‘You don’t have to spell it out for me,’ she said in a hollow voice, feeling quite sick. ‘And there’s no need for you to play the martyr, either.’
‘I am not playing the martyr,’ he retorted. ‘I am just taking responsibility for your predicament—’
‘Stop it! Just stop it!’ she interrupted, even angrier now. ‘I will not, not have this baby described as a “predicament”. It wasn’t planned, no—but it’s happened and I intend to make the best of it. This baby is going to be a happy baby, whatever happens. And you shan’t take the lion’s share of the responsibility, either. We’re both to blame, if you like.’
‘Blame?’ He gave an odd smile. ‘Now who’s using loaded words, Catherine?’ But he forced himself to draw back, to blot out lips which when furiously parted like that made him want to crush them beneath his own. And to try to put out of his mind the fact that to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed might just rid them both of some of their pent-up anger.
And frustration, he thought achingly.
‘Would you like to get changed?’ he asked, eyeing the purple dress which clung so provocatively to her blossoming body and wondering how he was going to get through the weekend with any degree of sanity.
Catherine nodded. ‘Please.’
‘Come on, I’ll show you upstairs.’
There were four bedrooms, though one was almost too tiny to qualify.
Finn put her suitcase on the bed of the largest room, which suddenly seemed like the smallest to her, when he was close enough to touch and she was beguiled by a faint, evocative trace of his aftershave.
‘The bathroom’s along the corridor,’ he said quickly. ‘You’ll find everything you need.’
She had a quick bath and then struggled into her jeans, throwing a baggy jumper over the top. When she came downstairs she found that Finn had changed as well.
He saw her frowning. ‘What’s up?’
‘My jeans won’t do up!’ she exclaimed, pointing at the waistband.
He hid a smile. ‘That’s generally what happens, Catherine. We’ll have to buy you some pregnancy clothes—though God knows where around here!’
‘Big tent-like dresses with Peter Pan collars!’ she groaned.
‘No, not any more,’ he said knowledgeably.
Her eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know that?’
‘I remember Aisling telling me, the last time she was pregnant. Come on and I’ll make you tea,’ he said. ‘And then I’ll light a fire.’
She followed him into a kitchen which had most definitely not been modernised, and Catherine raised her eyebrows in surprise at the old-fashioned units and the brown lino on the floor. Even the ugly windows hadn’t been replaced!
‘How long have you owned this place, Finn?’
He turned the tap on and filled up the kettle, his back to her. ‘It came on the market about five years ago.’
She heard the evasion in his voice and wondered what he wasn’t telling her. She raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s not the kind of place I imagined you buying. It’s…well, it’s nothing like your place in Dublin.’
‘No.’ He had forgotten for a moment that she was a journalist, with a journalist’s instinct for a story. His instinct would be not to tell it. But they were married now, even if it was in name only. And if she was going to give birth to his baby then what was the point in keeping everything locked in? ‘It’s where I was born. Where I lived until the age of seven.’
Catherine studied him. There was something else here, too—something which made his voice deepen with a bleak, remembered pain. She wondered what had happened to him at the age of seven.
He saw the question in her eyes and sighed, knowing that he had to tell her. She carried his baby, and that gave her the right to know about a past he had grown used to locking away. ‘My mother died,’ he said, in stark explanation, bending down to light the gas with a match.
‘I’m sorry—’
‘She’d been widowed when I was a baby—there was no one left to look after me and so I went to live with my aunt.’
‘Oh, Finn.’ Her heart went out to him, and she wanted to put her arms tightly round him and hug away his pain, but the emotional shutters had been banged tightly shut. She could read that in the abrupt way he had turned away, putting cups and saucers upon a tray with an air of finality. Catherine understood the need for defence against probing into pain. The time was not right—indeed, it might never be right. But that was Finn’s decision, not hers.
‘Have you such a thing as a biscuit?’ she asked, with a smile. ‘I’m starving!’