Evie's Bombshell - By Amy Andrews Page 0,34
him because he’d never tried to offer any advice or interfere or make things better when things with James had been going to hell in a hand basket. Unlike others. And she’d appreciated that.
‘I heard you were back and fully recovered. Although …’ she squinted and inspected his face a little closer ‘… you don’t look so good at the moment.’
Finn almost groaned. Did every woman find it their duty today to tell him he looked like hell? ‘What are you doing here? Didn’t you move to your white-picket-fence house in the burbs?’
‘Just visiting the old stomping ground,’ she said.
Finn turned to look back out the window and Ava knew she had been dismissed, that it was her job to walk on down the stairs and leave him to his obvious brooding, but there was something achingly lonely about Finn and they’d been pretty frank with each other in the past.
Still, she hesitated. She knew that Finn was an intensely private man. But then Finn turned his gaze towards her. It was so incredibly turbulent, almost too painful to look at.
‘You’re a therapist, right?’
Ava laughed. ‘I’m a sex therapist, Finn.’
He shrugged. ‘But you do have a psychology degree?’
Ava nodded. ‘Is there something you want to talk about?’
Finn shook his head. He wanted to talk to Ava Carmichael about as much as he wanted to become a father but … she’d always given it to him straight and he could do with some insight into the female psyche right now.
‘Evie’s pregnant. I suggested we get married. She said no. I need her to say yes.’
Ava blinked at the three startling pieces of information. She and Evie were friends, not bosom buddies and they certainly hadn’t seen much of each other since her own baby had been born, but she knew more about Finn and Evie’s relationship than Finn probably realised.
People told her stuff—it was an occupational hazard.
She knew Evie loved Finn. She knew Finn was a hard man to know and an impossible one to love. She knew that if Evie had turned him down it had been for a pretty good reason.
‘Okay …’ she wandered closer to him, propping her hip against the window sill. ‘So when you say you suggested? What did that entail exactly?’
‘I said I thought we should get married.’
Ava nodded. ‘So, let me guess … you didn’t get down on one knee and do the whole big proposal thing? You kind of … presented it as a fait accompli?’ Finn looked away from her probing gaze. ‘Am I warm?’
He looked back again, glaring. ‘It was more of a … spontaneous thing. Us getting married isn’t about any of the hoopla. It’s about being practical. About giving our child a normal family with a mother and father living under the same roof. And Evie isn’t the kind of woman that goes for all that romantic rubbish.’
Ava arched an eyebrow. ‘And how do you know that, Finn? Have you ever really even tried to get to know her?’
He looked away again at the view. ‘I know she loves me, Ava. Why be coy about it? Why pretend this isn’t what she wants?’ He looked back at her. ‘This way she gets what she wants and I get what I want.’
‘What? A man who doesn’t love her?’
Finn wanted to smash the window at her gentle insight. ‘Look, Ava … it’s complicated. I grew up in a single-parent household and then …’ He shook his head. He couldn’t tell Ava, no matter what degree she had. He didn’t talk about his issues—he just left them behind in the past, where they belonged. Where they couldn’t touch him any more. ‘I don’t want that for my kid.’
Ava pitied him. Finn was a man on the edge and he was the only one who didn’t know it. ‘Tell her, Finn. Not me.’
He shook his head. He was so used to burying it inside he doubted he even knew how to access the words. ‘I can’t.’
Ava’s heart squeezed at the bleakness in his eyes. ‘I do recall telling you that this would happen one day, Finn. That by pushing Evie away and not letting her in that one day something would happen and you’d find yourself locked out of Evie’s life.’
Finn nodded miserably. She’d said exactly that. Yelled it at him, actually, when he was being rude and stubborn and difficult, refusing to see Evie after he’d been hospitalised with the infection.
‘Seriously?’ he said. ‘You’re going with an I told you so now?