Читать книгу Sharon Kendrick Collection - Sharon Kendrick - Страница 31

CHAPTER TWELVE

TRISS stared at Cormack disbelievingly. ‘You don’t,’ she told him in a hollow whisper. ‘Please don’t say you do when you don’t.’

He frowned. ‘Don’t what? Don’t want to marry you? Oh, I do, Triss. This is, after all, the second time of asking, remember?’

‘But you don’t love me!’ she hissed back angrily, uncaring that people were watching her. ‘You’re just saying that because you want Simon and you know that I come as part of the package! And you know that I wouldn’t dream of marrying you unless I knew that you loved me...’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ he asked interestedly.

She eyed him suspiciously. ‘What?’

‘Marry me if I didn’t love you? Be honest now, Triss.’

His blue eyes were piercingly direct, and Triss found that she could not look into them and tell a lie. And hadn’t she already decided that afternoon that she would marry him, if he still wanted her to?

‘Yes,’ she admitted in a low voice. ‘I think I would.’

‘And why would you do that?’ he coaxed softly.

Should she risk her pride with an honest answer? Didn’t she owe him that much after everything she had done to him? ‘Because I have more than enough love to go round,’ she told him simply. ‘For both of us.’

He started grinning. And grinning. And then he began to chuckle. In all the time she had known him, she had never seen Cormack laugh quite so uninhibitedly.

‘What’s so funny?’ demanded Triss indignantly.

‘Nothing. Everything. Oh, darling, you have just made every dream I ever had come true.’

‘Cormack—’

But he shook his head. ‘Let me just say this, Triss. Let me get it off my chest. When our relationship soured before—’

‘It was through my jealousy,’ she put in firmly.

‘Well, yes—partly. But I couldn’t have made you feel very secure if you believed that I was capable of infidelity.’

‘I don’t think I actually believed that,’ she admitted. ‘I just didn’t want beautiful women fawning all over you whenever I wasn’t around. I wanted to be around you all the time, Cormack, and yet I thought that if I was, then you wouldn’t want me any more.’

‘But why?’ he queried, in a stunned voice. ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

‘Because I was a successful globe-trotting model—and that’s the woman you fell in love with! Wouldn’t you have felt a little short-changed 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!