The Secrets She Must Tell

by Lucy King

  Which, finally, he thought darkly as he heard the sound of the front door opening and closing and abandoned the coffee to stride towards it, was now.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he said curtly, relief, a shot of unwanted desire and something else undefinable making him sound short.

  Having parked the pushchair just inside the door, Georgie glanced up at him, her eyebrows raised no doubt in response to his tone. ‘Out,’ she said, turning her attention to Josh, unbuckling him and lifting him free.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘We had lunch with Carla.’

  ‘I called.’

  ‘My phone ran out of battery.’

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘We were chatting. I lost track of time.’

  ‘You should have left a note.’

  As she fitted Josh to her hip, she turned to him, her eyes narrowing minutely and her chin jutting up. ‘Are you implying I’m somehow accountable to you, Finn?’

  No. Yes. Dammit. ‘No.’

  ‘So why are you so cross?’

  ‘You weren’t here when I got home. That’s never happened before. I was worried.’

  She froze, tension suddenly pouring off her as the colour bled from her face. ‘Josh is fine,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘Truly. Look.’

  What? No. She couldn’t believe that he’d think she’d hurt him, could she? Hell, just how bad had things got? ‘That wasn’t what I meant at all.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No,’ he said with a decisive shake of his head.

  ‘Then what did you mean?’

  There was no way he could explain the emotions that had ripped through him when it had occurred to him that she and Josh might have gone for good. He wasn’t entirely sure he fully understood them himself. Perhaps it would be best to get to the point. ‘I have a proposal.’

  Her gaze turned quizzical, wary. ‘What kind of a proposal?’

  ‘A way forward that will suit us all. Permanently.’

  She frowned. ‘By “proposal” you don’t mean marriage, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Phew. Thank goodness for that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go thanking goodness just yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because instead, you and I are going to enter into a civil partnership.’

  * * *

  If Georgie hadn’t been holding on quite so tightly to Josh she might well have dropped him in shock. A civil partnership? Was Finn being serious? He couldn’t be. And yet he didn’t look as if he was joking. His jaw was set and he wasn’t smiling. His gaze was fixed on hers with an intensity that was both unnerving and oddly exciting. He clearly meant every word.

  ‘What on earth makes you think that’s a good idea?’ she asked, ignoring the little leap of her pulse and concentrating on the fact that a civil partnership may not technically be marriage but it was just as much of a commitment and equally unnecessary.

  ‘It will provide security for Josh.’

  Not ‘would’ but ‘will’, she noticed. So this wasn’t a hypothetical proposal. Finn had given it quite a bit of thought already and evidently considered it a fait accompli. Too bad for him that she didn’t. ‘He already has security without it,’ she pointed out. ‘We’ve added your name to his birth certificate and he now carries your surname instead of mine. Plus financially you’ve set him up for life.’

  ‘That’s not enough.’

  Of course it was enough. It was more than enough. So what was going on? What more security could Josh have or need? Unless it wasn’t only Josh Finn was thinking of. ‘Is this in some way about you?’ she asked, since there was absolutely no chance it was about her.

  Something flickered in the depths of his eyes, something that suggested she’d hit the nail on the head. ‘Why would it be about me?’

  Hmm. ‘You do know that I have no intention of ever preventing Josh from seeing you or vice versa, don’t you? Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I don’t see how it would be possible.’

  ‘I have no doubt you mean that at the moment.’

  Ouch. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘It’s early days.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that,’ she said coolly, still stinging at the realisation he didn’t see her progress in the same light as she did.

  ‘Then you’ll understand why a formal arrangement is necessary.’

  ‘I can understand why you think it might be, but I don’t agree.’

  ‘It will benefit you, too.’

  Oh? ‘In what way?’ she asked, transferring Josh to the other hip.

  ‘Commit to me and you’ll have the stability you admitted you need. You’ll never want for anything again.’

  Well, materially that might be true, yet he’d promised her that already. And what about him? What advantages would it have for him? Was he somehow hoping for a friends-with-benefits sort of thing? He’d better not be. ‘What would you get from it?’

  ‘Peace of mind.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  Right. So not sex. Obviously. Stupid of her. Why would she even have thought it when he showed absolutely no interest in her like that? Damn those scorchingly hot dreams she’d been having about him.

  ‘What would happen if either of us met someone else?’ she asked, thinking that, while she couldn’t imagine ever doing so herself, Finn was gorgeous and a billionaire and presumably had women flinging themselves at him left, right and centre. She’d seen zero evidence of it to date, but that could well change once things settled down.

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge if and when we come to it,’ he said, which wasn’t exactly a denial. ‘Think about it, Georgie. What do you have to lose?’

  The hint of arrogance and condescension in Finn’s voice annoyed her even more than the tiny irrational stab of jealousy she felt at the thought of him with another woman, but actually none of this was about her, was it? This was about Josh. Too much of his short life had been taken up with her illness and she owed it to him to make amends. Goodness knew she hadn’t been the best of mothers. In fact, she must have been among the worst.

  Surely he’d be better off with two parents together. Didn’t the statistics suggest precisely that? The inconvenient and all-consuming attraction she felt for Finn would fade to a manageable level eventually. It already had done a bit. Look at the way the shock of his suggestion had rid her of her ridiculous embarrassment around him.

  And they were hardly strangers any more. She’d even go so far as to say that they had a weird kind of connection that had nothing to do with Josh, an odd sense of recognition that made her think ‘oh, that’s right, it’s you’, which she’d felt the night they’d met, and which hit her with increasing regularity now.

  And really, how bad would such a situation be for her? she thought, on one hand barely able to believe that she was even considering Finn’s preposterous suggestion yet on the other totally seeing the sense of it. They got on well enough. And he was right. She would have the stable family unit she’d always yearned for, along with the security that Finn could provide.

  If they were joined in partnership he wouldn’t be able to just get up and leave, would he? Should she have a relapse he wouldn’t abandon Josh, and therefore he wouldn’t abandon her. They’d be safe. He’d told her she’d always have his support, which she believed, and she wasn’t going to get anything like it anywhere else. She wasn’t exactly an attractive prospect and it wasn’t as if there was anyone else waiting in the wings.

  Ultimately, despite his arrogance and condescension, Finn had a point. She really did have nothing to lose. In fact, she had everything to gain, and so, to ensure the best future for Josh in particular, it really was a no-brainer.

  ‘All right,’ she said with a brief nod. ‘If it’s a civil partnership you want, it’s a civil par
tnership you shall have.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE CEREMONY TOOK place in a register office a stone’s throw from Finn’s hotel a week later, the usual lengthy bureaucracy associated with such an event magically disappearing the moment he produced an enormous cheque, which only went to demonstrate yet again that once he wanted something he didn’t stop until he got it.

  The arrangements hadn’t been complicated in any case. Georgie had only wanted Carla there, and, apart from their son, Finn had no relations. His mother had been hit by a bus when he was ten, he’d told her, his father had died of terminal cancer around three months ago, and he had no siblings. He was as alone in this world as she was, and when she’d discovered this she’d had the fanciful notion that by hitching her wagon to his she might be rescuing him as much as he’d rescued her.

  Faintly unsettled by that thought and unwilling to acknowledge what the accompanying squeeze of her heart might mean, Georgie had joked that it was going to be a small ceremony, and indeed it was. She wore a knee-length ivory dress and matching coat. Finn had on a dark suit that fitted as if made for him, which it probably was, and a snowy white shirt open at the collar that drew attention to the firmness of his jaw and strong planes of his face.

  She didn’t know quite why they’d dressed up. There was nothing remotely weddingy or romantic about either the venue or the occasion. But that didn’t douse the flicker of warmth that uncurled deep within her when they stood together with a thankfully beautifully behaved Josh in Finn’s arms while Mrs Gardiner, who’d doubled up as the second witness, took the photo she’d insisted on taking after they’d all signed the register. Nor did it stop her noticing how smoulderingly hot her new... What? Not husband... So partner...? How smoulderingly hot he looked and how delicious he smelled close up.

  Not that any of that mattered, any more than the weird idea that the ceremony was somehow special did. She’d get over that nonsense. Nothing had changed. And, while the way Finn made her physically feel was going to continue to be hard to ignore, it wasn’t impossible. She was made of stern stuff. If she could get through the insanely tough initial stages of post-partum psychosis, she could handle this inconvenient attraction, however insistent. It wasn’t as if there was any other option when how she felt was so clearly one-sided. She was hardly going to throw herself at him and suggest a repeat of that wild night they’d spent together. Heaven forbid. His likely rejection would be mortifying.

  However, for the sake of their son, she and Finn could be perfectly civil and mature about all of this, and she, at least, intended to start with the lunch they were about to embark upon to mark the occasion. Carla had gone straight back to work after the ceremony and Mrs Gardiner had taken Josh back to the apartment for his customary nap, which left her and Finn in one of the many restaurants in his company’s portfolio, together and on their own for the first time in weeks.

  ‘What shall we toast to?’ she asked, once they’d sat down at their table and a bottle of champagne had been delivered and poured.

  Finn arched one dark eyebrow. ‘Is there any need to toast anything?’

  ‘I think so... Ooh, I know. How about to no longer being alone?’

  He didn’t say anything, merely carried on looking at her steadily, his gaze unwavering and unfathomable, and for one horrible moment she thought she’d got it all wrong. But just as she was beginning to feel a bit of a fool sitting there with her hand outstretched, he touched his glass to hers and gave her the faintest of smiles before lifting the glass to his lips and tipping half of its contents down his throat.

  ‘So why didn’t you want any of your friends to be a witness?’ she said, taking a sip of her own drink and for some reason feeling ridiculously pleased that she hadn’t got it wrong after all. ‘Come to think of it, do you have any friends?’ She hadn’t heard any mention of any.

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said, setting his glass down and twirling the stem between his fingers and thumb. ‘One of them’s on honeymoon, and it didn’t seem worth bothering any of the others for something that was merely a formality.’

  Oh. Right. Well. That told her. Just as well she hadn’t been harbouring any ideas of their civil partnership being anything other than purely practical.

  ‘Do they know about me and Josh?’ she asked, slightly distracted by the mesmerising movement of his fingers, as so often happened whenever she looked at his hands.

  ‘If they do it’ll have been via the press.’

  So he wasn’t exactly shouting the news of their union from the rooftops. Which was fine. There was absolutely no reason why he should, she told herself, lifting her gaze and getting a grip. ‘Will I ever meet any of them?’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘I look forward to it,’ she said, realising with some surprise that it was true. She wanted to know more about this man and, weirdly, not just because he was the father of her child.

  ‘Why didn’t you want your parents there today?’

  With a jolt she refocused and, as usual whenever she thought of her parents, a tight knot of anger and resentment and God only knew what else formed in her stomach. ‘There wouldn’t have been any point,’ she said, hearing the faint note of bitterness in her voice and inwardly cringing. ‘They wouldn’t have come even if we had been on speaking terms. Marriage and civil partnerships are far too conventional for their way of life.’

  ‘You mentioned they live in a commune.’

  ‘That’s right. They do.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I have no idea. They travel around. They always have.’

  ‘Even when you were young?’

  ‘Even then.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Great in some ways, awful in others,’ she said with a casual shrug designed to hide the strange combination of pain and happiness that accompanied memories of her childhood. ‘When I was very young, not having to go to school was fantastic. I had no set bedtimes and I could eat what I liked, although, since we only really had lentils and vegetables, I guess that wasn’t such a luxury. The first time I had a grilled tuna steak I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It’s still my favourite thing to eat. Anyway, there were no boundaries and zero discipline. In hindsight, I must have been totally feral. We all were, really.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘Wherever we lived and however many families we lived with, there were always lots of children.’

  ‘It sounds idyllic.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, considering it from the point of view of growing up with only one parent and no siblings. ‘But it wasn’t.’ Not for her, and definitely not for Carla. ‘Not for a teenager, at least.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She frowned for a moment. ‘I think subconsciously I really needed those boundaries to prove that I mattered. That my parents did actually care about me. And because I didn’t have any, I went looking for them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I became a classic attention-seeking teen. I used to dress up and hang out in bars and order drinks while underage and flirt with all sorts of inappropriate people, desperate for someone to come and haul me home and ground me after some stern words.’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘Nope,’ she said with a sigh of the deep disappointment that annoyingly she still couldn’t seem to shake even now, a decade later. ‘Never. Once I got caught shoplifting and was delivered home by the owner of the shop with a warning and the only thing my parents were cross about was that the face cream I’d nicked wasn’t organic. Eventually I figured that the only person who was going to look out for me was me and so I decided to take control of my own life. I managed to blag my way into a sixth-form college and then got into university. As if that wasn’t conventional enough, I became a lawyer, at which point my parents pretty much disowned me. We haven’t been properly in touch much since.’

  ‘Do you miss them?�
��

  She stared at him, for a moment completely taken aback. What an odd question. She’d never thought about it like that. She’d always been too stuck in a rut of simmering resentment and disappointment to allow herself to grieve for the loss of what could have been.

  ‘I think I miss the idea of them,’ she said after a few moments of consideration. ‘I envy families. I never really had a proper one. The commune was no substitute. I was angry with my parents for a long time. Maybe I still am a bit. They let me down in every way possible. They failed at everything. No child deserves to feel unloved and unwanted. They should have been responsible. They should have been better. It’s kind of in the job description.’

  A job description that was hers now, she thought, making a silent promise to be the best parent she could for Josh. She might not have got off to a good start on the motherhood front but she would now do everything in her power to prevent her son ever feeling the way she had. Josh would never have to question whether he mattered. Whether he was truly loved. He’d never feel he had to find support elsewhere. He would never have to seek the attention he craved by hitting bars and clubs and engaging in unsuitable flirting.

  ‘Do they know you’ve been ill?’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t see the point of telling them. They wouldn’t have been any help. They’d have just boiled up some hemp and sung a song or something. They’ve had the luxury of never being properly ill. At least, as far as I’m aware.’

  ‘Have you told them about Josh?’

  ‘I emailed my mother and got a reply warning me about the dangers of disposable nappies.’

  ‘Their loss.’

  And so it was, she realised as those two simple words sliced through the complex emotions she felt about her upbringing and pulverised the resentment and the pain. Finn was right. Her parents would never know her or him and they would never know their grandson, and that was their loss.