LITMIR.BIZ

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      Triss smiled serenely, but Lola could detect the sadness behind the smile, and wondered what had put it there.

      ‘Yes, it’s all been chopped off,’ she affirmed briskly, but she winced a little as she said it.

      Lola bit her bottom lip. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to come out with it like that. It’s just that you look so different.’

      ‘That was the whole point of getting it cut,’ said Triss in a new and oddly hard kind of voice. ‘Out with the old and in with the new—’

      ‘Are you sure you won’t stay and have some tea?’ Geraint broke in with a steady smile, and Lola observed Triss weakening very slightly.

      But then she seemed to pull herself up short and shook her head again. ‘No. I won’t. I’ll take a rain check. But thanks—maybe some other time. No, I. . .’ She drew in a deep, determined breath, like a runner sucking in air after a hard-won race. ‘I came to introduce myself, really. I’ve just moved in next door—’

      ‘Snap!’ laughed Geraint, and Lola found herself observing the way his grey eyes creased up at the corners. ‘So have I!’

      Blast him! Lola thought furiously. He never smiles in that crinkly-eyed way at me!

      ‘Geraint Howell-Williams,’ he said, holding his hand out. ‘And this is Lola Hennessy—whose house this is.’

      Triss shook both their hands then looked from one to the other. ‘You mean you don’t live here?’ she queried. ‘Together?’

      Lola found herself pathetically wanting him to say something territorial like ‘No, but I’m working on it!’—but of course he didn’t. He merely shook his dark, tangled head and explained, ‘No. I live on the other side.’

      ‘Not in Dominic Dashwood’s house?’ queried Triss, with a look of surprise. ‘Has he sold up?’

      Geraint shook his head again. ‘No. He’s still abroad. He asked me to keep an eye on it until he gets back.’

      ‘Why?’ asked Triss, with a nervous start. ‘Is security poor? I hope not—I only moved in here because I was told that I couldn’t be better protected if I lived in a nunnery!’

      Her innocent remark caused Lola to go extremely pink around the ears and to stare fixedly down at her shoes as she tried not to imagine what she and Geraint might now have been doing if it had not been for the fortuitous—yes, fortuitous she told herself firmly—knock on the door.

      ‘Security on the estate is fine,’ said Geraint soothingly. ‘Or so Lola was just telling me. Weren’t you, sweetheart?’

      Lola looked up and met his mocking glance with embarrassed eyes.

      ‘That’s right,’ she answered stiffly, wishing that he would not tease her like that in front of Triss—she was already feeling dumpy and inferior next to the statuesque redhead!

      ‘No, I’m looking to buy somewhere in England for myself,’ he explained as Triss stared up at him with her huge, amazing eyes. ‘My staying here is doing both me and Dominic a favour, really. He’s due back in a couple of months, and that news usually brings his legion of admirers out of the woodwork! I think he’s a little fed up with arriving home to find eager women laying siege to him!’

      Triss Alexander clasped her pale hands together, for all the world as if she was about to utter a fervent prayer, and then turned her beautiful eyes on Lola and said the most extraordinary thing.

      ‘By the way, I want you to know that I have a—baby,’ she stumbled over the words, her whole face lighting up with a fierce kind of pride, and for the first time Lola could see why so many men considered her exquisitely beautiful.

      ‘But that’s wonderful,’ said Lola. It was instinct more than curiosity which made her gaze flick to Triss’s left hand, to see that her wedding-ring finger was quite bare.

      ‘When you’re reasonably well known—or have been—well, people think they have a kind of right to you, and I’m very nervous for his safety,’ Triss told them, her expression almost hypnotic as she looked at first Lola and then Geraint, as if committing their faces to memory. ‘That’s the main reason I moved to St Fiacre’s—because security is so tight.

      ‘No one really knows about him—the Press certainly don’t know! My sister-in-law delivered him—she’s a doctor. He’s my secret,’ she said, and hugged her arms tightly against her chest, as if her baby were there in her arms.

      ‘I’m telling you all this because you’re my immediate neighbours, and my mother once told me that if you placed your trust in neighbours then they would never let you down. Is that very naive of me, do you think, Geraint?’ She turned her extraordinary blazing eyes towards him, her generous mouth softening as she said his name in a way that made Lola’s chest inexplicably clench with fear.

      ‘I think it’s very clever of you,’ he answered drily. ‘And your mother. No trust so charmingly placed could ever be abused. Your secret is quite safe with me.’

      ‘He’ll be well protected on St Fiacre’s,’ said Lola encouragingly. ‘There are quite a few babies and toddlers living on the estate; you should be able to get to know some of them—’

      ‘No!’ Triss shook her shorn head with sudden emphasis. ‘I don’t want to! Not yet, anyway. The thing is. . .’ She chewed on her lip like a nervous exam candidate. ‘If anyone should come looking, or asking, for me—or for—Simon. . .’

      ‘We know nothing,’ said Lola comfortingly, and looked up to see the oddest expression on Geraint’s face—a mixture of anger and defiance that she could not for the life of her work out.

      ‘Are you in trouble?’ he demanded suddenly.

      Triss hesitated, seemed about to speak and then changed her mind. ‘No,’ she answered firmly. ‘I’m not. I’m going to be just fine. And now I must go. I’ve left Simon in his pram—see.’ And her face became animated as she gestured to the drive behind her, to where a huge, old-fashioned coach-built pram stood parked on the gravel.

      Lola’s eyes brightened. ‘Can I have a peep at him?’

      ‘Well. . .’ Triss beamed with maternal pride, Lola’s eagerness too infectious to resist. ‘He’s asleep. . .’

      ‘Just for a moment!’ urged Lola. ‘And I promise not to wake him!’

      Triss gave a wry, crooked smile. ‘Actually, he’s so gorgeous I don’t really mind if you do!’ she confided.

      Lola grinned. ‘You shouldn’t have said that!’

      ‘I know!’

      Lola ran out into the crisp, early spring afternoon, slowing down to a stealthy creep as she quietly approached the pram.

      Inside, bundled up in a white bonnet and soft, fleecy white shawls to protect him against the sharp March air, lay a baby, fast asleep, his chubby cheeks all rosy, a beatific little smile fixed to his mouth.

      Lola stared down at him. People brought babies onto the aircraft every day, but somehow this was different. Seeing a baby fast asleep in the grounds of her own home made her experience a sudden ache, a primitive desire to have her own baby to hold in her arms.

      It took every bit of will-power she had not to straighten his blanket or adjust his bonnet in the hope that he might wake and she would be able to pick him up!

      Lola heard footsteps behind her, but didn’t bother turning round. ‘Oh, he’s gorgeous, Triss!’ she sighed blissfully. ‘Absolutely gorgeous! I could eat him up for breakfast! You lucky thing!’

      ‘It isn’t Triss,’ came an oddly strained voice, and Lola turned round to find that it was Geraint who had come up behind her, while Triss remained on the doorstep, bending down to retrieve one of Simon’s bootees, which had obviously fallen from her duffle-coat

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