Finn withdrew from her and rolled away, and the physical deprivation of his presence made her whimper like a lost little animal.
‘What are you doing?’ she murmured sleepily, watching through half-slitted eyes the graceful, muscular body as he reached for his jeans.
‘What does it look like? I’m getting dressed.’
He pulled the jeans back on and zipped them up before replying, and suddenly his face was shuttered. This was a new, hard Finn she didn’t recognise, with a new, hard voice she didn’t recognise either.
‘Wh-where are you going?’
‘I don’t think that’s really any of your business, do you?’
Catherine screwed up her eyes as she sat up, thinking that she must have misheard him—or that perhaps she had slipped unknowingly into a nightmare made uncannily real by his expressionless face. ‘What?’
The movement which curved his lips was a bitter parody of a smile. ‘Shall I repeat it for you in words of one syllable, Catherine?’ he questioned cruelly. ‘I said it’s none of your business. Got that?’ And he slipped his feet into the deck shoes, jerked on the blue sweater.
Her mind was spinning as it strove to make sense of this bizarre ending to what had just happened. Perhaps if she wasn’t so befuddled by the aftermath of her orgasm then she might have made sense of it sooner. ‘Finn, I don’t understand—’
‘Oh, don’t you?’ His mouth twisted and the blue eyes were as cold as ice. ‘Then you can’t be very good at your job, can you? If you lack the ability to understand the implication behind a simple sentence like that!’
The penny dropped. Her job, he had said. Yes, of course. Her job—her wretched, wretched job! Oh, God—he had seen the article! ‘Finn, I want to explain—’
‘Oh, please—spare me your lies. Just don’t bother!’
Realising that she was completely naked, Catherine grabbed at her tee shirt and wriggled it over her head as she scrambled to her feet, aware of the movement of her breasts and aware too that Finn wasn’t oblivious to their movement either. She turned to him with a face full of appeal, and suddenly nothing was more important than establishing the truth. ‘You owe me the right to explain what happened,’ she said in a low voice.
‘I owe you nothing!’ he spat back, and the temper which had been simmering away came boiling over, words spilling out of his mouth without thought or care. ‘In fact, quite the contrary—I felt that in view of the fact I’d been paid nothing for an article about me which I did not agree to, then I should take my payment in kind!’
It took a moment or two for the meaning behind his words to sink in, and when it did Catherine felt sick. Physically sick. And even worse was the look in his eyes…
So here was the look of blistering contempt she had been anticipating at the very beginning but had conveniently forgotten when he had given her flowers and put his arms around her. And it was even worse than in her most fevered imaginings…
She swallowed down the bitter taste in her mouth, barely able to believe what he was implying. ‘Y-you mean…you mean…you came here today deliberately to have sex with me—’
‘Sure,’ he answered arrogantly. ‘It wasn’t difficult—but why should it be? It was as easy as pie the last time.’
She wanted to hit him, to shout, to scream at him—but still she forced herself to question him, because surely there was some kind of ghastly mistake. ‘To get your own back for some stupid magazine article?’ she finished faintly.
“‘Some stupid magazine article”?’ Two high lines of colour ran across his cheekbones, and his Irish accent seemed even more pronounced. ‘It may be just some stupid article to you, sweetheart, but it has very effectively sent my credibility flying!’
‘You mean that you wanted to look whiter than white because you hope to run for government?’ she demanded.
‘That has nothing to do with it!’ His voice became a low hiss. ‘Other people put labels on me that I do not seek for myself! I couldn’t give a stuff about politics, but I do care what my friends and family read about me!’
And he fixed her with a look of such utter scorn that Catherine actually flinched.
Her own look matched his for scorn now. ‘And the flowers? Such an elaborate masquerade, Finn,’ she said bitterly. ‘Did you really have to go to so much trouble to ensure my seduction? Did you think that your powers of persuasion were slipping?’
‘I never doubted that for a minute, sweetheart,’ he drawled, and then his eyes gleamed and his voice softened. ‘No, the bouquet was to send you a silent message.’
She stared at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Did you never hear of the language of flowers, Catherine?’
The question and the way he asked it were so close to the image of the poetic Irishman who had swept her off her feet that for a moment Catherine was lulled into imagining that the things he had said were not real.
She shook her head.
‘Every flower carries its own message,’ he continued softly.