by Amy Andrews
‘Finn …’ Evie sighed. She didn’t have the energy to fight today.
‘Please, Evie.’
Evie blinked. Finn wasn’t one for saying ‘please’. Not even when he’d suggested they get married had he thrown in a ‘please’.
‘Where exactly are you taking her?’ Bella asked, placing a protective hand on her sister’s arm.
Bella didn’t like the way he’d been treating Evie, especially his silence this last month. If she were pregnant there was no way Charlie would treat her so abysmally. He’d wrap in her cotton wool, which was no less than any woman deserved. Especially Evie, who’d been the Lockheart family rock for ever and worked such long, punishing hours.
‘It’s a surprise,’ Finn hedged.
‘Is it a good surprise?’ Bella demanded. ‘Will she like it, Finn Kennedy, because I don’t care how much money you bring into the hospital’s coffers or how brilliant everyone says you are, frankly I think you can be pretty damn obtuse.’
‘Bella,’ Lexi said reproachfully.
But Finn gave a grudging smile. Trust another Lockheart to tell him like it was. Bella had been pretty easy to dismiss due to being sickly most of her life but those new lungs had certainly given her a whole lot of breath! ‘Yes,’ he conceded, ‘it’s a good surprise.’
Evie’s pulse fluttered at her wrist and tap-danced at her temple as Bella removed her hand. He didn’t look any softer but his words were encouraging. Maybe they were going to have an adult conversation about the way forward?
‘Fine,’ she said, dropping a kiss on Bella’s cheek before she eased herself out of the booth. Finn stepped aside for her and Evie was excruciatingly aware of the sudden rabid interest—some subtle, some not so subtle—directed towards them as she gave Lexi a quick peck.
She turned to Finn, ignoring the speculation she could practically feel coursing through Pete’s like an electrical current. ‘Lead on,’ she said.
She breathed a little easier once they’d got out of the pub and were walking to his car, parked at the kerb outside. It was black and low with only two seats—the ultimate status symbol—and it surprised her. She’d never seen Finn’s car. He walked to work as everyone who lived at Kirribilli Views did, and like everyone else at his professional level and with his abrasive personality didn’t have a social life that really required one.
She supposed the women he’d dated probably thought it was hot and cool. Good-looking doctor—check! Racy car—check! But all she could think as the engine purred to life was, Where was he going to put the baby seat?
‘So what’s the big surprise?’ she asked as Finn negotiated the late-afternoon traffic.
‘Patience,’ he said, his eyes not leaving the road. ‘Patience.’
So they didn’t talk for the fifteen minutes it took to get where they were going. Evie looked around bewildered as they pulled up at a house in Lavender Bay, not far from the hospital or the harbour. In fact, as she climbed out of his car—something that would probably be impossible at nine months—she could see down to the harbour where the early evening light had laid its gentle fingers and across the other side to the tall distinctive towers of the SHH and further on to the large garish clown mouth of Luna Park and the famous bridge that spanned the harbour.
A breeze that smelled of salt and sand picked up her hair, blowing a strand across her face as she tracked the path of a yellow and green ferry. She pulled it away as she turned to face Finn, who was opening the low gate of the house where they were parked.
‘Okay, so … what are we doing here?’
‘All will be revealed shortly,’ he said as he gestured for her to follow him up the crumbling cement path.
Evie frowned. Whose place was this? Did he want her to meet someone? Someone who might help her understand him? A patient? A relative? Lydia? However she fitted into the puzzle that was Finn. His mother? His grandmother? Did he even have either of those? He never spoke of them.
It had to be someone he knew, though, because he had a key and as she watched him walk up the three stairs and traverse the old-fashioned balcony covered by a Seventies-style awning he didn’t even bother with knocking. Just slipped the key into the lock and pushed the door open.
He turned to her. ‘Come,’ he said as he stepped into the house.
Evie rolled her eyes. The man was clueless. Utterly clueless. But she followed him anyway because she was dying to know who lived in this gorgeous little cottage overlooking the harbour and what they had to do with Finn.
Maybe it was a clue to his life that he always kept hidden from her. From everyone.
She stepped inside, her heels clacking against smooth polished floorboards the colour of honey. The sound echoed around the empty house. The rooms, as she moved through, following Finn, were devoid of furniture, curtains or blinds and floor coverings. Soaring ceilings graced with decorative roses added to the cavernous echo.
He opened the back door and she followed him down the three stairs to the back entertaining area and then onto a small patch of grass, the back fence discreetly covered by a thick row of established shrubbery.
‘Well?’ he said, turning around with his arms splayed wide like a game-show host. ‘It’s beautiful, don’t you think?’
He was smiling at her, a rare smile that went all the way to his eyes, lighting them up like a New Year’s Eve laser display, and Evie’s foolish heart skipped a beat. ‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly, smiling back.
‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘Ours. I bought it. As a wedding gift. The perfect place to raise our son.’
Evie stared at him for the longest time as everything around her seemed to slow right down to a snail’s pace. The flow of blood in her veins, the passage of air in her lungs, the distant blare of a ferry horn on the harbour. Then the slow death of her smile as realisation dawned.
‘Is this another way of suggesting we get married?’ she asked, her quiet voice sounding loud in the silence that seemed to have descended on the back yard.
Finn shook his head vigorously. ‘Absolutely not. It’s a proposal. I was wrong last time just … assuming. I should have asked you. I got the call this afternoon from the real estate agent that she was mine.’
Ours, she corrected silently knowing that the gesture, while grand, was empty. It was obvious he didn’t think of it as theirs. That it was just another way of getting what he wanted.
He reached out and took her hand. ‘What do you say, Evie? Let’s get married. Let’s raise our son together, here in this house with the harbour just there and everything he could ever want.’
Evie looked into his gorgeously shaggy, earnest face. A part of her whispered, Do it. Say yes. Take the fake marriage. Take whatever he’s offering. You can make him love you with time and patience.
And it was, oh, so tempting.
But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
She wanted more than that. She wanted it all—the whole hearts and flowers catastrophe. If she’d learned anything from her own parents’ marriage and years of navigating a fraught household, it was that you couldn’t make someone love you if they didn’t.
No matter how hard you tried.
And you had to start as you meant to go on.
She withdrew her hand from his. ‘No.’
She refused to live on Finn’s crumbs as her mother had on her father’s. If they were going to enter into a marriage then she wanted all of him.
‘Hell, Evie,’ Finn said, shaking his head incredulously. ‘I bought you a house. What more do you want from me?’
‘I can buy my own house,’ she snapped.
‘Then what do you want’ he demanded.
‘You, Finn,’ she yelled. ‘I want you. I want you to open up to me. To know every secret, every ugly thought, every tear you’ve ever shed. I want to know about every sad, sorry day of your existence. And I want you to want to know about mine. I want to know about Isaac and the day that he died in your arms and about who the hell Lydia is and how she fits into your life a
nd about your childhood and your time in the army as a trauma surgeon.’
Evie was breathing hard as she finished and she’d just scraped the surface of the things she wanted to know about the man she loved. ‘That’s what I want,’ she said, ramming her hands onto her hips, pulling her shirt taut across her bump. ‘Anything less is asking me to debase myself. And I deserve better than that.’
Finn reeled from her list. She wanted too much. She wanted stuff he’d never given to anyone. Not to Lydia. Not even to Isaac.
Finn steeled himself to be the practical one. Obviously the pregnancy was making level-headed Evie a trace emotional.
‘None of those things are open to negotiation,’ he said, his voice steely. ‘Neither are they required to make a life together. I’m sure if we’re both practical we can make it work, Evie.’
Evie’s temper flared at his condescension. He truly thought he could just wear her down. She’d swallowed a lot of pride where Finn was concerned because she loved him and she’d known he’d been hurting and she’d seen the injured soul under the gruff and bluff but she drew the line here. She would not become his wife—give him her all—and end up married to a stranger.
‘Okay, then,’ she snapped. ‘Tell me how it will work, Finn. How? We get married and have a committed normal relationship where you take out the rubbish and I hang out the washing and we argue over the TV remote and snuggle in bed on the weekends with the newspapers?’
She glared at him as she drew breath. ‘Or is it just a name-only thing? Do we sleep in the same bed to keep up the ruse for our son? Or apart? Do we have some kind of open marriage where we discreetly see other people? Or do we just go without sex for the next twenty-ish years and you spend a lot of time in the shower and I run up an account at the sex shop we just passed?’
Finn blinked at her vehemence, lost for words, but she seemed to have paused for a moment and was looking at him like it was his turn to add to the conversation. ‘I haven’t really thought about the nitty-gritty, Evie.’
‘Bum-bah!’ she snorted. ‘Wrong answer. Try again. You want me to accept this proposal?’ She folded her arms. ‘Convince me.’
Finn picked carefully through words and phrases in his head, hoping that he found the right ones to convince her. ‘I assumed we’d be sharing the same bed. In the …’ he searched around for a delicate way to put it ‘… fullest sense of the word.’
‘Well, I just bet you did, didn’t you? Works well for you, doesn’t it, to have sex on tap. No need for all those showers then.’
Finn wondered if Evie was maybe becoming a little hysterical but he was damned if he was going to be made out to be the bad guy here because he wanted to have sex with his wife. ‘No need for you to take out shares in sex-toy companies either,’ he pointed out, his jaw aching from trying to stay rational.
‘Well, I wouldn’t count on that.’
It was Finn’s turn to snort. ‘You know well enough, Evie Lockheart, that I can make you come loud enough to scare nesting birds on the other side of the harbour.’
She shrugged. ‘So can a little imagination.’
He quirked an eyebrow. ‘It can’t hold you afterwards.’
‘Maybe not. But at least it’s not going to break my heart a little more each time and slowly erode my self-respect.’
‘Damn it, Evie,’ he fumed as his control started to slip. ‘This is not what I wanted. I didn’t want to be a father but it’s happening and I’m here. Do you think you could at least meet me halfway?’
Evie grappled with her escalating temper. He was right. He was here. Even if he was being a total idiot about it. She took a calm, steadying breath.
‘This,’ she said, repeating his open-armed action from earlier as she indicated the house and yard, ‘isn’t halfway, Finn. This is full throttle. Halfway is agreeing to a parenting schedule. Talking about how it’s going to affect our jobs and what we can do to lessen the impact on two households. It’s talking about what schools he should go to and getting our wills in order.’
Finn shook his head. She seemed much calmer now but he could feel it all slipping away. This was not how he’d planned today would go. ‘What about the house?’ he demanded.
‘It’s fabulous,’ she said gently. God knew, she’d move in tomorrow if things were different between them. ‘And our son is going to love being here with you. But I’m not going to marry you, Finn. Not when you don’t love me.’
‘I don’t want some modern rubbish arrangement for my kid,’ he said stubbornly. He didn’t want his son to be bouncing between houses—his whole childhood had been like that and he’d hated it. ‘It’ll be confusing for him.’
‘He won’t have known anything else,’ she murmured, and then she shook her head. ‘It’s funny, I never picked you as a traditionalist.’
‘Kids should be raised by their parents. Together.’
‘Sure. In an ideal world. But what we’ve got here isn’t ideal, is it, Finn? And I’m pretty sure I’m capable of doing my bit to raise our son.’
Her calmness was getting on his nerves. He knew for sure he wasn’t capable of raising a child by himself. He needed her. He needed her to provide the love and comfort stuff. The nurturing. He could teach him to build a fire and climb a tree and how to fish. He needed Evie there to make up for the stuff he wasn’t capable of in all the quiet, in-between times.
‘Well, you haven’t exactly done such a stellar job so far,’ he lashed out. ‘You’ve got yourself electrocuted, almost drowned and followed that up by a case of hypothermia.’
Evie gasped, her hand automatically going to her belly, as if to shield the baby from the insult. If she’d been a more demonstrative woman, she might just have slapped him. ‘The baby is perfectly fit and healthy and completely unharmed,’ she said, her voice vibrating with hurt.
His gaze dropped to where her hand cradled her belly and he felt the irrational surge of anger from the day she’d been caught up in the rip break over him again. ‘Well, that was sheer luck, wasn’t it?’ he snapped.
Evie wanted to scream and rant and stomp her foot but it was useless and exhausting and getting them nowhere. Finn was being his usual pig-headed self and she should know better than to try and reason with him in this mood.
She shook her head at him, swallowing down all the rage and fury and sucking up his bad temper like she always did. The only thing she had was the high ground. And now seemed like a very good time to take it.
‘Goodbye, Finn,’ she said, turning on her heel and marching through the house.
He followed her, calling out to her about being reasonable and driving her back, but a taxi came along just as she was opening the gate and it pulled in when she waved, and she didn’t look back as Finn told her to stop being ridiculous. She just opened the door and told the driver to go, go, go.
A week later Evie was lying in bed on her day off after five day shifts, too exhausted to get up to relieve her full bladder, which the baby was taking great delight in using as a trampoline. She hadn’t heard boo from Finn all week. In fact, she’d only glimpsed him once, and she didn’t know whether that had been his passive-aggressive way of agreeing to do it her way or if he was just off plotting his next grand gesture.
She suspected the latter, although right now she was too tired to care.
Another five minutes of baby gymnastics and she could ignore the need to go no longer. She rolled out of bed and did her business. She was heading back again when there was a knock on her door. She wistfully eyed the corner of her bed, which she could see through the open door.
It was probably just Bella, who had taken to dropping in all the time to check on her. She could probably just ignore it but the knock came again and she didn’t have the heart to leave her sister on the doorstep.
Except it wasn’t Bella when she opened the door. It was Lydia.
Evie blinked, feeling like an Amazon next to the tiny redhead. She tried to suck in her belly but that was no longer possible. ‘Oh … Hi … Lyd
ia?’
Lydia smiled at her as she checked out Evie’s belly. ‘Well, he’s right,’ she said. ‘You’re definitely pregnant.’
‘Er … yes,’ Evie said, struck by how truly bizarre this moment was. Not knowing Lydia’s exact relationship with Finn made this meeting kind of awkward. For her anyway. Lydia didn’t seem ready to scratch her eyes out—in fact, she seemed friendly—so maybe they didn’t have that kind of history?
‘Do you think I could come in?’ Lydia asked. ‘I’ve come on behalf of Finn.’
Evie groaned—Finn had sent an emissary? She was too tired for this. ‘Look, Lydia, if Finn’s sent you to offer me some crazy incentive—money or diamonds or the goose that lays the golden eggs—I really need to let you know right off the bat that you’re wasting your breath.’
Lydia pursed her lips. ‘Oh, dear … the house,’ she tutted. ‘It’s worse than I thought.’
Evie frowned. ‘Huh?’
‘Can I, please, just come in and explain?’ Evie hesitated and Lydia dived in to reassure her. ‘I’ve come on behalf of Finn but he doesn’t know I’m here. He’d be furious if he did. But I haven’t seen him this … bleak in a very long time and I can’t bear it any longer.’
Evie could hear the woman’s genuine concern and worry as she had that day Lydia had told her Finn’s whereabouts. She got the sense that Lydia loved Finn and the spike of jealousy that drove into her chest almost knocked Evie flat. She reached for the door to steady herself, the overwhelming urge to slam it in Lydia’s face warring with her curiosity.
Curiosity won out.
Part of Evie needed to know where Lydia fitted into Finn’s life.
Evie fell back and ushered her inside. She played the perfect hostess, fixing Lydia a cup of coffee and some green tea for herself. They sat on opposite sides of the coffee table, sipping at their drinks for a moment or two, and then Evie voiced what she’d sensed from the beginning.
‘You love him?’
Lydia nodded. ‘Yes.’
