Modern Romance August 2019 Books 1-4. Heidi Rice

along Fifth Avenue, his body tensing as he stared up at the Flatiron building he hadn’t seen since he’d been, what...fourteen? Fifteen? That had been the last time he’d spent his school vacation here. That particular homecoming had ended in the usual violence when his father had raised his fist to him but Lucas had turned his back and simply walked away, trying to block out the sound of the other’s man’s taunts which had been ringing in his ears.

      ‘Not man enough to fight?’

      It had been a flawed assessment because for the first time ever, Lucas had felt too much of a man to fight back. He’d filled out that summer and his muscles had been hard and strong. The almost constant sport he’d done at his fancy Swiss boarding school had made him into a fine athlete and deep down he knew he could have taken out his adoptive father, Diego Gonzalez, with a single swipe.

       And the reason he hadn’t was that because he was afraid once he started, he wouldn’t know when to stop. That he would keep punching and punching the cruel bully who had made his life such a misery.

      So he had carried on walking and not looked back. The only other time he had returned had been for his mother’s funeral, when the two men had sat on opposite sides of the church without speaking. With the cloying scent of white lilies making him want to retch, Lucas remembered staring at the ornate scrolling on the lavish coffin, realising he’d never really known the woman he’d thought at the time had given birth to him. And he had been right, hadn’t he? He hadn’t known her at all.

      But he wasn’t going to dwell on that. He had spent his life rejecting the past and he wasn’t going to change that now.

      Deliberately focussing his attention on the here and now, he saw a woman standing up at the lights in front of him and the tawny colour of her hair made him think about Tara, even though that was something else he had decided was off-limits. He’d told himself that it had been a mistake. That maybe it had happened because he’d been thrown off-balance by what had lain ahead of him in New York. But at least he had let her down gently and no real harm had been done. And as she’d said herself—she’d had to lose her virginity some time.

      Yet his eagerness to put her out of his mind hadn’t been the plain sailing he’d expected. His night-time dreams had been haunted by memories of her slim, pale body and the delicious tightness he’d encountered as he had entered her. He would wake up frustrated and angry—with a huge erection throbbing uncomfortably between his thighs.

      He still couldn’t quite believe he’d had sex with her—his innocent housekeeper. Someone who, despite her fiery curls, had always seemed to blend into the background of his life, so that he hadn’t regarded her as a woman at all—just someone to cook and clean and scrub for him. But she’d been a woman that night in his bed, hadn’t she? All milky limbs and hair which had glowed like fire as the storm had flashed through the sky with an elemental force which had seemed to mimic what had been taking place in his bed. He found himself recalling the passion with which she’d kissed him and the eagerness with which she’d fallen into his arms. And then the unbelievable realisation—of discovering he was her first and only lover.

       How could he have been so reckless?

      His uncomfortable preoccupation was interrupted by the vibration of the cell-phone in his pocket and when he pulled it out his fingers froze around the plastic rectangle as he saw the name which had flashed up onto the screen. He shook his head in slight disbelief, as if his thoughts had somehow managed to conjure up her presence.

      Tara.

      Quickly, he calculated the time in Dublin and frowned. Getting on for ten in the evening, when normally she would have been laying the table for his breakfast, before retiring to her room at the top of the house. Of course, he wasn’t there to make breakfast for, so she was free to do whatever she wanted, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she was ringing him.

      Why was she ringing him?

      He couldn’t think of a conversation they could possibly have which wouldn’t be excruciatingly uncomfortable, but, despite wanting to let the call go to voicemail, he knew he couldn’t ignore her. He might wish he could take back that night and give it a different outcome but that wasn’t possible. And she’d been a faithful employee for many years, hadn’t she? Didn’t he owe her a couple of minutes of conversation, even if it was going to be something of an ordeal? What if there’d been a burglary—a bone fide one this time, not just some holy statue crashing to the floor in the middle of a storm?

      He felt an unmistakable wave of guilt as his thumb hit the answer button. ‘Tara!’ he said, his voice unnaturally bright, and he thought how usually he would have greeted such a call with a faint growl—the underlying message that he hoped she had a good reason for ringing. ‘This is a surprise!’

      ‘Is it a bad time to ring?’

      She sounded nervous. Maybe she was remembering that other time when she’d called him and he’d been abroad, with a model called Catkin. Despite the warning look he’d given her, Catkin had picked up his phone and answered it, her voice laughing and smoky with sex. He remembered Tara’s stuttering embarrassment when she’d finally come on the line and the way the model had sniggered beside him, loud enough to be heard. And with that loathsome demonstration of feminine cruelty, she had unwittingly put an end to their relationship.

      ‘I’m dodging pedestrians on Fifth Avenue, Tara,’ he said lightly. ‘So you may have trouble hearing me above all the traffic noise.’

      ‘Oh.’

      She sounded flat now and he thought how their easy familiarity seemed to have been replaced by an odd new formality as he asked a question which sounded more dutiful than caring. ‘Nothing’s wrong, I hope?’

      Her response was cautious. As if she was picking out her words—like someone sorting through the loose change in their pocket while searching for a two-euro coin. ‘Not exactly.’

      Not exactly? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Please don’t start telling me that you miss me or that—God forbid—you’ve decided you’re in love with me. ‘No burst pipes in the basement?’ he enquired, his forced joviality not quite hitting the mark.

      ‘No, nothing like that. Lucas, I have... I have to talk to you.’

      He could feel his heart sink because this sounded exactly as he’d feared. He’d had too many of these conversations in the past with women unable to recognise that their needs were very different. That the sex they’d shared meant nothing—it was just sex. She probably wanted to see him again, and soon—while he most definitely wanted to close the page on it. ‘I thought that’s exactly what we were doing,’ he said smoothly.

      ‘No. I don’t mean a phone call. I mean face to face!’ she burst out, her voice tinged with a desperation he’d never heard there before.

      ‘But I’m in New York, Tara,’ he told her, almost gently, because if he was going to have to let her down—which he suspected he was—then he needed to be kind about it. Because wasn’t it his own damned fault that his housekeeper was now clearly pining for him? ‘And you’re in Dublin.’

      ‘No, I’m not,’ she corrected, sounding a little more confident now. ‘I’ve just flown into LaGuardia.’

      ‘LaGuardia?’ he echoed incredulously. ‘You mean you’re in New York?’

      ‘Obviously.’ Her voice became terse.

      Afterwards Lucas would wonder how he could have been so stupid, but that was only afterwards, when the hard, cold facts had finally percolated into his disbelieving brain. Maybe it was the double whammy of finding out the truth about his parentage which had sucked all the sense and perception out of him. Which meant he was able to shelve the glaringly obvious reason why Tara Fitzpatrick had taken it into her head to follow him to America, and to give a nod of acknowledgement to the curvy real-estate agent who had appeared outside the main entrance of the apartment block.

      ‘Look, I haven’t got time for this