The Secrets She Must Tell - Lucy King Page 0,7

I’m busy. So get to the point. What are you doing here? What do you want?’

He was right. The time for dithering was over. Finn had a right to know and she badly needed any support he might be prepared to offer. She stuck her hands into the back pockets of her jeans to hide the trembling and took a deep breath. ‘Well, the thing is, you...we...well, basically, Finn, our one-night stand left me pregnant and as a result you have a son.’

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN FINN HAD instructed Bob to send Georgie up he hadn’t given much thought to what he was expecting with regards to her appearance. On the rare occasion he’d allowed the memory of her to flow unfettered through his mind, she either sat at the bar, exuding confidence and vibrancy and dazzling him with flirty banter and smouldering smiles, or lay sprawled across his bed as morning dawned, looking flushed and tousled and sleepily sexy.

He barely recognised the on-edge, wary version standing in front of him. Her dark hair was scraped back from a face that was ghostly pale. Her eyes were dull and her cheeks hollow. Her clothes were hanging off her. Above the neckline of her white T-shirt, her collarbones stuck out, and her jeans hung loose on her hips despite her belt being tightly buckled. It was as if someone had switched off her light, and once he’d got over his shock he’d found himself wondering what had happened to her.

Now, with the bombshell she’d just dropped, he couldn’t think at all. His mind had gone blank. His pulse was thundering and a cold sweat had broken out all over his skin. His vision was blurred. The room seemed to be spinning.

‘What?’ he said roughly, his voice sounding as if it came from far, far away while the disorientation intensified.

‘You, well, we, have a son,’ she said. ‘Josh. He’s six months old.’

A son.

Josh.

Six months old.

The words flew through the air, bulldozing a path through the chaos and hitting his brain like bullets, where they pulverised the fog and cleared the way for indisputable logic and instinctive denial.

A baby?

His baby?

It was impossible.

Or at the very least improbable.

‘We can’t,’ he said thickly, grappling for some kind of hold on this.

‘We can. We do.’

‘You said you were on the pill.’

‘I was.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said with a slight frown. ‘I might have been sick. Or on antibiotics. I don’t remember.’

Disbelief barrelled through him. ‘You don’t remember?’

‘No.’

How could she be so cool, so calm? Could she possibly have done it deliberately? At the thought his blood chilled and his gut churned. ‘How convenient.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘What do you think?’

Her chin came up. ‘Believe me, I did not plan it. I did not plan any of it.’

‘What makes you think he’s mine?’

‘You’re the only person I slept with at the time. The last person I slept with actually.’

‘Do you expect me to believe that simply because you say so?’

‘Well, yes. But it doesn’t matter. I have photos,’ she said, twisting slightly to rummage around in her bag before extracting her phone and fiddling with it for a moment. ‘Here.’ She walked over to him and held out the device. ‘Take a look. Swipe left. There are lots.’

For a moment Finn stared at the phone as if it were a live grenade. His heart hammered against his ribs. He went hot, then cold. He wanted to look. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t know what he wanted, but it didn’t seem to matter because, with a hand that wasn’t entirely steady, he was reaching for the phone anyway and lowering his gaze, and one glance at the screen was enough to detonate what remained of an already shattered life. Because the baby in the photo, with his shock of thick, dark hair, laughing blue eyes, and rosy, chubby cheeks was the spitting image of him at a similar age.

The blow of recognition winded him so hard he couldn’t breathe. The floor tipped beneath his feet and his knees nearly gave way. But somehow he remained upright and somehow he managed to blindly swipe through the pictures that followed, the overwhelming sense of familiarity intensifying with every passing second.

The truth of the child’s parentage was undeniable.

Which meant that he was a father.

A violent rush of emotion rocked though him then, tangling up with the issues surrounding his own parentage and his feelings about Jim and Alice, which he couldn’t even begin to unravel. And quite