Secret Sins: A Callie Anson Read Online Free PDF Page B

usual.
    ‘That would probably help.’
    Triona positioned her body so that she was facing the window rather than Frances. ‘I met Neville Stewart years ago. Nearly ten years back.’
    ‘About the time you and I lost touch,’ Frances realised.
    ‘Yes. And he was probably the main reason. When we were together, living together, there wasn’t time for anything else in my life.’
    ‘Were you together for a long time?’
    ‘Three months. A lifetime. Take your pick.’ Triona closed her eyes. ‘God, I loved him. I was crazy in love with him. And he…I don’t think he knows the meaning of the word “love.”’ She swallowed, stopped. There was a long silence.
    ‘Did he leave you after three months?’ Frances prompted eventually.
    ‘No, I left him . I moved out.’
    ‘I don’t understand,’ admitted Frances.
    Triona’s hands twisted together, then sprang apart in a dramatic gesture. ‘I wanted him to marry me, see? But he was terrified of commitment. So I thought I’d shock him into doing something. I moved out. I was so sure he’d come after me. Find me and…something. Whatever. But he didn’t. He never tried to find me. He just bloody let me go.’
    Frances still didn’t understand; this seemed to her to be a very perverse way to get someone to marry you, and it also seemed like water long since under the bridge. She waited for Triona to continue.
    ‘I married someone else after a few months. Someone from work—a solicitor from the firm where I was doing my articles. I didn’t love him,’ she added bluntly. ‘I never loved him. I married him to spite bloody Neville Stewart. I hoped that Irish bastard would lay awake at night and think about what he was missing, what he’d passed up.’
    ‘And did he?’
    Triona gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘He did not. He didn’t even know I was married! How’s that for an irony? I went through six years of a bad marriage to spite him, and he never even knew it.’
    That still didn’t explain how she was now carrying his child. Frances was good at waiting and listening; she folded her hands in her lap.
    Getting up restlessly and moving to the window, Triona went on. ‘And then he walked back into my life. Or me into his—I suppose it depends on the way you look at it. That day when you…’ She paused delicately, as if unwilling to remind Francesof something she would rather forget. ‘I hadn’t seen him since I left him. Nine years, almost to the day.’
    Frances observed the tension in her back, heard the pain in her voice.
    ‘I’d been hating him for nine years. Hating him as passionately as I’d loved him. But when I saw the bastard again, I realised that the love was still there, too. Always had been. You can’t just stop loving someone because you want to, can you?’
    ‘I suppose not.’
    ‘He was still a free agent. I’d shed my husband a few years
    ago. It wouldn’t have been professionally ethical for us to see each other until your business was all sorted out. But after that…he invited me to dinner. And being a fool, I said yes.’
    ‘So you’re back together.’
    ‘I wish it were that simple.’ Again the bitter laugh, as Triona wrapped her arms round herself and leaned her forehead against the glass of the window. It had just started to rain; fat drops hit the glass and rolled slowly down, leaving beaded tracks. ‘We slept together. Just the once. Once, which turned out to be enough.’ She rubbed her stomach. ‘He wanted to move in, straightaway. Start where we’d left off. But I…said no.’
    ‘You didn’t want to get back together?’
    ‘I wanted it more than anything.’ Triona began drumming her fingers on the window in rhythm with the rain. ‘But on my terms, not his. I told him he’d have to make an effort. Win me over, woo me.’
    ‘And has he done that?’
    Triona shot her a look over her shoulder. ‘Oh, he was brilliant. For a few weeks, at least. Flowers, romantic meals in expensive restaurants, evenings at the