Heated Rush - Leslie Kelly [24]
At least, Sean hoped.
“If he does…I can come to you, can’t I?”
He had absolutely no place in his world for a twenty-one-year-old girl. Not even a real home—just a couple of apartments in different cities in the world, nothing resembling stability. Nor did he believe that would ever make Moira happy. While Sean might have been desperate to leave home, his younger sister was never happier than when riding her horses or socializing with her friends right there in Wicklow.
But he would never refuse her. “It won’t come to that, but, yes, Moira. You’ll always have a home with me if you need it.”
She wouldn’t need it. People learned from their mistakes, didn’t they? Their father wouldn’t risk losing Moira, too, not after he’d seen Sean kick off the ancient dust of their ancestral home three days after he’d turned twenty-one. Telling his father what he could do with the ugly antique ring Sean was supposed to give to his “fiancée,” he’d stormed out.
In the ensuing seven years, his father had tried many different tactics to get him back under his patriarchal thumb. He’d used threats, bluffs, false health alerts. He’d even paid to have a damned engagement announcement put in the papers, hoping to embarrass Sean into returning.
Sean hadn’t relented. He’d had a small trust fund that his father hadn’t been able to interfere with. It hadn’t been a fortune, but it had been enough, at least, to start a new life, and that’s what he’d been determined to do. He’d wanted to see the world, explore, experience everything.
Find his mother.
Funny, that was the one thing his father had most feared…yet the one that had softened Sean’s attitude toward his father more than anything. Once he met his mother in person, he’d understood the truth. Hearing from her own lips that she’d been incapable of thinking of anything except her own drug habit when he was a child, that she’d been a danger to everyone around her, he’d realized his father had done the right thing.
One day, he’d tell the old man that. If he ever saw him again. But the way things were going, that wouldn’t happen soon.
“I could come now,” Moira said. “I love your apartment.”
“I’m almost never there, darlin’.” He said it gently so he wouldn’t hurt her feelings, even as his brain numbed at the very idea. “And you’d be miserable in the city.”
She’d seen his place in London, though she had no idea he had one in Paris and another in New York. That would just bring up too many questions about how he could afford his lifestyle. Ones he wasn’t ready to answer.
He was well off now, but he certainly hadn’t been rich at first. Merely determined to be independent and never go home. And Moira knew it.
Living simply and being careful with his money, he hadn’t needed his father’s. So that bullying tactic had been easily evaded. The threats hadn’t changed his mind, either, nor had the guilt, or any sense of familial duty. If he owed something to the moldering bones of six generations of Murphys lying in the family plot, they were welcome to come see him personally to call him on it. Until then, he owed nothing to anyone and there wasn’t a thing his father could do to bring him back.
Except stage a health crisis.
Sean had been about to board a plane to return to Ireland a year after he’d left, having gotten word of his father’s heart attack. Then his teenage sister had called and told him it was a sham, that if he showed up, he’d be walking into his own damned engagement party.
Manipulative old bastard.
That was the last straw, the thing that had finally pushed Sean over the edge. That his father would put him through hell thinking he was on death’s door just to get his own way proved Sean’s demands for independence had fallen on deaf ears. The incident had made him realize that if he wanted his own life, he was going to have to separate himself so far from his old one that there would be no chance of ever going back.
And that’s exactly what he’d done. City by city. Job by job. Woman by woman.
Starting in Singapore.