The Secrets She Must Tell - Lucy King Page 0,53

me, because of what I was or wasn’t?’

He hated the catch he could hear in his voice, but he didn’t regret the question because her face softened and, ah, there was the sympathy he’d been in need of. ‘Do you really believe that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you remember of her?’

He scrolled back twenty years, searching for memories that were faded and hazy but nevertheless still there. ‘She smelled of roses,’ he said eventually. ‘She taught me poker and played football with me. Every Saturday she’d bake brownies.’

‘She sounds lovely,’ Georgie said, a trace of wistfulness flitting across her face.

‘She was.’

‘Did she make you eat your vegetables?’

‘Yes.’

‘Make you do your homework and go to bed on time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you ever sent to your room or grounded?’

‘Frequently.’

‘Then she loved you,’ she said with quiet conviction. ‘Very much. Take it from someone who knows what it feels like not to matter. They must have wanted you very much too, to go all the way to Argentina to fetch you. And they must have had their reasons for keeping it from you.’

‘I guess I’ll never know,’ he said, his throat oddly tight.

‘Unless your investigation agency digs something up.’

‘Maybe not even then.’

‘So much in life we just have to accept.’

‘As I’m discovering.’

‘Me too.’

With a strangely sad sort of smile she pushed herself off the bed and returned her attention to the suitcase, and as he watched her pull the top down and zip it up it hit him like a blow to the chest that, despite everything he’d just revealed, nothing had changed.

‘You’re still planning to leave?’ he asked, the blade of rejection slicing through him like a knife.

‘I have to get back to Josh.’ She shot him a quick glance, full of something he was too stung, too busy reeling, to identify. ‘Unless there’s any other reason for me to stay?’

‘No, nothing,’ he said, coolly, calling himself a fool for wanting her to stay, for thinking that he was good enough for her, for believing that they were in this together. ‘Go. Please. Don’t let me stop you.’

All she’d wanted was for him to say that he wanted her to stay, thought Georgie numbly as she stepped off the train at St Pancras and, dragging her wheelie case behind her, went in search of a taxi. That they were a team. A tightly knit unit. That she mattered to him as much as he mattered to her, despite her best efforts to deny it.

But he’d let her go with such ease, and that hurt unbelievably badly. So much for thinking that she could somehow avoid more pain, that she could protect herself. Or that she was only beginning to fall for him. She already had. There could be little doubt about it. She had to be head over heels in love with him for his indifferent dismissal to cause this much agony.

But however much it hurt, the pain wouldn’t last because that love hadn’t been real. Finn wasn’t the man she’d thought him to be. She’d given him attributes—loyalty, honesty, integrity—that he didn’t have, and really she had no one to blame but herself. She was the one who’d placed him on a pedestal so high and wobbly that it was inevitable he should fall off it. She was the one who’d misread every look and every word, reading things into his actions that simply hadn’t been there. This whole mess was entirely her fault.

The train journey from Paris had lasted two and a half hours and every minute of it she’d spent analysing their relationship, such as it was. And she could see now that she’d been a fool. Finn had never wanted her. Not really. All he wanted was Josh. She came as part of the package and was handy for sex, but that was about it.

She knew this to be true because right from the start she’d been the one in the driving seat. In the bar the night they’d first met she’d been the one to approach him, and then the one to proposition him by telling him she wanted to leave, with him. He hadn’t chosen her that night. She’d chosen him.

And so it had been ever since.

She’d given him no option but to take up the role of father and provide his support. What else could he have done in the circumstances? How could she have forgotten the reluctance with which he’d taken her in along with Josh? How she’d made him spend his evenings with her and then