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‘How very convenient for you.’
‘Triss!’ he thundered savagely. ‘You are testing my patience to the extreme! Now, are you going to shut up and listen to what I have to say—or am I going to be forced to assert my mastery?’
Her heart raced and her mouth dried as her body responded automatically to his words. ‘Y-you w-wouldn’t d-dare!’
‘Wouldn’t I?’ Suddenly he smiled and the anger was gone—although the sexual promise wasn’t. ‘No, you’re right—I wouldn’t.’ There was a pause. ‘As I said, I met Helga nearly two years after you and I split up—’
‘And in all that time you never once contacted me!’ she accused him, aware even as the words tumbled out that she was giving herself away.
‘And neither did you,’ he retorted softly, ‘contact me.’
‘But you were the one who said you didn’t want to be friends—’
‘Not didn’t want to be,’ he corrected her. ‘I just felt we couldn’t be. That our somewhat tempestuous relationship was not a particularly sound basis for friendship. And I assumed that the relationship was dead since neither of us had been able to make it work.’
He shook his dark head. ‘I stayed alone for a long time, but when Helga came along she was...’ He shrugged and spread out the palms of his hands rather helplessly.
‘Tell me,’ she said, though the words choked her.
‘Easy, I guess.’ And then he saw her expression and shook his head again. ‘Oh, not in the commonly used sense. I mean that she was undemanding, uncomplicated—’
‘The opposite to me, in fact?’
He did not flinch under her accusing stare. ‘If you like. I certainly wasn’t looking for a replica of the intensity I had shared with you, Triss.’
‘So what happened?’ she demanded. ‘It sounds as though in Helga you found your dream woman.’
He regarded her critically. ‘In theory, perhaps she was. She never answered me back the way you do. And she didn’t have a jealous bone in her body.’
‘So why no happy ever after?’ enquired Triss caustically. ‘Or did your night of sex with me put paid to all that?’
‘You can be such a little bitch,’ he told her softly, and something in his eyes warned her that she really was stretching his patience just that little bit too far. ‘I’m trying to tell it like it was, Triss—not how I would have liked it to be.’
And quite what he meant by that Triss didn’t know—but judging by the look on his face now was not the time to ask him.
‘So what happened?’
‘Nothing actually happened. We just drifted apart, I guess, so gradually that our meetings became less and less frequent. Helga never actually lived with me, and she was based in Paris—’
‘Paris again,’ interjected Triss bitterly, thinking of how they had met. She stared at him, not even bothering to disguise the jealousy in her eyes. She had always thought of Paris as their city.
‘Paris again,’ he agreed, and his face was sombre. ‘It was a totally different relationship from the one I had shared with you. When she was away I never actually missed her—not in the way I missed you.’ He smiled. ‘And Helga wasn’t in love with me either. She always said that she wanted to marry another German. And she has. I’m godfather to their baby, as a matter of fact.’
‘I see,’ said Triss rather faintly. Godfather? Which meant that not only must Helga have the highest regard for Cormack, but her husband must too. What a manipulative Irish rogue he was! ‘Carry on,’ she instructed primly, ‘with your story.’
His face was reflective. ‘I hadn’t seen Helga since October. She’d gone to visit her parents in Germany over Christmas.’
‘And you?’ she asked. ‘What did you do over that Christmas?’
‘I stayed home.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yep.’
Triss’s eyes widened. ‘But why? You must have had millions of invitations.’
He smiled, and it was like the sun coming out. ‘Not millions, Triss. Some.’
