Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick
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he told her. ‘And it will be an equal marriage, too—I’m not too proud to cook and to bath babies. How do you feel about that?’
Lola gazed up at him. What could she say? She seemed to have hitched her star to the original masterful man. But oh, she wouldn’t have it any different!
‘Well?’ he prompted.
‘Yes,’ she told him firmly. ‘Yes, yes, yes! Yes, I’ll marry you, yes, I love you—’
‘I’m going to make love to you,’ he interrupted with a small groan of desire. ‘Right now.’
‘We have a baby next door we’re supposed to be looking after,’ she reminded him in a shaky voice. ‘Or had you forgotten?’
‘No, I hadn’t forgotten.’ Geraint made a mental note to have Lola to himself for at least a year after they were married. Unless. . . ‘Are you pregnant, do you think, sweetheart?’ he asked her quietly.
Lola shook her head. ‘No,’ she said half-regretfully. ‘I let you think I might be as a kind of way of getting my own back—to make you worried. Are you very angry, Geraint?’
He smiled at her tenderly. ‘Angry? No! Relieved? A bit! Disappointed? A little. But we have years ahead to have our babies, Lola—if that’s the way God plans it.’
Lola was so flooded with the feeling of being properly loved that she felt secure enough to confide, ‘It wasn’t just for revenge that I told you I might be pregnant, Geraint.’
His mouth curved. ‘Oh?’
‘Although I hated what I thought you’d done I simply couldn’t resign myself to the thought of never seeing you again. I knew that if you thought there was the remotest possibility of me having a baby it would give you a reason to come back.’
His smile broadened. ‘I would have come back anyway, my darling—I didn’t need a reason. Do you think anything could have kept me away from you, once I’d found you? I’ve spent my whole life looking for you, Lola, and I’m never going to let you go.’
‘Oh, Geraint,’ she sighed, her eyes filling up with tears.
‘Shh,’ he soothed. ‘My only regret is not telling you everything before we made love.’
‘You tried,’ she whispered.
‘Not very hard,’ he admitted. ‘I was too ensnared by you, too worried that you might refuse ever to see me again if you had an inkling of my original motive.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘What time did Triss say she was coming back?’
‘She didn’t, exactly.’
He frowned. ‘Then do you think your mother might babysit for an hour or so—especially if I take you all out to dinner later to celebrate our engagement?’
‘We could always ask her.’ Lola gave him a questioning stare, although the look on his face was enough to make her start to shiver in delicious anticipation. ‘Why?’
‘Go upstairs and wait for me there,’ he instructed, a wicked glint in his eye as he picked up the telephone to punch out the number. ‘And in a minute I’ll show you exactly why.’
‘And you, being you, would never consider getting no for an answer, I suppose?’ said Lola, over her shoulder.
The darkening of his eyes told its own story. ‘Never!’ Geraint replied, and he smiled as he began to speak to Lola’s mother.
Look out for KISS AND TELL,
next episode in the Revenge is Sweet series by Sharon Kendrick
Triss Alexander, beautiful model, loving
mother, with an axe to grind against her baby’s father—Cormack Casey.
Coming Soon. . .
WOULD he come? That was the question. A question which could only be answered by the man himself, all six feet four of him, with his unruly hair and his Irish eyes and that irreverent humour which always seemed to be lurking at the corners of a mouth just made for kissing.
Triss shivered. She must just be patient, and wait. She had waited fourteen months, after all, so another few minutes were neither here nor there.
In fact, what she should do was to make herself remember why she had split up with Cormack Casey in the first place.
And after that she should force herself to recall every single one of his bad points, so that a miracle might happen and she might remain immune to him.
Some hopes.
The 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