They both managed to look a picture of innocence as Ronnie said, ‘Anything you two care to share?’
Uh oh … Sweeney suddenly got a very bad feeling. She exchanged a look with Fin. They couldn’t possibly know about last night, right?
‘No.’ His frown deepened.
‘Are you sure about that, Finley?’ Connie asked, her voice a little sing-songy, as though she had a delicious secret she was dying to spill.
He folded his arms. ‘Yes.’
‘Not according to the WhatsApp group,’ she replied.
Ronnie produced her phone, already displaying a paused video on the screen. It was them. On the beach. Someone had filmed them and put it in the chat.
Ugh! This freaking town.
Accepting the phone, Sweeney hesitated, not wanting to watch it because it had already played on a loop in her head all damn night. But it’d been dark—maybe they had plausible deniability?
Pressing play, Sweeney was cheered by the initial grainy, unfocused footage, and so was Fin if his long, relieved exhale was anything to go by.
Plausible deniability.
But that soon corrected, coming into sharp focus. Not yet fully dark and with an obviously superior phone camera, it was apparent from the get-go that the couple kissing for AustraliaandIreland were her and Fin.
Well… shit. So much for what happens at the lake stays at the lake…
It was also apparent that it had been filmed from the water. From the jetty, to be precise. Which meant that at some stage the teenagers—one of whom must have been a Murphy for the video to be in this chat—had looked up from their snog-fest, realised they had Feeney in their presence and started recording.
Dandy. Just dandy.
There was no point watching the rest of the video, and yet Sweeney couldn’t drag her eyes off the screen. Nor Fin either, apparently. There was something compelling about the passion between them even at a distance. It looked very,veryreal.
Nothing fake about it.
It had certainly felt that way—intensely so—her world narrowing down to just his mouth, his intoxicating aroma and the solid weight of his leg at the juncture of her thighs. Thoughts of him being her friend subsumed by the reality of him being a man.
But it looked it too. They were, clearly, completelyintoeach other.
No wonder their mothers were looking at them, twin thought bubbles above their heads, one containing a wedding carriage, the other a baby carriage.
That expression of hope on their faces?Thatwas why she and Fin had to keep things strictly as friends.Especiallynow.
‘There’s pictures of you both, too,’ her mother said.
Sweeney glanced up, alarmed, remembering her flash job, but then she realised that her mother wouldn’t be standing here all excited if there was a half-naked picture of her daughter in the Murphy family chat.
She’d probably be giving a lecture about public decorum.
Closing the video down, she navigated to the pictures, relieved to see it was only a few snaps of them racing along the beach. The message read:#Feeneysighting at the lake last night. These two should seriously get a room.
The messages that followed were colourful but gleeful.
Fin cleared his throat as he handed the phone back to his mother. ‘It’s not what it looks like.’
‘Oh, really?’ She quirked an eyebrow.
Rhonda quirked an eyebrow better than anyone Sweeney knew. One little raise that could silently compel an over-exuberant child to hush at the library or shame teenagers making out in the shelves to show some decorum.
Fin had once called it his mother’s eyebrow of doom.
