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‘But you didn’t go out?’
‘I chose not to.’
‘And New Year’s Eve?’
He turned away and poured himself a second glass of wine, so that his face was hidden from her. ‘The New Year’s Eve party was just a spur-of-the-moment thing.’
‘I see.’
He shook his dark head. ‘No, that’s just the trouble—I don’t think you do see, Triss. When I walked into that party, I knew I had got it all wrong and that nothing had changed. That there was still this overwhelming passion which burned deep inside me.’ He challenged her with a piercing blue gaze. ‘And in you, too, however reluctantly.’
‘So you took me to bed, knowing—’
‘You make it sound like an intellectual decision,’ he objected. ‘Which it was not.’
She ignored the interruption. ‘Knowing that you were still involved with Helga.’
‘Knowing that I was on the periphery of involvement,’ he amended. ‘That everything between Helga and me had changed. It was over. It had been over for months.’
‘Had it?’
His gaze was unwavering. ‘Absolutely. She knew it and I knew it—it was just that neither of us had actually got around to putting it into words. So, while perhaps technically I should not have been with you that night, in my heart it felt morally right—and that remained the important thing.’ Although I knew that you would not feel the same,’ he added sombrely. ‘But, oh, Triss, it was right!’
She set her mouth in
to an obstinate line. ‘Isn’t that just a way of justifying your behaviour?’ she questioned. ‘If it feels good then it must be right?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted eventually. ‘But all I can tell you is that it did feel good. And it did feel right. You know it did. And my son was conceived as a result of it.’ His face darkened and he added bitterly, ‘Or so I now discover.’
She found that her hands were trembling uncontrollably, so that she had to knit them together in a clasp in order to still them. ‘Well, just what did you expect?’ she demanded.
‘I expected you to tell me,’ he said simply, ‘that I was going to become a father. Was that not my right, Triss?’
‘And you think that slaking your lust for one night gives you rights, do you?’
He put his glass down with a white-knuckled hand. ‘If I had simply chosen to “slake my lust”,’ he bit out, ‘then I would have chosen someone a lot more uncomplicated than you to do it with! Someone, moreover, who was not carrying around a load of excess emotional baggage! Don’t make the situation any worse than it already is, Triss, by defining what happened between us that night in terms of mere lust!
‘And tell me,’ he continued relentlessly, his voice tinged with bitterness, ‘did your primitive form of revenge make you feel really good? Isn’t that what revenge is supposed to do?’
She thought about his questions carefully. ‘Of course it’s supposed to make you feel good—there is a sense of getting even when you embark on revenge—but...’
His eyes were very watchful. ‘But?’
‘As to whether it has actually succeeded in making me feel good...then, no. Not now, it doesn’t.’
‘And before?’
She resented the tone of his questioning, as though everything were that simple. As though he were the angel in all this and she the big, bad devil.
‘Yes, I suppose it did make me feel good for a while—although that was some time in coming after the initial bitterness. When Helga’s call woke us up that New Year’s morning, I couldn’t believe that you could make love to me when you were still involved with someone else. Quite apart from what it seemed to say about your attitude towards me, as a woman, it seemed to belittle what we had shared before.
‘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?’
