He had no problems seeing her as the woman she’d become, after all. ‘I’m thirty-two years old, Sweeney. I’ve smoked weed, I’ve adopted the Irish fondness for the c word and sometimes I drive my car too fast. I often have too many Guinness at the local with the TGIF crowd from my work, and one of those nights about two weeks before I made this trek home, I took a woman I’d only met a few hours prior out into the alley and went down on her. She screamed so loudly when she came I thought someone was going to think I was murdering her and call the guards.’
Okay, that might have been a little TMI and he’d never been one to brag about his sexual conquests, but this conversation was pushing buttons he didn’t even know existed. For fuck’s sake, he was a fully grown man.
Couldn’t she see that?
By the look of her, she couldnow, her indulgent smile slowly fading.Good.He may have been square boy back then, but these days he was the King of Cunnilingus, and she could take that to the goddamn bank.
She didn’t say anything for several beats, just stared at him as though something had broken in her brain. And then, as if she didn’t quite know how to process the information, she switched tack. ‘Wait.’ She shot him a faux frowny look. ‘You cheated on me?’
It was Fin’s turn to blink, momentarily confused by the jump in topic. ‘What?’
‘Two weeks before you came here? How dare you, Finley Murphy. We’d been engaged for a month by then. You wait until I tell your mother about this.’
It took a beat for him to catch on, then he laughed loud and long, his hand sliding to his belly, grateful for her choice of humour to alleviate a situation that had become bizarrely intense. It had certainly cured the weird itch in his blood that had made him want to peel his skin off.
‘Nowyou’redrinking the Kool Aid,’ he said when he was finally able to speak again.
They grinned at each other for long moments before Sweeney stirred. ‘Well, anyway.’ She handed him back the phone. ‘Once I get reassigned, the whole Feeney watch will die a natural death.’
And that couldn’t come soon enough. Except, of course, it’d probably be a long time until he saw Sweeney again, and suddenly that wasn’t okay. This last week may well go down as one of the more bizarre of his life, but connecting with his old friend had been an unexpected benefit and he didn’t want it to be so long between drinks again.
‘Let’s make a pact,’ he said as he placed his phone on the coffee table.
She eyed him warily, which was fair enough considering they were already unwitting partners in this fake fiancé bullshit.
‘What kind of pact?’
‘Let’s not leave it four years between seeing each other again after all this. I’ve missed you,’ he said. ‘A lot.’
‘Yeah.’ Sweeney smiled. ‘I’ve missed you, too.’
And that was all the encouragement Fin needed. It suddenly felt like an imperative to make a regular catch-up date. ‘Let’s agree to meet up once a year—ish—going forward.’
‘Fin.’ She shook her head. ‘Next time we turn up in Ballyshannon together, our mothers will probably have just told some huge fib about us being pregnant despite us having broken off the engagement, and I’ll have to waddle around rubbing my stomach while you get to take expectant father advice fromDonny.’
Fin shuddered at the latter, even as the former slid invisible fingers under his skin. ‘Not here,’ he quickly amended. ‘It can be wherever you might be at the time. As long as I had a couple of months’ notice I could probably swing it. How much in advance do you know your jobs?’
She leaned in, which Fin took as an encouraging sign. ‘Things are usually booked six months or so in advance. There obviously can be last-minute changes to allow for unforeseen staff issues, internal unrest in a particular country, inclement weather events and, you know—’ She waggled her eyebrows. ‘Pandemics and volcanic eruptions. But mostly I do know where I’m going to be months ahead of time.’
‘Good, okay. Once things are back to—’
He’d been going to saynormal. But he doubted things would ever be normal again after this. There was going to have to be a new normal after being fake engaged to Sweeney and kissing her under the mistletoe and thinking about her waddling around rubbing her belly with his baby snugged safely inside.
‘Once we’re back into our routines, let’s see if we can find a few days in the next twelve months to meet up.’
‘Okay, let’s do it,’ she enthused, which set off a low flutter of excitement in Fin’s chest cavity. ‘I stay in some seriously nice places, too. Always put up in the best suites. Plenty of room for two. We can make a weekend of it?’
‘I like the sound of that.’ The thought of seeing her again after all this? He liked it very much.
‘Oh, actually, I think I have a job in August in Donegal. We could meet there?’
Fleetingly, Fin wondered how many times she’d been to Ireland while he’d been living there, but dismissed it. Neither of them had kept in very good contact, and if she had been in Ireland it would have been to work, not catch up or socialise.
He nodded with a smile. ‘I’ve not made it that far north yet. Sounds like a plan.’
One he was already stupidly excited about.
Twelve
