Sullivan's Child. Gail Link

discover the wonderful secrets of her body, molding, shaping, exploring, leading her on the journey.

      Then, he welcomed her participation. “Touch me,” he said, his voice deep and demanding.

      Cat complied, exalting in the feel of the crisp black hair that angled across his lean, muscular chest. She stroked his rib cage, palmed her hand across his flat belly. Felt the power in his strong thighs as her fingertips glided down and over them.

      Then, needing to experience the taste, the touch of his lips again, she sought his mouth with her own, letting the growing hunger that twisted her insides speak for her.

      In turn, Rory responded with a primitive fervor that drew her deeper and deeper into a vortex of indescribable passion.

      Cat’s initiation into total womanhood was accomplished with gentleness and love, with sharing and joy.

      Another month passed rapidly, with Cat wrapped in a haze of love and what she thought was security. Any day he would ask her to marry him, share his life as she shared his love, she was sure of that.

      Then, late one afternoon the dreamworld she’d lived in disintegrated when he shared his news with her. Snuggled in his bed, replete after intense lovemaking, Rory explained the offer he’d just received.

      “It’s a dream come true, Cat, something I’ve been working for. The opportunity to further my studies at Trinity College in Dublin with a prestigious research fellowship.” His voice sang with delight as he hugged Cat close, one hand stroking her tousled hair.

      “It’s all so sudden,” she’d heard herself say.

      “Yes, but so what? I applied over a year ago, and it’s finally come through. My flight to Dublin leaves this weekend, and I’ve already given notice to Cedar Hill that I won’t be returning for the fall term. I’ll take care of finding us a place to live,” he announced. “Then, when you’ve said your goodbyes here, you can join me, only don’t make it too long, darling.”

      Cat listened to his voice brimming with excitement. Suddenly her hopes for the future, their future, were vanishing, washed away by the waves of his plans like grains of sand.

      “I can’t.”

      “What do you mean, you can’t?”

      “Just that,” Cat said, each word pulled from her like a layer of skin being removed. “I can’t give up my life and go to Ireland with you on a whim.”

      “Whim? Is that what you think this is?”

      “Maybe not for you.”

      He stiffened beside her.

      “This is obviously what you want.” She knew he was ambitious. She accepted that. Or at least she thought she had. But the idea of uprooting herself was unthinkable. Just pack up her life and go, without a care for her family, her friends, the business she loved and worked so hard to build? There were so many reasons why she couldn’t go, but he’d never thought to ask.

      “I thought you loved me.”

      “I do.” And she did, so much so that she felt sick at having to refuse him. Ireland? She wanted to go there someday. But she couldn’t go now. Couldn’t walk away from all she had here.

      His voice was low and soft. “Then come with me.”

      “And do what?”

      “Be with me.”

      She reiterated, “And do what?”

      “Whatever you like.”

      His arrogant words chilled her, sending icy tentacles to wrap around her heart.

      “I can’t do that. I have a business to run.”

      “It’s not like I’m asking you to forget about it,” he said. “Just set it aside for a little while. Get someone else, like Mary Alice, to handle it for you.”

      Just set it aside. Like it was a toy or a game she could easily pick up later when the mood struck. “For how long?”

      He shrugged. “I don’t know. A year. Maybe more.”

      “Then my answer is still no.”

      Rory threw back the sheet and rose from the bed. He stood facing her, naked, like a Celtic warrior getting ready for battle. “You won’t change your mind?”

      Sadness choked Cat’s voice. “No.”

      She watched him dress with quick, economical movements, feeling her happiness wither inside her, shriveling in the sudden chill.

      Rory walked back to where she lay. His eyes, once warm and tender, now resembled cold, frostbitten chips of dark blue ice. “I won’t ask again.”

      “I know,” she admitted, holding back the tears until he left the room. Sobs shook her body repeatedly. He never once mentioned marriage. Stupidly, she assumed that he wanted it because she had. Couldn’t he understand that she couldn’t throw her dreams into limbo merely to be his live-in love with no guarantees? Her dreams were important to her. Foolishly, she’d believed that they were to him also. And, she was too proud to beg him to make the ultimate commitment when it was obvious that’s not what he had in mind.

      Cat rinsed out her cup and set it in the sink, then wiped away the hot tears that welled in her eyes.

      The secure world that she’d built for herself and her child was about to be invaded.

      The man who’d broken her heart was coming back.

      Chapter Two

      Finally, he was, he believed, back where he truly belonged.

      After almost seven years of voluntary exile in Ireland, Rory Sullivan had returned to the States. Returned not to the elegant four-story town house on the Upper East Side of New York City where he was born and raised and which he now owned, but instead to Cedar Hill, the small town in southeastern Pennsylvania where he had taught college. Back to a fresh start at a new life. Back to a place overflowing with memories.

      He held one such in his hand, a slim volume of poetry. It was an old book, privately published and quite rare, bound in leather and stamped in gold, a find from an estate sale; it was a unique birthday gift he had cherished doubly because of the person who had given it to him. Contained inside the pages were poems of love and longing, of heartbreak and happiness, the work of an Irish woman in the late nineteenth century, simply titled To My Beloved.

      He gently opened the book, read the inscription that he’d read hundreds of times before: Always and forever, Cat.

      The irony of that phrase haunted him. Just because you left a place, or a person, didn’t mean they left you. Some memories were burned too deep to ever depart; they remained in your mind, constant reminders of what was.

      What was, what is, what would always be for him—the woman whose memory he’d tried to ignore. A recollection he’d tried—but found impossible—to suppress. A woman that he tried his damnedest to erase from the deepest recesses of his mind and found she was unforgettable. The passion he tried to so hard to bury where he thought it belonged—in the over-and-done-with category—was ultimately unquenchable.

      She was still there. In his heart. In his mind. In his past. A living ghost that had attached itself to him with ethereal chains stronger than any forged with steel.

      One day several months ago, while surfing the Internet in his Dublin apartment, he’d stumbled upon her name quite by accident. He’d been checking a list of specialty Irish bookstores in the States, trying to locate an out-of-print research book. It was available in two places, one of which turned out to be hers. Cat’s bookstore had its own Web site, and it included a recent article from a local newspaper on her thriving business, along with a current photo that showed a beautiful woman who looked barely older than some of his undergraduate students. Even through the filter of a monitor screen her hair still gleamed that