Kiss And Tell

With his gleaming blue eyes and devil-may-care air, Cormack Casey looked the embodiment of the kind of man most mothers warned their daughters against.

Unless you happened to have a mother like hers, thought Triss bitterly, who fancied Casey rotten herself and had delighted in enlightening Triss as to what kind of man he really was.

‘Here.’ He had gracefully risen to his feet and was holding his hands out. ‘Let me take that from you.’

Triss blushed, knowing that she was at her most vulnerable when he was gentle to her. ‘It’s OK, thank you. I can manage.’

‘But it’s heavy, sweetheart—here.’ And he captured the tray from her with ease. ‘Sit down,’ he instructed. ‘And stop glowering at me like that.’

Glowering was her only defence against being called ‘sweetheart’ in that irresistibly lilting Irish way of his. She was trying all the while to tell herself that the affectionate term meant nothing—nothing at all. It was a phrase people used all the time in Belfast.

She had heard him say it to just about everyone in the past, particularly when he took a break from working, when he was on a roll and in one of those extravagantly happy moods which made women who were total strangers thrust their phone numbers into his pocket in restaurants.

At the time, Triss had pretended to laugh at his entirely instinctive flirting—as he had laughed—but his ability to laugh had hurt almost as much as his refusal to rebuff the women who drooled all over him.

‘Does it turn you on,’ she had demanded one day, ‘to have all these women fawning over you and making themselves blatantly available?’

‘You seem to forget that I have a say in all this, Triss,’ he had told her frowningly, with a shrug of those massively broad shoulders. ‘These women feel they know me because they happen to have seen a couple of my films. So am I to be rude to them in public? It just makes it less confrontational if I let them leave their pieces of paper and smile politely. Later on, I bin them. I don’t know why it bothers you, sweetheart. It means nothing, and it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with you and me. Understand?’

So Triss had forced herself to nod bravely, while the memory of those telephone numbers had scorched into her heart like a blow-torch and she’d tortured herself with wondering whether he had actually thrown them all away.

Now he poured black tea into one of the delicate china cups the cottage had provided, and handed it to her.

She shook her head rather apologetically. ‘I don’t take it black any more, Cormack. I’ll have milk and two sugars in it, please.’

He very nearly dropped the cup. ‘What did you say?’

She almost smiled. ‘You heard.’ He nodded his head so that inky tendrils danced enticingly around his ears. ‘Yes, I heard.’ He dropped two lumps of sugar into the cup and added milk before returning it to her with those black brows of his arrogantly arched in query. ‘So when did you give up the starvation diet?’

When she had discovered that running up and down stairs to tend to a crying baby beat any aerobics class for using up energy! She sipped at her tea gratefully and looked at him. ‘I was never on a starvation diet, Cormack,’ she objected. ‘Just—’

‘I know! I know!’ He held his hand up and recited in a careless, bored tone, ‘Just no chocolate for your skin, no alcohol for your early mornings, sugar made you sluggish—’

‘It was my career!’ Triss snapped back. ‘And I wanted to do it to the best of my ability—which did not include staggering into an early shoot with a hangover, having survived on just three hours’ sleep, because you wanted to go partying!’

Humour, which had stayed dormant in the depths of those lapis lazuli eyes, now shone through, nearly swamping her in its soft blue blaze. ‘But I thought you liked partying,’ he observed in that low, sexy drawl of his, rubbing his chin thoughtfully while he watched her.

‘I suppose I did. At first.’ Triss shook her head, wondering if she would ever get used to feeling her neck so exposed and vulnerable. She missed her long hair, that was the trouble, but cutting it off had come to symbolise the whole new way of life she had embraced. And if she grew it back again would she become that passive, prying clothes-horse she had grown to despise? ‘But after a while it wore me down. And those parties bored me.’

‘But you never actually said anything,’ he remarked.

‘No.’ She had just withdrawn and sulked like a schoolgirl—expecting Cormack to be able to guess the reason for her discontent, feeling disappointed when he did not. And disappointed too, she had to admit, that she on her own was not enough for Cormack. That he liked, even needed those parties.

Cormack picked up his cup in the distinctive way which Triss remembered so well, cradling it between his palms, seeking warmth from it like a Scout sitting round a camp fire. ‘We should have talked about it,’ he observed. ‘Maybe come to a compromise.’

Triss cocked him a glance. ‘When?’

His eyes gleamed as he sipped his tea, the look on his face leaving her in no doubt as to what he was thinking about. ‘I take your point,’ he murmured. ‘We didn’t actually do a lot of talking, did we, Triss?’

To her fury, Triss found herself blushing. She had meant that both her and Cormack’s heavy work schedules had conflicted, giving them very little free time with each other, but Cormack had obviously misinterpreted her meaning. Deliberately? she wondered. She lifted her chin. ‘No,’ she answered, sounding surprisingly cool. ‘We didn’t.’

His eyes glittered at her. ‘Anyway, as I recall, Beatrice, you didn’t find the parties completely boring. You enjoyed dressing up to the nines so that the whole room went silent as you walked in. Didn’t you?’ he finished softly.

‘I needed to look my best, yes,’ she argued defensively. ‘Because I wanted to make sure that I had enough work. And my agent always told me to go out with the thought that people were going to judge me by my appearance. If you will remember, those were the days before it became acceptable for models to grunge around in public wearing their oldest clothes with their hair scraped back into an elastic band. And besides, you liked me to dress up, Cormack—don’t deny that.’

‘Yes, I did like it.’ He nodded, his face reflective. ‘Your beauty astonished me, if you must know. I was as dazzled as the rest of them. When you pulled out all the stops to really dress up, I could hardly believe that you were with me—the upstart from Belfast!’

‘Like a trophy on your arm, you mean?’ she challenged drily. ‘Is that it?’

He shook his head so that the ebony waves gleamed as blackly as a raven’s wing, but his blue eyes were cold—icy-cold, like a frozen sea. ‘I’m not the kind of man who needs a beautiful woman to define him, Beatrice. You were there because I liked you—no other reason.’

And now? Triss swallowed, wondering when exactly they had stopped liking one another. She forced down another mouthful of tea, then looked directly into that strong, vibrant face which exuded so much earthy sensuality. ‘You’re still very laid-back, aren’t you, Cormack?’ she said.

‘In what way?’

‘Well, I would have thought that most men would have burst in here demanding to know just why they were here. Not sat there calmly drinking tea like a civilised stranger.’

‘We’re neither civilised, nor strangers. Not really—are we, Triss?’ His eyes glittered with an unspoken message of remembered desire, and Triss had to fiercely blot out the memory of lying naked in Cormack’s bed while he taught her everything he knew about the art of lovemaking.

And it had shocked as well as thrilled her to discover just how much he did know.

‘As to what most men would do—well, that doesn’t really concern me. All I know is that the woman I lived with, who disappeared so conclusively from my life after a night of the most spectacular sex I’ve ever experienced—’

Triss clapped her cool palms up to her flaming cheeks. ‘Cormack, don’t—’

‘Don’t what? Don’t tell the truth?’ he demanded. ‘Why? Does it disturb you so much?’ He smiled, but Triss could detect the anger which burned slowly behind the appearance of humour. ‘Why should she then send me a message—quite out of the blue—asking me to meet her at some God-forsaken place on the southern coast of England?’

‘Was it difficult to arrange?’

He shot her a narrow-eyed look. ‘I’ve reached the stage in my career where very little is difficult to arrange.’

It suddenly occurred to her that she had simply expected him to drop everything and just come to her.

And he had! Hope sprang to life in her heart, like the first snowdrop after the austerity of winter. If she asked him, might he answer all her hopes and dreams and prayers and say that he had missed her? Triss took her courage in both hands and said, ‘And why did you come so readily?’

He smiled. ‘I’m intrigued as to why you asked me, if you must know, Triss. And the sensation of being intrigued these days is so rare that I feel honour-bound to savour every moment.’

Disappointment lanced through her, but somehow she managed to keep her features neutral. ‘How jaded you sound, Cormack!’ she observed critically. ‘And how cynical!’

His eyes glittered like blue ice. ‘That’s the price you pay for success, sweetheart.’

‘Are you after the sympathy vote?’ she demanded. ‘Because you won’t get it from me, you know!’

‘I’m not after anything,’ he told her pointedly.

‘You were the one who invited me here, so you, presumably, are the one who is after something. I’m still waiting for you to tell me what it is.’

‘And you don’t seem to be in any hurry to find out,’ she observed in surprise, wondering why everything felt as though it was going horribly wrong.