Expectant Mistress

No. Stupid. Too chirpy and revealing—Adam would see through her pretence of throwaway confidence immediately. He’d look her deep in the eyes with that intense, melted-toffee gaze...

She found herself trembling, and hurriedly put her mind to the problem in hand. Hell, what was she going to say?

Petra chattered engagingly as they walked along the damask-walled corridor towards a pair of imposing mahogany doors and the Garden Suite beyond. It was a luxurious hotel with ankle-wrecking carpets, impressive oil paintings and antique furniture. All far too beautiful for Trish to dare sit on or risk touching with her sticky fingers. And the silver cutlery looked so heavy that she feared she’d get repetitive strain injury if she tried to wade through the entire five courses for dinner.

As they swept past vast urns and baroque marble hall tables groaning under the weight of stiff floral displays, Trish barely heard a word her friend was saying.

She was too busy keeping her nerves under control and rattling around the pathetically sparse contents of her brain, searching for something casual and witty for her opening lines. Increasingly she longed to turn tail and run like a frightened rabbit back to her burrow.

Apart from worrying about the effort of keeping a bright, see-how-I’ve-forgotten expression on her face the whole evening, she felt stranded, like a fish out of water. London had reduced her to wide-eyed silence. It was horribly noisy and unfriendly—terrifying, even. She’d made a hash of using the underground, and hadn’t a clue about tipping taxi drivers or doormen. Judging by their open-mouthed amazement, she’d funded their children’s private education for life.

City life was all about speed. People spoke faster, their movements were quick and frantic, as if there wasn’t enough time in the day to get things done. After just two days, she felt edgy and stressed.

But this was Adam Foster’s preferred environment. He’d relocated his computer software business from Truro to London four years ago and become a powerful mover and shaker in this alien world. He must love the hectic pace. Perhaps he was hooked on exhaust fumes. A diesel junkie.

Trish bit her lip, encountering the unfamiliar taste of lipstick. She and Adam were from two different planets. Chalk and cheese. Right now, she wanted to be back home where she belonged.

Yet stubborn curiosity kept her heading for the party. She wanted to see him gazing adoringly at Louise. Needed to, for her own peace of mind. Then she’d be able to shrug off the lurking feeling of something unfinished and life-changing. Once this party was over, she’d feel capable of making a commitment to her ever-patient boyfriend.

Time would have changed Adam and she’d probably find that he wasn’t a patch on the man she’d once idolised. He might be more Cardigan Man than Danger Man. More socks than sex. She’d changed too. After all, she’d been an impressionable eighteen when she’d last seen him.

Seen Touched, scoured with her tongue, felt her body dissolve during that long, heart-stopping moment when he’d looked at her and murmured her name... Every detail of their coming together was still fresh and hot in her mind, etched like acid on silver.

Only much later, after she’d fled home in agonies of self-recrimination, had she realised that he’d lost control for one reason only. Adam’s grief over the loss of his wife two months earlier had made him reach out blindly for someone to hold. She should have realised that.

Darling Christine’s death, after five years of battling with cancer of the spine, hadn’t been unexpected. But Adam had been too upset even to attend the funeral. Trish sighed. When he’d looked at her longingly, spoken her name and stretched out his hand, the poor man could never have anticipated that she would react as if he’d made a wholehearted invitation of love!

Never in the whole of her life had she behaved so badly or felt so ill from guilt and shame. Even now, she stumbled on the teetery shoes, knowing she’d never forgive herself.

They had reached the double doors. She was about to come face to face with him.

‘Smile!’ 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?