There was an odd, brittle kind of pause. ‘You mean he died?’ he questioned slowly.
She shook her head, met his eyes squarely. Defiantly. ‘I’m illegitimate, Finn.’
‘Come on now, Catherine,’ he said gently. ‘That isn’t such a terrible thing to be.’
‘Maybe not today it isn’t—but things were different when I was a child.’
‘Did you never meet him?’
‘Never. I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead,’ she said simply. ‘He was married to someone, and it wasn’t my mother. Like I said, I didn’t know him and he didn’t want to know me.’ Her eyes were bright now. ‘And I didn’t want to inflict that on my own child.’
He caught a sense of the rejection she must have felt, and again was filled with a pang of remorse. ‘I’m sorry—’
‘No!’ Fierce pride made her bunch her fists to wipe away the first tell-tale sign of tears, and she set her shoulders back. ‘I don’t want or need your sympathy for my upbringing, Finn, because it was a perfectly happy upbringing. It’s just—’
‘Not for your childhood,’ he said heavily. ‘For my recklessness.’
Their eyes met. ‘You don’t have the monopoly on recklessness,’ she said quietly. ‘The difference is that our motivations were different. You came round hell-bent on revenge, and you extracted it in the most basic form possible, didn’t you?’
Had he? Had he really been that cold-blooded? It was surely no defence to say that all he had planned to do was to deliver the flowers with a blistering denouncement, but that all rational thought and reason had been driven clean out of his mind by the sight and the touch and the feel of her. Was that the truth, or just a way of making events more palatable for his conscience?
‘You have a very powerful effect on me, Catherine,’ he said unsteadily. Because even now, God forgive him—even with all this going on—he was thinking that she looked like some kind of exquisite domesticated witch, with that tumble of ebony hair and the wide-spaced green eyes. Or a cat, he thought thickly. A minxy little feline who could sinuously make him do her will.
What kind of child would they produce together? he found himself wondering. An ebony-haired child with passion running deep in its veins? ‘A very powerful effect,’ he finished, and met her eyes.
She steeled herself against his charm, the soft, sizzling look in his eyes. ‘Yes, and we all know why, don’t we? Why I have such an effect on you.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re attempting to define chemistry?’
‘I’m not defining anything—I’m describing something else entirely.’ She threw him a challenging look and he matched it with one of his own.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m intrigued.’
‘We both know why such a famously private man should act in such an injudicious way.’
That one word assumed dominance inside his head. It wasn’t a handle which had ever been applied to him before. ‘Injudicious?’
‘Well, wasn’t it? If you’d bothered to find out a little bit more about me then you would have discovered that I was a journalist and presumably would have run in the opposite direction.’
‘You were being deliberately evasive, Catherine. You know you were.’
‘Yes, I was. I always am about my job, because people hold such strong prejudices.’
‘Can you wonder why?’ he questioned sarcastically.
‘But it all happened so quickly—there was no time for an extended getting-to-know-you, was there, Finn? Tell me, do you normally leap into bed quite so quickly?’
‘Not at all,’ he countered, fixing her with a mocking blue look.
‘Do you?’
‘Never.’ She drew a deep breath, not caring whether he believed her or not. His moral opinion of her did not matter. He would learn soon enough that she intended to be the mother to end all mothers. ‘But maybe you didn’t need to get to know me.’
‘Now you’ve lost me.’
‘Have I? Well, then, let me spell it out for you! We both know that the reason you couldn’t wait to take me to bed was because I reminded you of your childhood sweetheart!’
‘My childhood sweetheart?’ he repeated incredulously.