She’d had the best day, and now, as she listened to the sound of the shower and contemplated joining him in it, she couldn’t help wondering if there was anything stopping them from turning this relationship that had started for the benefit of Josh into one that also benefited them. Because not only was she happy, but Finn too seemed remarkably content with the way things were. He was certainly less stressed and more relaxed than he’d been a month or so ago.
They appeared to be on the same wavelength and there was lust and there was trust and possibly even the beginnings of love, so who knew? Their relationship could go anywhere, and she cautiously examined the heart-thumping idea that the tight, stable, supportive family unit she’d always longed for might actually be within her grasp for the first time in her life.
Closing her eyes, she tried envisaging it, and it wasn’t that hard because her common sense was no match for the allure of that which she craved deep inside. Within minutes she had herself and Finn and Josh living in a gorgeous house in the country filled with laughter and lust and love in a place where it was perpetual summer and the birds didn’t stop singing.
It was a heady, if utterly unreal, bubble and one that kept expanding preposterously until it abruptly burst when Finn’s phone started buzzing its way across the bedside table. The phone fell to the floor before she could reach it, but she leaned down to pick it up anyway, and as she did so, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the caller.
Osborne Investigations.
The name sparked something in the dusty recesses of her memory.
What was it?
Hmm...
Oh, yes.
The night he’d scooped her and Josh up and whisked them to his hotel. The night she’d been left with no option but to tell him where she’d been and what she’d been doing because if she hadn’t he’d have had an investigating agency on to it so fast it would make her head spin.
That was it.
But what could Finn possibly need investigating? she wondered, replacing his phone on the bedside table and lying back against the pillows. Was it something to do with work? A person? A company? Or something else entirely? It was none of her business, of course, yet she couldn’t help but be curious. She was curious about everything to do with him.
‘Why do you have an investigation agency working for you?’ she asked when he emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam and a fluffy white towel wrapped around his hips, a sight she didn’t think she’d ever tire of.
He visibly tensed, and all the little hairs at the back of her neck stood up in response to the conclusion that she was on to something interesting. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Your phone vibrated and then fell on the floor, so I picked it up. Their name was on the screen.’
He went even stiller and seemed to pale. ‘Did you answer it?’
‘Of course not.’
‘When did they ring?’
‘About a minute ago.’
‘Right.’ He tossed the towel onto the bed and, to her disappointment, since it clearly meant that some more of that lovely, headboard-banging sex was temporarily off the agenda, spun away to don a pair of jeans and a shirt.
‘Well?’ she prompted.
‘Excuse me,’ he muttered distractedly as he strode to the bedside table and grabbed his phone. ‘I need to return that call.’
* * *
With the last twenty-four hot, intense and strangely perturbing hours instantly wiped from his mind, Finn stalked out of the bedroom, across the hall, and into the sitting room. He closed the door behind him with deliberate control, his gut churning and his pulse racing. Alexandra Osborne called him once a week, same time, same day, regardless of whether she’d made progress, and Sunday evening at six—or five p.m. back home—was neither that day nor that time.
Beginning to pace up and down, he located the missed call and returned it, and when she answered said, ‘What do you have for me?’
‘You might want to sit down,’ she replied without preamble.
He drew to an abrupt
halt and dropped into the nearest available chair. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Early last week one of the leads we’ve been working on finally came good.’
‘In what way?’