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!’