Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick

sound of the waves beating down on the wet blond sand outside the cottage rang in her ears. Triss glanced down at her watch and for the twentieth time she wondered how Simon was. She had never been away from her beautiful blue-eyed baby before, and had been totally unprepared for the almost physical pain of his absence.

      No one ever warned you what babies would do to you, she thought, with a sudden rush of overwhelming love. How motherhood would change you irrevocably, so that the person you used to be before you had the baby seemed like a distant stranger.

      The cottage she had rented had been deliberately chosen for its lack of television and telephone. Cormack was a man whom other people clam-oured to be with. When they had lived together his phone had never stopped ringing—hence the lack of facilities in this out-of-the-way place. But, even more importantly, she wanted all his attention when she dropped her bombshell into his lap.

      She had given the number of the local pub to Lola—who was looking after Simon for her—with the instructions that she was to ring Triss immediately if there was anything she wasn’t happy about.

      Please God, there wouldn’t be.

      She thought of the comfort and security of her elegant house on the exclusive St Fiacre’s Hill estate, bought with the earnings from her successful modelling career. The perfect place, she had decided during her pregnancy, in which to bring up her baby.

      Triss swallowed down the ever-present fears which were part and parcel of motherhood and allowed herself a fleeting glance in the mirror, wincing slightly as she did so.

      The simple rust-coloured linen dress she had chosen was practical and comfortable, but it made her look so mumsy—and today it seemed to drain all the colour from her skin.

      Should she have worn make-up? she wondered.

      She had decided against it in the end. Make-up might seem contrived, as though she was trying to focus all Cormack’s attention on her, while nothing could be further from the truth.

      Her face was pale—paper-pale—with the freckles which spattered her small snub nose standing out in stark relief. Her green and golden eyes were as big as beacons, but tiny lines of strain, fanning out from the corners, could be seen if you looked closely. Though she doubted that Cormack would be interested in looking closely.

      At least she wasn’t holding out any hope that Cormack would attempt to seek some form of reconciliation with her today. She looked a completely different person from the woman he had first met—with her red-brown hair all shorn off, her face completely bare of make-up. And hadn’t Cormack loved the fact that her model-girl looks were so flamboyant that millions of men lusted after her?

      Well, she couldn’t imagine anyone lusting after her now...

      She heard the distant sound of an engine, and her ears pricked up even as she frowned, trying to work out what made this particular engine sound quite unlike any car she had ever come across. But only one man in the world would drive to a beach in something which sounded like Concorde breaking through the sound barrier!

      Cormack!

      Triss ran her fingertips beneath her eyes, as if by doing so she could magically remove the dark smudges of so many sleepless nights. Then she bit down hard on her bottom lip so that the blood rushed in to give her mouth some colour.

      And waited.

      The cottage was right off the beaten track—that had been one of the main reasons for choosing it. The beach made it fairly inaccessible, and you had to park your car right at the top and then clamber down over a low wall before you could walk across the sand to the house.

      So how come she could hear the engine getting closer and closer, its loud, buzzing intensity sounding like a giant insect gone mad?

      Triss flung the front door open and saw the sleek black and silver machine which was noisily growling its way to a halt right in front of the cottage, sludging up the pale, hard sand as it did so.

      Trust Cormack to hire himself a motorbike, she thought, torn between exasperation and admiration. It had been one of the things which had both attracted and infuriated her—the fact that Cormack Casey was like no other man in the world.

      The man in question was now pulling off an outrageous silver and scarlet crash-helmet, and Triss held her breath to see whether he had adopted a more sober and sensible hairstyle which might better reflect his reputation as Hollywood’s hottest, sharpest and hunkiest scriptwriter.

      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.