She could see the social media footage. It would go viral. Millions of people would view her demise. She would finally be famous but for all the wrong reasons.

Kat turned to face her opponent with a bravado she was nowhere near feeling. This was the upside of having gone to acting classes. She could do ‘affronted driver’ down pat. But the man wasn’t growling and swearing or shaking his fists at her. He was smiling.

She rolled down her window and glowered at Flynn Carlyon’s amused expression. ‘I would ask you what the hell you’re doing here but I’m not sure I want to know the answer.’

He leaned down so his head was on a level with hers. Kat dearly wished he hadn’t. This close she could see the bottomless depth of his glinting eyes. The cleanly shaven jaw of this morning was gone; in its place was the dark shadow of late-in-the-day, urgent male stubble peppered all over it. And, if that wasn’t enough to make her heart come to a juddering stop, some strands of his ink-black hair fell forward over his forehead, giving him a rakish look. ‘Want me to park it for you?’

‘No, thank you,’ Kat said, doing a prim schoolmistress tone straight out of her actor’s handbook. ‘I’m perfectly capable of parking my own car.’ Not quite true. She had always had trouble with reverse parking, especially in busy traffic. She had failed her driving test three times because of it.

His smile stretched to tilt one corner of his mouth. ‘It looks like it.’

Kat clenched her teeth hard enough to crack a walnut. And to add insult to injury two more cars tooted. Flynn straightened and turned, flattening his back against the side of her door as he waved the traffic through. The fabric of his coat—one hundred per cent cashmere, if she was any judge—was close enough for her to touch. She gripped the steering wheel like her hands were stuck there with superglue and wondered why the planets had conspired against her to have Flynn Carlyon witness her humiliation in a busy Notting Hill street.

He turned back and tapped the roof of her car. ‘Watch out for the car behind,’ he said. ‘It’s mine.’

She double-blinked. ‘Yours?’

‘Yeah, didn’t I tell you?’ That annoying smile again. ‘We’re neighbours.’

Later, Kat didn’t know how she’d parked that car without ramming into his. She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. Nothing would have given her more pleasure than to smash up his pride and joy. To reverse her car at full throttle time and time again.

Crash. Bang. Crash. Bang. Crash. Bang.

She got out of her car and pretended she didn’t notice how out of place it looked sandwiched between his showroom-perfect BMW and the silver Mercedes. It looked like a donkey at the starting gates at Royal Ascot.

Kat joined him on the footpath. ‘Just answer me one question. Did you have something to do with my appointment at the Carstairses’ next door?’

‘They were looking for a house-sitter. Your name came up.’

Kat narrowed her gaze. ‘Why me? You know nothing about me.’

‘On the contrary, Miss Winwood,’ he said with a slow smile that had a hint of imperiousness, ‘I know quite a lot about you.’

‘Like what?’

‘Your father is Richard—’

‘Apart from that.’

‘Why don’t you want to meet him?’ Flynn said.

‘The first time we spoke you wanted to stop me meeting him. Now you want me to come to his stupid party. How do I know what he’ll want tomorrow or the next day?’

He gave a loose shrug of a very broad shoulder. Did he row for England? Work out? Lift bulldozers in the gym? ‘He’s changed his mind since then,’ he said. ‘He wants to make amends. He feels bad about the way things turned out.’

Kat gave a scoffing laugh. ‘“Turned out”? Things didn’t “turn out.” He was the one who tried to get rid me as a baby. He treated my mother appallingly. The only thing he feels bad about is my mother finally telling me of my origin. That’s what he’s upset about. He thought his dirty little secret had gone away. His agent is probably only doing this as some sort of popularity stunt. I bet Richard couldn’t care less about meeting me. He just doesn’t want his adoring public to see him as a deadbeat dad.’

‘The rest of the family would like to meet you. They haven’t done you or your mother any wrong.’

There was a part of Kat that conceded he was right, but she wasn’t ready to join them for family get-togethers, because it would pander to Richard Ravensdale—not to mention Flynn, who was acting for him. ‘What about his wife, Elisabetta Albertini?’ she said. ‘I bet she isn’t waiting for me with open arms to welcome me to the bosom of the family.’

‘No, but she too might change her mind when she sees how sweet and lovable you are.’

Kat shot him a withering look. ‘But I thought she was going to divorce him. Who will you represent if she does? Don’t you act for both of them?’

‘I’m hoping it won’t come to that. A divorce would be costly to both of them.’

‘Why should you mind?’ she said. ‘Either way, you’d still get paid bags and bags of money.’

‘Contrary to what you might think, money is not my primary motivation in representing my clients,’ he said. ‘The Ravensdales are people I admire and respect and am deeply fond of. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get in out of this rain.’

Kat had barely noticed the rain but now that he mentioned it she could feel it dripping down the back of her coat collar in icy shards. God knew what her hair looked like. She could feel it plastered to her scalp and over her shoulders like a Viking helmet. Not that she cared a fig for how she looked in front of Flynn Carlyon. She didn’t care for his opinion one way or the other. So what if he only ever surrounded himself with beautiful people?

She. Did. Not. Care.

She balled her hands into fists. ‘What do you possibly hope to achieve by having me installed next door?’

His look was inscrutable. ‘If you’re so uncomfortable with the notion then why not call the agency and be transferred?’

Kate would have done so if it hadn’t been for the money. The Carstairs family was paying extra for her to Skype them each day with the cat. Weird, but true. She only hoped Monty would agree to sit on her lap long enough to look at his family on the other side of the globe. ‘Once I commit to something, I don’t like to let people down,’ she said.

‘Nor do I,’ he said and, giving her another one of those annoying winks, he turned and went inside his house.

* * *

Flynn was enjoying a quiet drink in his sitting room, with his little dog Cricket snoring at his feet while he went over a client’s brief, but his mind kept drifting to his conversation with Kat Winwood. Conversation? More like a verbal fencing match. As soon as he’d met her last October he had felt a compulsive desire to see her again. Even if Richard had told him to forget about making contact with her, Flynn knew he would still have done so, for his own reasons, not his client’s.

She was simply unforgettable.

Her sparking green-grey eyes, her beautiful, wild brown hair with its copper highlights, her gorgeous figure, her razor-sharp tongue and acerbic wit were a knockout combination. A sexy, heady cocktail he wanted to get smashed on as soon as he could.

When his neighbours had phoned and asked him if he knew anyone who could house-sit for them at short notice, he had immediately thought of her. Why wouldn’t he recommend her? He knew she was well respected at the agency. It suited him to have her close. He was a fully paid-up member of the keep-your-friends-close-and-your-enemies-closer club.

Not that she was really his enemy. She was a challenge he couldn’t resist.

As he saw it, Kat had everything to win by making peace with her father. Not that Flynn believed Richard was trying to make up for the way he had handled things. He wasn’t so gullible he couldn’t see what his client’s motives were. He knew it had more to do with Richard wanting everyone to think he was doing the right thing by Kat. He hadn’t been a class act in how he had treated Kat’s mother, but as for his apology being genuine and heartfelt? Well, Richard hadn’t received all those acting awards for nothing.

Kat was being stubborn on principle. Flynn could understand it but he wanted her to put her prejudices aside and form some sort of relationship with the man whose DNA she carried. She was lucky. At least she knew who both her parents were.

He had no idea who his were. And he never would.

For the last couple of months Kat had filled his every waking moment and far too many of his sleeping ones. He wasn’t sure what it was about her that intrigued him so much. He’d had his fair share of beautiful women over the years since Claire had left him, but none had made him feel this power surge of attraction. He looked forward to seeing her, to bantering with her. She was smart and funny, and her broad Scottish accent was so darn cute it never failed to make him smile. He liked her energy, the feisty flare of temper that made him wonder what she would be like in bed. All that passion had to have an outlet. He wanted to be the trigger that made her explode.

He had to get her to that party. It was his mission. His goal. It wasn’t just because Richard had entrusted him with the task of getting her to meet with him. It was because once Flynn set his mind to a task he allowed nothing and no one to get in his way. He had faced down huge challenges all of his life and won.

This was no different.

The party was going to be televised live. His reputation would be on the line. Everyone knew he had been assigned the task of getting Kat into the bosom of the family. He couldn’t accept failure. He had to pull this off no matter what. Failure wasn’t in his vocabulary. His professional tag line was ‘Flynn Equals Win.’

Kat was being pig-headed about meeting Richard out of loyalty to her mother. That wasn’t a bad thing. He understood it. Admired it, even. But this wasn’t just about her father. The whole family wanted to embrace her because they were decent people who wanted to do the right thing by her. She had no one else. He couldn’t see why she wouldn’t welcome the chance to be included in one of London’s wealthiest and most talented families. Plus they could fast-track her to the fame she was striving for.

Cricket lifted his head off his crossed paws and gave a sharp bark.

‘You want a walk at this time of night?’ Flynn said.

Cricket bounced up and yapped in excitement, spinning in circles like a dervish on an upper. Flynn put his papers down and smiled. ‘You do realise this is why my mother got rid of you? You’re seriously high maintenance.’

Cricket ran to pick up his lead, trailing it behind him and getting his stubby little legs tangled up in it in his excitement. Flynn bent down to clip the lead on the dog’s collar and ruffled his odd little one-up, one-down ears. ‘Come on, you crazy little mutt. But, if it starts snowing, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

CHAPTER THREE

KAT WAS ON her way to bed when she realised she hadn’t seen Monty since she had given him dinner—or tried to. He had turned up his nose at her and stalked off with his tail twitching as though someone had sent an electric current through him. The Skype attempt hadn’t gone well either—she bore the scratches on her hands to prove it. But at least she had met the Carstairs family, who were as lovely as they appeared in their array of photographs. They assured her Monty would soon be purring contentedly in her lap once he established trust. They never once mentioned their handsome neighbour, which seemed a bit suspicious to Kat. If he was smack, bang in the middle of their most recent Christmas photo, then surely they would mention him in passing?

She couldn’t stop looking at that photo every time she went into the sitting room. It wasn’t just Flynn’s smiling face that pulled her gaze, but the way he was so comfortable around those kids. The little boy called Josh was looking up at Flynn in what looked like a state of hero worship. There was another photo in the study, with Flynn and the Carstairses’ little girl Bella, who was about three years old, sitting on Flynn’s knee. She was sucking her little thumb and leaning contentedly against Flynn’s broad chest as he read to her from a children’s picture book.

It made Kat wonder if he planned to settle down and have his own family one day. He was known to be a bit of a ladies’ man but not as much of a full-on playboy as Jake Ravensdale had been before becoming engaged to Jasmine Connolly. But if Flynn had been seeing anyone on a regular basis lately there hadn’t been anything in the press—or not that Kat had been able to find.

The only person he had been seen with, ironically enough, was her.

She looked through each of the rooms but Monty wasn’t anywhere to be seen. There was a circular patch of sooty fur where he had been sleeping on the Carstairses’ white linen bed but no sign of him in the flesh...or fur, so to speak.

She checked all the windows, even though she hadn’t opened any, to make sure he hadn’t escaped. But when she checked the laundry window she noticed there was a cat flap on the bottom of the door. She hadn’t noticed it there before, but then, why would she? Monty was supposed to be an inside cat. Kat had cleaned his litter tray earlier. He wasn’t supposed to go outside and get wet, or snowed on, or run over by a car...or bring in—gulp—horrible hunting trophies. The cat flap was unlocked. Should she close it? What if he was outside and couldn’t get back in?

Kat decided to do another thorough search of the house before she locked the cat flap. Surely Monty wouldn’t go outside on such a foul night? What was that saying about mad dogs and Englishmen? Or was that just a saying about summer?

She was coming through the sitting room when she heard the bump of the cat flap opening and closing. Then she heard the sound of Monty giving a weird-sounding miaow. Every hair on Kat’s scalp fizzed at the roots. Every knob of her spine froze. She knew what that was. That was a victory miaow. The sort of miaow a cat makes when it lands its prey and was about to show it off to its owners.

But Kat wasn’t his owner. She didn’t want to see his handiwork. No way. This was why she didn’t own a cat. This was why she didn’t even like cats. They brought in stuff, horrible stuff, like dead birds and...and...she couldn’t even think the word without wanting to jump on a chair and scream. Dread as cold as the snow falling outside chugged through her veins. A hedgehog climbed up her windpipe until she couldn’t take a breath. Fear tightened her chest, making her heart go into arrhythmia so bad any decent cardiologist would have rushed for a defibrillator.

Her eyes were glued to the door of the sitting room. It was like a scene in a Friday night fright film. She was frozen with primal fear, unable to move a step forward or a step back. Her feet were nailed to the floor. Monty made that muffled miaow again from just outside the sitting room, the miaow that sounded like he had his mouth full of...something.

No. No. No. Kat chanted manically. This couldn’t be happening. Not to her. Not on her first night in this lovely house. Lovely houses like this didn’t have dreadful, ghastly, horrid, unmentionable creatures inside them...

It was so quiet she could hear each soft pad of Monty’s paws on the carpet as he came round the door into the sitting room. Puft. Puft. Puft. Puft. Her eyes widened in horror when she saw what was dangling from his mouth. ‘Eeeeeek!’ She screamed so loudly she was vaguely aware she might shatter the chandeliers or windows. Or wake the neighbours. In France.

But then the stupid cat let the thing go. And it wasn’t dead! It streaked across the floor right next to Kat’s feet and disappeared under one of the sofas.

Kat bolted from the room so fast she could have qualified for the Olympics. She snapped the door shut behind her and fled to the front door, barely stopping long enough to grab her coat from the coat stand. She didn’t bother with gloves—she would never have been able to get them on her shaking hands. She had only taken one flying step out of the Carstairses’ house when she came face to face with Flynn, who was walking a weird-looking dog.

He frowned and steadied her with a hand on her arm. ‘Are you all right? I heard you screaming and—’

Kat pointed back at the house with a quaking finger. ‘In—in there... M-Monty brought in a...a...’

‘A what?’

‘I can’t say it,’ she said. ‘Please will you get rid of it for me? Please? I’ll never be able to sleep knowing it’s in there.’

‘What’s in there?’

Kat absolutely never cried. Not unless it was written in the script. Then she could do it, no problem. But fear colliding with relief that someone had come to her rescue made her want to throw herself on Flynn’s chest and howl like a febrile teething baby. She bit her bottom lip, sure she was going to bite right through before she could stop it trembling. ‘I—I have this thing...a phobia... I know it’s silly but I—I just can’t help it.’

He put his gloved hand on her shoulder. Even though there were layers of fabric between his skin and hers, she felt something warm and electric go right through her body from the top of her shoulder to the balls of her feet. ‘Did Monty bring in a mouse?’

Kat squeezed her eyes shut and put her hands over her ears. ‘Don’t say that word!’

His hand slipped down from her shoulder to take her bare hands in his gloved ones. ‘Look at me, Kat.’

Kat looked. But he wasn’t laughing at her. His expression was serious and concerned. ‘It got away from Monty,’ she said, almost wailing like a little kid. Waa-waa-waa. ‘It—it went under the sofa.’

He gave her freezing hands a warm squeeze. ‘I’ll deal with it, or at least Cricket and I will.’

‘Cricket?’

The little dog at Flynn’s feet yapped and spun around on his back legs as if on cue. He was not the sort of dog she was expecting someone like Flynn to own. She had expected some classy, Crufts-standard, purebred Malamute, a regal Great Dane or a velvet-smooth German pointer. Cricket wasn’t any bigger than a child’s football, was of indeterminate breed and looked like something out of a science fiction movie. His wiry coat was a caramel brown with little flecks of white that stood up at odd angles like they had been stuck on as an afterthought. He had one ear that stood up and one that flopped down, a thin, wiry tail that curled like a question mark over his back and a lower jaw that stuck out a few millimetres like a drawer that hadn’t been shut properly.

‘My right-hand man,’ Flynn said. ‘An expert at rodent-ectomies.’

Kat was almost limp with relief. ‘I’d be ever so grateful.’

‘Do you want to wait at my house while we get the business end of things sorted?’

Another groundswell of relief nearly knocked her off her feet, as if all her bones had been taken out of her body. ‘You wouldn’t mind?’

He smiled and looped her arm through one of his. ‘Come this way.’

Kat was beyond worrying about going all damsel-in-distress with him. She was in distress. She would have happily sat in an axe murderer’s house rather than face that...that creature under the sofa.

Besides, it was a perfect opportunity to have a look around Flynn’s house while he wasn’t there.

He unlocked the door and led her inside, telling her to make herself comfortable and that he’d be back soon. Cricket bounced at Flynn’s feet as if he knew he was in for some blood sport. Eeeww.

Once they were gone Kat had a peep around. It was much the same layout as the Carstairses’ house next door but, while the Carstairses’ was a family home with loads of photos and family memorabilia, there was nothing to show Flynn’s family of origin. There wasn’t a single photo anywhere. There were some quite lovely works of art, however. And some rather gorgeous pieces of antique furniture that suggested he was a bit of a traditionalist, rather than a man with strictly modern taste.

Kat found his study next door to the sitting room, which had a beautiful cedar desk and leather Chesterfield chair. There was a black Chesterfield sofa set in front of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The titles went from thick law tomes to the classics and history, with a smattering of modern titles, mostly crime and thrillers.

She went back into the sitting room and sat down at the grand piano that was set to one side of the room near the windows. She put her fingers to the keys, but all she could tinkle out was a nursery rhyme or two—but not Three Blind Unmentionables. Not exactly Royal Albert Hall standard, she thought with an embittered pang at what she could have had if her father had provided for her during her childhood. No doubt the Ravensdale siblings were all accomplished musicians. They had gone to fabulous schools and been taken on wonderful holidays with no expense spared.

What had she had?

A big, fat nothing. Which was why it was so hard to get established now. She was years behind her peers. She hadn’t had acting lessons until recently because she couldn’t afford them. She still couldn’t afford a voice coach. A Scottish accent was fine if that was what a play called for. But she needed to be versatile, and that came with training, and training was hideously expensive—at least, the good quality stuff was. She could join some amateur group but she didn’t want to be stuck as an extra in some unknown play in some way-out suburb’s community hall.

She wanted to be at the West End in London.

It had been her goal since she was a kid.

It wasn’t about the fame. Kat didn’t give a toss for the fame. It was about the acting. It had always been about the acting, of getting into character in real time. About being onstage. About being in that electric atmosphere of being engaged with a live audience, seeing their reactions, hearing them gasp in shock, laugh in amusement or cry with heartfelt emotion. It wasn’t the same, acting on a film set. The sequences were shot out of order. The camera had to come to you rather than onstage when you had to project your character to the audience.

That was what she loved. What she lived for, dreamed of, hungered after like a drug.

But there was another side to acting she found therapeutic. Cathartic, even. Stepping into a role was the chance to step away from her background. Her hurt. Her pain. Her shame.

The sound of Flynn’s return made Kat scoot away from the piano and sit on one of the plush sofas, hugging a scatter cushion as if she had been there for the last half-hour.

Cricket came in with a panting smile, looking up at his master as if to say, ‘Aren’t I clever?’

‘All sorted,’ Flynn said.

Kat glanced at the dog’s mouth to see if there was any trace of the murderous act that had gone on next door. ‘Is it dead?’ she asked, looking back at Flynn.

‘Your visitor has gone to the great, big cheese shop in the sky.’

Her shoulders went down in relief. ‘I can’t thank you enough.’

Flynn looked at her for a beat. ‘There is one way.’

Kat sprang to her feet. ‘No. No way. You can’t blackmail me into seeing my father. Anyway, you said the wretched thing was dead. You can’t bring it back to life to twist my arm.’

‘It was worth a try, I thought.’ He moved over to a drinks cabinet. ‘Fancy a drink to settle your nerves?’

She wanted to say no but somehow found herself saying yes. ‘Just a wee one.’

He handed her a Scotch whisky. ‘From the home country.’

Kat took the glass from him, touching him for the second time that evening, but this time skin to skin. Something tight unfurled in her belly. ‘Do you live here alone?’ she asked to disguise her reaction to him.

‘Yes.’

‘No current girlfriend?’

His dark eyes glinted. ‘I’m currently in the process of recruiting.’

Kat tried not to look at his mouth but it felt like an industrial-strength magnet was pulling her gaze to that stubble-surrounded sensual curve. ‘How’s that working out for you?’

‘I have high hopes of filling the vacancy soon.’

‘What are your criteria?’ She gave him a pert look. ‘Breathing with a pulse?’

Amusement shone in his gaze. ‘I’m a little more selective than that. How about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Are you dating anyone?’

Kat raised one of her brows in an arc. ‘I thought you knew everything there was to know about me.’

‘Not quite everything,’ he said. ‘But I know you’ve been single for a couple of months.’

How did he know? Or did he think no one would want to date her? Wasn’t she up to his well-heeled standards? What was it about her that made him think she had ‘single’ written all over her? Surely he couldn’t tell she hadn’t had sex in ages. That was just plain impossible. No one could tell that... Could they? Or had he somehow found out about that stupid affair with Charles—the man who had conveniently forgotten to mention he had a wife—which had kicked off her celibacy pact? ‘You know?’ she said. ‘How?’

He gave a light shrug of one of his shoulders. ‘Just a feeling.’

‘I thought lawyers relied on evidence, not feelings.’

His mouth slanted again. ‘Sometimes a bit of gut instinct doesn’t go astray.’

Kat moved her gaze out of reach of his assessing one. ‘Your place looks like it’s much the same layout as next door. Have you lived here long?’

‘Seven years,’ he said. ‘I have another place in the country.’

Kat mentally rolled her eyes. ‘Only one?’

He gave a low, deep chuckle that did strange things to the base of her spine, making it go all loose and wobbly. ‘I like collecting things. Property is one of them.’

‘Does it make you happy, having all that disgusting wealth to throw around?’

Something at the back of his gaze shifted. ‘It’s satisfying to have something that no one can take away.’

‘Did you grow up with money?’

‘My parents weren’t wealthy by any means but they were comfortable.’

Kat looked at the gorgeous artwork hanging on the walls. None of them were prints. All were originals. One of them was surely a Picasso? ‘They must be very proud of what you’ve achieved.’

He didn’t answer for a moment. ‘They enjoy the benefits of my success.’

She turned to look at him, wondering what was behind his cryptic response. ‘Are you close to them?’

‘I live my life. They live theirs.’

His expression had a boxed-up look about it. What was it about his family that made him so guarded? ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ she asked.

‘Two younger brothers.’

‘What do they do?’

‘Felix is a plumber and Fergus is a builder, like my father in Manchester,’ he said. ‘My mother stopped work when I came along. But now she does the bookwork and accounts for my father and brothers. She’s made quite a career of it.’

Kat was surprised to hear he was originally from Manchester. He had no trace of the regional accent at all. But then, maybe he could afford a voice coach. ‘How long have you lived in London?’

‘Since I was ten,’ he said. ‘I won a scholarship to the same school the Ravensdale twins went to. I ended up spending more time at school than with my family.’

‘Neither of your brothers got scholarships?’

‘No.’

‘Were they jealous?’

His mouth twisted. ‘They’re not the academic type. They both left school as soon as they could get an apprenticeship.’

‘You don’t sound like you have much in common with them.’

‘I don’t.’

Kat shifted her lips from side to side, wondering why he was so different from the rest of his family. His father and younger brothers were tradesmen and yet he was one of London’s top lawyers, known for his incisive mind and clever wit. Had his stellar career trajectory made him an alien to his family? Had his educational opportunities created a chasm between him and his family that could not be bridged? Or was he just one of those people who didn’t have time for family—an unsentimental man who wanted to make his own way in the world without the ties of blood?

There were no photos of his family around that she could see. Unlike the Carstairses’ house next door, where just about every surface was covered in sentimental shots of happy family life. Flynn’s house was more like a showcase house out of a home and lifestyle magazine. The luxurious decor spoke of unlimited wealth, yet it wasn’t overdone. There was a sophisticated element to the placement of every piece of antique furniture, hand-woven carpet and the beautifully crafted soft furnishings.

She wasn’t the sort of girl to get her head turned by a good-looking man. But something about Flynn made her senses go a little crazy. She was aware of him in a way she had never been aware of another man. She felt his proximity like a radar signal in her body. Every nerve was registering exactly where he was in relation to her. Even that first day, when he had come to her café and introduced himself, her body had responded with a shockwave of visceral energy. When his gaze met hers that first time she had felt a lightning-bolt reaction, like she was being zapped with a stun gun. She had felt it humming through her blood, an electric buzz that centred deep in her core. He had a sensual power about him way beyond any other man she had encountered before.

The thought of him touching her again was strangely exciting. He had nice hands, broad and square with long fingers and neat nails. He had a sprinkling of dark hair over the back of them that came from beneath the cuffs of his cashmere sweater, which made her imagination go wild, wondering where else it was sprinkled over the rest of his body. Would he be one of those men who man-scaped? Or would he be au naturel?

Cricket came and sat in front of her with a beseeching look on his face. Kat bent down and ruffled his funny little ears. ‘How long have you had this adorable little guy?’

‘I got him at Christmas.’

Kat looked up at Flynn. ‘Where did you get him? Is he a rescue dog?’

Again he seemed to hesitate before he answered. ‘You could say that.’

Kat frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

He put his glass down but she noticed he hadn’t drunk more than a sip or two. ‘My mother has this habit of collecting cute strays but when they’re no longer cute she gets rid of them.’

Kat heard the faint trace of bitterness in his tone. Was there more to the dog story than he was saying? Did it have something to do with his childhood? His relationship with his mother? His family? ‘I always wanted a dog but we could never afford one while I was growing up,’ she said. ‘And we always lived in flats.’

‘You could have one now, couldn’t you?’

She straightened and glanced at him where he was leaning against the piano. ‘I don’t have the sort of lifestyle to own a dog. I move around a lot in search of acting work.’

‘Anything on the horizon for you?’

Kat wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him too much in case he told Richard Ravensdale. She wanted that part in the play on her own acting merit, not because of her famous father’s influence. ‘Not much.’

‘Have you always wanted to be an actor?’

‘Ever since I was old enough to know what acting was,’ she said. ‘I was cast as a donkey in a nativity play in primary school. I’ll never forget the feeling I got when I looked out at that sea of faces. I felt like I had come home. They had to drag me off when it was over. I didn’t want the play to end. Of course, my mother would’ve known why it was such a passion in me, but she never told me, not until a couple of days before she died. If anything she tried to discourage me from acting. She didn’t even let me take dancing classes. Not that we could’ve afforded them, of course.’

Flynn was looking at her with a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘It must have come as a big shock to find out who your father was. How had she settled your curiosity before then about who had fathered you?’

‘She told me she didn’t know who he was,’ Kat said. ‘When I was old enough to understand, she said she’d had a one-night stand with someone and never saw or heard from him again. I believed her because she kind of lived like that while I was growing up. She had men come and go all the time. None of her relationships lasted that long. She married at eighteen soon after she left home but they divorced before she was twenty. She wasn’t all that lucky in the men department. She attracted the wrong sort of guy. She wasn’t a great judge of character.’ Not that I can talk.

‘Were you close to her?’

Kat liked to think she had been to a point, but with her mother keeping such a secret from her for so long she wondered whether she had imagined their relationship to be something it was not in order to feel more normal. She was nothing like her mother in personality. Her mother had lacked ambition and drive. She hadn’t seemed capable of making a better life for herself. She’d had no insight into how she’d kept self-sabotaging her chance to get ahead. Kat was the opposite. She was uncompromising in the setting and achieving of goals. If she put her mind to something, she would let nothing and no one stand in her way.

‘I loved her, but she frustrated me because she didn’t seem capable of making a better life for herself,’ Kat said. ‘She didn’t even seem to want to. She cleaned hotel rooms or worked in seedy bars ever since she left home after a row with her parents as a teenager. She didn’t even try to move up the ranks or try to train for something else.’

What was she doing? She wasn’t supposed to be getting all chummy with him. What had made her spill all that baggage out? Was it because he had rescued her from the unwelcome visitor next door? Was it because he hadn’t made fun of her about her phobia? Unlike a couple of her mother’s dodgy boyfriends, who had found it great sport to see her become hysterical and paralysed with fear.

She rarely spoke to anyone of her background. Even her closest friend Maddie only knew the barest minimum about her childhood. Life had been tough growing up. Kat had always felt like an outsider. She had been the kid with the hand-me-down clothes; the one with the shoes that had come from a charity shop; the one with the home haircut, not the salon one. The kid who’d lived in run-down flats with lots of unwelcome wildlife. Money had always been tight, even though there had been ways her mother could have improved their circumstances. She sometimes wondered if her mother’s lack of drive had made her all the more rigidly focused and uncompromisingly determined.

Flynn still had that contemplative expression on his face. ‘You’re so much like your father it’s uncanny. He had his first start in theatre at the age of five too. Both he and Elisabetta talk of the buzz of being onstage in front of a live audience. It’s like a drug to them. They don’t feel truly alive without it.’

Kat wasn’t so sure she wanted to be reminded of how like Richard Ravensdale she was. She had his green-grey eyes and dark-brown hair, although her natural copper highlights were from her mother. She used to be quite pleased with her looks, thanking her lucky stars she had a good face and figure for the theatre. But now they felt more like a burden. It was a permanent reminder of how her mother had been exploited by a man who had used her and cast her away once he was done with her.

She didn’t fool herself that her mother had loved Richard and his abandonment had set her life on the self-destructive course it had taken. Her mother had already been well on her way down the slippery slope when she’d met Richard. It was more that Richard was one of many men who had used and abused her mother, fulfilling her mother’s view of herself as not worthy of being treated with respect and dignity—messages she had heard since childhood. Kat had asked her mother just before she died why she hadn’t made contact with Richard in later years to tell him he had a child. Her mother had told her it had never occurred to her. She had taken the money he’d offered and, as far as she was concerned, that was the end of it. It was typical of her mother’s lack of drive and purpose. She’d let life happen to her rather than take life by the throat and wring whatever opportunities she could out of it.

‘I’m not going to meet him, so you can put that thought right out of your mind,’ Kat said.

‘But he could help you get established in the theatre,’ Flynn said. ‘Why wouldn’t you want to make the most of your connection to him?’

‘It might be the way you lawyers climb the career ladder, by using the old boys’ network, but I prefer to get there on my own,’ Kat said. ‘I don’t need or want my father’s help. He wasn’t around when I needed it most and as far as I’m concerned it’s way too late to offer it now.’

‘What if it’s not help he’s offering?’ he said. ‘What if he just wants to get to know you? To have some sort of relationship with you?’

‘I don’t want to get to know him,’ Kat said. ‘I don’t need a father. I’ve never had one before so why would I want one now?’

‘Do you have any family now your mother’s gone?’

Kat didn’t like thinking of how alone in the world she was now. Not that she hadn’t always felt alone anyway; but somehow having no living relative now made her feel terribly isolated, as if she had been left on an island in the middle of a vast ocean with no hope of rescue. Her grandparents had died within a couple of years of each other a few years back and, as her mother had been an only child, there were no aunts, uncles or cousins.

The Christmas just gone had been one of the loneliest times in her life. She had sat by herself in a damp and cold bedsit eating tuna out of a can, trying not to think of all the warm, cosy sitting rooms where families were gathered in front of the tree unwrapping gifts, or sitting around the dining table to a sumptuous feast of turkey and Christmas pudding. To have no backup, no sense of a safe home-base to go to if things turned sour, was something she had never really grown up with, but it didn’t mean she didn’t long for it—that sense of belonging, the family traditions that gave life a sense of security, of being loved and connected to a network of people who would look out for each other.

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