The Honeymoon Arrangement

by Wood, Joss

  Callie placed her bowl on the coffee table and wrapped her arms around her bent knees. ‘I’ve always thought that there was something more to your break-up than—well, just a break-up. Then I saw your reaction to that couple last night. It was written all over your face.’

  Finn grimaced. ‘And I thought I hid my reaction so well.’

  Callie pushed her unbrushed curls out of her eyes. ‘Not so much. I take it that you really wanted the baby?’

  Finn slowly nodded. ‘I really did … I’ve always wanted to have a family—a wife, a couple of kids.’

  ‘Because of your own dad?’

  Finn took a long time to answer her. ‘My dad was useless. That’s the kindest word I can find to describe him. He’d come back, make these elaborate promises to us, siphon money off my mum and disappear again. It was always just Mum and I, and life was tough sometimes. I wanted a dad I could rely on.’

  ‘James was that person for you?’

  Finn nodded. ‘He really was. He taught me about family.’

  ‘And when Liz told you she was pregnant it was your chance to have the family you’d always craved?’ Callie gently pushed. ‘Tell me about losing your baby, Finn.’ Finn rubbed his jaw in agitation. ‘She just started to bleed that night. We were at home. I’ve seen war—reported on war—seen some pretty horrendous stuff, but there was always a distance been me and the event. This was up close and personal. Blood … so much of it.’

  That’s why he got rid of the mattress, Callie realised. Oh, Finn, honey.

  Callie knew that if she spoke, if she uttered a word of sympathy, she’d lose him.

  ‘They took her to Theatre, did a D&C, what is that, anyway?’

  ‘Basically, they just go in and …’ Callie bit her lip ‘… clean everything out.’

  Finn briefly closed his eyes. ‘Anyway, when she came out of Theatre we had a discussion and she suggested that we break it off. She said that we were only together for the baby. That if she hadn’t fallen pregnant then she doubted we would’ve been together any more.’

  Callie’s respect for Liz rose and she placed her hand on her heart. ‘That was enormously brave.’

  Finn frowned at her. ‘What?’

  Callie lifted her shoulder. ‘She was brave, Finn. It would’ve been so much easier to go through with the wedding, to go home and pretend that you still loved each other, that you could love each other again like you should. Instead she chose the hard route—the one that took courage. Cancelling the wedding, exposing herself to gossip, to questions. In her most painful moment she looked for the truth—you’ve got to respect that.’

  Finn stared at her. ‘I never thought about it like that.’

  ‘She deserves some credit for making a tough choice when she could’ve lied to herself and to you.’ Callie smiled softly. ‘You have great taste in women, Banning,’ she teased.

  The corner of his mouth lifted. ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘Could they tell whether your baby was a boy or a girl?’

  Finn’s broad shoulders rose and fell. ‘I have no idea. To me it just felt right that he was a boy.’

  Callie rested her chin on her kneecap. ‘I bet you named him after your stepdad.’

  Finn’s mouth lifted at the corners in another reluctant smile. ‘Witch. Yeah, I did. In my head I called him James—Jamie—same as my stepdad.’

  You’re still in mourning, honey, for both your stepdad and your lost little boy.

  ‘Does anyone know, apart from me, about the baby? About what you lost?’

  Finn shook his head. ‘We hadn’t told anyone that she was pregnant and Liz asked me to keep it like that. She’s pretty private and her folks are conservative.’

  ‘I think coping with all the questions about why you broke up so close to the wedding would be hard enough; having to explain about the miscarriage too would probably have sent her running into the night,’ Callie said, empathising.

  ‘You seem to understand her a lot better than I ever did,’ Finn said, his voice sad.

  ‘I’m a woman—and you feel bad because you wish you could’ve loved her more.’

  Finn stared at the wild African bush that edged the opposite bank of the river and Callie sensed that it was time to be quiet, to leave him to his thoughts.

  After a couple of minutes he spoke again. ‘I feel stupid for mourning like this. God, I can’t even call him a baby—he didn’t get that far. He was an entity that I never met! That’s what I’ve been battling with—the idea that I can be so devastated when I hadn’t even met him yet.’

  ‘Don’t feel stupid. You are allowed to mourn losing him, Finn. It doesn’t matter that his time with you was brief, or that he wasn’t even fully formed yet. He was a soul and you loved him. If you lose love you are always entitled to mourn.’

  ‘When my stepdad died—God, it was six months ago, but it still feels like it was yesterday—I lost my mentor, my rock, my best bud. Losing the baby made me feel like I’d lost him all over again.’

  He might be slow to talk but, dang, he definitely needed to, Callie thought. This was heavy baggage to carry on your own.

  Finn turned his back to her and gripped the railing with his hands, his head dropping to his chest. Callie knew that he was fighting tears and that he’d hate for her to see them.

  Staying where she was, she asked another soft question. ‘Did you bury your stepdad? Does he have a grave? A headstone?’

  ‘No. He wanted his ashes scattered out at sea. Why?’ Finn, now back in control, turned to face her but kept his white-knuckled grip on the railing behind him.

  Callie shrugged. ‘It’s nice to have a place to go to remember, to cry if you need to. A place where you can think about your stepfather and your son.’

  ‘It’s a nice idea, but I don’t.’ Finn released the railing and walked over to the coffee table. He drained the half-glass of orange juice he’d left there earlier. ‘Can we change the subject? I’m feeling a bit like a specimen under a microscope.’

  Callie looked up at him and saw his shuttered eyes, his now implacable face. Yeah, he was done talking. And that was okay, she thought. She’d got a lot more out of him than she’d expected to.

  And she’d given him something in return. She wasn’t sure what. Maybe a little comfort, a little support. And that was more than okay—she had it and he needed it.

  She was beginning to think that there wasn’t much that she wouldn’t give Finn.

  Including, if she wasn’t very, very careful, her heart.

  After Livingstone they were sent back to South Africa and booked into a sprawling, Vegas-type casino on the outskirts of the country’s capital. Callie had been looking forward to this portion of their trip the most, but instead of loving it, as she’d expected to do, she wanted to go back to easy summer days and hot summer nights—in bed as well as out.

  She didn’t want fancy rooms or air-conditioning. She wanted to hear the call of the fish eagles, to smell the electricity of a wild storm. She didn’t want to hear the ker-ching of slot machines or the whoops of overdressed, over-perfumed people.

  Callie leaned back in her chair in the restaurant section of a popular bar and hoped Finn wouldn’t take his time fetching her wrap from their hotel room. Then again, their room was about a mile from the entertainment area, so she might only see him again in an hour or two.

  Callie gave a man approaching her table a look that said don’t even think about trying to chat me up and he halted in his tracks and turned away. Fishing her mobile out of her purse, she pushed a speed dial number and blocked her other ear so that she could hear when Rowan answered.

  ‘Uh … Cal. I didn’t expect you to call tonight.’

  ‘Why?’ Callie demanded, laughter in her voice. ‘Are you out having fun with my wicked witch of a mother?’

  The long silence that followed her comment was all the confirmation she needed. Callie felt her stomach cramp and she stared at the table, fighting the burning sensation in her eyes.

 
; ‘Where are you?’ she croaked out.

  ‘Awelfor,’ Rowan finally answered.

  ‘He allowed her to come home?’

  ‘Callie—’

  Callie heard a familiar guffaw in the background and her clenching stomach launched up her throat. ‘Is my dad there?’

  ‘Yeah, Seb invited him and Annie round for dinner.’

  ‘With Laura?’ Callie clasped her neck with her hand. ‘Am I the only one who still has a problem with the fact that she left for over twenty years and we haven’t heard from her since? That she abandoned me—us? How can you all just sit there and laugh and drink and pretend what she did was okay?’

  ‘Honey—’

  ‘Don’t honey me. God, you all suck …’ Callie whispered into the phone, before jamming her finger against the red button.

  Hauling in air, she looked around for a waiter but there wasn’t one to be seen. She needed a drink and she needed it now. More than that, she needed to forget that her family—the people who were supposed to love her most—were laughing and drinking and eating with Laura as if she’d done no wrong. How could they just forget? Just forgive?

  And her dad? How could he? He was supposed to be on her side.

  She didn’t want to think about her mother and she couldn’t consider forgetting or forgiving. No, what she needed was a distraction. Something to take her mind off her mother, her family and the aching void in her heart.

  Callie looked around and through the window to a pub, where she saw a group of well-dressed adults. They looked sophisticated and successful and badly in need of a party.

  Well, she was their girl.

  He’d lost his fake wife, Finn thought, bemused, holding her wrap in his hand and back in the restaurant where he’d left her. Finding Callie was going to be a nightmare. Was it asking too much for her to have stayed where he’d left her?

  Hearing a loud chorus of male laughter from the adjacent pub, Finn had a sinking feeling that he’d find her wherever the action was—and it sounded as if the action was next door.

  Heading that way, he walked through the frosted doors and there she was, standing behind the bar, a bottle of tequila in her hand, happily pouring shots into the grubby glasses lined up in front of her. The bartender next to her had two bottles in his hand and was filling up the glasses too.

  A mound of lemon segments sat on the plate in front of the fifteen-strong crowd and Finn shook his head when he saw that there were women in the group as well. It seemed that Callie could charm members of her own sex into drinking competitions as well.

  He’d only been gone an hour. How the hell had she get managed to get front and centre and drinking in sixty minutes? God, bartenders must love her. Finn shook his head as Callie licked salt off her hand, tossed back her drink and sucked on her lemon, pulling the inevitable ‘tequila face’.

  She was a handful, and a man would have to have steel balls to take her on.

  You are not that man, he reminded himself. You are not in a place where you can even think about getting emotionally involved with another woman; Callie is your rebound fling. It doesn’t matter that she totally gets you about the miscarriage, that she understands how it feels to lose something you’ve never had, that she’s fun and smart and so sexy.

  It was the wrong time and place. He’d thought long and hard about getting involved with Liz, longer and harder about Liz moving into his house, and here he was, after a few short weeks, thinking about taking on a girl with a wild streak.

  It would be crazy. And yet a reckless part of him wanted to. He wondered what it would be like to love her, to be loved by her. To have her there when he came home, to think about her when he was away. And he knew that he would think about her when he was gone—he knew that he wouldn’t be able to compartmentalise her as easily as he had Liz.

  Callie would demand so much more from him than Liz—or any other woman he’d ever met.

  He didn’t have it in him—not now and not any time soon—to give her a quarter of what she wanted or expected. Or deserved. Callie deserved the world and he didn’t have it in him to give it to her.

  ‘Hey, hubby!’ Callie waved the tequila bottle at him, her eyes slightly squinty.

  Finn pushed through the crowd to stand directly opposite her. ‘You’re on the wrong side of the bar, wife. How did you get there?’

  Callie smiled broadly and pointed to a sophisticated-looking couple. ‘Kelvin and Neil are celebrating their anniversary and these are all their friends!’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘And I offered to buy them a drink—to toast them—and they said yes, and then we got talking about our favourite shooters, and I showed Grant here—’ she laid a hand on the barmen’s shoulder ‘—how to make a champagne shooter, and we had some of those. Now we’re doing it old school.’

  ‘Ah …’ Finn winced at the thought of what she’d spent, throwing liquor down strangers’ throats. Correction: what he was about to spend—because Callie, dressed in a slinky black cocktail dress, certainly didn’t have a credit card tucked between her magnificent breasts or under the thin cord of her tiny, tiny thong. He knew this because—well, because he’d happily watched her climb into, and out of, and back into that dress hours earlier.

  And he couldn’t put the booze on his hotel bill—even he wouldn’t get away with forty-plus shooters on his expense account.

  One half of the anniversary couple stood up and held his hand out for Finn to shake. He looked more sober than the rest of his crew. ‘Your wife is an absolute delight and such a hoot.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Finn replied, looking at his wife, who was leaning across the bar, squishing her boobs with her elbows and giving herself a hell of a cleavage. Even the gay boys seemed fascinated by the view. Her breasts might be spectacular, but he was distracted by the fact that her eyes were more violet than blue—a colour he’d come to associate with Callie being upset or sad.

  ‘Something happen while I was gone, angel?’ he asked quietly.

  Her smile was bright and bold and perfectly suited to this fake place. ‘Yeah, I started a party! I haven’t done that for a while. I have my mojo back!’

  Oh, yeah, something had happened. Another call from her mother? Maybe …

  ‘Honey, you never lost it.’ He jerked his head as he put his hand in his back pocket to pull out his wallet. ‘Time to go, angel.’ He flipped open his wallet and pulled out a credit card, which he handed to the amused barman.

  ‘Awww, I don’t wanna …’ Callie whined.

  ‘I have a surprise for you waiting in our room,’ Finn lied.

  He just had to get her to the room; he knew that as soon as Callie fell onto the bed she’d be dead to the world, and he doubted that she’d remember that he promised her a surprise. After all, tequila was well known for its coma-inducing and amnesiac qualities.

  As he’d suspected Callie’s eyes lit up, and she skipped around Grant to come over to his side of the bar. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait and see.’ Finn took the credit card slip and his eyes widened at the total. Damn! How many shooters and how many bottles of champagne had they gone through?

  The barman sent him a sympathetic look. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘She’s going to bankrupt me,’ Finn muttered, taking back his card. ‘Let’s go before you do any more damage.’

  ‘Got to say goodbye first,’ Callie told him, and Finn waited while she kissed cheeks and exchanged hugs as if she was saying goodbye to her best friends. Good grief, she’d only met these people an hour or so ago.

  ‘Be happy, people!’ Callie yelled at them as he steered her towards the door.

  Most of them—Callie included—were certainly not going to be happy in the morning.

  Callie rolled over in the massive bed and feeling as if she had a bowling ball bouncing off the inside of her skull. There was a time, she thought on an internal whimper, when she could party herself stupid and wake up the next morning raring to go.

  That t
ime had passed, she decided mournfully. Squinting, she sat up on her elbows and forced her eyes open to look at the gold and white garish suite. Ack. If her husband—real, that was—had brought her here for her honeymoon she’d have stabbed him between the eyes with a fork.

  Talking about husbands—where was hers?

  He’d slept with her—she had a recollection of him waking her up to swallow some aspirin some time close to dawn—but she didn’t recall him leaving their bed. She needed him right now. Mostly to order coffee and to hand her some more aspirin.

  Note to self: I can no longer drink like a twenty-year-old.

  Second note to self: tequila is nasty and no longer your friend.

  But her brother and her best friend and her father and soon-to-be stepmother had spent last night laughing and drinking and socialising with Laura.

  She’d wanted a distraction, to forget, and it had worked for a while. But this morning she still felt hurt and betrayed and she had a hangover. Talk about adding fuel to the fire. Callie tucked her hand under her cheek, ignoring the trickle of tears leaking from her eyes.

  Hurting, she wondered if she was being harsh in not wanting to engage with Laura. Was she just being stubborn? Unfair? Why was reconnecting with her so much easier for Seb than it was for her?

  She closed her eyes and remembered those long nights sobbing in her room, her ten, fifteen, eighteen-year-old self wondering what had been so wrong with Laura’s life—with her—that she’d had to leave. What had she and her dad and Seb done that was so wrong that she’d had to leave and never call or write? Was she sick … poor—dead?

  She’d spent most of her nights worrying about Laura and her days pretending that she was fine, so that her father and Seb wouldn’t worry about her.

  It had taken all the emotional energy she had.

  And now she was supposed to just wipe her past away because Laura had decided that it was time to reconnect? No.

  Callie felt the bed dip behind her and Finn’s warm, broad hand stroking her bare back. Within seconds she felt comforted, calmer, as if she could cope with whatever life threw at her. What was it about this man that made her feel both brave and safe at the same time?