CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I’M SENDING Miss Walker through, Finn.’
‘Thanks, Sandra.’ Finn flicked off the intercom and waited, sitting very still behind the huge desk as the door to his office opened and Catherine walked in, an indefinable expression in her green eyes. She wore a black velvet coat—a loose, swingy sort of thing—and with its contrast against her pale face and black hair she looked liked a beautiful sorceress.
‘Come in, Catherine,’ he said evenly, and rose to his feet. ‘Shut the door behind you.’
As if she needed telling! As if she wanted his assistant to hear what she was about to say to him—and the ensuing discussion which would inevitably follow it. She shut it.
‘Sit down, won’t you?’ He sat down himself and gestured to the chair opposite his, but Catherine shook her head.
‘I’ll stand, if you don’t mind. I’ve been cooped up on a flight and in a cab,’ she said. And although she knew that the flutterings in her stomach were due to nerves, and not the baby, she wasn’t going to risk sitting in front of him and squirming. She met his gaze. ‘I’m surprised that you agreed to see me.’
‘I’m surprised that you want to.’
In his unmoving face only his blue eyes showed signs of life. His features looked as cold and as motionless as if they had been hewn from rock as old as the stone of Glendalough, where he had taken her that day which now seemed an age ago. And it was. It had been a different Catherine who looked up and laughed into his eyes that day.
The Catherine who was here was on a mission. To give him the truth—a truth which she felt honourbound to tell him. But wasn’t it funny how you could practise saying something over and over again, yet when the opportunity came the words just wouldn’t seem to come?
Finn watched her as he waited, thinking that somehow she looked different—and not just because her face was closed and wary and pale. No, there was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, something which alerted his sixth sense. The same sense which told him that a beautiful woman like Catherine Walker must have her pride. A pride which would have no time for a man who had acted as he had done. Yet she had phoned asking to speak to him. Personally and urgently.
‘I’m all yours, Catherine,’ he said, and then wished he hadn’t, for the irony hadn’t escaped him—nor her either, to judge from her brief, bitter smile.
No need to preface it with anything as humiliating as, Do you remember when we last met in London…? Such a distortion of the truth would only embarrass them.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said baldly.
There was a long, long silence, but not a flicker of emotion crossed his face. ‘I see.’
‘It’s yours!’ she declared wildly, wanting to shatter the tense expectation in the air, to breathe some life into that unmoving face of his.
‘Yes.’
Catherine stared at him, and delayed shock, to gether with his cold and monosyllabic reply, made her legs feel like water. She sank into the chair he had originally offered and stared at him with wide, un-comprehending eyes.
‘You aren’t going to deny it?’
‘What would be the point? I can’t imagine that I would be your first choice as father to your child. What we had between us hardly qualifies as the greatest love affair of all time, does it? So why would you lie about something as important as that? And if you aren’t lying then the logical conclusion is that you must be telling the truth.’
It was a cold and analytical assessment and, oddly enough, seemed to hurt far more than if he had just lost his temper and flatly denied it—called her all names under the sun and told her to get out of his office and his life. For a start, it would have given her a let-out clause.
And it would have shown passion. Feelings. Something other than this cold and distant look in his eyes. As if he were a scientist surveying some rather odd-looking specimen in a test-tube. But then, what had she expected? ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ she said heavily.
He shrugged. ‘A simple case of cause and effect.’
‘How very cynical, Finn.’
‘Cynical, but true,’ he mocked, then drew a deep breath as he thought back to that mad and tempestuous morning in her London flat. He gave a long and heavy sigh. ‘That’s what comes of forgetting to wear a condom, I suppose.’
Reduced to the lowest possible denominator.
Catherine flinched, as though he had hit her. And he might as well have hit her, the pain in her heart was so intense. She remembered the frantic way they had fallen to the floor, the wild hunger she had felt for him, and he, apparently, for her.
Yet he had come there that day with just such a seduction—if such a word could be used to describe something so basic—in mind. But he had not protected himself, and she had been too caught up in the mood and the magic—yes, magic—to notice.
She could deny it until she was blue in the face, but Finn Delaney had completely had her in his thrall. Then, and before. But now she saw the so-called magic for what it was—an illusion—like a trick of the light.
‘Was your lack of care simply an omission on your part?’ she questioned.