thought you might be,’ he sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it earlier. I knew you were going to fret over it as soon as I’d said it. Come on,’ he said, taking my plate, ‘I’ll put this lot in the kitchen and then I’ll tell you.’
I sat and faced him, my legs drawn up beneath me and my damp hair free from the band I had tied it back with while I was eating. The weight of it fell around my face and I pushed it behind my ears. I could feel it was already curling out of all control, but that was nothing new.
‘I wasn’t going to tell you any of this,’ Finn eventually began, ‘but after what you did and said last night, and what happened after you’d done it, I was more aware than ever that I’m really falling for you, Freya and in order to do that properly, there’s something I need to share with you, even though it pains me to do it.’
‘Okay,’ I whispered.
‘And Zak said I should too.’
‘Zak?’
‘I know,’ he said, looking at me and shaking his head. ‘Who would have thought my pain in the arse half-brother could actually turn over a new leaf and offer words of wisdom?’
‘Words of wisdom?’
‘Well,’ Finn conceded, ‘perhaps not wisdom, but some plainly spoken home truths.’
We both smiled and I felt some of the tension which had been building ebb away.
‘He said that I owed it to you to explain why I thought the worst of you when I assumed you had jilted someone at the altar.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that doesn’t really need explaining. Jilting someone at the altar would be a pretty shitty thing to do.’
‘Oh, I know it’s a pretty shitty thing to do,’ he said with a rueful smile.
‘How?’ I quietly asked, even though his words practically guaranteed I’d guessed.
‘Because I was the sad sod waiting for the bride who’d had a change of heart but not quite mustered the courage to tell me before I was standing in front of family and friends on a distant sun-drenched beach.’
Yep, that was exactly what I’d just worked out that he was going to say. Apart from the beach bit. I didn’t have Finn down as a sunshine wedding type at all.
‘Oh, Finn,’ I breathed, trying not to picture his heartbreak and humiliation.
‘No wonder I have trust issues, right?’ he said gruffly.
‘Especially,’ I sighed, ‘when a girl comes along who you like, but who you think has done the very same thing to someone else as you’ve had done to you, yes?’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ he said, lacing his fingers together and biting his lip. ‘I’m sorry I jumped to that conclusion, Freya.’
‘It’s okay,’ I told him, because I could hardly hold it against him when what I said in the pub had made it sound very much like that was what I had done. ‘And please don’t feel obliged to say any more about what happened to you.’
‘But I want to,’ he insisted. ‘I want you to know everything. I think it’s important that you do.’
He then proceeded to explain how he’d met this girl and started a relationship with her while building an extension on the property she was living at.
‘She told me the guy who owned the place was her uncle. I only met him once and given his age that was totally believable, but after she left me at the altar, I discovered that he had been her partner. It turned out she’d had a few older men in her life.’
‘Did no one guess about their relationship while you were doing the building work?’
‘No,’ he shrugged. ‘We were there to build an extension, not get to know the ins and outs of the personal dynamics of the client. Besides, the bloke was never around when we were and Erica never did or said anything to arouse any suspicion.’
‘But she must have loved you,’ I pointed out, only defending her to save Finn’s feelings, ‘otherwise she wouldn’t have agreed to marry you, would she?’
‘Oh, she didn’t want me,’ Finn laughed.
‘Then why… ?’
‘She thought I was going to inherit Dad’s business,’ he cut in. ‘She’d been looking at the family portfolio and assumed I was going to receive a secure and wealthy future.’
‘So, if you knew that, why did you want to marry her?’
‘I didn’t know she’d set her sights on the family fortune until after she disappeared.’
‘I see,’ I swallowed. ‘Had you not told her about your ambition to become