Revenge is Sweet: Getting Even

‘Just for a moment!’ urged Lola. ‘And I promise not to wake him!’

Triss gave a wry, crooked smile. ‘Actually, he’s so gorgeous I don’t really mind if you do!’ she confided.

Lola grinned. ‘You shouldn’t have said that!’

‘I know!’

Lola ran out into the crisp, early spring afternoon, slowing down to a stealthy creep as she quietly approached the pram.

Inside, bundled up in a white bonnet and soft, fleecy white shawls to protect him against the sharp March air, lay a baby, fast asleep, his chubby cheeks all rosy, a beatific little smile fixed to his mouth.

Lola stared down at him. People brought babies onto the aircraft every day, but somehow this was different. Seeing a baby fast asleep in the grounds of her own home made her experience a sudden ache, a primitive desire to have her own baby to hold in her arms.

It took every bit of will-power she had not to straighten his blanket or adjust his bonnet in the hope that he might wake and she would be able to pick him up!

Lola heard footsteps behind her, but didn’t bother turning round. ‘Oh, he’s gorgeous, Triss!’ she sighed blissfully. ‘Absolutely gorgeous! I could eat him up for breakfast! You lucky thing!’

‘It isn’t Triss,’ came an oddly strained voice, and Lola turned round to find that it was Geraint who had come up behind her, while Triss remained on the doorstep, bending down to retrieve one of Simon’s bootees, which had obviously fallen from her duffle-coat pocket.

Geraint’s eyes were unreadable. ‘I’m beginning to see what it is about you that made a wily businessman like Peter Featherstone leave you this house,’ he said unwillingly, in a voice which was almost bleak and held some indefinable note of tension. “There is something really rather irresistible about a woman who loves children so much.’

Their eyes met, and Lola felt as though she could lose herself for ever in that grey gaze. Her heart beat faster as she recognised that he had paid her the greatest compliment of her life. It would be so easy, she thought, much much too easy to love Geraint.

‘Here comes Triss,’ said Geraint suddenly, his voice breaking into the tense silence like a brick dropped on ice.

Triss moved towards them with a catwalk model’s natural grace. The March sun was pale and golden and it brought out the tawny highlights of her shorn hair as if an artist had carefully painted them in by brush. With her big eyes and rangy limbs, she looked like some exotic jungle animal that had wandered into a suburban garden by mistake.

Triss’s pale face was animated as she peered into the pram. ‘He’s wonderful, isn’t he?’ she cooed, her question directed more at Geraint than at Lola. ‘Though I know I’m slightly biased, of course!’

Geraint smiled back at her and glanced down into the pram indulgently. ‘That’s understandable. I think I would be too!’

Lola experienced the sour and bitter taste of jealousy as she watched them beaming into each other’s eyes as if the rest of the world did not exist. And at that moment she could have cheerfully wished Triss Alexander a million miles away.

She gave the other woman a level stare. ‘Your husband must be as delighted as you are,’ she observed neutrally, and then felt stricken with guilt, for the smile died like a withered leaf on Triss’s face.

‘I have no husband,’ she answered woodenly. ‘And no partner, either!’ she added, with a spirited touch of defiance. ‘I’m completely on my own.’

Lola was aware of the furious look which Geraint was directing at her, but even that could not possibly make her feel worse than she already did. Imagine making a mean comment like that to a mother on her own—even if she was a beautiful ex-model!

Geraint shot Lola one final glare before turning to Triss and saying soothingly, ‘Please don’t feel you have to explain your private life—certainly not to us. You don’t have a monopoly on convoluted relationships, that’s for sure!’ He absent-mindedly tucked in a stray corner of Simon’s blanket. ‘But any time you feel the need to call on a man—if your lights fuse—’

‘I can just about manage to mend a fuse, thank you, Geraint!’ retorted Triss crisply.

He smiled. ‘I’m sure you can. But if you’re worried about anything—anything at all—then call me. Please. Here’s my card.’ From the back pocket of his jeans he extracted a small cream-coloured card and, to Lola’s surprise, handed it first to her.

‘You write your number on it too, Lola,’ he suggested. ‘Then Triss knows she has allies on both sides of the fence.’

Lola nodded, feeling oddly deflated as she scribbled down her number with the slim gold pen Geraint gave her. If Triss Alexander had no husband, and no partner, then what hope did that give her with Geraint?

For it appeared that he had no partner either, and when the chips were down wouldn’t he prefer to spend time chatting up a stunning ex-model as opposed to a rather buxom air hostess he could scarcely be civil to for more than a minute at a time?

Triss’s mouth widened into the enormous, crooked grin which had graced magazine covers the world over. ‘Oh, thanks!’ she said. ‘Thanks! To both of you! And now I’d better get going. Simon will be waking up for his feed soon—and, believe me, I can cope with a tantrum-throwing art director far more easily than I can a small, hungry baby who seems to have me twisted around his little finger!’ She gave a happy shrug of contentment, and began to push the pram away. ‘Bye!’

‘Bye!’ called Lola, thinking that she would call on Triss tomorrow and offer to babysit. At least that might make amends for her nasty little remark about husbands.

Triss, had gone only a few yards down the drive when she turned to look over her shoulder and said, rather absently, ‘You must come over some time—for a drink, or something. Both of you, I mean.’

‘Sure! We’d love to,’ Geraint replied easily, and Lola was still too stricken with guilt to remind him that she had a mouth of her own and she didn’t need him to answer for her!

They stood side by side, watching Triss push the pram over the resisting gravel until she was out of sight.

‘I shouldn’t have asked about her husband,’ said Lola miserably.

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ he agreed evenly. ‘So why did you?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘Perhaps—but I’d prefer you to tell me.’

She stared at a purple-blue clump of grape hyacinth, nestling beneath the budding branches of the cherry tree. ‘I guess I was being territorial,’ she admitted reluctantly, wondering if he would turn on his heel and run. ‘I had no right to be.’

‘You had no need to be,’ he corrected her quietly. ‘I’ve never juggled women in my life and I certainly don’t intend to start now! Anyway, Triss wasn’t interested in me,’ he concluded with a shrug.

‘Seriously?’

‘Uh-huh!’ He looked down and smiled into her eyes. ‘Seriously.’

She found that she loved the proprietorial way he spoke and she tried not to read too much into it, but it wasn’t easy. She let her eyelids fall, to conceal herself from that searching gaze. ‘Geraint. . .’ she began, when he put the palm of his hand beneath her elbow so that she was forced to look up at him, to lose herself in the stormy depths of his eyes.

‘You’re having dinner with me tonight!’ he declared roughly. ‘I don’t care whether it’s at your place or mine, or who cooks it. I don’t mind whether we go and shop now for ingredients, or whether we decide to explore the local restaurants later. I don’t even care if we go and eat an overpriced bar snack in the tennis club here on the estate—none of that matters.’

‘Why?’ she whispered, fascinated. ‘What does matter?’

His eyes gleamed. ‘Only that by the end of the evening it will be just you and me. Alone. I want to kiss you again, Lola. But properly this time. Without stopping. In private. Knowing that no one will disturb us.’

Lola gave a distressed laugh while her heart beat in a distracted rhythm. ‘You can’t seriously expect me to agree to have dinner with you tonight when you have virtually declared your intention to try to make love to me afterwards?’

‘Surely I can’t be the first man in your life to have been honest and up front about his desires?’ he challenged mockingly.

He was the first man whom she had found attractive enough to fear the challenge, but she wasn’t going to tell him that! And if she blurted out the truth—that she had never made love to a man, nor come even close to it—he would never believe her.

Because men had preconceived ideas about virgins. About how they looked and how they behaved. You could be a virgin if you wore no make-up and worked in a library. You could not be a virgin if you flew around the world, had more curves than you cared for and a ready smile which sometimes got you into trouble!

‘I could try saying no,’ she told him with a quiet dignity.

She saw him tense, saw a muscle begin to work quickly in his cheek. ‘You could try,’ he agreed softly.

‘But you’re so certain that you’d get rid of any opposition I might put up?’