Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick

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      ‘What plans?’ she asked immediately, wondering why all this seemed to be going so horribly wrong.

      He shook his dark head. ‘I don’t intend to waste any more time in discussion now. Just lock up, then get in the car and we’ll talk there.’ He took her small overnight bag from her and began to trudge up the hard, wet sand towards where Triss had parked her navy BMW.

      Triss felt too emotionally overwhelmed to do anything other than automatically carry out his instructions, so she locked up the cottage and made her way towards the car, where Cormack was already settled in the driving seat, his dark profile stony and unforgiving.

      She waited until he had negotiated the car up the steep, narrow lanes and was at last heading out on the motorway towards London before she brought the subject up once more.

      ‘What plans,’ she asked, ‘were you referring to earlier?’

      There was a pause. ‘Plans to get to know my son, of course.’

      ‘Cormack, I really think—’

      ‘And the only way to do that is to live with him,’ he continued remorselessly.

      His words were like lethal little darts being fired into her skin—there was such unconcealed venom behind them. ‘Live with him?’ she questioned faintly, not quite believing what she’d heard, but the implacable expression in his blue eyes left her in no doubt.

      ‘Yes, live with him!’ he echoed passionately. ‘Because you’ve denied me five months of his life, damn you, Triss Alexander, and I don’t intend to let you deny me any more!’

      Triss closed her eyes and saw a vivid image of what living with a Cormack who despised her might be like, and she felt physically sick at the thought of it. ‘You can’t just barge into someone’s house uninvited—’

      ‘But you did invite me, didn’t you?’ he told her in that silky Irish way of his as he smoothly overtook a car which was hogging the middle lane. ‘If not to your house, then certainly back into your life. And there must have been a reason behind that invitation, mustn’t there, sweetheart?’

      His eyes glittered with undisguised hostility. ‘So what was it? Getting tired of the burden of motherhood? Wanting to spread your wings? Some man on the horizon who can’t tolerate the sound of a crying baby when he’s trying to make love to you?’

      ‘If you weren’t driving I would hit you for saying something as disgusting as that!’ she fired back at him, her heart thudding painfully in her chest.

      He shrugged, seemingly unperturbed by her threat. ‘Disgusting, Triss?’ he mocked. ‘Or realistic?’

      ‘Do you really think,’ she flared, so angry that she could barely catch her breath, ‘that I would have gone to bed with you this afternoon if I had some other man hovering in the background?’

      He edged smoothly into. top gear and the powerful car seemed to swallow up the road in front of them. ‘How would I know what you would do any more?’ he challenged fiercely. ‘You’re like a stranger to me now, Triss.’

      ‘A stranger?’ she whispered, slowly becoming aware that her actions seemed to have opened up a real can of worms. She had seen no further than her desire to hurt Cormack as he had hurt her; she had given no thought to how she still felt about the father of her baby. And no thought, either, to how vulnerable his blistering criticism would make her feel. ‘Cormack—I shared your life and your house for almost a year...’

      His mouth hardened forbiddingly at the corners. ‘If you think that I am about to be swayed by your sentimental reminiscences, then think again, sweetheart!’ he snapped, speaking with a bitter kind of cynicism which Triss had never heard him use before.

      ‘So how can you say that I’m like a stranger to you?’ she asked him in genuine confusion.

      ‘Because the woman I-thought I was in love with would never have behaved in such a despicable way!’ he stormed. ‘You suddenly confront me with the news that I am a father—’

      ‘And have you never stopped to ask yourself just why I might have behaved in such a “despicable” way?’ Triss snapped back as she remembered how she had felt when she’d discovered that he had betrayed her.

      He shook his dark head impatiently. ‘I’m afraid that your motivations concern me less than practical considerations at the moment, Triss. Like whereabouts in Surrey are we going?’

      She wondered whether he would have heard of it. ‘To St Fiacre’s Hill estate,’ she told him slowly.

      He had. He exhaled a long, low breath. ‘Not “The Beverly Hills of England”?’ he quoted, in a mocking sing-song voice.

      ‘That’s what the tabloids say,’ answered Triss, with a defensive little shrug.

      ‘And the reason why, presumably, you wanted to live there?’

      The numbing effect of the intimacies they had shared was wearing off, and now came the return of Triss’s sense of purpose. ‘Don’t make any presumptions on my behalf, thank you very much!’ she told him frostily. ‘I happened to buy the house because it is set in almost nine hundred acres of beautiful green land.’

      ‘Rather than because it happens to be populated by rich men with an eye for a beautiful woman on her own?’ he mocked.

      ‘That doesn’t even deserve the courtesy of a response!’ Triss glared at him. ‘St Fiacre’s is secure and well tended and very, very private. And the gates keep unwelcome visitors out—’

      ‘Like me?’ he queried sardonically.

      Triss went quiet.

      ‘That must have influenced your choice of where to live?’ he suggested softly. ‘I imagine that if your instantly recognisable face—’

      ‘But I’m not instantly recognisable any more!’ she protested. ‘I’ve had my hair cut off—remember?’

      ‘Maybe not instantly,’ he conceded. ‘But certainly recognisable. Not many women have eyes and bone-structure and height and posture like yours, Triss. If you had chosen to live anywhere else I shouldn’t think it would have been too long before someone was tempted by the lure of money from one of the newspapers to tell the story of the super-model turned single mother.’ His blue eyes glittered. ‘With a lot of speculation as to who the absentee father might be.’

      Triss gave a silent groan as she remembered blurting out Cormack’s identity to Lola. But she trusted Lola.

      ‘But I presume,’ he continued remorselessly, ‘that everyone who lives on St Fiacre’s is so financially secure and so paranoid about their own safety that they’ve barely given you a second look. And even if they did they certainly wouldn’t need to flog your story for cash.’

      Triss wondered whether this whole idea of telling Cormack about his son had been nothing more than a hare-brained scheme. But it was too late to back out now. ‘You need to take the furthest exit on this roundabout,’ she told him in an odd, brittle kind of voice that did not sound like her voice at all. ‘We’re almost there.’

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