The Secrets She Must Tell - Lucy King Page 0,25
the stability you admitted you need. You’ll never want for anything again.’
Well, materially that might be true, yet he’d promised her that already. And what about him? What advantages would it have for him? Was he somehow hoping for a friends-with-benefits sort of thing? He’d better not be. ‘What would you get from it?’
‘Peace of mind.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No.’
Right. So not sex. Obviously. Stupid of her. Why would she even have thought it when he showed absolutely no interest in her like that? Damn those scorchingly hot dreams she’d been having about him.
‘What would happen if either of us met someone else?’ she asked, thinking that, while she couldn’t imagine ever doing so herself, Finn was gorgeous and a billionaire and presumably had women flinging themselves at him left, right and centre. She’d seen zero evidence of it to date, but that could well change once things settled down.
‘We’ll cross that bridge if and when we come to it,’ he said, which wasn’t exactly a denial. ‘Think about it, Georgie. What do you have to lose?’
The hint of arrogance and condescension in Finn’s voice annoyed her even more than the tiny irrational stab of jealousy she felt at the thought of him with another woman, but actually none of this was about her, was it? This was about Josh. Too much of his short life had been taken up with her illness and she owed it to him to make amends. Goodness knew she hadn’t been the best of mothers. In fact, she must have been among the worst.
Surely he’d be better off with two parents together. Didn’t the statistics suggest precisely that? The inconvenient and all-consuming attraction she felt for Finn would fade to a manageable level eventually. It already had done a bit. Look at the way the shock of his suggestion had rid her of her ridiculous embarrassment around him.
And they were hardly strangers any more. She’d even go so far as to say that they had a weird kind of connection that had nothing to do with Josh, an odd sense of recognition that made her think ‘oh, that’s right, it’s you’, which she’d felt the night they’d met, and which hit her with increasing regularity now.
And really, how bad would such a situation be for her? she thought, on one hand barely able to believe that she was even considering Finn’s preposterous suggestion yet on the other totally seeing the sense of it. They got on well enough. And he was right. She would have the stable family unit she’d always yearned for, along with the security that Finn could provide.
If they were joined in partnership he wouldn’t be able to just get up and leave, would he? Should she have a relapse he wouldn’t abandon Josh, and therefore he wouldn’t abandon her. They’d be safe. He’d told her she’d always have his support, which she believed, and she wasn’t going to get anything like it anywhere else. She wasn’t exactly an attractive prospect and it wasn’t as if there was anyone else waiting in the wings.
Ultimately, despite his arrogance and condescension, Finn had a point. She really did have nothing to lose. In fact, she had everything to gain, and so, to ensure the best future for Josh in particular, it really was a no-brainer.
‘All right,’ she said with a brief nod. ‘If it’s a civil partnership you want, it’s a civil partnership you shall have.’
CHAPTER SIX
THE CEREMONY TOOK place in a register office a stone’s throw from Finn’s hotel a week later, the usual lengthy bureaucracy associated with such an event magically disappearing the moment he produced an enormous cheque, which only went to demonstrate yet again that once he wanted something he didn’t stop until he got it.
The arrangements hadn’t been complicated in any case. Georgie had only wanted Carla there, and, apart from their son, Finn had no relations. His mother had been hit by a bus when he was ten, he’d told her, his father had died of terminal cancer around three months ago, and he had no siblings. He was as alone in this world as she was, and when she’d discovered this she’d had the fanciful notion that by hitching her wagon to his she might be rescuing him as much as he’d rescued her.
Faintly unsettled by that thought and unwilling to acknowledge what the accompanying squeeze of her heart might mean, Georgie had joked that it was going to be a small ceremony, and indeed it was. She wore