AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER ONE
WOULD he come? That was the question. A question which could only be answered by the man himself, all six feet four of him, with his unruly hair and his Irish eyes and that irreverent humour which always seemed to be lurking at the corners of a mouth just made for kissing.
Triss shivered. She must just be patient, and wait. She had waited fourteen months, after all, so another few minutes were neither here nor there.
In fact, what she should do was to make herself remember why she had split up with Cormack Casey in the first place.
And after that she should force herself to recall every single one of his bad points, so that a miracle might happen and she might remain immune to him.
Some hopes.
The sound of the waves beating down on the wet blond sand outside the cottage rang in her ears. Triss glanced down at her watch and for the twentieth time she wondered how Simon was. She had never been away from her beautiful blue-eyed baby before, and had been totally unprepared for the almost physical pain of his absence.
No one ever warned you what babies would do to you, she thought, with a sudden rush of overwhelming love. How motherhood would change you irrevocably, so that the person you used to be before you had the baby seemed like a distant stranger.
The cottage she had rented had been deliberately chosen for its lack of television and telephone. Cormack was a man whom other people clam-oured to be with. When they had lived together his phone had never stopped ringing—hence the lack of facilities in this out-of-the-way place. But, even more importantly, she wanted all his attention when she dropped her bombshell into his lap.
She had given the number of the local pub to Lola—who was looking after Simon for her—with the instructions that she was to ring Triss immediately if there was anything she wasn’t happy about.
Please God, there wouldn’t be.
She thought of the comfort and security of her elegant house on the exclusive St Fiacre’s Hill estate, bought with the earnings from her successful modelling career. The perfect place, she had decided during her pregnancy, in which to bring up her baby.
Triss swallowed down the ever-present fears which were part and parcel of motherhood and allowed herself a fleeting glance in the mirror, wincing slightly as she did so.
The simple rust-coloured linen dress she had chosen was practical and comfortable, but it made her look so mumsy—and today it seemed to drain all the colour from her skin.
Should she have worn make-up? she wondered.
She had decided against it in the end. Make-up might seem contrived, as though she was trying to focus all Cormack’s attention on her, while nothing could be further from the truth.
Her face was pale—paper-pale—with the freckles which spattered her small snub nose standing out in stark relief. Her green and golden eyes were as big as beacons, but tiny lines of strain, fanning out from the corners, could be seen if you looked closely. Though she doubted that Cormack would be interested in looking closely.
At least she wasn’t holding out any hope that Cormack would attempt to seek some form of reconciliation with her today. She looked a completely different person from the woman he had first met—with her red-brown hair all shorn off, her face completely bare of make-up. And hadn’t Cormack loved the fact that her model-girl looks were so flamboyant that millions of men lusted after her?
Well, she couldn’t imagine anyone lusting after her now...
She heard the distant sound of an engine, and her ears pricked up even as she frowned, trying to work out what made this particular engine sound quite unlike any car she had ever come across. But only one man in the world would drive to a beach in something which sounded like Concorde breaking through the sound barrier!
Cormack!
Triss ran her fingertips beneath her eyes, as if by doing so she could magically remove the dark smudges of so many sleepless nights. Then she bit down hard on her bottom lip so that the blood rushed in to give her mouth some colour.
And waited.
The cottage was right off the beaten track—that had been one of the main reasons for choosing it. The beach made it fairly inaccessible, and you had to park your car right at the top and then clamber down over a low wall before you could walk across the sand to the house.
So how come she could hear the engine getting closer and closer, its loud, buzzing intensity sounding like a giant insect gone mad?
Triss flung the front door open and saw the sleek black and silver machine which was noisily growling its way to a halt right in front of the cottage, sludging up the pale, hard sand as it did so.
Trust Cormack to hire himself a motorbike, she thought, torn between exasperation and admiration. It had been one of the things which had both attracted and infuriated her—the fact that Cormack Casey was like no other man in the world.
The man in question was now pulling off an outrageous silver and scarlet crash-helmet, and Triss held her breath to see whether he had adopted a more sober and sensible hairstyle which might better reflect his reputation as Hollywood’s hottest, sharpest and hunkiest scriptwriter.
