The Most Scandalous Ravensdale

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.