hissed Petra. ‘You’ll strip paint off the skirting boards!’
‘Cheaper than turps,’ she quipped
But she obeyed because Adam must be happy now, his wife’s death merely a sad memory—and he had a loving woman by his side, in his arms... Trish’s smile became a little desperate.
Petra flung open the double doors.
Trish had an impression of raised voices, synthetic perfume and sleek heads. A general air of wealth, confidence and nervous energy emanated from everyone in the banqueting room. Ribbons and roses seemed to be everywhere—nothing jolly, like balloons, she noted wryly. Stiff and awkward, she was horribly aware that she stood out in this high-powered crowd because she looked so ordinary.
‘Don’t leave me!’ she said quickly, turning to Petra. But her friend had been swept into the welcoming crowd, casting helpless, backward ‘sorry!’ looks at her.
As she stood in the doorway, her eyes skittered about, searching for someone a head and shoulders above the rest and who dominated the room with the sheer strength of his personality But he was nowhere to be seen. Her shoulders tensed. The ordeal was to be prolonged, then.
All around, Trish could hear snatches of conversation, none of which made sense because people were tossing words such as ‘gigabytes’ and disk formatting failure’ at each other. She felt like an alien.
‘Hello! What a fabulous tan! Have you been skiing?’
A sentence she could interpret! Trish smiled gratefully at the tall and staggeringly beautiful redhead who’d appeared in front of her. She gave an envious glance at the perfectly cut shoulder-length bob and the fashionably asymmetrical cream dress that hugged her languid body like liquid, and said politely, ‘No. I live on Scilly—’
‘Italy!’ exclaimed the vision coolly, her green eyes narrowing inexplicably as she scrutinised Trish’s face. ‘I adore Italy. How fascinating. What part?’
‘The Scilly Isles, not Sicily,’ corrected a low, well-loved voice from the doorway behind her. ‘They’re in the Atlantic, twenty-eight miles to the south-west of Land’s End in Cornwall. Five inhabited, if I remember aright, the other one hundred and forty islands being left entirely to Nature.’ There was a brief, silken pause. ‘Rather like the inhabitants.’
Adam’s hand rested on Trish’s shoulder. He and the redhead were exchanging words but she didn’t hear them. His power, his warmth flooded through her entire body, releasing her tense muscles immediately and turning them into fluid. Trish pretended not to recognise his voice. She was dealing with a sudden fizz of activity inside her head, and wanted to be perfectly composed when she faced him.
Thanks, Adam, she thought sourly. She was Miss Nature in person, was she? Hiding her irritation, she forced a smile, remembering her decision to be a peasant with straw in her hair and jolly well like it.
‘So!’ exclaimed the vision. ‘This is Trish, then!’ There was a flash of white as Adam moved to the woman’s side. Trish kept her gaze fixed doggedly ahead, a plastic grin on her face, as the woman added lightly, ‘And all this time I thought she was Italian! You look foreign.’
Louise, for that was clearly who it had to be from the way she hung onto Adam’s tuxedo sleeve, was eyeing Trish’s dark colouring as if it were an inferior brand of face cream. Trish felt crushed by her cool assessment. Clearly Louise had been expecting an Italian temptress on the lines of Sophia Loren, not a badly put-together female with macraméd hair.
Hating the little spurts of jealousy which were shooting up her body, Trish adjusted her smile to a decent wattage and said, ‘I can’t oblige you by producing some Italian genes, but some of the time my Spanish blood comes out. When I’m excited, for instance...’ She went pink and hastened to make her meaning clear. ‘When someone annoys me.’
‘Any other time your Spanish blood comes out?’ enquired Adam in a wickedly teasing drawl
She still wouldn’t look at him. Her heart was pumping too hard and he sounded far too amused by her discomfort. OK, so amuse him Go for humour; prove you don’t give a damn, a little voice was telling her.
‘Yes. If I get careless chopping carrots,’ she said sweetly.
He laughed. It was lovely to hear him—and astonishing to see Louise’s reaction Her eyebrows were disappearing into her hairline.
‘That’s not a sound I’ve heard for a long time,’ Louise said, as if she disapproved of frivolity in a mature man. She pointed a sharp, bare shoulder at Adam in accusation.
‘I’d forgotten how. Life’s been a bit fraught, hasn’t it?’ Adam murmured. ‘Not much time for fun.’ Any fool could have heard the irritation lacing his voice.
Aware of a slight tension building between the two, Trish blundered on. ‘Gran says I have quite a few Spanish smugglers and shipwrecked Spanish seamen lurking in my genes. My female ancestors made the most of their opportunities.’ She wondered if her eye-to-eye stare with Louise was becoming unnatural, bordering on the manic. Nerves made her gibber unthinkingly. ‘When you live on an island the size of a dinner plate, you have to grab all the available talent there is.’
Louise’s eyes narrowed even more. Too late, Trish realised she’d now suggested that she was out hunting a man, any man, to take back to her lair. Damn! She wasn’t any good at this small talk stuff. How crass she was!
‘Hello, Trish,’ Adam said, laughter enriching his voice. ‘Good to see you again.’
With a properly convivial smile, she began to unwind one of her rehearsed greetings, speaking to his shirtfront which was so close it came over as a white blur.
‘Such a long tune, isn’t It? How we’ve aged—!’
‘Age be damned!’ he protested.
Startlingly, she found herself in his masterful arms, the sound of her name filling her head like sweet music, the smell of him heightening her senses and driving the breath from her body. She wanted them to stay like that for ever.
Her eyes closed, all the better to imagine that situation. His lush mouth pressed warmly into each cheek It seemed his lips lingered a fraction longer than was socially acceptable but she’d mislaid her brain cells so she was probably wrong. Because when he released her he was smiling—not at her, but at Louise
Her stomach felt as if it had been subjected to a fast descent in a lift. She decided to be stern with herself. What had she been expecting? A dramatic, ‘My God! Trish! I claim you as the woman of my dreams’ Goodbye, Louise, all is over!’?
It seemed that subconsciously, that was precisely what she had been hoping for. His indifference to their clinch really hurt. And she wondered why she kept on wounding herself with so many impossible and downright immoral desires where he was concerned.
She hadn’t come to snatch him away, but to beat it firmly into her dim brain that Adam was far too handsome and talented for the likes of her. For heaven’s sake, how could she compete with a red-headed goddess who’d been given Adam’s seal of approval?
‘I’m a little late with the introductions, but as you gathered, Louise—’ he said easily ‘—this is Trish. Trish, Louise, my fiancée.’
‘Welcome
