Summer Fling

‘Of course I love him.’ Her tone was both dismissive and impatient because she couldn’t understand why he was wasting time stating the obvious. ‘He’s my brother. He’s family.’

‘You make it all sound so straightforward, but life isn’t always like that, Kyla. It’s complicated.’

‘What’s complicated about telling the truth? You should have just told us. That’s what I would have done.’

Ethan swore softly and closed the distance between them. ‘Maybe it is, but I’m not like you and my family is nothing like yours.’

Kyla tried to step backwards but he caught her shoulders and forced her to look at him.

‘You want to talk about this? All right, let’s talk about it.’ His voice was raw with a depth of emotion that she hadn’t heard from him before. ‘Your family is a single unit. You’re in and out of each other’s lives, interfering and interacting. You’re individuals but you’re all small parts of a whole.’

She ignored the fact that his fingers were digging into her shoulders. ‘So? That’s what families are.’

‘Not mine.’ He released her then and his hands dropped to his sides, his tone hoarse. ‘Not mine, Kyla.’

‘I know your parents were divorced and remarried, but—’

‘You don’t know anything.’ He stared out across the sea. ‘Catherine and I didn’t share the same brother-sister relationship that you have with Logan. You love Logan. Do you want to know how I felt about Catherine? For most of my life, I hated her. There.’ He turned to look at her, a smile of self-derision on his handsome face. ‘Now are you shocked?’

She didn’t know what to say so she didn’t say anything, and he turned away again with a humourless laugh.

‘Oh, yes, you’re shocked, because hating your family isn’t something that really happens around here, is it, Kyla? Around here, on Glenmore, family is the most important thing. But the truth is that I hated Catherine. And she hated me, too. From the moment we met when I was eleven and she was eight, we hated each other. She hated me because my father married her mother and she liked it being just the two of them. It meant that she had to compete for attention. I hated her because she was the most selfish person I had ever met. She believed that the whole world had to revolve around her and it drove me mad. She took drugs, she stole, she did just about anything a person can do to gain attention. And I hated her.’

Reminding herself that he’d deceived her, Kyla tried to hold onto her anger but she felt it slipping out of her. ‘You were a child.’

‘Don’t make excuses for me. Catherine and I spent the next ten years trying to make each other miserable, and usually succeeding. We argued, we fought, we each blamed the other for our terrible home life. She was half-wild, always running away from school and driving my father mad. Three times he had to collect her from the police station—did she ever tell you that? I thought she was incredibly selfish. She thought I was aloof, remote and judgmental. We couldn’t wait to get out of each other’s lives.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Ten years ago.’

‘Ten years …’ Kyla tried to imagine not seeing Logan for ten years. ‘So—why did you follow her here? Why now if you didn’t have that sort of relationship?’

For a long moment Ethan didn’t answer. ‘She wrote to me, a year ago, and I realise now that it was probably just a few days before she went into labour with Kirsty. It was the only letter I ever had from her and probably the only communication we had that wasn’t tinged with bitterness. She wrote because she said that she’d discovered paradise. She told me that she’d settled in Scotland and suddenly felt different about life. She realised that family were important and she wanted to make contact. She told me that I was going to be an uncle.’

‘Did you write back?’

‘By the time I received her letter, she was already dead.’

‘But—’

‘I was working in the Sudan, Kyla. I was in Africa. I was battling heat and dust and disease like you cannot possibly imagine.’ His voice was raw and she suddenly realised just how much of this man she didn’t know. She’d assumed he’d worked in London. ‘She sent the letter to my flat in London. For some reason it wasn’t forwarded. I only received it two months ago when I finally came home.’

‘So why not just turn up here and introduce yourself? Why pretend to be someone else?’

He frowned in response to her question. ‘I didn’t pretend.’

‘But her surname was King. How can you be Walker?’

‘Her mother refused to take my father’s name. She was always King and I was Walker.’

‘She never mentioned you,’ Kyla told him. ‘She always said that her family could have done with living on Glenmore for a while. I suppose she felt that having the baby was a time to make a fresh start.’

‘That letter has tortured me. It left me with so many unanswered questions. The Catherine in that letter bore no resemblance to the Catherine of my childhood. She claimed it was this place that had changed her.’ He breathed in and looked around him. ‘She said that it was Glenmore. The sea, the ruins, the wildness. And most of all the people.’

‘She arrived on the ferry one day with a backpack and never left. Glenmore has that effect on some people.’ But not on him. The island hadn’t changed him or caus

ed him to open up to others. He was as reserved and self-contained as ever.