Sharon Kendrick Collection - Sharon Kendrick

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Simon?’ asked Lola.

      ‘Asleep,’ answered Cormack. ‘I put him down about ten minutes ago.’

      Triss saw the assessing look which passed between Lola and Geraint as they jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion. They probably thought that she and Cormack were about to join them for a double wedding, she decided gloomily.

      ‘Oh, I do love Simon!’ sighed Lola. ‘How I’d love babies of our own! And soon, please, Geraint, darling? Lots and lots of them!’

      ‘I want you to myself for a while before we start having babies, Miss Hennessy!’ responded the devastating Welshman, with an almost imperceptible wink at Cormack.

      Triss and Cormack left the lovebirds behind. They were driving slowly towards the restaurant when Cormack noticed a man with a long-lens camera hiding not very inconspicuously beneath a tree.

      ‘Look.’ He pointed.

      ‘Paparazzi?’ queried Triss.

      ‘Looks like it.’

      ‘Wonder why? Is it you?’ she wondered aloud, but he shook his head.

      ‘I’m much too boring and low-profile for the tabloids,’ he smiled. ‘No, it’s Dominic. I hate to say I told you so.’

      ‘Well, he shouldn’t be so rich and so good-looking,’ observed Triss, and Cormack shot her an unfathomable look.

      ‘So he appeals to you, does he?’ he queried softly.

      ‘No.’

      Oddly, he did not pursue it. In fact, he waited until they were taken to a prime-position table in the restaurant which overlooked the lake before he spoke again.

      The other diners watched closely as they sat down, but neither Triss nor Cormack noticed. They were given menus, but the print was a blur to Triss, and she found herself looking rather helplessly across the table at Cormack.

      ‘Two Caesar salads to begin with,’ he told the waiter, interpreting her look correctly. ‘Then roast salmon with green beans. Half a bottle of Vouvray and some iced water, please.’

      He handed their menus back and the two of them sat in silence while the waiter adjusted their cutlery, poured their drinks, then left them.

      Triss felt nervous and scared, and then Cormack leaned across the table, picked up her hand from where it lay inertly on the table, and said softly, ‘I love you very much, Triss Alexander. So will you please marry me?’

       CHAPTER TWELVE

      TRISS stared at Cormack disbelievingly. ‘You don’t,’ she told him in a hollow whisper. ‘Please don’t say you do when you don’t.’

      He frowned. ‘Don’t what? Don’t want to marry you? Oh, I do, Triss. This is, after all, the second time of asking, remember?’

      ‘But you don’t love me!’ she hissed back angrily, uncaring that people were watching her. ‘You’re just saying that because you want Simon and you know that I come as part of the package! And you know that I wouldn’t dream of marrying you unless I knew that you loved me...’

      ‘Wouldn’t you?’ he asked interestedly.

      She eyed him suspiciously. ‘What?’

      ‘Marry me if I didn’t love you? Be honest now, Triss.’

      His blue eyes were piercingly direct, and Triss found that she could not look into them and tell a lie. And hadn’t she already decided that afternoon that she would marry him, if he still wanted her to?

      ‘Yes,’ she admitted in a low voice. ‘I think I would.’

      ‘And why would you do that?’ he coaxed softly.

      Should she risk her pride with an honest answer? Didn’t she owe him that much after everything she had done to him? ‘Because I have more than enough love to go round,’ she told him simply. ‘For both of us.’

      He started grinning. And grinning. And then he began to chuckle. In all the time she had known him, she had never seen Cormack laugh quite so uninhibitedly.

      ‘What’s so funny?’ demanded Triss indignantly.

      ‘Nothing. Everything. Oh, darling, you have just made every dream I ever had come true.’

      ‘Cormack—’

      But he shook his head. ‘Let me just say this, Triss. Let me get it off my chest. When our relationship soured before—’

      ‘It was through my jealousy,’ she put in firmly.

      ‘Well, yes—partly. But I couldn’t have made you feel very secure if you believed that I was capable of infidelity.’

      ‘I don’t think I actually believed that,’ she admitted. ‘I just didn’t want beautiful women fawning all over you whenever I wasn’t around. I wanted to be around you all the time, Cormack, and yet I thought that if I was, then you wouldn’t want me any more.’

      ‘But why?’ he queried, in a stunned voice. ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

      ‘Because I was a successful globe-trotting model—and that’s the woman you fell in love with! Wouldn’t you have felt a little short-changed to discover that suddenly my life’s ambition was to be a hausfrau?’

      ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart,’ he chided softly. ‘People change. That’s natural—and right. Otherwise no one would settle down and get married and have babies.’ He sighed. ‘We should have discussed it instead of letting it drive a wedge between us. And that was my fault.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘Because of my background, I guess.’ He shrugged. ‘Growing up with my father...’ His voice tailed off, and Triss winced as she remembered the beatings he’d used to endure.

      She squeezed his hand and he flashed her the sweetest smile of gratitude.

      ‘It was a tough, working-class area of Belfast,’ he continued, though his voice held no trace of bitterness. ‘Where men were taught to drink or to punch their woes away. Certainly never to do anything as wimpish as analyse or talk about their feelings! And, though I escaped to the States just as soon as I could, I took that inability to open up and communicate with me.

      ‘Triss, darling.’ His voice was very sombre. ‘Just look into my eyes and tell me that you don’t believe I love you.’

      She slowly raised her face to meet his unflinching gaze, and it was as though a curtain had just been lifted, for the love which blazed out from his blue eyes almost blinded her with its intensity.

      ‘I believe you, Cormack.’ She blinked, close to tears. ‘I believe you.’

      He ran a finger in a tiny, sensual circle round the centre of her palm and then looked up, his dark-fringed eyes suddenly serious. ‘I’ve a confession,’ he admitted.

      But, strangely enough, Triss knew that nothing he could ever tell her now would shock her. Not now. ‘Go on.’

      ‘The New Year’s Eve party. That fateful night. I knew you were going to be there.’

      Somehow it was less surprising than she would have expected it to be. ‘How?’

      ‘Martha rang me—’

      ‘Martha did?’

      ‘After you’d been to see them. She told me that the two of us needed our heads knocking together—but of course in my stubbornness I refused to believe her. I went there convinced that seeing you again would be enough to banish the spell you had cast on me for ever. But, of course, it had exactly the opposite effect.’ He paused. ‘Are you angry?’

      ‘With Martha?’

      ‘No.

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