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So she was shy. Modest. Coy. Was she also kind? Kind in a way that made her vulnerable? “I’m sorry,” he said the words easily despite the fact he rarely used them. In most instances they showed weakness. Here, they served his purpose. “I’m looking to be distracted. Now I’m the one who’s prying.”
He could see her prevaricating. Yes, she felt sympathy for him, and it would be her undoing. Her eyes seemed to shift colour at the moment she decided to relax in his company, and take her cues from him and his seemingly innocent line of enquiry. “I like to be busy,” she said honestly. “And there’s always plenty of work for people like me.”
Gently, gently. “You must be away from home often.”
Her smile was indulgent. “Home is a mad-house, in any event. I don’t mind escaping for stretches like this.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh, goodness. Only, I didn’t mean that anything about this is good for me.” She shook her head slowly. “That was insensitive, sir.”
“Please,” he said with a shake of his head. “Don’t worry.”
But she did! She had, momentarily, forgotten that his father had just died, and she’d been about to launch into a prattling rundown of her room-mates’ failings.
“Why is your home a mad-house?” He pushed, very wiling to pick up the conversation. Was there a husband? A boyfriend? Children? The former he could dispense with. But the latter? He wouldn’t become a party to home-wrecking. Not when there were children.
She began to speak, but her voice was tempered. She was weighing up each sentence, careful not to get carried away in her narrative. “Well, I live with my best friends. I have done for years. Connie is a school teacher – fourth grade – and our lounge room is constantly overflowing with assignments and research projects she’s conducting. All of last year we had to put up with twenty seven little jars of pineapple heads that she was trying to coax to put down roots.”
Her laugh was like sand, brushing across the desert. He found it disturbingly mesmerising. “Do pineapple tops grow in London?”
“No,” her eyes met his and they were laughing too. “But every morning, she’d warm them with a hair dryer and tell us that she was sure she could see something happening.” Finn shook her head and then flicked the indicator on. She turned the car off the main road, onto a small lane that cut away from it at a right angle.
“She’s forgetful and hare-brained and ludicrously addicted to those crappy singing shows, but she’s the kindest person you’ll ever meet.”
Caradoc didn’t much care for kindness. Loyalty, yes. Integrity, certainly. Kindness? What was that, but an emotion that exposed one to harm?
“The pineapples eventually ended up in the rubbish, and Connie had to break the news to her students that their experiment hadn’t worked.”
Every word now made him want her more. Her lips moved with a kind of grace as she spoke and her accent was enchanting.
“Then there’s Cliff.”
“Cliff?” He repeated, his heart thundering in his chest.
“Yeah. My other flatmate. Connie and Cliff.” She smiled at him in the mirror, then wished she hadn’t, when her whole body seemed to tremble in a fierce sense of
recognition.
“They’re a couple?” He pushed, wanting confirmation that she was single.
“No. Gosh, no. In fact, to start with, they couldn’t stand one another. Cliff and I used to date.”
“Used to?”
“Yeah, years ago.”
“But you don’t now?”
“No.” She furrowed her brow, and she wondered if she was sharing way too much with this gorgeous American. She was certainly not in the business of discussing her private life with clients. In fact, she’d never disclosed more than her name to anyone else she’d worked for. What was it about him that was exerting such power over her?
“Why not?”
Finn’s even white teeth bit down onto her lower lip. The gesture caught Caradoc’s attention. “You know,” she said with ambivalence. “These things happen.”
It was a frustrating uninformative response, but without wanting to overplay his hand, he could hardly interrogate her further. “Yes,” he agreed. Gently, gently.
“I’m not being deliberately vague,” she said after the silence had crackled for several seconds. “I’m a private person, that’s all.”
“As am I,” he murmured, not wanting to feel the swelling of appreciation for her confession.
“Then you’ll understand how strange it must be for me to speak so openly to someone I hardly know.”
