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He hadn’t!
And Triss was unprepared for the relief which flooded through her as she caught sight of that magnificent mane of dark hair which grew down the tanned column of his neck. Too long and too tousled, it gleamed blue-black beneath the pale light of the March sun, with its riotous waves looking as though some frantic woman had just run her fingers all the way through it.
Triss swallowed down the dark, bitter taste of jealousy and looked into
eyes as deeply blue as the finest lapis lazuli. Simon’s eyes, she thought suddenly, with the shock of recognition.
‘Hello, Beatrice,’ he said unsmilingly, and his voice sounded at once strange and yet poignantly familiar.
The Irish accent, she noted, was still intact, though now it held the faintest trace of a soft Mid-Atlantic twang. Hardly surprising, Triss supposed, seeing as how he had been living in the States since the age of sixteen.
‘Hello, Cormack,’ she said, her own voice sounding reedy and weak—but that was hardly surprising either. She had been unprepared for the impression he always made on her, and that was sheer stupidity. How on earth could she have forgotten just how devastating he was in the flesh?
He was dressed from head to toe in black leather. A leather jacket clung to shoulders as broad as a labourer’s and then tapered down to the curved indentation of his waist, and below the jacket were leather jeans—black and outrageously snug, the soft material caressing the muscular definition of his thighs, and on and on down his seemingly endless legs.
Leather, thought Triss despairingly. That most sensual of fabrics, with its sleek look and slick feel and its exciting, animal scent.
Those intelligent blue eyes didn’t miss a trick. He observed her gaze wandering, hypnotised, over every centimetre of his body. ‘Like it?’ he queried softly.
‘What?’ she whispered.
‘The leather.’ His eyes glittered. ‘Some women find it a turn-on.’
‘Is that why you wore it?’
‘I’m not sure. Perhaps subconsciously?’
‘You look like a labourer,’ she said sweetly. ‘Or a degenerate rock star.’
The first smile came then—a typically roguish Cormack-type smile—and Triss was unprepared for its impact. Stupidly unaware that the sight of it would set her heart racing as it had done so many times before. Damn him! she thought indignantly. He knows. He knows what that smile can do to a woman. And it’s an unfair advantage!
‘Well, that’s appropriate, isn’t it?’ he drawled. ‘As I’ve been both a labourer and a rock star. Though never degenerate.’ There was a long pause while he studied her. ‘You’ve had your hair cut, Triss,’ he said eventually, and there was an odd note of surprise in his voice.
Triss had been holding her breath, waiting for all the comments he could have made, and felt oddly disappointed that Cormack, of all people, should have said something so commonplace.
For the first time she felt a glow of something approaching achievement—that she had had the strength to remove the trademark which had eventually trapped her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed evenly. ‘All chopped off.’
‘When?’ he demanded, as though she were a suspect he was cross-examining.
This was a touch more difficult—she had had her thick red-brown hair shorn on the day she had discovered she was pregnant. It had seemed a very symbolic and necessary thing to do at the time. She gave a careless little shrug. ‘Can’t remember,’ she lied.
The blue eyes narrowed disbelievingly. ‘Really? Can you remember why you did it?’
Triss managed to return his hard, questioning stare. ‘Why shouldn’t I cut it? Models often change their image—’
‘But you don’t model any more, do you, Triss?’
Her eyes widened. How much, she wondered anxiously, did he already know? ‘Wh-what do you mean?’
He frowned. ‘Good God, woman—has your brain gone to mush, or are my questions so complex that I’m going to have to clarify each and every one?’
“There’s no need to be so sarcastic!’ Triss shot back furiously, remembering how his razor-sharp mind had always been able to make her feel so ridiculously inferior. But no more. No more. ‘Is there?’
‘No.’ He gave her a steady look. ‘OK, I presume that you’ve given up modelling—mainly because I never see you in any of the glossies these days. And you certainly aren’t very visible on the catwalk. Are you?’
Had he perhaps been following her career? Hope stirred foolishly in her heart, but Triss firmly repressed it. ‘No. That’s right. I’m not modelling these days.’
Arrogant black brows which looked as though an artist had swept them on darkly and indelibly against that high, intelligent forehead curved upwards in bemused question. ‘And why’s that? You were the best model of your generation.’
