Made love, indeed!
She might have been swept away with the passion of seeing him again, but Finn’s seduction had been cold-blooded in thought, if not in deed.
And yet the responsibility was just as much his as hers, surely?
She could be proud and vow never to tell him that his child was growing inside her womb, but what of the child itself?
Was she going to subject him or her to a lifetime of what she had had to endure? The terrible insecurity of not knowing who your father was? Of growing up with one vital half of the gene jigsaw missing? And with her having to nurse some terrible, pointless secret?
So did she pick up the telephone and tell him? Or write him a letter detailing the consequences of their moment of madness? She winced as she attempted to compose a clumsy paragraph inside her head. Impossible.
The sun began to dip in the sky and she put the cup of untouched tea down on the coffee table as tears began to slide down her cheeks. She angrily brushed them away, her heart aching for the new life inside her. Why should her baby suffer just because two adults had acted without thought?
She needed courage, more courage than she had ever needed before, because there was only one way to tell him something like this.
Face to face.
Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I’M SENDING Miss Walker through, Finn.’
‘Thanks, Sandra.’ Finn flicked off the intercom and waited, sitting very still behind the huge desk as the door to his office opened and Catherine walked in, an indefinable expression in her green eyes. She wore a black velvet coat—a loose, swingy sort of thing—and with its contrast against her pale face and black hair she looked liked a beautiful sorceress.
‘Come in, Catherine,’ he said evenly, and rose to his feet. ‘Shut the door behind you.’
As if she needed telling! As if she wanted his assistant to hear what she was about to say to him—and the ensuing discussion which would inevitably follow it. She shut it.
‘Sit down, won’t you?’ He sat down himself and gestured to the chair opposite his, but Catherine shook her head.
‘I’ll stand, if you don’t mind. I’ve been cooped up on a flight and in a cab,’ she said. And although she knew that the flutterings in her stomach were due to nerves, and not the baby, she wasn’t going to risk sitting in front of him and squirming. She met his gaze. ‘I’m surprised that you agreed to see me.’
‘I’m surprised that you want to.’
In his unmoving face only his blue eyes showed signs of life. His features looked as cold and as motionless as if they had been hewn from rock as old as the stone of Glendalough, where he had taken her that day which now seemed an age ago. And it was. It had been a different Catherine who looked up and laughed into his eyes that day.
The Catherine who was here was on a mission. To give him the truth—a truth which she felt honourbound to tell him. But wasn’t it funny how you could practise saying something over and over again, yet when the opportunity came the words just wouldn’t seem to come?
Finn watched her as he waited, thinking that somehow she looked different—and not just because her face was closed and wary and pale. No, there was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, something which alerted his sixth sense. The same sense which told him that a beautiful woman like Catherine Walker must have her pride. A pride which would have no time for a man who had acted as he had done. Yet she had phoned asking to speak to him. Personally and urgently.
‘I’m all yours, Catherine,’ he said, and then wished he hadn’t, for the irony hadn’t escaped him—nor her either, to judge from her brief, bitter smile.
No need to preface it with anything as humiliating as, Do you remember when we last met in London…? Such a distortion of the truth would only embarrass them.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said baldly.
There was a long, long silence, but not a flicker of emotion crossed his face. ‘I see.’
‘It’s yours!’ she declared wildly, wanting to shatter the tense expectation in the air, to breathe some life into that unmoving face of his.
‘Yes.’
Catherine stared at him, and delayed shock, to gether with his cold and monosyllabic reply, made her legs feel like water. She sank into the chair he had originally offered and stared at him with wide, un-comprehending eyes.
‘You aren’t going to deny it?’
‘What would be the point? I can’t imagine that I would be your first choice as father to your child. What we had between us hardly qualifies as the greatest love affair of all time, does it? So why would you lie about something as important as that? And if you aren’t lying then the logical conclusion is that you must be telling the truth.’
It was a cold and analytical assessment and, oddly enough, seemed to hurt far more than if he had just lost his temper and flatly denied it—called her all names under the sun and told her to get out of his office and his life. For a start, it would have given her a let-out clause.
And it would have shown passion. Feelings. Something other than this cold and distant look in his eyes. As if he were a scientist surveying some rather odd-looking specimen in a test-tube. But then, what had she expected? ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ she said heavily.
He shrugged. ‘A simple case of cause and effect.’
‘How very cynical, Finn.’
‘Cynical, but true,’ he mocked, then drew a deep breath as he thought back to that mad and tempestuous morning in her London flat. He gave a long and heavy sigh. ‘That’s what comes of forgetting to wear a condom, I suppose.’
Reduced to the lowest possible denominator.
Catherine flinched, as though he had hit her. And he might as well have hit her, the pain in her heart was so intense. She remembered the frantic way they had fallen to the floor, the wild hunger she had felt for him, and he, apparently, for her.
Yet he had come there that day with just such a seduction—if such a word could be used to describe something so basic—in mind. But he had not protected himself, and she had been too caught up in the mood and the magic—yes, magic—to notice.
She could deny it until she was blue in the face, but Finn Delaney had completely had her in his thrall. Then, and before. But now she saw the so-called magic for what it was—an illusion—like a trick of the light.
‘Was your lack of care simply an omission on your part?’ she questioned.
‘What do you think?’ he demanded. ‘That I did it deliberately? That I somehow hoped for this particular little scenario?’ His blue gaze bored into her. ‘What was I thinking?’ He gave a low, bitter laugh. ‘That’s the trouble, you see, Catherine—I wanted you so badly that I wasn’t thinking at all.’
‘A wanting fuelled by contempt,’ she observed bitterly, noticing that he didn’t deny it.
‘And when is the—?’
His deep, musical Irish voice faltered just a little.
He stared down at the figures he had been working on, and she noticed that it was the first time he had let any emotion creep in.
He looked up again. ‘When is the baby due?’
‘They aren’t sure.’
The blue gaze became more intense. Quizzical. Silently demanding some kind of explanation. And of course he was entitled to one. She was here, wasn’t she? She had foisted paternity on him and with that he had earned certain entitlements.
‘I wasn’t really sure about my dates myself, that’s all. June—they think.’
‘June.’ He stared unseeingly out at the panoramic view from the window. ‘So I’m to be a father some time in June?’
‘Not necessarily.’
Now it was his turn to flinch, the dark-featured face looking both pained and quietly thunderous, and she realised that he had grossly misinterpreted her words.
‘No, no, no!’ she defended instantly. ‘I didn’t mean that. What I mean is that you don’t have to have anything to do with this baby. Not if you don’t want to.’ He had not
sought fatherhood, and therefore he should not be shackled by it.
‘So why exactly are you here, Catherine?’ He narrowed his eyes at her thoughtfully. ‘Is it money you want?’
His mercenary judgement was like a slap to the face, and Catherine blanched as she shakily tried to rise to her feet. But there seemed to be no power to her legs. How much more hurt could he inflict on her?
‘How dare you say that?’ she hissed with an angry pride. ‘You may be a big, powerful, rich businessman, but if you think I’ve come here today begging—begging for your largesse,’ she repeated on a shuddering breath, ‘then you are very much mistaken, Finn Delaney!’
‘So just what do you want? A ring on your finger?’
‘Hardly!’ she contradicted witheringly. ‘Strange as it may seem, I have no desire to tie myself to a man who thinks so badly of me that he believes I would treat my child as a commodity! Actually, I came here today to tell you about the baby simply because I felt that as an intelligent human being you would want to accept your share of responsibility for what has happened.’
‘Catherine—’
‘No!’ Anger was giving her strength—beautiful, restorative strength. ‘You’ve made your views perfectly clear. Don’t worry, I won’t be troubling you again!’
‘I guess you could always sell your story to the highest bidder,’ he said consideringly, and then ducked instinctively as something whizzed across the room.
Catherine had picked up the nearest object to her on his desk, which happened to be a large and very heavy paperweight, and it flew a foot wide of him and bounced deafeningly against the wall, bringing a marvellous landscape painting shattering down beside it, the glass breaking into a million shards.
The office door flew open and Sandra, his assistant, ran in, her eyes taking in the scene in front of her with disbelief. ‘Oh, my God! Is everything all right, Finn?’ she asked, her soft Irish accent rising in alarm. ‘Would you have me call Security?’ She stared at a white-faced and mutinous Catherine. ‘Or the police?’
But Finn, astonishingly, was laughing—a low, gravelly laugh.
He shook his head. ‘No, no—leave it, Sandra,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine. Miss Walker was just getting in a bit of target practice!’
‘But unfortunately I missed!’ said Catherine, her voice tinged with a slight hysteria. Her chair scraped back as she struggled to her feet.
‘That will be all, thanks, Sandra,’ said Finn quickly.
Sandra gave him one last, mystified stare before exiting the room and shutting the door behind her, just as Catherine reached it.
But Finn was quicker, beside her in a moment, where he caught hold of her shoulder. ‘You’re not going anywhere!’
‘Let go of me!’
‘No.’ He moved her away from the door and whirled her round. He could see that she was very, very angry indeed. ‘You could have killed me, you know,’ he observed slowly.
‘I wasn’t aiming at you!’ she snapped. ‘But I wish to God I had!’
‘What, and leave your child without a father?’
‘You’re not fit to be a father!’
He saw how distressingly white her face was and his whole manner altered. No matter what his feelings on the subject, the fact remained that she was pregnant. With his baby. And this kind of scene could surely not be doing her any good.
‘Come and sit down and have some tea.’
‘I don’t want any tea! I want to go home!’
‘To London? I think not. You’re in no fit state to be flying back today. Not in your condition.’
It was that time-honoured phrase which did it. Which finally broke down the barriers she had tried to erect around her heart. In your condition. Someone should have been saying that to her with tender loving care. Preferably a husband who adored her, worshipped the ground she walked on, wanted to rub the small of her back and wait on her. Not a man who had had sex with her as some primitive kind of revenge and got so carried away with himself that he hadn’t stopped to think about the consequences.
Though neither had she.
And instead she was about to replicate exactly what she had spent her whole life vowing not to do. Becoming a single mother, with all the emotional and financial hardship which went with that role.
She thought back to her own childhood. Her mother doing two and sometimes three jobs to make ends meet, so that Catherine should never feel different from the other children. Of course, she had felt different—some of the other children had made sure of that—but she had always been fed and clothed and loved and warm enough.
She had prayed that her mother would meet someone, but when eventually she had he had regarded Catherine as an encumbrance. Someone who was in the way and would always be in the way of his new wife and himself. He hadn’t been outwardly horrible to her, but she had seen the hostility in his eyes sometimes, and it had frightened her.
Her mother must have seen it, too—for one day she had greeted Catherine at the school gates, a little pale and a little trembling, and told her that she was no longer going to marry Johnny. Catherine had laughed with delight and hugged her mother, and they had gone out and eaten tea and scones in a small café. His name had never been mentioned again.
How often had she hoped to repay her mother for her hard work and sacrifice by providing lavishly for her as she became older? Hadn’t she dreamed of being one of the most snapped-up journalists in the land? Of maybe one day even writing a novel—a novel which would be a bestseller, naturally. She would buy her mother’s cottage for her, make her old age secure.
Instead of which she must now go and destroy her mother’s hopes and dreams for her. And her own, too.
She wanted to go away and just howl in some dark and private corner, but she saw that Finn was effectively barring the door.
‘Are you going to let me leave?’
‘What do you think?’
She fixed him with an icy look. ‘I could scream the place down—that would get “Security” up here in a flash—if they thought you were raping me!’
He opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it. Now was not the time to make a cheap and clever remark. ‘Sit down, Catherine.’
‘No, I w-won’t.’
‘Sit down, will you, woman? Or do I have to pick you up and carry you?’
It was like a brand-new sapling trying to withstand the full force of a hurricane. Catherine gave a weary sigh. She could see that he meant business, and besides, sitting down was what she wanted to do more than anything else in the world. Though lying down would have been better. Much better.
She sat down in the chair and closed her eyes. ‘Go away,’ she mumbled. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Your logic is failing you,’ he said drily. ‘This is my office, remember.’ He flicked on the intercom again. ‘Sandra, will you have us sent in some tea? Good, strong tea. Oh, and something to eat?’
‘Cake, Finn? Your favourite chocolate?’ purred Sandra.
‘Something more substantial than cake,’ he replied, with a swift, assessing look at Catherine’s fined-down cheekbones. ‘A big, thick sandwich with a bit of protein in the middle.’
‘Did you not have your lunch, Finn?’ giggled Sandra.
‘Now, please, Sandra!’ he snapped.
‘Why, certainly!’ his assistant replied, in a hurt and huffy voice.
His face was stern as he looked down at Catherine, who was still sitting in the chair with her eyes closed. ‘Are you asleep?’ he asked quietly.
‘No. Just trying to block out the sight of your face!’
‘And what if the baby looks like me?’ he questioned. ‘Won’t that be a terrible problem?’
Catherine opened her eyes and steeled herself against the impact of his handsome, mocking features. ‘I hope it’s a girl,’ she said frostily. ‘Who looks as little like you as possible! And even if he or she does look like you—’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll still love them!’ she
declared fiercely. ‘I may not have a lot to offer, but I can give this baby love, Finn Delaney! Now, are you please going to let me go? Or am I a prisoner here?’
He spoke using the soothing voice of a psychiatrist who was trying to placate an extremely mad patient. ‘You’re not going anywhere until you’ve calmed down.’
‘Then get me as far away from you as possible—that’s the only way to guarantee that!’
There was a light tap on the door. ‘Come in, Sandra,’ called Finn rather drily, noting how circumstances could change routine. Sandra never, ever knocked. But then he never, ever had women turning up at his headquarters hurling paperweights against the wall!
A frosty-looking Sandra deposited a loaded tray on the low table in one corner of the room.
‘Will there be anything else, Finn?’
He shook his head. ‘No—thanks, Sandra.’
‘You’re welcome.’
He couldn’t miss the trace of sarcasm, but then maybe it wasn’t so very surprising. Sandra had been with him for years, had seen him run his affairs with cool-headed acumen and detachment.
‘Catherine?’
‘What?’
‘Do you take sugar?’
She almost laughed aloud at the irony of it all—until she remembered that it wasn’t in the least bit funny. Her green eyes blazed with a kind of furious indignation, directed at him, but felt deeply by herself.
‘What a funny old world it is, don’t you think, Finn? Here I am carrying your baby, and you don’t even know whether I take sugar in my tea! Or milk, either, for that matter!’ she finished wildly, wondering if she could put these sudden, violent mood swings down to fluctuating hormones. Or the bizarre situation she found herself in.
‘So, do you or don’t you?’ he questioned calmly. ‘Have sugar?’
‘Usually I don’t, no! But for now I’ll have two!’ she declared, experiencing a sudden desire for hot, sweet tea. ‘And milk. Lots of it.’
He poured the tea and handed her a hefty-looking sandwich.
‘I don’t want anything to eat.’
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