Sharon Kendrick - Finn's Pregnant Bride

‘Got any photos?’ demanded Miranda as she nodded towards the chair opposite her.

Catherine sat down and fished a wallet from her handbag. It was a magazine tradition that you brought your holiday snaps in for everyone else to look at. ‘A few. Want to see?’

‘Just so long as they’re not all boring landscapes!’ joked Miranda, and proceeded to flick through the selection which Catherine handed her. ‘Hmmm. Beautiful beach. Beautiful sunset. Close-up of lemon trees. Blah, blah, blah—hang on.’ Behind her huge spectacles, her eyes goggled. ‘Well, looky-here! Who the hell is this?’

Catherine glanced across the desk, though it wasn’t really necessary. No prizes for guessing that Miranda hadn’t pounced on the photo of Nico grinning shyly into the lens. Or his brother flexing his biceps at the helm of the pleasure-cruiser. No, the tousled black hair and searing blue eyes of Finn Delaney were visible from here—though, if she was being honest, Catherine felt that she knew that particular picture by heart. She had almost considered buying a frame for it and putting it on her bedside table!

‘Oh, that’s just a man I met,’ she said casually.

‘Just a man I met?’ repeated Miranda disbelievingly. ‘Well, if I’d met a man like this I’d never have wanted to come home! No wonder you’re over Peter!’

‘I am not over Peter!’ said Catherine defensively. ‘He’s just someone I met the night before I left.’ Who saved my life. And made me realise that I could feel something for another man.

Miranda screwed her eyes up. ‘He looks kind of familiar,’ she mused slowly.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Finn Delaney.’

‘Finn Delaney…Finn Delaney,’ repeated Miranda, and frowned. ‘Do I know the name?’

‘I don’t know, do you? He’s Irish.’

Miranda began clicking onto the search engine of her computer. ‘Finn Delaney.’ A slow smile swiftly turned to an expression of glee. ‘And you say you’ve never heard of him?’

‘Of course I haven’t!’ said Catherine crossly. ‘Why, what have you found?’

‘Come here,’ purred Miranda.

Catherine went round to Miranda’s side of the desk, prepared and yet not prepared for the image of Finn staring out at her from the computer. It was clearly a snatched shot, and it looked like a picture of a man who did not enjoy being on the end of a camera. Come to think of it, he had been very reluctant to have her take his picture, hadn’t he?

It was a three-quarter-length pose, and his hair was slightly shorter. Instead of the casual clothes he had been wearing in Pondiki, he was wearing some kind of beautiful grey suit. He looked frowning and preoccupied—a million miles away from the man relaxing with his ouzo at the restaurant table with the dark, lapping sea as a backdrop.

‘Has he got his own website, then?’ Catherine asked, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice. He hadn’t looked like that sort of person.

Miranda was busy scrolling down the page. ‘There’s his business one. This one is the Finn Delaney Appreciation Society.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Nope. Apparently, he was recently voted number three in Ireland’s Most Eligible Bachelor list.’

Catherine wondered just how gorgeous numbers one and two might be! She leant closer as she scanned her eyes down the list of his many business interests. ‘And he has fingers in many pies,’ she observed.

‘And thumbs, by the look of it. Good grief! He’s the money behind some huge new shopping complex with a state-of-the-art theatre.’

‘Really?’ Catherine blinked. He had certainly not looked in the tycoon class. Her first thought had been fisherman, her second had been pin-up.

‘Yes, really. He’s thirty-five, he’s single and he looks like a fallen angel.’ Miranda looked up. ‘Why haven’t we heard of him before?’

‘You know what Ireland’s like.’ Catherine smiled. ‘A little kingdom all of its own, but with no king! It keeps itself to itself.’

But Miranda didn’t appear to be listening. Instead she was continuing to read out loud. “‘Finn Delaney’s keen brain and driving talent have led to suggestions that he might be considering a career in politics.” Wow!’ Her face took on a hungry look. ‘Are you seeing him again, Catherine?’

‘I—I hadn’t planned to.’ He had told her to drop by if ever she was in Dublin—but you couldn’t really get more offhand than that, could you? Besides, if he had his very own appreciation society then she was likely to have to join a very long queue indeed!

‘Did he ask you out?’

Catherine shook her head. ‘No. He just gave me his card and said to call by if I happened to be passing, but—’

‘But?’

‘I don’t think I’ll bother.’

From behind her spectacles Miranda’s eyes were boring into her. ‘And why not?’

‘Millions of reasons, but the main one being that it’s not so long since I finished with Peter. Or rather,’ she corrected painfully, ‘Peter finished with me. It went on for three years and I need to get over it properly.’ She shrugged, trying to rid her mind of the image of black hair and piercing blue eyes and that body. Trying in vain to imprint Peter’s there instead. ‘A sensible person doesn’t leap straight from one love affair to another.’

‘No one’s asking you to have a love affair!’ exploded Miranda. ‘Whatever happened to simple friendship?’

Catherine couldn’t explain without giving herself away that a woman did not look at a man like Finn Delaney and think friendship. No, appallingly, her overriding thought connected with Finn Delaney happened to be long, passionate nights together. ‘I’m not flying to Dublin to start a tenuous new friendship,’ she objected.

‘But this man could be a future prime minister of Ireland!’ objected Miranda with unaccustomed passion. ‘Imagine! Catherine, you have to follow it up! You’re an attractive woman, he gave you his card—I’m sure he’d be delighted to see you!’

Catherine narrowed her eyes suspiciously. ‘It isn’t like you to play matchmaker, Miranda—you once said that single people gave more to their job! Why are you so keen for me to see Finn Delaney?’

‘I’m thinking about our readers—’

Everything slotted into place. ‘Then don’t,’ warned Catherine. ‘Don’t even think about it. Even if I was—even if I was planning to call in on him—there’s no way that I would dream of writing up a piece about it, if that’s the way your devious mind is working!’

Miranda bared her teeth in a smile. ‘Oh, don’t take things so seriously, girl! Why don’t you just go?’ she coaxed. ‘Give yourself a treat for a change.’

‘But I’ve only just got back from my holiday!’

‘We can do a feature on the city itself—the whole world loves Dublin at the moment—you know it does! The single girl’s guide! How about if we call it an assignment? And if you want to call in on Finn Delaney while you’re there—then so much the better!’

‘I’m not writing anything about him,’ said Catherine stubbornly, even while her heart gave a sudden leap of excitement at the thought of seeing him again.

‘And nobody’s asking you to—not if you don’t want to,’ soothed Miranda. ‘Tell our readers all about the shops and the restaurants and the bands and who goes where. That’s all.’

That’s all, Catherine told herself as her flight touched down at Dublin airport.

That’s all, she told herself as she checked into the MacCormack Hotel.

That’s all, she told herself again, as she lifted the phone and then banged it straight down again.

It took three attempts for the normally confident Catherine to dial Finn Delaney’s number with a shaking finger.