The Secrets She Must Tell - Lucy King Page 0,56
the energy to pack up with Josh and leave, as she’d originally planned. And in any case, where would she have gone? She could hardly move into a different hotel room, and Carla would ask too many questions that Georgie wouldn’t be able to answer. Besides, she and Finn needed to unpick this disaster of an arrangement and sooner rather than later.
She fed Josh and changed him and played with him, but she felt oddly disengaged, as if she was simply going through the motions. And, while a tiny part of her recognised that how she was feeling wasn’t normal and was concerned by it, the greatest part of her was too drained to pay any attention. Finn would be back soon anyway, and when he was he could take over, so she could crawl into bed and stay there for a month, at which point maybe they could then talk. In fact, she thought dully as the sound of the front door opening reached her, here he was now.
She felt the air shift, and glanced up from the journal that was sitting open and empty in her lap to find Finn standing in the doorway and emanating a weird sort of taut determination, his face set and his eyes dark.
‘Hi,’ he said, removing his jacket and rolling the sleeves of his shirt up with an efficient competency that not so long ago would have had her quivering with desire but now left her distressingly unmoved.
‘Hi.’
‘How have you been?’
Freezing, actually. But spring could be like that. Maybe she ought to have turned the heating on. ‘Fine.’
‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ He stalked over to a lamp in the corner and switched it on.
‘I didn’t realise it was so late,’ she said, blinking at the sudden light.
‘How’s Josh?’
‘He’s fine. He’s asleep.’ Finally. ‘He started crawling yesterday.’
‘Did he? I’m sorry I missed that.’
‘He’s fast,’ she said, attempting a weak smile. ‘I envy his energy.’
Finn sat down on the ottoman, leaning forwards and resting his elbows on his knees, and peered at her, his eyes narrowing slightly. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You look tired.’
‘Josh has another tooth coming through. It’s been keeping us both up at night.’
‘Where’s Mrs Gardiner?’
‘I gave her a couple of days off.’
His dark brows snapped together. ‘Why?’
‘It was her granddaughter’s birthday. She lives in Wales. Mrs G was keen to go.’ And she’d been keen to have her go because even conversation had started being hard work.
‘When is she back?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘I’ll give her a call later.’
‘How were your meetings?’
‘Fine,’ he said, his gaze locking with hers and not letting it go. ‘But I don’t want to talk about my meetings.’
Of course he didn’t. He didn’t want to talk to her about anything. Why would he?
‘I want to talk about us.’
Oh, the irony. ‘There is no us,’ she said, her chest nevertheless squeezing.
He went very still, something she couldn’t even begin to identify flickering in the depths of his eyes. ‘Do you mean that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you clearly don’t trust me.’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘What?’
‘You don’t trust me.’
‘Why would you think that?’
She closed the journal with a snap, a sudden hot rush of emotion obliterating the numbness and firing her deadened nerve-endings. ‘I told you everything about me, Finn. Everything. Yet every time I asked you anything about your parents or anything even vaguely personal you brushed me aside. You told me nothing. Until you absolutely had no choice.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your adoption. That huge thing that you didn’t think to share with me.’
He stared at her, a tiny muscle in his jaw pulsating. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said gruffly. ‘I could barely make sense of it myself. I certainly couldn’t have talked about it any sooner than I did. With you or anyone.’
‘No one else knows?’
‘You’re the only person I’ve told. The only person I wanted to know, I’ve recently realised. You unlocked me in that respect. You made me re-evaluate the past and see things from a different perspective. I don’t regret any of that. I do, however, regret how that conversation ended. I’m sorry. I let decades-old hang-ups get the better of me. I was an idiot for letting you leave.’
‘If you’d told me that I mattered to you and that we were in this together I’d have stayed.’
A flicker of warmth and something that looked like hope leapt in the depths of his eyes. ‘You do matter to me and we are in this together.’
‘Because of Josh.’
His gaze intensified and heated. ‘Not entirely.’
No,