Christmas Alpha Read Online Free PDF

needed to get away from the limelight and paparazzi for a while. Or something else. Maybe someone else?
      “Doesn’t your family know where you are?” She frowned at the thought of the fuss there would be with her own family if she just disappeared.
      Finn moved to turn on and adjust the lights. “I only have my older brother, and his wife and kids. He’s a fisherman out of Galway,” he added distractedly. “I call him once a month on my cell phone, just to let him know I’m alive,” he added dryly. “Liam has never understood my interest in photography.” Finn shrugged as she looked surprised. “He asked me if I was a sissy when I took it up professionally,” he remembered fondly.
      Eva almost choked on her own tongue. “Does your brother need glasses?”
      Finn chuckled ruefully. “I come from a long line of fishermen, Eva. Playing around with a camera in my hand isn’t Liam’s idea of man’s work.”  
      “Did he see your ‘War’ exhibition?”
      His eyebrows rose. “Did you?”
      Oh yes, Eva had seen it. She had lined up outside the gallery for an hour just to get into the exhibition after the critics had raved about it in the press.
      It had taken only the first few photographs for her to know that this wasn’t the blood and guts of war but the devastation war left in its wake.
      A line full of laundry left blowing in the wind next to a completely demolished house.
      A man drinking water from a puddle in the road.
      A dog left to starve in a garden, the owners having fled or dead.
      There had been thirty photographs in the exhibition altogether, from no specific country, all of them heartbreaking. A stark and terrible reminder that it was the innocents who really suffered in war.
      They weren’t photographs taken for their commercial value. Not the sort of thing anyone would want hanging on the wall of their dining room. They were the heart and soul of people. All people devastated by war.
      “You won numerous awards for that exhibition. Were given a Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society,” Eva recalled wistfully.
      “So I was.” Finn nodded. “Liam thought one of the awards was something I used to prop the door open,” he recalled affectionately. “He loves me, but he doesn’t understand what I do for a living,” he explained at Eva’s shocked expression. “My grandfather was a fisherman, my father too, and now Liam does the same. It’s what he knows. What he’s comfortable knowing.”
      And into that practical and obviously loving family had been born a man with the heart and soul of a poet. Except Finn talked with the keenness of his eye, through the lens of a camera, rather than with a pen and words.
      “Will you be going home for Christmas?” The holidays were still four days away, but surely the storm would be long gone by then, and hopefully the roads all reopened for the people traveling to family and friends for Christmas. Besides which, the fact that there wasn’t a single Christmas decoration up in the house seemed to imply he wouldn’t be staying here over the holidays.
      Finn shook his head distractedly as he stepped back, obviously pleased with the lighting for now. “Those kids I mentioned? Six of the little darlin’s, aged from one to eight—Liam had a bad back that one year.” He grinned. “Not that I don’t love every one of them, Liam and Ailish too, but I’d go insane with the noise of them all after an hour!”  
      It was the poet in him that needed the calm and quiet, Eva realized. She was the same when it came to history, and could spend hours in a museum, imagining the people, the time and the place, whom all those artifacts had once belonged to.  
      “Does that mean you’re staying here for Christmas?”
      “You sound surprised?”
      “There’s no Christmas decorations, not even a tree.”
      He shrugged. “Men don’t bother with things like that when they’re on their own, you