‘Suit yourself.’
But the bread and the ham looked mouthwateringly good, and Catherine remembered that she had eaten nothing since a midnight craving had sent her to the fruit bowl last night and she had demolished the last three remaining apples. Her stomach rumbled and her hand reached out for the sandwich. She began to eat, looking at him defiantly, daring him to say something. But to his credit he simply took his own tea and sat down in front of her.
He waited until she had finished, relieved to see that the food and drink had brought a little colour into her cheeks. ‘So now what? Where do we go from here?’
‘I told you—I’m going back to London.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he demurred. ‘You can’t just arrive on my doorstep like the good fairy, impart a momentous piece of news like that, then take off again.’
‘You can’t stop me!’
‘No, I can’t stop you. But you still haven’t told me why you came here today.’
‘I would have thought that was pretty obvious.’
‘Not really. You could have phoned me. Or written me a letter.’ The blue eyes challenged her. ‘So why didn’t you?’
What was the point of hiding anything now? If she hadn’t kept her job secret then he probably wouldn’t have given her his card, and she wouldn’t have gone to see him, and then this would never…
But she shook her head. What was the point of wasting time by thinking of what might have been? Or what might not have been, in this case.
‘I wasn’t sure that you’d believe me.’
‘You thought that seeing me in person would convince me?’ He frowned. ‘But why? You don’t look pregnant—’ With that she opened the buttons of her coat and stared at him defiantly. He stilled.
For there, giving a smooth contour to her slim body, was the curve of pregnancy, and Finn stared at it, utterly speechless.
‘I just knew I had to tell you face to face, and show you that it’s real, it’s happening,’ she said, meeting that shocked stare. ‘Besides, it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to write, is it?’
He forced himself to remember that she had betrayed him. ‘Even for a journalist?’ he questioned sarcastically.
‘Even for a journalist,’ she echoed, but she felt the prick of tears at the back of her eyes and bit her lip again, knowing that whatever happened he had to hear this truth, too. He might not believe her, but she had to tell him.
‘Finn, my editor did send me to Dublin when she found out we’d met—and she did try to get a story on you. But I said no.’
‘So the story was just a figment of my imagination?’ he queried sarcastically.
‘No, but I didn’t write that piece about you, and neither did I receive any money.’
‘Oh?’ he queried cynically. ‘So they just happened to guess what the inside of my apartment is like, did they? And the fact that you obviously rate me in bed?’
‘I was upset, and I blurted a few things out to my editor, not expecting her to use them.’
‘What very naive behaviour for a journalist,’ he said coldly, but his heart had begun to beat very fast. If she had been tricked into giving a confidence, then didn’t that put an entirely different complexion on matters? And didn’t that, by default, make his subsequent behaviour absolutely intolerable?
‘Oh, what’s the point in all this?’ she sighed. ‘Don’t worry about it, Finn. I’m not asking you to have anything to do with this baby.’
‘But it’s not just down to you, is it?’ he asked quietly.
A cloud of apprehension cast its shadow. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that I want to,’ he said grimly. ‘This is my baby, too, you know, Catherine. By choosing to tell me you have irrevocably involved me—and believe me, sweetheart, I intend to be involved!
Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
CATHERINE stared at Finn in shock and alarm.
‘Well, what did you expect?’ he demanded. ‘That I would say, Okay—fine—you’re having my baby? Here’s a cheque and goodbye?’
‘I told you—I did not come here asking you for money!’ she said furiously.
‘No? But you still haven’t told me why you did come here.’
Catherine stared down at her lap, then looked back up at him, her eyes bright. ‘Because I didn’t know my own father.’
There was an odd, brittle kind of pause. ‘You mean he died?’ he questioned slowly.
She shook her head, met his eyes squarely. Defiantly. ‘I’m illegitimate, Finn.’
‘Come on now, Catherine,’ he said gently. ‘That isn’t such a terrible thing to be.’
‘Maybe not today it isn’t—but things were different when I was a child.’
‘Did you never meet him?’
‘Never. I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead,’ she said simply. ‘He was married to someone, and it wasn’t my mother. Like I said, I didn’t know him and he didn’t want to know me.’ Her eyes were bright now. ‘And I didn’t want to inflict that on my own child.’
He caught a sense of the rejection she must have felt, and again was filled with a pang of remorse. ‘I’m sorry—’
‘No!’ Fierce pride made her bunch her fists to wipe away the first tell-tale sign of tears, and she set her shoulders back. ‘I don’t want or need your sympathy for my upbringing, Finn, because it was a perfectly happy upbringing. It’s just—’
‘Not for your childhood,’ he said heavily. ‘For my recklessness.’
Their eyes met. ‘You don’t have the monopoly on recklessness,’ she said quietly. ‘The difference is that our motivations were different. You came round hell-bent on revenge, and you extracted it in the most basic form possible, didn’t you?’
Had he? Had he really been that cold-blooded? It was surely no defence to say that all he had planned to do was to deliver the flowers with a blistering denouncement, but that all rational thought and reason had been driven clean out of his mind by the sight and the touch and the feel of her. Was that the truth, or just a way of making events more palatable for his conscience?
‘You have a very powerful effect on me, Catherine,’ he said unsteadily. Because even now, God forgive him—even with all this going on—he was thinking that she looked like some kind of exquisite domesticated witch, with that tumble of ebony hair and the wide-spaced green eyes. Or a cat, he thought thickly. A minxy little feline who could sinuously make him do her will.
What kind of child would they produce together? he found himself wondering. An ebony-haired child with passion running deep in its veins? ‘A very powerful effect,’ he finished, and met her eyes.
She steeled herself against his charm, the soft, sizzling look in his eyes. ‘Yes, and we all know why, don’t we? Why I have such an effect on you.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re attempting to define chemistry?’
‘I’m not defining anything—I’m describing something else entirely.’ She threw him a challenging look and he matched it with one of his own.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m intrigued.’
‘We both know why such a famously private man should act in such an injudicious way.’
That one word assumed dominance inside his head. It wasn’t a handle which had ever been applied to him before. ‘Injudicious?’
‘Well, wasn’t it? If you’d bothered to find out a little bit more about me then you would have discovered that I was a journalist and presumably would have run in the opposite direction.’
‘You were being deliberately evasive, Catherine. You know you were.’
‘Yes, I was. I always am about my job, because people hold such strong prejudices.’
‘Can you wonder why?’ he questioned sarcastically.
‘But it all happened so quickly—there was no time for an extended getting-to-know-you, was there, Finn? Tell me, do you normally leap into bed quite so quickly?’
‘Not at all,’ he countered, fixing her with a mocking blue look.
‘Do you?’
‘Never.’ She drew a deep breath, not caring whether he believed her or not. His moral opinion of her did not matter. He would learn soon enough that she intended to be the mother to end all mothers. ‘But maybe you didn’t need to get to know me.’
‘Now you’ve lost me.’
‘Have I? Well, then, let me spell it out for you! We both know that the reason you couldn’t wait to take me to bed was because I reminded you of your childhood sweetheart!’
‘My childhood sweetheart?’ he repeated incredulously.
‘Deidra O’Shea! Are you denying that I look like her?’
It took a moment for her words to register, and when they did his accompanying feeling of rage was tempered only by the reminder that she was pregnant.
‘You have a look of her about you,’ he said carefully. ‘But so what?’
‘So what?’ Catherine turned a furious face to him. ‘Don’t you realise how insulting that is for a woman?’
‘What? That I happen to be attracted to dark-haired women with green eyes? Where’s the crime in that, Catherine? Don’t you normally lust after men who look like me? Isn’t that what human nature is all about? That we’re conditioned to respond to certain stimuli?’
What would it reveal about her if she admitted that she didn’t usually lust after men at all? That Peter had been the very opposite of Finn in looks and character. Peter didn’t dominate a room, nor did his charisma light it up just as surely as if it had been some glorious, glowing beacon. Peter had not been able to make her melt so instantly and so responsively with just a glimmering look from his eyes.
‘Did you pretend I was her?’ she demanded heatedly. ‘Close your eyes and think it was her?’
‘But I didn’t close my eyes, Catherine,’ he answered seriously. ‘I was looking at you all the time. Remember?’
Oh, yes, she remembered. She remembered all too well. The way his eyes had caressed her just as surely as his fingertips had. The things he had said about her body. He had compared her skin to silk and cream, in that musical and lilting Irish accent.
‘And what about you?’ he questioned suddenly. ‘What’s the justification for your behaviour? Was it perhaps a way of striking out at a man who had hurt you badly?’
Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
‘Peter,’ he said deliberately. ‘The man who left you.’
‘How on earth did you find out about Peter?’ she breathed.
‘Oh, come on, Catherine! When the article was brought to my attention by my cuttings service, I had a check run on you. Suddenly everything made sense. Why a woman, seemingly so aloof, should go to bed with me without me really having to try. You wanted to get back at your ex-boyfriend, didn’t you?’
She let him believe it. Because the truth was even more disturbing than his accusation. That she had been so besotted by Finn she had scarcely given Peter a thought. Didn’t that fact damn her more than redeem her?
Catherine felt tired. Weary. Unable to cope with any more.
‘Oh, what’s the point in remembering? What’s done is done and we just have to live with the consequences.’
‘Don’t go back to London today,’ he said suddenly.
She looked at him. ‘Can you give me a good reason why not?’
‘You’re tired. And we have things to discuss.’ His blue eyes gleamed with resolve, and he continued in a quieter voice, ‘Just as there are consequences to what happened between us, there are also consequences to your visit here. Come on.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Go where?’
‘I’ll take you back to the flat. You can rest there, and then we can talk.’
It wasn’t so much his strength or his determination which made Catherine weakly nod her head. She was pregnant, she told herself. She was allowed to be persuaded.
‘Okay,’ she agreed.
Finn stared out of the window at the distant waters of the Liffey—grey today, to match the sky. And to match his mood, he thought, with a heart which was heavy.
He turned silently to look at where Catherine lay, asleep on the king-sized sofa. She had been fighting sleep ever since he had brought her back here and at long last she had given up the battle.
Her hair lay in tousled silken strands of black, contrasted against a Chinese silk cushion, and her dark lashes feathered into two perfect arcs on her high cheekbones. She slept as peacefully and as innocently as a child, he thought. He stared at the curve of her belly as his thoughts repeated themselves in his mind.
A child.
A wild leap of something like joy jumped unexpectedly in his chest.
A child!
And not just any child. This was his child.
And, no matter what the circumstances, wasn’t the procreation of life always a miracle? Didn’t the tiny heart of his child beat inside this woman?
This stranger.
And yet he felt he knew her body more intimately than that of any woman who had gone before.
Catherine opened her eyes to find Finn standing, staring down at her. For a moment she was muddled and confused, wondering just where she was and what had happened. And then it all came back to her in one great jolting rush.
She was in his flat, and she had told him, and his reaction had been—unexpectedly—one of immediate acceptance, not suspicion.
She sat up and yawned. ‘I fell asleep,’ she said unnecessarily.
‘You certainly did.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘For almost an hour. Looked like you needed it.’
An hour! ‘Good grief.’ She yawned again. When was the last time she’d slept so soundly in the middle of the day? Better start getting used to changes, she thought, as she ran her hand through her rumpled hair. She looked up into the imposing, impassive face. ‘What are we going to do?’
He gave an almost imperceptible nod. We, she had said, acknowledging the power in a single word. He realised that already they were a unit. If you were lovers, even married, then no matter how long you were in a relationship a certain question-mark of impermanence always hovered unspoken in the air. But not any more. He and Catherine were fact. Chained together for the rest of their lives. The mother, the father and the baby.
‘Tell me about what your life in London is like,’ he said suddenly, and seated himself on the sofa opposite hers, stretching his long legs out in front of him.
Catherine blinked. ‘Like what? You know where I live.’
‘Yes. A one-bedroomed flat in the middle of the city. Not the most ideal place for bringing up a baby,’ he observed.
She was intelligent enough not to argue with that. ‘No,’ she agreed quietly. ‘It’s not.’
‘And your job?’ he questioned. ‘On Pizazz!.’ He spat the word out as though it was a bitter pill. ‘Will they give you paid maternity leave?’
Catherine hesitated. Of course. He didn’t know—but then how would he? ‘I don’t have a job any more,’ she said slowly, and saw his head jerk upwards in surprise. ‘Or rather, I do, but it’s certainly not one which will give me paid maternity leave. I’m…I’ve gone freelance,’ she said at last.
‘Since when?’ he demanded. ‘Since before you knew you were pregnant?’
‘Of course! I’m not completely stupid!’
Guilt twisted a knife in his gut. ‘You can’t get another staff job?’
‘Not like this! Who’s going to take someone on at this stage of pregnancy? I can just see it now—Welcome, Catherine, we’d love to employ you. And, yes, we’d be delighted to give you paid leave in a few months’ time!’
He studied her, trying to be dispassionate, to block out her blinding beauty. ‘So how exactly are you planning to bring up this baby, in Clerkenwell, with no regular income?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
‘You make it sound as though you have the luxury of choice, Catherine—which it seems to me you don’t.’
‘I’ll think of something.’ Her mother had managed, hadn’t she? Well, so would she!
He looked at her closely, this beautiful woman he had been unable to resist, recognising that their lives would never be the same again.
‘Where does your mother live?’ he questioned, so uncannily that for one mad moment she wondered if he was capable of reading her thoughts.
‘Devon.’
‘Would you consider going there?’
Catherine shuddered. What, and let the village watch history repeating itself? The conquering daughter returning home vanquished, pregnant, and trying to eke out a living? Could she possibly land herself on her mother—who was happy with her independent life and her charity work? Would she want to go through the whole thing yet again?
‘It would be too much for my mother to cope with,’ she said truthfully.
That was one option dealt with. ‘And do you know many people in London?’
She shrugged. ‘Kind of—though I’ve only been there a couple of years. Colleagues, of course. Well, ex-colleagues, mainly,’ she amended. And work friendships were never the same once you’d left a job, were they? Everyone knew that. ‘I’ve got some good close friends, too.’
‘Any with children?’
‘Good grief—no! Career women to a fault.’
‘Sounds a pretty isolated and lonely place for a woman to be child-rearing.’
‘Like I said, I’ll manage.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Commendable pride, Catherine,’ he said drily. ‘But it isn’t just you to think about now, is it? Do you really think it’s fair to foist that kind of lifestyle on a poor, defenceless baby?’
‘You’re making it sound like cruelty!’ she protested. ‘Lots and lots of women have babies in cities and all of them are perfectly happy!’
‘Most probably have supporting partners and extended families!’ he snapped. ‘Which you don’t!’
‘Well—’
‘And most do not have a credible alternative,’ he said, cutting right across her protests. ‘Like you do,’ he finished deliberately.
There was something so solemn and profound in his voice that Catherine instinctively sat up straight, half-fearful and half-hopeful of what his next words might be. ‘Like what?’ she whispered.
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