she corrected silently knowing that the gesture, while grand, was empty. It was obvious he didn’t think of it as theirs. That it was just another way of getting what he wanted.
He reached out and took her hand. ‘What do you say, Evie? Let’s get married. Let’s raise our son together, here in this house with the harbour just there and everything he could ever want.’
Evie looked into his gorgeously shaggy, earnest face. A part of her whispered, Do it. Say yes. Take the fake marriage. Take whatever he’s offering. You can make him love you with time and patience.
And it was, oh, so tempting.
But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
She wanted more than that. She wanted it all—the whole hearts and flowers catastrophe. If she’d learned anything from her own parents’ marriage and years of navigating a fraught household, it was that you couldn’t make someone love you if they didn’t.
No matter how hard you tried.
And you had to start as you meant to go on.
She withdrew her hand from his. ‘No.’
She refused to live on Finn’s crumbs as her mother had on her father’s. If they were going to enter into a marriage then she wanted all of him.
‘Hell, Evie,’ Finn said, shaking his head incredulously. ‘I bought you a house. What more do you want from me?’
‘I can buy my own house,’ she snapped.
‘Then what do you want’ he demanded.
‘You, Finn,’ she yelled. ‘I want you. I want you to open up to me. To know every secret, every ugly thought, every tear you’ve ever shed. I want to know about every sad, sorry day of your existence. And I want you to want to know about mine. I want to know about Isaac and the day that he died in your arms and about who the hell Lydia is and how she fits into your life and about your childhood and your time in the army as a trauma surgeon.’
Evie was breathing hard as she finished and she’d just scraped the surface of the things she wanted to know about the man she loved. ‘That’s what I want,’ she said, ramming her hands onto her hips, pulling her shirt taut across her bump. ‘Anything less is asking me to debase myself. And I deserve better than that.’
Finn reeled from her list. She wanted too much. She wanted stuff he’d never given to anyone. Not to Lydia. Not even to Isaac.
Finn steeled himself to be the practical one. Obviously the pregnancy was making level-headed Evie a trace emotional.
‘None of those things are open to negotiation,’ he said, his voice steely. ‘Neither are they required to make a life together. I’m sure if we’re both practical we can make it work, Evie.’
Evie’s temper flared at his condescension. He truly thought he could just wear her down. She’d swallowed a lot of pride where Finn was concerned because she loved him and she’d known he’d been hurting and she’d seen the injured soul under the gruff and bluff but she drew the line here. She would not become his wife—give him her all—and end up married to a stranger.
‘Okay, then,’ she snapped. ‘Tell me how it will work, Finn. How? We get married and have a committed normal relationship where you take out the rubbish and I hang out the washing and we argue over the TV remote and snuggle in bed on the weekends with the newspapers?’
She glared at him as she drew breath. ‘Or is it just a name-only thing? Do we sleep in the same bed to keep up the ruse for our son? Or apart? Do we have some kind of open marriage where we discreetly see other people? Or do we just go without sex for the next twenty-ish years and you spend a lot of time in the shower and I run up an account at the sex shop we just passed?’
Finn blinked at her vehemence, lost for words, but she seemed to have paused for a moment and was looking at him like it was his turn to add to the conversation. ‘I haven’t really thought about the nitty-gritty, Evie.’
‘Bum-bah!’ she snorted. ‘Wrong answer. Try again. You want me to accept this proposal?’ She folded her arms. ‘Convince me.’
Finn picked carefully through words and phrases in his head, hoping that he found the right ones to convince her. ‘I assumed we’d be sharing the same bed. In the …’ he searched around for a delicate way to put it ‘… fullest sense of