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Maggie knew that he was right. A huge lump of mixed pain and guilt was filling her throat, making it impossible for her to speak. How it was that Finn had found a flaw in her plans that had escaped her? How was it that he had somehow known exactly how her grandmother would feel when she herself had not?
Maggie wasn’t sure which she resented having to acknowledge the more: his unexpected sensitivity towards the feelings of an elderly woman he didn’t even know, or the fact that that sensitivity made her feel guilty because she herself had not recognised the need for it. Her grandmother was her grandmother, not his.
‘I can find my grandmother another house,’ she told him challengingly.
Finn gave her a hooded, unreadable look that for some reason made her heart bounce around inside her chest like a rubber ball.
‘Yes, I’m sure that you can. But as I understood the situation the reason you wanted the Dower House for her was because of your grandparents’ past association with it. Of course, no doubt, during the course of a long marriage they would have shared other homes together…’ He paused, and Maggie looked angrily away from him.
‘They began their married lives together in the Dower House,’ she found herself admitting reluctantly.
As he surveyed her averted profile Finn felt a dangerous thread of unwanted tenderness for her curl itself sinuously around his heart. He itched to take hold of her and shake her for her stubbornness, and at the same time he ached to hold her, to banish from her eyes and her voice the pain he could see and hear in them. ‘You were very close to both your grandparents?’ he guessed.
Maggie couldn’t deny it. ‘Very,’ she agreed shortly, and then to her own consternation she heard herself telling him unsteadily, ‘They gave me a home, security, love, when my own parents—’ She stopped and shook her head, her mouth compressing, her expression betraying how much she regretted saying as much as she had.
But Finn ignored the invisible ‘keep out’ signs she was posting and pressed on ruthlessly. She intrigued him, baffled him, infuriated him, and made him ache with the intensity of those emotions. He was determined to find out just what it was that made her tick, what it was that made her so antagonistic towards him. ‘When your own parents what?’ he asked her.
Maggie closed her eyes. This was a conversation she wished she had never begun. She never talked about her parents to anyone. Not even her girlfriends knew how frightened, how insecure, how unwanted the careless, casual attitude of her mother and her father had made her feel.
She could still see the look of irritation on her mother’s face when she had begged her to attend her school play.
‘Oh, darling, no. James is taking me out to dinner tonight, and anyway you wouldn’t really want me to be there, would you? You know how bored I would be…’
Oh, yes, Maggie had known how bored she would be, how bored she so often was with Maggie herself.
‘Nothing,’ Maggie denied fiercely in answer to Finn’s question.
As she turned away from him, because she didn’t want Finn to see her expression, she wasn’t prepared for the sudden movement he made as he levered his body away from the wall and strode towards her, grasping her shoulders with his hands before she could escape.
‘They hurt you didn’t they, Maggie?’ he guessed. ‘They—’
‘No.’ Maggie hurled the denial at him like a thunderbolt, but she could hear in her voice, as clearly as she knew he must be able to himself, the fear and anguish that made a mockery of her lie.
‘Maggie…’
‘I don’t want to talk about it. It isn’t any of your business anyway. My parents were no different from countless other people of their generation, believing that they had a right to put themselves and their own happiness first. Their mistake was in having a child like me, who wanted…’
To her own horror Maggie could feel her eyes filling with tears. Frantically she tried to wrench herself out of Finn’s grasp, lifting her gaze furiously to his and then stiffening as she saw the compassion in his eyes.
Every ounce of her tensed body shrieked a silent scream of outrage that Finn could almost hear as he recognised how furiously she was rejecting his pity for the child she must have been.
‘No, Maggie,’ he corrected her gently. ‘Their mistake was in not valuing the gift they had been given.’
Something about the dark warmth of his voice was compelling her to look at him, to relax into him, to lift her face towards his and…
As he looked down into the cloudy emotion of her brown eyes Finn knew that he was lost. His gaze skimmed her face, her mouth. Her mouth…
Maggie could feel the soft groan he gave vibrating through his body. Feel it? What on earth was she doing standing so close to him? Frantically she pulled away from him, her eyes brilliant with tiny shards of anger.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she told him furiously. ‘I’m leaving—now.’
Quickly she spun round on her heel, heading for the front door.
‘Admirable exit line though that was, I’m afraid that you aren’t going to be able to go anywhere,’ Finn told her dryly.
Not leave? He wasn’t going to let her leave? Anger battled against fiercely sensual pleasure and excitement—and lost.
‘What do you mean?’ Maggie made herself challenge him. What was she going to do if he absolutely refused to let her go, if he insisted on keeping her here with him? A shocking thrill ripped through her, heating her face—and her body—with dangerously inflammatory secret thoughts and memories.
