moistened her dry lips, hardly able to believe Nick was saying these things to her. ‘But the portrait changed all that…?’
He nodded, sighing. ‘Because I’m an idiot. Because I didn’t believe you when you told me you weren’t the woman in the portrait. It looked like you!’ he groaned. ‘The you I had seen the night we spent together. The you who had been like a living flame in my arms. The you who had been haunting my days and invading my nights.’ He shook his head. ‘Seeing that portrait, imagining the man who had painted it looking at you and seeing exactly what I had seen, touching you in the way I had touched you—I was so angry I think I was blind with rage the next time we met,’ he admitted.
Nick was saying these things to her!
‘And now?’ she prompted breathlessly. ‘Now that you know the truth? You released me from our engagement and agreed to cancel the wedding,’ she reminded him huskily.
He gave a humourless smile. ‘I was trying to do the honourable thing. I realised that I had bullied you into both those things because of my mistaken belief that you were trying to trap me into marriage by getting pregnant on purpose. And I was mistaken, Hebe. I know now that you were just as surprised by your pregnancy as I was. Worse, you were probably terrified. And I’ve behaved like a complete bastard to you,’ he murmured self-disgustedly.
‘But now?’ she prompted again.
‘Now, after listening to Andrew, hearing him describe how much he loved Claudia and the hell his life has been for him since he lost her, I’ve decided—unless I want to go quietly insane—that I have to forget being honourable,’ he said determinedly. ‘I don’t want to be another Jacob or Andrew, my life barren and loveless because I’ve let the woman I love walk away from me without even trying to show her how much I love her and want to be with her. If it takes me months, or even years, I’m going to woo you, Hebe Johnson.’ He reached out to grasp her arms. ‘I’m going to woo you and win you. I love you too much, need you too much, to ever be able to let you just walk away from me. Will you allow me to do that, Hebe?’ he pressed fiercely. ‘Will you give me a chance to court you, care for you, love you?’
Hebe almost laughed at the ridiculousness of that question—she already loved him so much that parting from him today had been like a nightmare she couldn’t awaken from!
‘No, I don’t think so, Nick,’ she told him emotionally. ‘No, I don’t mean it like that!’ she hastened to assure him as he went deathly pale. ‘You see, I already love you.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve loved you for months—before you even spoke to me the first time,’ she admitted joyously. ‘And if it’s all right with you, I would like to go ahead with our wedding!’
‘Hebe…?’ He looked at her in disbelief..
‘I love you, Nick!’ It felt so good to be able to say those words at last—to let her love for this man shine in her eyes and light up her face. ‘I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you!’
Nick stared down at her as he drew in a shaky breath. ‘For eternity.’ He spoke forcefully. ‘I’m not willing to settle for anything less!’
‘Eternity,’ she echoed with a happy laugh. ‘I’m not willing to settle for anything less either!’
‘I swear to you that we’re going to be happy together, Hebe,’ Nick assured her firmly. ‘So very, very happy.’
She believed him.
And when their son and daughter, Andrew Henry and Claudia Luka, were born seven months later, mother and babies all healthy, Hebe knew she had been right to trust and believe in Nick—that their love for each other just grew stronger each and every day they were together.
As it would for eternity.
For Peter
CHAPTER ONE
‘DID you know there’s a contact lens in your cup of tea?’
Laura’s only outward show that she was in the least affected by the lilting Irish drawl she now heard behind her was a slight—barely perceptible, she hoped!—tremble of her hand as she continued to raise the cup to her lips.
Déjà vu…
Except she didn’t just have a feeling that this had happened before—it had happened before!
Where had he come from? She was sitting in the lounge of a luxurious hotel, was seated so that she could see both the main entrance and smaller back entrance, and yet somehow Liam had managed to enter without her being aware of it. He now stood behind her.
She carefully placed the cup and saucer back down on the tray on the table in front of her, her movements deliberate and slow. ‘In the first place, this is coffee; I don’t drink tea,’ she returned huskily, delaying the moment when she would have to turn around and face him. ‘And in the second—I don’t wear contact lenses!’
‘In that case…’ he was very close now, his warm breath stirring the dark tendrils of hair that curled at her nape ‘…you have the most incredibly beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.’
‘How can you possibly tell that from where you’re standing?’ she replied dryly, her face still averted.
‘Ah, Laura, now you’ve gone and broken the spell,’ Liam teased lightly, the Irish lilt in his voice stronger than ever. ‘Your next line in the script should have been something else entirely!’
Eight years ago, perhaps it had been. But this was another lifetime. A different Laura. She was no longer an impressionable English Literature student, in the third and final year of her degree.
And Liam was no longer a world-famous author come to give the students a lecture of whom she had been slightly in awe.
She drew in a deeply controlling breath before sitting forward and turning to face him, glad of that control as she found herself looking up into his handsome, laughing face.
He hadn’t changed a bit!
The thing that struck one most when first faced with Liam O’Reilly was his sheer size: six foot four inches tall, with a lithely muscular body that exuded vitality. He was dressed today, as always, with a complete disregard for his surroundings, in faded blue denims, blue tee shirt and black jacket. Second came recognition of the blue-black sheen to the overlong hair that brushed his shoulders, the intelligence in those intense blue eyes, the handsome face that looked as if it were carved out of hard, rugged stone.
But none of her inner dismay at the apparent lack of any change in his appearance showed as Laura continued to look at him with her ‘incredibly beautiful eyes’, one a clear shining blue, the other emerald-green. Which was the reason for his assumption, eight years ago, that she must have lost one of her tinted contact lenses.
She had been teased unmercifully about her different coloured eyes when she was at her all-girls, boarding-school, but as she’d grown older it had ceased to bother her as she’d come to realise that men actually found the strangeness of her eyes intriguing. As Liam once had…
She gave a cool smile. ‘I suppose I should feel flattered that you still remember that particular conversation,’
