‘And the mock orange blossom?’ she asked shakily. ‘What does that stand for?’
‘Can’t you guess?’ He paused, and raised his dark eyebrows. ‘Not got it yet, Catherine? Deceit,’ he said finally, with a cruel, hard smile.
She supposed that as a gesture it deserved some kind of accolade, but it felt like a knife being twisted over and over in her gut.
‘Just tell me one thing,’ he said, and his eyes were piercingly clear. ‘When you came to Dublin did your editor send you? Was it just coincidence that brought you? Or did she tell you to get something on me?’
Catherine opened her mouth. ‘Well, she told me to, yes. But—’
‘But what? The article just wrote itself, did it?’ he questioned witheringly.
She wanted to say, It wasn’t like that! But she knew that no words in the dictionary could ever make things right between them now.
‘Please go,’ she said quietly.
But he was alrea
dy by the door. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ he grated.
And with that he was gone.
Chapter Seven
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE moment the door had shut behind him, Catherine snatched the flowers from out of the vase and took them to the kitchen sink, where she squashed them ruthlessly with a rolling pin, bashing and bashing at them until they were made pulp.
That should relieve some of her pent-up frustration, she thought, with a fleeting feeling of triumph which evaporated almost immediately. Except that she wasn’t feeling frustrated—not in the physical sense, in any case. No, her frustration was born out of the random and cruel tricks of fate which had led her into this situation. The man whom she had fallen for, hook, line and sinker, would never trust her again.
But he didn’t even give you a chance to explain yourself, she reminded herself bitterly—and in the heat of the moment she had forgotten to ask him about Deirdra O’Shea. Finn Delaney himself was no saint, she thought. And there had been a reason why she had been so indiscreet with Miranda.
Tears began to slide down her cheeks just as the telephone rang.
She snatched it up, despising herself for the eagerness which prompted her, thinking that maybe Finn had had a change of heart—was ringing her to apologise for his unbelievably cruel behaviour.
‘H-hello?’
But it was her mother. ‘Catherine? Are you all right?’
Catherine wiped the tears away with a bunched fist. ‘Of course I’m all right, Mum.’
‘Well, you don’t sound it.’ Her mother’s voice sounded worried, but of course it would. Mothers were notoriously good at detecting when their daughters were crying, particularly when they were as close as Catherine and her mother. ‘Have you been crying?’
‘Not really.’ Sniff.
‘Not really?’ Her mother’s voice softened. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘I can’t! You’ll hate me for it!’
‘Catherine, stop it. Tell me what’s happened.’
Such was her distress that the story came tumbling out—or rather an edited version designed to cause the least hurt to her mother. Catherine did not mention that she barely knew the man, nor the shockingly short time scale involved. She just told her the simple truth of the matter, which was that she had leapt into a foolish and inconsidered relationship straight after Peter and that it was now over.
‘Oh, Mum!’ she wailed. ‘How could I have done it?’
‘You did it on the rebound,’ her mother said firmly. ‘Lots of people do. It isn’t the end of the world! Just try to put it out of your mind and forget about it.’
‘And I hadn’t seen Peter for months and months!’ Catherine found herself saying, which again was true. She didn’t want her mother thinking that she was about to start taking lovers at the drop of a hat.