‘I went back to London, nursing my hurt pride.’ And her badly wounded heart of course, but there was no need for Cormack to know that. ‘And a few weeks later discovered I was pregnant.’
‘Were you scared?’ he asked with soft perception.
His expression was too intense for her to do anything other than tell him the truth. ‘I was absolutely petrified.’
‘Then why the hell didn’t you tell me?’
She gave a hollow little laugh. ‘Tell you?’ She shook her head, as though not believing that he could be quite so dense. ‘Cormack, you were the last person in the world I even wanted to think about, let alone speak to! I didn’t allow myself to consider you. Simon had become my baby—and mine alone.’
‘So that’s why you went into hiding? Why you instructed Michael and Martha to keep your whereabouts secret?’
‘You could have found me if you had really wanted to!’ she accused him, finally admitting to the pain she had felt when he had not come looking for her.
‘Do you really think that I am the kind of man to force himself on a woman when she has shown every sign of not wanting me?’ he drawled.
‘Isn’t that what you’re doing right now?’ she challenged. ‘By staying here?’
‘Oh, no.’ He gave a cold, cynical laugh. ‘The difference is that I am no longer concerned with what you want, Triss. My concern now is for my son—and his wants. His needs too. You have denied him a father through an emotion as shallow as a fit of pique—simply because you were jealous of another woman.’
Triss scarcely recognised her own shaky voice as she said, ‘This has more to do with respect than jealousy.’
‘Well, if it’s about respect, then why don’t you show me a little?’ he queried gravely.
‘And how do I do that?’
He gave her an odd smile. ‘By marrying me, perhaps?’
CHAPTER TEN
TRISS turned to look at Cormack as though he had just taken leave of his senses.
What bitter-sweet irony, she thought, that he should at last have uttered the words she had once longed to hear. And what a pity that it should be in such unconventional and unsettling circumstances.
‘Marry you?’
‘Is that such a bizarre request, Triss?’
‘In view of the contempt which you obviously feel for me, then I would say yes, it is.’
‘But I notice that you didn’t automatically reject the suggestion out of hand,’ he mused.
Triss shook her head. ‘That’s because I’m intelligent enough to see that perhaps marriage does have something to recommend it—in our case. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to agree to it.’
‘Why not?’ he enquired coolly.
‘Because, while I recognise that the advantages to Simon of having both parents around would be huge, I think that they are outweighed by one fundamental disadvantage.’
‘Which is?’
“That we find it impossible to exist in anything resembling a state of harmony.’
‘But we did once,’ he reminded her. ‘Or have you forgotten that?’
Forgotten it? She had every moment of it etched indelibly on her mind! She ran her hand distractedly through her hair, realising that with all the planning and excitement and dread of the last few weeks she had not bothered to have it cut.
‘That was a long time ago, Cormack—’
‘It’s a little over three years, Triss—hardly a lifetime.’
‘It is when you’ve had a baby,’ she whispered, and saw from the pained expression which clouded his eyes that she had wounded him when she had not intended to.
‘That much has changed,’ he conceded.
‘And more too!’ she cried passionately. ‘We were young then—and in love...’ Her voice tailed away dispiritedly as her mind registered how much it hurt to talk of love always in the past tense.
‘Whereas now we’re both old and cynical?’
‘That’s a bit how I feel tonight, yes,’ she admitted, and stretched her arms high above her head in an attempt to ease some of the awful tension in her neck. ‘Old and cynical.’
‘Me too. So do you want to show me my room?’ His blue eyes glittered as he noted the hectic colour which immediately stained her cheeks. ‘It might do us both some good if we were to sleep on it. Don’t you think?’
‘Y-yes,’ she agreed nervously. ‘I’ll take you up there now.’
‘Thanks.’ He rose to his feet, his whole manner one of detachment, his face betraying nothing other than mild curiosity.
Her knees felt as weak as a schoolgirl’s as he followed her up the oak-banistered staircase.
She had mentally earmarked the room she was going to give him earlier, when he had gone away to collect his clothes. It wasn’t the biggest room in the house, nor the best—in fact just about the only thing it had going for it as far as Triss was concerned was that it was the furthest away from her own!
She pushed open the door. ‘There are towels there, and a bathroom just down the corridor,’ she babbled. ‘And I’ve left—’
‘Where does Simon sleep?’ he demanded suddenly.
She had known he was going to ask. Had been expecting it and yet dreading it. Simon all rosy with innocent sleep was gorgeous enough to break your heart in any case—but was she strong enough to cope with Cormack filling the role of adoring father, as she knew he would?
‘In—here,’ she croaked as she led him to the nursery, which was next door to her own room.
He pushed the door open and walked noiselessly across the thick pale blue carpet to where Simon lay, and for a moment he was distracted—not by the sight of his sleeping son, but by the crib he slept in.
He touched the carved shiny wood almost wonderingly. ‘Where on earth did you get this?’ he demanded, though his voice was little more than a whisper in order not to wake Simon.
‘It’s a long story,’ she told him softly.
‘Tell me.’
She told him falteringly.
She had seen the old-fashioned crib made from ancient dark wood and had ordered it, impulsively, on a shopping trip in New York. It had been in the window of a small furniture shop so cleverly tucked away in a back-street that just finding it had seemed to Triss like fate! She had been pregnant at the time, and emotional enough to tell the dealer that her baby’s father was Irish and that he had gone away.
The wood was engraved with lines of mystical long-forgotten Gaelic poetry, and whimsical representations of leprechauns and shillelaghs and other, more obscure Irish objects of which Triss had no knowledge.
It was nostalgic almost to the point of being corny, but Triss had adored it on sight.
It had been, or so the dealer had told her, a testament to a much loved Irish childhood—built by an Irish father for a son born in America, so far away from home.
At great cost Triss had had the cot shipped back to England, and it had not been until he wrote to her, later, that Triss had discovered that the dealer himself had built the crib. He had signed off his letter with the promise that the crib would bring the baby’s father back to her.
Triss had not believed it at the time, stuffing the letter to the back of a drawer and dismissing the words as those of a man whose vision was coloured by sentiment.
And yet the sight of the crib, dark and solid and comforting, had sown the seeds of an idea that keeping Simon a secret from his father for ever would not only damage the boy but also her own peace of mind for evermore.
Cormack nodded thoughtfully as she came to the end of her story, then turned his attention to his son, as though he had been saving the best bit for last.
Simon was sleeping, and had somehow managed to wriggle himself around so that he was the wrong way up in the crib, with his bottom pushed up against the headboard.
His thick black hair was ruffled, and he was dressed in a blue sleeping-suit dotted with Disney characters. His little security blanket was rumpled up beside his hand, while his duvet was nowhere near him.<
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Triss reached down over the crib and covered him with the duvet. She tucked him in and then automatically bent down to plant a soft kiss on his scented hair.
The movement did not waken him, but it must have disturbed him very slightly, for he stirred and kicked his legs a little until he found his thumb and stuck it into his mouth with a small sigh of pleasure.
Triss sneaked a look at Cormack, unprepared for the look of raw emotion on his face.
When you had lived with someone—even only for a year—you imagined that you had witnessed every emotion they were capable of expressing.
But not this one. Suddenly he looked like a stranger to her. ‘Cormack?’ she whispered tentatively. ‘What is
‘Oh, Triss,’ he sighed, and the note of anguish in his voice entered her heart like a knife-wound. ‘How did we ever let this whole damn mess happen?’
She shook her head, too close to tears to want to answer him. She put her finger over her lips and crept silently from the room, and Cormack followed her.
Outside, she hesitated and said, ‘Goodnight, then.’ But he shook his dark head decisively and reached for her, and she allowed him to pull her into his arms.
What was she thinking—she allowed him? She felt so empty that she wanted him to do this, to lower his head to hers and to...
He kissed her slowly, thoroughly, and just that first touch was enough to overload every sensual pathway in her body completely.
Without thinking, she entwined her arms sensually around his neck and kissed him back, full and passionately on the mouth, and their lips parted at exactly the same moment, as if governed by the same instinct.
The kiss went on and on. And no matter how many times Cormack kissed her, Triss thought despairingly, he could always extract this same trembling sense of wonder from her, as though it were the first time all over again.
She felt the almost imperceptible change in his body as desire began to make itself felt, and some tiny trace of self-preservation began to slow her down.
For all their sakes—but most importantly for Simon’s sake—Triss sensed that this time, at least, she must not give in to the demands of her body.
With an effort she pulled away and shook her head.
‘No?’ he queried.
‘No.’ She dragged in a breath of air.
‘You didn’t say no this afternoon.’
‘That was different.’ This afternoon she had been too consumed by hunger to be able to stop. ‘I hadn’t told you about Simon then.’
‘No. You hadn’t.’ His mouth tightened. ‘God—what do you do to me, Triss?’ he demanded hotly. ‘When you finally did tell me about Simon, about deliberately keeping him from me, I vowed that I would never lay another finger on you—never touch you again, no matter how much I was tempted to.’
‘I know that,’ she told him quietly.
‘How?’
Triss shrugged. ‘I knew that your sense of outrage at my duplicity would turn you off.’
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘And in theory it should. Only somehow it doesn’t work like that, does it, Triss? I not only find that my principles fly out. of the window when I’m confronted by that luscious body of yours, but I’m prepared to compromise them even further by asking you to marry me!’
Triss shuddered. For in that one short, cynical speech he had made his feelings for her crystal-clear. How on earth could she marry him when he could talk to her like that? It didn’t sound as though he had even the slightest regard for her as a person—although that was not really the point.
The point was that he was attracted to her against his will, and clearly resented the fact. And plainly he would never love her in the way that she still, she realised, loved him. Completely and without reservation.
So if she went ahead with what was essentially a marriage of convenience, then she would have to accept it for what it was. Because it would cause continued heartbreak if she found herself longing for an emotional commitment he was unable to give her.
She needed to sleep on it. To go over and over it in her mind. She did not want to be swayed or influenced by Cormack’s delicious lovemaking into making a decision which could ultimately harm her, or Simon.
‘I think we’re both tired and emotionally fraught,’ she told him, her green-gold eyes glittering in her white face. ‘I know that I certainly am. We both need sleep and a chance to think things over. So goodnight, Cormack—I’ll see you in the morning.’
Quite instinctively she reached up and kissed him on the cheek, and the gesture momentarily startled them both.
It was those small intimacies which were the most evocative, she thought as she showered before sliding into her satin pyjamas. The hugs and the small kisses and the reassuring little squeezes of the hand—those were the things which brought back memories of how close they had once been. And those were the memories which broke her heart.
Because the sex between them was superb and always would be superb. It was almost as if their bodies had been programmed to react to one another in the most mind-blowing way. But that unique chemical reaction was nothing to do with the sound foundations on which most people built their relationships—like love and respect.
Cormack was right, was her last waking thought. How on earth had they ever got themselves into this terrible mess?
To her surprise, Triss slept like a log, and when Simon woke her at six the following morning she had decided to do the best thing for her baby and approach their problems with a positive attitude.
Because babies were perceptive, and if she was going to start moping around the place then it wasn’t exactly going to do Simon any good! Or herself, come to that.
She went about her normal routine with a resolutely cheerful air.
She changed Simon and then brought him into her bed with her for his early-morning feed, unbuttoning her scarlet satin pyjamas and latching him onto her breast. It was a moment of pure peace, and she loved this quiet time alone with her son, with just the sound of the birds trilling outside her window in the spring sunshine.
He was glugging away quite contentedly when a slight movement caught her attention, and she glanced up to find Cormack watching them, a look of rapt preoccupation on his face.
He was dressed in nothing but a pair of black silk boxer shorts which left very little to the imagination. From a distance she could observe him almost neutrally in this partially clothed state, in a way which she had been unable to yesterday, when they were in bed together.
Physically, he was as close to perfection as you could get. Broad shoulders and a finely muscled torso with narrow hips and strong, long legs. His chin was darkly shadowed, as it always was first thing in the morning, and it gave him a devilishly sexy look.
His eyes were narrowed, and there was such a look of wonderment on his face that Triss knew she did not have the heart to exclude him from this most intimate part of motherhood. She had excluded him from enough already.
‘Come in,’ she coaxed softly, marvelling at the transformation in him. Normally, just the merest glimpse of her breasts would have had his gaze raking over her with hungry anticipation. But now the expression in his eyes was soft, admiring and full of frank regard—though Triss would have bet her last dollar that if she were to put Simon back down in his crib then the look of hunger would be back in force!
He came to sit on the edge of the bed, looking gloriously unselfconscious in nothing but the silk boxer shorts, and Triss found herself wishing that she had asked him to get dressed before inviting him in!
‘I didn’t realise you were still feeding him,’ he murmured questioningly.
‘Only last thing at night and first thing in the morning.’ She sighed, then said fervently, ‘I hate giving it up.’
‘Then why do it?’
She gave him a long look as she unhooked the baby and transferred him to the opposite breast. ‘Because I’ll probably go back to work soon—in some capacity—’
‘Work?’ he interrupted in a
horrified voice, as if she had just broached the idea of opening up a brothel! ‘Do you want to go back to work?’
She shook her head. ‘Not really, no. I seem to have got modelling right out of my system.’
‘Then why even think of it?’
‘Because I need to support us,’ she told him evenly. ‘I need—’
‘I’ll give you all the money you need to stop you from having to go out to work,’ he told her, his mouth tightening with suppressed anger. He shrugged broad, tense shoulders. “Though maybe that was your sole reason for introducing me to my son, Triss? So that I could slip into the role of financial provider?’
‘I don’t want your rotten, stinking money, Cormack Casey!’ she spat back at him proudly, and Simon lifted his head up, momentarily startled, before resuming his blissful glugging.
‘It might not be what you want, sweetheart,’ he declared, a half-smile threatening to curve his mouth as he took in her furious expression, ‘but maybe it’s what you need if it stops you farming out Simon to some child-minder!’
‘Oh!’ Simon had dozed off, so Triss gently eased him away from her, winded him, then put him into Cormack’s arms. ‘Only a man would have the nerve to use such an emotive phrase as “farming out” in connection with childcare! Millions of women go out to work every day and leave their babies—and those babies are thriving! And do you really think I would have someone sub-standard looking after my own son?’
He grimaced, and had the grace to look repentant. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Point taken and noted.’
Triss, who had been ready to launch into another animated defence of working mothers, quickly shut her mouth, the wind completely taken out of her sails by his apology.
‘What shall I do with him now?’ asked Cormack softly, glancing down at the warm, sleeping bundle in his arms.
‘You could put him down to sleep while I shower and dress,’ she suggested. ‘Then we can all have breakfast together, if you like.’
‘Do I have to put him down?’ he queried. ‘Couldn’t he sleep like this for a while?’
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