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‘That’s a bit how I feel tonight, yes,’ she admitted, and stretched her arms high above her head in an attempt to ease some of the awful tension in her neck. ‘Old and cynical.’
‘Me too. So do you want to show me my room?’ His blue eyes glittered as he noted the hectic colour which immediately stained her cheeks. ‘It might do us both some good if we were to sleep on it. Don’t you think?’
‘Y-yes,’ she agreed nervously. ‘I’ll take you up there now.’
‘Thanks.’ He rose to his feet, his whole manner one of detachment, his face betraying nothing other than mild curiosity.
Her knees felt as weak as a schoolgirl’s as he followed her up the oak-banistered staircase.
She had mentally earmarked the room she was going to give him earlier, when he had gone away to collect his clothes. It wasn’t the biggest room in the house, nor the best—in fact just about the only thing it had going for it as far as Triss was concerned was that it was the furthest away from her own!
She pushed open the door. ‘There are towels there, and a bathroom just down the corridor,’ she babbled. ‘And I’ve left—’
‘Where does Simon sleep?’ he demanded suddenly.
She had known he was going to ask. Had been expecting it and yet dreading it. Simon all rosy with innocent sleep was gorgeous enough to break your heart in any case—but was she strong enough to cope with Cormack filling the role of adoring father, as she knew he would?
‘In—here,’ she croaked as she led him to the nursery, which was next door to her own room.
He pushed the door open and walked noiselessly across the thick pale blue carpet to where Simon lay, and for a moment he was distracted—not by the sight of his sleeping son, but by the crib he slept in.
He touched the carved shiny wood almost wonderingly. ‘Where on earth did you get this?’ he demanded, though his voice was little more than a whisper in order not to wake Simon.
‘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.
