Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick

to discover that suddenly my life’s ambition was to be a hausfrau?’

      ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart,’ he chided softly. ‘People change. That’s natural—and right. Otherwise no one would settle down and get married and have babies.’ He sighed. ‘We should have discussed it instead of letting it drive a wedge between us. And that was my fault.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘Because of my background, I guess.’ He shrugged. ‘Growing up with my father...’ His voice tailed off, and Triss winced as she remembered the beatings he’d used to endure.

      She squeezed his hand and he flashed her the sweetest smile of gratitude.

      ‘It was a tough, working-class area of Belfast,’ he continued, though his voice held no trace of bitterness. ‘Where men were taught to drink or to punch their woes away. Certainly never to do anything as wimpish as analyse or talk about their feelings! And, though I escaped to the States just as soon as I could, I took that inability to open up and communicate with me.

      ‘Triss, darling.’ His voice was very sombre. ‘Just look into my eyes and tell me that you don’t believe I love you.’

      She slowly raised her face to meet his unflinching gaze, and it was as though a curtain had just been lifted, for the love which blazed out from his blue eyes almost blinded her with its intensity.

      ‘I believe you, Cormack.’ She blinked, close to tears. ‘I believe you.’

      He ran a finger in a tiny, sensual circle round the centre of her palm and then looked up, his dark-fringed eyes suddenly serious. ‘I’ve a confession,’ he admitted.

      But, strangely enough, Triss knew that nothing he could ever tell her now would shock her. Not now. ‘Go on.’

      ‘The New Year’s Eve party. That fateful night. I knew you were going to be there.’

      Somehow it was less surprising than she would have expected it to be. ‘How?’

      ‘Martha rang me—’

      ‘Martha did?’

      ‘After you’d been to see them. She told me that the two of us needed our heads knocking together—but of course in my stubbornness I refused to believe her. I went there convinced that seeing you again would be enough to banish the spell you had cast on me for ever. But, of course, it had exactly the opposite effect.’ He paused. ‘Are you angry?’

      ‘With Martha?’

      ‘No. With me.’

      ‘I’m rather flattered that you should have gone chasing across the snowy countryside in order to exorcise my ghost,’ she murmured.

      ‘And a fat lot of good it did!’ he murmured wryly. ‘And now, of course, I’d fly round the world a hundred times just to catch a glimpse of your beautiful face, Triss Alexander. Oh, hell!’ He briefly buried his face in his hands then looked up at her mock-despairingly. ‘Did I really say that?’

      ‘Yes, you really did!’ she gurgled contentedly. ‘And I rather like it when you’re being sloppy.’

      ‘Then you’ll marry me?’

      ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

      ‘When?’

      ‘Tomorrow?’

      He gave her a mock frown. ‘Don’t know if I can wait that long,’ he murmured, then eyed the two plates of Caesar salad which the waiter had just placed on the table in front of them. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Can you?’

      ‘Are we talking about marriage now?’ she queried primly. ‘Or bed?’

      His eyes glinted. ‘Bed.’

      ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ Triss sighed, and stood up as Cormack took a wad of notes from his wallet and flung them down on the table without even bothering to count them.

      They could barely wait until they were outside before they were in each other’s arms and kissing each other like there was no tomorrow.

      Inside the restaurant, the two Italian waiters looked on at the embracing couple indulgently, while several of the women sighed jealously and were almost—but not quite—tempted to give in to the dessert trolley.

      In fact, as one heavily jewelled and bone-thin woman remarked to her equally bone-thin friend, she didn’t know why some people bothered going out to eat, when food was obviously the last thing on their minds.

      And Triss and Cormack—if they could have heard—would have agreed with her wholeheartedly!

Settling the Score

       CHAPTER ONE

      DOMINIC DASHWOOD drove through the ornate golden and navy gates of St Fiacre’s Hill estate with just a little more speed than was necessary. Though not with as much speed as he would have liked, he decided, with a grim smile which nonetheless transformed his devastating features into the kind of face that most women only ever fantasised about.

      Tensing one long, muscular thigh, he depressed the accelerator pedal, and his dark green Aston Martin shot forward like a bullet.

      What he would have liked was to be on some wide, empty highway, where he could put his foot down and succumb to the heady lure of mechanical power. Machines and speed were two of Dominic’s great passions. In the past women had accused him of being cold and unfeeling.

      ‘You love that damned car more than you love me!’ some sultry beauty had once poutingly accused him.

      And Dominic had been unable to deny the truth which lay behind her accusation. He had taken her to bed one last time—because she had begged him to and, in truth, because he had wanted to—and had then walked away, wondering what it was that made him immune to the pain of emotion.

      You know damn well what it is! mocked an inner voice, and Dominic’s long fingers tightened convulsively around the soft leather of the steering wheel, as if they were biting deliciously into a woman’s tender flesh. But not just any woman. He felt the potent flicker of desire as he slowed to take the bend near the clubhouse.

      His sensual mouth twisted as a woman in tennis whites emerged from the St Fiacre’s club-house. She stopped dead and stared at the car as it roared by, her eyes narrowing with speculation as they took in the hard, handsome profile of the driver.

      But Dominic deliberately avoided eye contact with her. The woman’s body language made it patently clear that she was available, and Dominic avoided such openly available women like the plague.

      His unconscious sexual appeal had become the bane of his life. In his youth he had used it, squandered it even. For many years now he had desired the challenge of a woman who would not melt with early submission into his arms.

      Unfortunately, the woman he was scheduled to meet in just under an hour was not going to provide the challenge he needed, though once again he felt the reluctant heat coursing around his veins which just the thought of her could provoke.

      For Romy Salisbury was everything he despised in a woman.

      She was a siren who used her sexuality indiscriminately. Who had ruined at least one man’s life and had haunted his own for longer than he cared to admit.

      A muscle worked in his lightly tanned cheek as he drove past another sports car, unwilling excitement shivering its way up his spine as he anticipated what he intended to happen.

      Dominic smiled—but it was a cold, cruel smile as his mind lingered on the pleasure of the retribution he was going to exact in the next few days.

      He had waited five years for his moment and now it had come at last.

      It