CHAPTER ONE
WOULD he come? That was the question. A question which could only be answered by the man himself, all six feet four of him, with his unruly hair and his Irish eyes and that irreverent humour which always seemed to be lurking at the corners of a mouth just made for kissing.
Triss shivered. She must just be patient, and wait. She had waited fourteen months, after all, so another few minutes were neither here nor there.
In fact, what she should do was to make herself remember why she had split up with Cormack Casey in the first place.
And after that she should force herself to recall every single one of his bad points, so that a miracle might happen and she might remain immune to him.
Some hopes.
The sound of the waves beating down on the wet blond sand outside the cottage rang in her ears. Triss glanced down at her watch and for the twentieth time she wondered how Simon was. She had never been away from her beautiful blue-eyed baby before, and had been totally unprepared for the almost physical pain of his absence.
No one ever warned you what babies would do to you, she thought, with a sudden rush of overwhelming love. How motherhood would change you irrevocably, so that the person you used to be before you had the baby seemed like a distant stranger.
The cottage she had rented had been deliberately chosen for its lack of television and telephone. Cormack was a man whom other people clam-oured to be with. When they had lived together his phone had never stopped ringing—hence the lack of facilities in this out-of-the-way place. But, even more importantly, she wanted all his attention when she dropped her bombshell into his lap.
She had given the number of the local pub to Lola—who was looking after Simon for her—with the instructions that she was to ring Triss immediately if there was anything she wasn’t happy about.
Please God, there wouldn’t be.
She thought of the comfort and security of her elegant house on the exclusive St Fiacre’s Hill estate, bought with the earnings from her successful modelling career. The perfect place, she had decided during her pregnancy, in which to bring up her baby.
Triss swallowed down the ever-present fears which were part and parcel of motherhood and allowed herself a fleeting glance in the mirror, wincing slightly as she did so.
The simple rust-coloured linen dress she had chosen was practical and comfortable, but it made her look so mumsy—and today it seemed to drain all the colour from her skin.
Should she have worn make-up? she wondered.
She had decided against it in the end. Make-up might seem contrived, as though she was trying to focus all Cormack’s attention on her, while nothing could be further from the truth.
Her face was pale—paper-pale—with the freckles which spattered her small snub nose standing out in stark relief. Her green and golden eyes were as big as beacons, but tiny lines of strain, fanning out from the corners, could be seen if you looked closely. Though she doubted that Cormack would be interested in looking closely.
At least she wasn’t holding out any hope that Cormack would attempt to seek some form of reconciliation with her today. She looked a completely different person from the woman he had first met—with her red-brown hair all shorn off, her face completely bare of make-up. And hadn’t Cormack loved the fact that her model-girl looks were so flamboyant that millions of men lusted after her?
Well, she couldn’t imagine anyone lusting after her now...
She heard the distant sound of an engine, and her ears pricked up even as she frowned, trying to work out what made this particular engine sound quite unlike any car she had ever come across. But only one man in the world would drive to a beach in something which sounded like Concorde breaking through the sound barrier!
Cormack!
Triss ran her fingertips beneath her eyes, as if by doing so she could magically remove the dark smudges of so many sleepless nights. Then she bit down hard on her bottom lip so that the blood rushed in to give her mouth some colour.
And waited.
The cottage was right off the beaten track—that had been one of the main reasons for choosing it. The beach made it fairly inaccessible, and you had to park your car right at the top and then clamber down over a low wall before you could walk across the sand to the house.
So how come she could hear the engine getting closer and closer, its loud, buzzing intensity sounding like a giant insect gone mad?
Triss flung the front door open and saw the sleek black and silver machine which was noisily growling its way to a halt right in front of the cottage, sludging up the pale, hard sand as it did so.
Trust Cormack to hire himself a motorbike, she thought, torn between exasperation and admiration. It had been one of the things which had both attracted and infuriated her—the fact that Cormack Casey was like no other man in the world.
The man in question was now pulling off an outrageous silver and scarlet crash-helmet, and Triss held her breath to see whether he had adopted a more sober and sensible hairstyle which might better reflect his reputation as Hollywood’s hottest, sharpest and hunkiest scriptwriter.
He hadn’t!
And Triss was unprepared for the relief which flooded through her as she caught sight of that magnificent mane of dark hair which grew down the tanned column of his neck. Too long and too tousled, it gleamed blue-black beneath the pale light of the March sun, with its riotous waves looking as though some frantic woman had just run her fingers all the way through it.
Triss swallowed down the dark, bitter taste of jealousy and looked into eyes as deeply blue as the finest lapis lazuli. Simon’s eyes, she thought suddenly, with the shock of recognition.
‘Hello, Beatrice,’ he said unsmilingly, and his voice sounded at once strange and yet poignantly familiar.
The Irish accent, she noted, was still intact, though now it held the faintest trace of a soft Mid-Atlantic twang. Hardly surprising, Triss supposed, seeing as how he had been living in the States since the age of sixteen.
‘Hello, Cormack,’ she said, her own voice sounding reedy and weak—but that was hardly surprising either. She had been unprepared for the impression he always made on her, and that was sheer stupidity. How on earth could she have forgotten just how devastating he was in the flesh?
He was dressed from head to toe in black leather. A leather jacket clung to shoulders as broad as a labourer’s and then tapered down to the curved indentation of his waist, and below the jacket were leather jeans—black and outrageously snug, the soft material caressing the muscular definition of his thighs, and on and on down his seemingly endless legs.
Leather, thought Triss despairingly. That most sensual of fabrics, with its sleek look and slick feel and its exciting, animal scent.
Those intelligent blue eyes didn’t miss a trick. He observed her gaze wandering, hypnotised, over every centimetre of his body. ‘Like it?’ he queried softly.
‘What?’ she whispered.
‘The leather.’ His eyes glittered. ‘Some women find it a turn-on.’
‘Is that why you wore it?’
‘I’m not sure. Perhaps subconsciously?’
‘You look like a labourer,’ she said sweetly. ‘Or a degenerate rock star.’
The first smile came then—a typically roguish Cormack-type smile—and Triss was unprepared for its impact. Stupidly unaware that the sight of it would set her heart racing as it had done so many times before. Damn him! she thought indignantly. He knows. He knows what that smile can do to a woman. And it’s an unfair advantage!
‘Well, that’s appropriate, isn’t it?’ he drawled. ‘As I’ve been both a labourer and a rock star. Though never degenerate.’ There was a long pause while he studied her. ‘You’ve had your hair cut, Triss,’ he said eventually, and there was an odd note of surprise in his voice.
Triss had been holding her breath, waiting for all the comments he could have made, and felt oddly disappointed that Cormack, of all people, should have said something so commonplace.
For the first time she felt a glow of something approaching achievement—that she had had the strength to remove the trademark which had eventually trapped her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed evenly. ‘All chopped off.’
‘When?’ he demanded, as though she were a suspect he was cross-examining.
This was a touch more difficult—she had had her thick red-brown hair shorn on the day she had discovered she was pregnant. It had seemed a very symbolic and necessary thing to do at the time. She gave a careless little shrug. ‘Can’t remember,’ she lied.
The blue eyes narrowed disbelievingly. ‘Really? Can you remember why you did it?’
Triss managed to return his hard, questioning stare. ‘Why shouldn’t I cut it? Models often change their image—’
‘But you don’t model any more, do you, Triss?’
Her eyes widened. How much, she wondered anxiously, did he already know? ‘Wh-what do you mean?’
He frowned. ‘Good God, woman—has your brain gone to mush, or are my questions so complex that I’m going to have to clarify each and every one?’
“There’s no need to be so sarcastic!’ Triss shot back furiously, remembering how his razor-sharp mind had always been able to make her feel so ridiculously inferior. But no more. No more. ‘Is there?’
‘No.’ He gave her a steady look. ‘OK, I presume that you’ve given up modelling—mainly because I never see you in any of the glossies these days. And you certainly aren’t very visible on the catwalk. Are you?’
Had he perhaps been following her career? Hope stirred foolishly in her heart, but Triss firmly repressed it. ‘No. That’s right. I’m not modelling these days.’
Arrogant black brows which looked as though an artist had swept them on darkly and indelibly against that high, intelligent forehead curved upwards in bemused question. ‘And why’s that? You were the best model of your generation.’
Trust Cormack, thought Triss in some alarm. He had always had the knack of getting to the point without any effort whatsoever. Give him a couple more minutes and he would have extracted her reason for inviting him here, and that was not her plan at all!
She did not intend to blurt anything out. Not now—not on the doorstep with a bitter March wind blowing up a storm around them.
She had planned it out so carefully in her mind. They were supposed to have a civilised period chatting together. A reacquaintance over the simple lunch she had prepared. Something calm and unemotional which befitted modern, enlightened exlovers who knew all the rules of the dating game. Before she dropped her bombshell.
‘Why don’t we go inside?’ she suggested quickly. ‘It’s warmer in there. The kettle is on the boil, and I’m making some soup.’ She cast up her eyes expressively at the oyster-grey sky. ‘It looks like soup kind of weather, doesn’t it?’
‘It sure does.’ His mouth moved in a sardonic twist, and he said nothing more as he followed her inside, but Triss could guess what he was thinking.
In the days when they had lived together Triss had scarcely known one end of a kettle from another. And their relationship had never progressed beyond the tempestuous passion stage to the living in relative harmony stage.
How people changed, she reflected as Cormack walked into the sitting room, shutting the front door behind him. Well, she had certainly changed—she had had to—but had Cormack?
‘You’ve lit a fire,’ he observed in surprise as he placed his helmet on the floor beside one of the armchairs and began to unzip his black leather jacket.
‘Yes.’ For the first time, humour danced in her hazel eyes.
‘And what’s so funny?’ he murmured casually, though his blue eyes were very watchful.
‘You,’ she answered without thinking. ‘Making all these conventional observations. It doesn’t sound like you at all, Cormack.’
‘And Triss Alexander lighting fires and boiling kettles and concocting soups—that doesn’t sound like you at all, either. So what do you think that says about us, hmm?’
Triss shrugged. ‘I’ll leave all the deductions to you, I think,’ she answered brightly. ‘After all, that’s what you’re good at.’
‘But I thought that you were the queen of jumping to conclusions,’ he parried softly. ‘After all, I only had to speak two words to a woman and everyone knew that I must be sleeping with her, didn’t they, Triss?’
His caustic words brought back the aching and humiliating memories of sexual jealousy, and Triss felt all the remaining colour drain from her cheeks.
Was she setting herself up for more of the same? The same kind of limbo she’d used to live in constantly when she was with Cormack? She had hated the person she’d eventually become—with her checking and counter-checking and her suspicions about him. Her insane jealousy had appalled both her and him, and yet she had been powerless to change her behaviour.
She drew in a deep breath. She had not brought Cormack here today to resurrect old battles. She was a mother now, and a responsible grown-up woman of twenty-four. She must lead by example, and surely if she was calm and mature and remained unruffled, then Cormack might behave likewise? ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked politely.
The ironic twist of his mouth acknowledged her formality as he sank down into the armchair nearest the fire, his leather clothes making little swishing sounds as the fabric moved in conjunction with his big, muscular limbs. ‘Starving,’ he admitted. ‘But I need a drink first.’
Triss was startled. She thought about the supplies she had brought with her. One bottle, and she wasn’t even sure if there was a corkscrew in the place. ‘I have wine,’ she told him rather hesitantly. ‘But that’s all.’
‘I meant tea, actually,’ he said, with a disbelieving little look at the grandfather clock which ticked loudly in one corner of the over-furnished room. ‘Goodness me, Triss,’ he murmured admonishingly. ‘Offering me alcohol before midday—what degenerate circles you must have been mixing in!’
If only he knew! ‘I’ll make a pot,’ she said stiffly, and headed off into the kitchen where she welcomed the chance to busy herself with kettle and cups and saucers. The activity stopped her from thinking too much, and she willed her hands to stop trembling, but they steadfastly refused to obey her.
He had not moved when she carried the loaded tea-tray back in and the sight of him in that tiny, old-fashioned room, all brooding masculinity and black leather, conjured up the image of something both sensual and forbidden.
With his gleaming blue eyes and devil-may-care air, Cormack Casey looked the embodiment of the kind of man most mothers warned their daughters against.
Unless you happened to have a mother like hers, thought Triss bitterly, who fancied Casey rotten herself and had delighted in enlightening Triss as to what kind of man he really was.
‘Here.’ He had gracefully risen to his feet and was holding his hands out. ‘Let me take that from you.’
Triss blushed, knowing that she was at her most vulnerable when he was gentle to her. ‘It’s OK, thank you. I can manage.’
‘But it’s heavy, sweetheart—here.’ And he captured the tray from her with ease. ‘Sit down,’ he instructed. ‘And stop glowering at me like that.’
Glowering was her only defence against being called ‘sweetheart’ in that irresistibly lilting Irish way of his. She was trying all the while to tell herself that the affectionate term meant nothing—nothing at all. It was a phrase people used all the time in Belfast.
She had heard him say it to just about everyone in the past, particularly when he took a break from working, when he was on a roll and in one of those extravagantly happy moods which made women who were total strangers thrust their phone numbers into his pocket in restaurants.
At the time, Triss had pretended to laugh at his entirely instinctive flirting—as he had laughed—but his ability to laugh had hurt almost as much as his refusal to rebuff the women who drooled all over him.
‘Does it turn you on,’ she had demanded one day, ‘to have all these women fawning over you and making themselves blatantly available?’
‘You seem to forget that I have a say in all this, Triss,’ he had told her frowningly, with a shrug of those massively broad shoulders. ‘These women feel they know me because they happen to have seen a couple of my films. So am I to be rude to them in public? It just makes it less confrontational if I let them leave their pieces of paper and smile politely. Later on, I bin them. I don’t know why it bothers you, sweetheart. It means nothing, and it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with you and me. Understand?’
So Triss had forced herself to nod bravely, while the memory of those telephone numbers had scorched into her heart like a blow-torch and she’d tortured herself with wondering whether he had actually thrown them all away.
Now he poured black tea into one of the delicate china cups the cottage had provided, and handed it to her.
She shook her head rather apologetically. ‘I don’t take it black any more, Cormack. I’ll have milk and two sugars in it, please.’
He very nearly dropped the cup. ‘What did you say?’
She almost smiled. ‘You heard.’ He nodded his head so that inky tendrils danced enticingly around his ears. ‘Yes, I heard.’ He dropped two lumps of sugar into the cup and added milk before returning it to her with those black brows of his arrogantly arched in query. ‘So when did you give up the starvation diet?’
When she had discovered that running up and down stairs to tend to a crying baby beat any aerobics class for using up energy! She sipped at her tea gratefully and looked at him. ‘I was never on a starvation diet, Cormack,’ she objected. ‘Just—’
‘I know! I know!’ He held his hand up and recited in a careless, bored tone, ‘Just no chocolate for your skin, no alcohol for your early mornings, sugar made you sluggish—’
‘It was my career!’ Triss snapped back. ‘And I wanted to do it to the best of my ability—which did not include staggering into an early shoot with a hangover, having survived on just three hours’ sleep, because you wanted to go partying!’
Humour, which had stayed dormant in the depths of those lapis lazuli eyes, now shone through, nearly swamping her in its soft blue blaze. ‘But I thought you liked partying,’ he observed in that low, sexy drawl of his, rubbing his chin thoughtfully while he watched her.
‘I suppose I did. At first.’ Triss shook her head, wondering if she would ever get used to feeling her neck so exposed and vulnerable. She missed her long hair, that was the trouble, but cutting it off had come to symbolise the whole new way of life she had embraced. And if she grew it back again would she become that passive, prying clothes-horse she had grown to despise? ‘But after a while it wore me down. And those parties bored me.’
‘But you never actually said anything,’ he remarked.
‘No.’ She had just withdrawn and sulked like a schoolgirl—expecting Cormack to be able to guess the reason for her discontent, feeling disappointed when he did not. And disappointed too, she had to admit, that she on her own was not enough for Cormack. That he liked, even needed those parties.
Cormack picked up his cup in the distinctive way which Triss remembered so well, cradling it between his palms, seeking warmth from it like a Scout sitting round a camp fire. ‘We should have talked about it,’ he observed. ‘Maybe come to a compromise.’
Triss cocked him a glance. ‘When?’
His eyes gleamed as he sipped his tea, the look on his face leaving her in no doubt as to what he was thinking about. ‘I take your point,’ he murmured. ‘We didn’t actually do a lot of talking, did we, Triss?’
To her fury, Triss found herself blushing. She had meant that both her and Cormack’s heavy work schedules had conflicted, giving them very little free time with each other, but Cormack had obviously misinterpreted her meaning. Deliberately? she wondered. She lifted her chin. ‘No,’ she answered, sounding surprisingly cool. ‘We didn’t.’
His eyes glittered at her. ‘Anyway, as I recall, Beatrice, you didn’t find the parties completely boring. You enjoyed dressing up to the nines so that the whole room went silent as you walked in. Didn’t you?’ he finished softly.
‘I needed to look my best, yes,’ she argued defensively. ‘Because I wanted to make sure that I had enough work. And my agent always told me to go out with the thought that people were going to judge me by my appearance. If you will remember, those were the days before it became acceptable for models to grunge around in public wearing their oldest clothes with their hair scraped back into an elastic band. And besides, you liked me to dress up, Cormack—don’t deny that.’
‘Yes, I did like it.’ He nodded, his face reflective. ‘Your beauty astonished me, if you must know. I was as dazzled as the rest of them. When you pulled out all the stops to really dress up, I could hardly believe that you were with me—the upstart from Belfast!’
‘Like a trophy on your arm, you mean?’ she challenged drily. ‘Is that it?’
He shook his head so that the ebony waves gleamed as blackly as a raven’s wing, but his blue eyes were cold—icy-cold, like a frozen sea. ‘I’m not the kind of man who needs a beautiful woman to define him, Beatrice. You were there because I liked you—no other reason.’
And now? Triss swallowed, wondering when exactly they had stopped liking one another. She forced down another mouthful of tea, then looked directly into that strong, vibrant face which exuded so much earthy sensuality. ‘You’re still very laid-back, aren’t you, Cormack?’ she said.
‘In what way?’
‘Well, I would have thought that most men would have burst in here demanding to know just why they were here. Not sat there calmly drinking tea like a civilised stranger.’
‘We’re neither civilised, nor strangers. Not really—are we, Triss?’ His eyes glittered with an unspoken message of remembered desire, and Triss had to fiercely blot out the memory of lying naked in Cormack’s bed while he taught her everything he knew about the art of lovemaking.
And it had shocked as well as thrilled her to discover just how much he did know.
‘As to what most men would do—well, that doesn’t really concern me. All I know is that the woman I lived with, who disappeared so conclusively from my life after a night of the most spectacular sex I’ve ever experienced—’
Triss clapped her cool palms up to her flaming cheeks. ‘Cormack, don’t—’
‘Don’t what? Don’t tell the truth?’ he demanded. ‘Why? Does it disturb you so much?’ He smiled, but Triss could detect the anger which burned slowly behind the appearance of humour. ‘Why should she then send me a message—quite out of the blue—asking me to meet her at some God-forsaken place on the southern coast of England?’
‘Was it difficult to arrange?’
He shot her a narrow-eyed look. ‘I’ve reached the stage in my career where very little is difficult to arrange.’
It suddenly occurred to her that she had simply expected him to drop everything and just come to her.
And he had! Hope sprang to life in her heart, like the first snowdrop after the austerity of winter. If she asked him, might he answer all her hopes and dreams and prayers and say that he had missed her? Triss took her courage in both hands and said, ‘And why did you come so readily?’
He smiled. ‘I’m intrigued as to why you asked me, if you must know, Triss. And the sensation of being intrigued these days is so rare that I feel honour-bound to savour every moment.’
Disappointment lanced through her, but somehow she managed to keep her features neutral. ‘How jaded you sound, Cormack!’ she observed critically. ‘And how cynical!’
His eyes glittered like blue ice. ‘That’s the price you pay for success, sweetheart.’
‘Are you after the sympathy vote?’ she demanded. ‘Because you won’t get it from me, you know!’
‘I’m not after anything,’ he told her pointedly.
‘You were the one who invited me here, so you, presumably, are the one who is after something. I’m still waiting for you to tell me what it is.’
‘And you don’t seem to be in any hurry to find out,’ she observed in surprise, wondering why everything felt as though it was going horribly wrong.
‘I’m a patient man.’ He smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes, and for the first time since she had decided to contact him Triss felt a whisper of fear skittering down the length of her spine.
‘Are you?’ she asked him in a low voice. ‘You must have changed, then, Cormack.’
‘We all change, Triss. It’s inevitable—it’s part of life and of growth. Without change, we stagnate and die.’
And suddenly it was more than just reluctance to tell him about Simon; it was fear.
For Cormack was fundamentally a man of morals—an honourable man.
Once, in a rare, confiding moment, he had told her that in the past he had fallen for the wife of one of his greatest friends—something which he had despised himself for doing. He had convinced himself that he had kept his affection secret, but the woman must have guessed—or maybe it had been what she had been praying for herself.
She had waited until her husband was away on a trip, and then had plotted her grand seduction. She had crept into Cormack’s bed late one night, knowing he was at a party, and lain in wait for him in all her glorious golden nakedness.
Triss remembered the look of intense strain etched on his face as he had described how he had quietly asked the woman to leave.
‘But wasn’t it tempting—to let her stay?’ Triss had asked him breathlessly.
Lying next to her in bed, looking so bronzed and so gorgeous, Cormack had given her a look which had made her feel terribly young and terribly naive. ‘Of course it was tempting,’ he had answered quietly. ‘The forbidden always is. But friendship rates highly in my book. Certainly above lust.’
‘Lust?’ she had queried, appalled. ‘Not love?’ He had smiled coldly. ‘How could it be love?’ he asked her. ‘To love someone you have to get to know them properly—and you certainly can’t do that while they are married to someone else.’
Strange that she should remember that conversation now, thought Triss—especially after all this time. Was some self-protective instinct reminding her of just how ruthless and cold Cormack could be when he chose?
Triss had eyes which were sometimes green and sometimes gold—depending on the light, or how she happened to be feeling at the time. In her modelling days she had acquired the skill of being able to make her face reflect whichever mood the art director was searching for, but these days she was badly out of practice.
She let her heavy lids drop, like a demure Victorian heroine, for fear that Cormack’s intelligent, searching eyes would guess at more than she wanted him to.
‘So tell me, have you changed, sweetheart?’ he queried in that lilting Irish accent which managed to be soft and sweet and hard and sexy all at the same time.
‘I suppose I must have done,’ answered Triss slowly, for she certainly could not have imagined taking motherhood so much in her stride when she was living with Cormack.
In fact, when she thought about it now, she had taken nothing in her stride when she’d lived with Cormack. But then she had been completely out of her depth. And, although she’d been earning a fortune from modelling when they had met, her fame had been small-beer when compared with the man who had been dubbed ‘Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor’ by the trade papers as well as the tabloids.
Triss had always been scornful of such extravagant soubriquets, and it hadn’t been until she’d met Cormack Casey that she’d realised that for once the papers had not exaggerated...
