Free Falling for Alexander (Corkscrew Bay #2) by Claire Robyns

blame.
    “ Ruins of Love really is your song, isn’t it?” she said softly.
    His slow nod sent another wave of emotion up her throat.
    “It’s beautiful, Alexander. You’re incredibly talented.” She blinked back a silly, useless tear. “I’ll find my own way home. Again, I’m sorry.”
    She hadn ’t removed the backpack from her shoulder, so all she had to do was walk away. She was crossing the threshold of the parlour when the curse came.
    “ What are you doing?”
    She stopped. Turned. “ I’ll catch a train. A bus.” She shrugged. “I just need to get out of here.”
    “ You came with me,” he said in a gravel hard voice. “I’ll take you home.”
    She almost laughed at the archaic notion. “ Maybe you mean well. Maybe you’ve got some well-deserved punishment planned for the return trip. It doesn’t matter, Alexander. I’m not driving back with you.”
    “ You damn well will!”
    Her spine snapped tight.
    He closed his eyes, taking a breath that strained his shirt across his chest. His eyes opened, softening into the creases at the corners as he looked at her. “That was uncalled for. I don’t usually bark orders.”
    “ Bark all you want,” she informed him. “I’m still leaving and I’m leaving alone. ”
    She narrowly missed bumping into Mrs. Pinnings as she marched from the room. Ho w long had she been standing in the passage? From her bewildered expression, Kate concluded long enough.
    “ I’m sorry,” she mouthed quietly over her shoulder as she made her way to the front door.

 
     
    Chapter Eight
     
     
     
    Tension coiled in every muscle of his b ody as Alexander willed himself to watch her leave. He could hardly haul her back and physically restrain her, and that was exactly the reaction he was struggling to contain.
    His gaze went to the window when he heard the outer door close, watching as she w alked down the path, walked away from him, out of his life. For good, he hoped. Wasn’t that what he’d spent the day trying to achieve? She’d lied and schemed to get close to him. To get the scoop on the man behind the walls.
    But he wasn ’t so sure of that. She’d spent most of the trip romanticising the macabre history of Corkscrew Bay and the castle in a blatant attempt to persuade him to her cause.  A cause that started with her Easter egg hunt, but no doubt didn’t end there.
    He ’d been wrong. She wasn’t a cold-hearted reporter with her nose buried so deep in the job, she couldn’t smell the roses from the dung.
    When it came to Kate, all that stubborn, blind passion was for Corkscrew Bay. After what she ’d said at lunch, he thought he understood. She may be whole, perfectly happy and fulfilled, but she spoke of herself as half-missing. Seemed to him, the town she’d grown up in was what she’d filled that missing half with. A hunger to be co-joined, connected to a whole, and she’d fight tooth and nail to protect it.
    Against his better judgement, admiration for the woman surged.
    The problem with Kate…she wasn’t all that different from most reporters he’d had the misfortune to come up against. She blurred the lines, erased them when it suited her.
    The problem with K ate…her current passion, her obsession to integrate his home with her town, wasn’t something he could work with. They were balanced on opposite ends of a seesaw. One soaring higher to their goal would be at the cost of the other plunging.
    The logic and rea son was all there, but he couldn’t make it stick. Because right now his biggest problem with Kate was…she’d left before he was ready for her to be gone.
    “ Alexander?”
    He turned to find Dora entering, a large white mug in one hand.
    “I couldn’t help overhearing,” she said. “You should know, she didn’t tell you the full story.”
    “ Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”
    “ Everything she did today,” Dora went on, moving deeper into the room, “was to get to me, not to you. We’ve formed a passing