‘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.
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?
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