by Lucy King
Georgie gave a loud sigh of what sounded like exasperation. ‘Oh, for the love of God, will you please stop calling them that?’ she said heatedly.
Stunned at her tone, wondering where the hell the sympathy he’d been expecting was, Finn came to an abrupt halt and whipped round to stare at her. ‘What?’
Her colour was high and her eyes were blazing and the need that suddenly streaked through him nearly knocked him off his feet. ‘Look, Finn, I get that you feel let down and betrayed. And, believe me, I know what it’s like to have your whole world turned upside down and your identity stripped away. But Jim and Alice were, to all intents and purposes, your parents.’
He ruthlessly quashed the desire and frowned at her, denial reeling through him. ‘I fail to see how.’
‘Biology doesn’t automatically grant parental rights,’ she said bluntly. ‘Nor does it guarantee the ability to parent successfully. Look at mine. They’re hardly an advert for parents of the year. They never gave a toss about me, not properly, and they still don’t. Carla’s looked out for me far more than they ever did. She’s the reason I was able to find you all those weeks ago. If she hadn’t made me send her a photo of you along with your name the night we met, things could have turned out very differently. You had two people who loved and cared for you. And, yes, then, tragically, only one, but nevertheless you had someone on your side for years, someone who by your own admission never failed to support and champion you when it mattered most. You honestly don’t know how lucky you were.’
‘What if my mother’s death wasn’t an accident?’ The question shot out of his mouth before he could stop it and he froze, every muscle in his body as taut as a bow string.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked carefully and he suddenly found himself on a knife edge.
He could easily deflect the question, he knew, but what would be the point of that? He needed her perspective and her insight into things he couldn’t make head or tail of, and that meant unlocking the doors on his greatest concerns and flinging them open, so he took a deep breath and said, ‘What if she killed herself deliberately because of me, because of what I was or wasn’t?’
He hated the catch he could hear in his voice, but he didn’t regret the question because her face softened and, ah, there was the sympathy he’d been in need of. ‘Do you really believe that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you remember of her?’
He scrolled back twenty years, searching for memories that were faded and hazy but nevertheless still there. ‘She smelled of roses,’ he said eventually. ‘She taught me poker and played football with me. Every Saturday she’d bake brownies.’
‘She sounds lovely,’ Georgie said, a trace of wistfulness flitting across her face.
‘She was.’
‘Did she make you eat your vegetables?’
‘Yes.’
‘Make you do your homework and go to bed on time?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you ever sent to your room or grounded?’
‘Frequently.’
‘Then she loved you,’ she said with quiet conviction. ‘Very much. Take it from someone who knows what it feels like not to matter. They must have wanted you very much too, to go all the way to Argentina to fetch you. And they must have had their reasons for keeping it from you.’
‘I guess I’ll never know,’ he said, his throat oddly tight.
‘Unless your investigation agency digs something up.’
‘Maybe not even then.’
‘So much in life we just have to accept.’
‘As I’m discovering.’
‘Me too.’
With a strangely sad sort of smile she pushed herself off the bed and returned her attention to the suitcase, and as he watched her pull the top down and zip it up it hit him like a blow to the chest that, despite everything he’d just revealed, nothing had changed.
‘You’re still planning to leave?’ he asked, the blade of rejection slicing through him like a knife.
‘I have to get back to Josh.’ She shot him a quick glance, full of something he was too stung, too busy reeling, to identify. ‘Unless there’s any other reason for me to stay?’
‘No, nothing,’ he said, coolly, calling himself a fool for wanting her to stay, for thinking that he was good enough for her, for believing that they were in this together. ‘Go. Please. Don’t let me stop you.’
* * *
All she’d wanted was for him to say that he wanted her to stay, thought Georgie numbly as she stepped off the train at St Pancras and, dragging her wheelie case behind her, went in search of a taxi. That they were a team. A tightly knit unit. That she mattered to him as much as he mattered to her, despite her best efforts to deny it.
But he’d let her go with such ease, and that hurt unbelievably badly. So much for thinking that she could somehow avoid more pain, that she could protect herself. Or that she was only beginning to fall for him. She already had. There could be little doubt about it. She had to be head over heels in love with him for his indifferent dismissal to cause this much agony.
But however much it hurt, the pain wouldn’t last because that love hadn’t been real. Finn wasn’t the man she’d thought him to be. She’d given him attributes—loyalty, honesty, integrity—that he didn’t have, and really she had no one to blame but herself. She was the one who’d placed him on a pedestal so high and wobbly that it was inevitable he should fall off it. She was the one who’d misread every look and every word, reading things into his actions that simply hadn’t been there. This whole mess was entirely her fault.
The train journey from Paris had lasted two and a half hours and every minute of it she’d spent analysing their relationship, such as it was. And she could see now that she’d been a fool. Finn had never wanted her. Not really. All he wanted was Josh. She came as part of the package and was handy for sex, but that was about it.
She knew this to be true because right from the start she’d been the one in the driving seat. In the bar the night they’d first met she’d been the one to approach him, and then the one to proposition him by telling him she wanted to leave, with him. He hadn’t chosen her that night. She’d chosen him.
And so it had been ever since.
She’d given him no option but to take up the role of father and provide his support. What else could he have done in the circumstances? How could she have forgotten the reluctance with which he’d taken her in along with Josh? How she’d made him spend his evenings with her and then virtually forced him into going to bed with her by following him into his room the night he’d told her to put on a dressing gown and whipping her top off? Ditto when she’d pressed the condom into his hand at the party last night and told him she wanted sex. He hadn’t even planned to take her to Paris. The invitation had been last-minute and he’d only asked her because of what they’d been getting up to after dark.
And then take this evening, when he’d finally opened up to her about how he felt about his parents and the revelations surrounding his adoption. He’d only done that because she was there. Because she was convenient. He hadn’t particularly wanted to talk to her.
He’d volunteered nothing willingly, she could see now. He obviously didn’t see her as an equal in this relationship. Maybe not in anything. They weren’t partners in any sense of the word. They were nothing. She was nothing. And so, frankly, what was the point in them continuing with this ridiculous charade?
CHAPTER TWELVE
FINN SPENT THE torturous hours following Georgie’s departure railing at himself while ploughing through half a bottle of Scotch. He’d been a fool for telling her everything. He’d made himself insanely vulnerable and unacceptably weak. He’d invested too much in the power of her response, and, unlike any other he’d ever made, that investment had badly backfired. The hurt and disappointment that roared through him when h
e recalled how carelessly she’d left him were precisely why he didn’t share. How could he have forgotten that? At what point had he recklessly decided to ignore what he knew to be true—that other people’s behaviour was incalculable and that the only person he could rely on was himself? What had he been thinking?
All in all, he was glad she’d gone. He had a hectic schedule over the next couple of days and he needed to focus. He did not need extra stress and he did not need Georgie. He was perfectly capable of working through everything going on in his head on his own. It might take some time, but he was going to let it play out and eventually he’d get there. He had to obliterate the ridiculous feelings of rejection and abandonment, and regroup.
However, with increasing frequency, he found himself revisiting their conversation, assessing what Georgie had said and stripping the words of emotion. Grudgingly, he came to the conclusion that she’d had a point. Possibly even more than one. Because the truth was that, however hard he looked, however much money he threw at the investigation, he may never get the answers he sought.
So what was he going to do? He couldn’t spend the rest of his life being bitter and resentful. He had to accept that he’d become the man he was now because of Jim and Alice, who had been his parents in all ways that counted. The memories he had of his mother were warm and happy. The photos they’d taken of him had filled dozens of albums. His father had not once let him down while alive. He’d been an unfailing tower of strength. Only in death had he turned out to have feet of clay. But as neither of them was around to defend or explain their actions and decisions, what had gone before was beyond Finn’s control.
How he went forward, however, was within his control. Whatever the reasons for his adoption and the subsequent secrecy surrounding it, he had to forgive his parents, his father in particular. He could understand now a paternal determination to protect a child to the exclusion of all else. To not let anything upset the status quo. Whatever else he might think, he had to understand that none of it was anything to do with him and believe it. His parents had done their best and they’d been good people, and Georgie was right: he had been lucky. It was all right to regret that his father had never got to meet Josh and it was all right to resume the grieving process that had been interrupted with the discovery of that certificate.
He had to let it go and focus on the family he did have instead of chasing relentlessly after wisps of the one he may or may not have elsewhere. He had so much to appreciate. So much to value.
Especially Georgie.
Who, despite her apparent rejection, despite his attempts to put her out of his mind, he was missing more than he could have ever imagined. He’d got used to having her around, in his home and in his bed, and he felt her absence like a physical loss. It was more than just the phenomenal sex he missed. He missed her wit and her smile, her wisdom, the way she challenged him and made him face up to things he’d rather ignore, and the conversations that had relaxed and deepened with time. Their relationship might have started out as one of convenience for the sake of Josh but it wasn’t any longer. They knew every inch of each other’s bodies. And minds. He’d trusted her with his secrets and she’d trusted him with hers, her honesty so raw that it had torn at his soul and filled him with even more burning regret that his support had come so late.
Finn had never been in love before. He’d never even so much as thought about it, so he had nothing with which to compare the feelings that were swirling around inside him, feelings that were so intense, so powerful they couldn’t be locked away even if he tried. Nevertheless he was now pretty sure that the way his heart leapt whenever she walked into the room, the unrelenting need, the respect and admiration he had for her, and the hammering desire to protect her and grow old with her met the definition of it. So too did the happiness and sense of rightness that spread through him whenever she entered his head, which was virtually all the time. And when he thought about the shimmering warmth with which he occasionally caught her looking at him and the way her eyes sparkled when she was with him he was equally sure that she felt the same way about him.
Or at least she had done.
Until he’d behaved like an idiot and let her go. Even if he hadn’t realised at the time quite why he needed her, he should have come up with a reason for her to stay. As she’d asked. A request, which, now he thought about it, now he could clearly recall how she’d put it, had been made with the answer she wanted in mind. Of course, it was entirely possible that she had simply wanted to get back to Josh. But equally, what if she’d wanted something else entirely? What if he’d allowed his insecurities to dominate and had overreacted? What if she hadn’t been rejecting him, but the abominable way he’d behaved? More importantly, what might have happened if he hadn’t let her go?
As Finn strode out of the hotel on Tuesday afternoon and climbed into the car he thought with grim determination that there was only one way to find out whether or not he’d ruined things with Georgie for good. And, since he was now through with boxing up emotion and ignoring it, however difficult, he was going to take it.
* * *
Finn had texted her earlier to say that he was on his way home and had given her an ETA, but Georgie, who was sitting cross-legged on the sofa and staring into space, couldn’t summon up the energy to care. The last couple of days hadn’t been easy. In fact, apart from the time she spent with Josh, they’d been miserable. She felt so cold, so tired. What with all the thinking she’d been doing about her and Finn, she hadn’t been sleeping too well, and watching out for Josh, who’d started crawling and was constantly getting to places he shouldn’t, was exhausting. This morning she’d barely managed to haul herself out of bed when her son had called for her for the fifth time in as many hours.
Contrary to her expectations, the disappointment and sadness she felt at knowing that the man she’d fallen in love with didn’t exist hadn’t faded. Everything had worsened and then amalgamated and now thrashed around in the pit of her stomach, giving her no respite. The delirious happiness she’d once thought she felt had been nothing but an illusion. The realisation that the secure, loving family unit she craved was as distant a possibility as it ever had been was devastating.
Nothing she did alleviated the gloom. She’d tried writing about how she felt in her journal but the last two days’ pages were blank. She didn’t know where to begin. Going out and getting some fresh air seemed like a huge effort, so she hadn’t bothered. Even venturing onto the terrace presented a mammoth challenge. She certainly hadn’t had the energy to pack up with Josh and leave, as she’d originally planned. And in any case, where would she have gone? She could hardly move into a different hotel room, and Carla would ask too many questions that Georgie wouldn’t be able to answer. Besides, she and Finn needed to unpick this disaster of an arrangement and sooner rather than later.
She fed Josh and changed him and played with him, but she felt oddly disengaged, as if she was simply going through the motions. And, while a tiny part of her recognised that how she was feeling wasn’t normal and was concerned by it, the greatest part of her was too drained to pay any attention. Finn would be back soon anyway, and when he was he could take over, so she could crawl into bed and stay there for a month, at which point maybe they could then talk. In fact, she thought dully as the sound of the front door opening reached her, here he was now.
She felt the air shift, and glanced up from the journal that was sitting open and empty in her lap to find Finn standing in the doorway and emanating a weird sort of taut determination, his face set and his eyes dark.
‘Hi,’ he said, removing his jacket and rolling the sleeves of his shirt up with an efficient competency that not so long ago would have had her quivering with desire but now left her distressingly unmoved.
‘Hi.’
‘How have you been?’
Freezing, actually. But spring could be like that. Maybe she ought to have turned the heating on.
‘Fine.’
‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ He stalked over to a lamp in the corner and switched it on.
‘I didn’t realise it was so late,’ she said, blinking at the sudden light.
‘How’s Josh?’
‘He’s fine. He’s asleep.’ Finally. ‘He started crawling yesterday.’
‘Did he? I’m sorry I missed that.’
‘He’s fast,’ she said, attempting a weak smile. ‘I envy his energy.’
Finn sat down on the ottoman, leaning forwards and resting his elbows on his knees, and peered at her, his eyes narrowing slightly. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You look tired.’
‘Josh has another tooth coming through. It’s been keeping us both up at night.’
‘Where’s Mrs Gardiner?’
‘I gave her a couple of days off.’
His dark brows snapped together. ‘Why?’
‘It was her granddaughter’s birthday. She lives in Wales. Mrs G was keen to go.’ And she’d been keen to have her go because even conversation had started being hard work.
‘When is she back?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘I’ll give her a call later.’
‘How were your meetings?’
‘Fine,’ he said, his gaze locking with hers and not letting it go. ‘But I don’t want to talk about my meetings.’
Of course he didn’t. He didn’t want to talk to her about anything. Why would he?