An Insatiable Passion
LYNNE GRAHAM
You finally came backAfter her brief but passionate affair with Veterinarian Jake Tarrant ended in heartbreak – and his marriage to someone else! – Kitty Colgan left her home vowing never to return. But now, eight years later, an unexpected death in the family forces Kitty to face the one place, and the one person, she had hoped never to see again.She’s determined to grieve quietly then return to her new life as an actress but when she sees Jake, the man who left a deep scar on her heart, it’s impossible to deny the way he makes that same heart still flutter…
is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.
In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!
LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon
reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.
An Insatiable Passion
Lynne Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
‘DON’T I know your face from somewhere?’ The teenager in the shop stared fixedly at her.
She dug her change into her purse. ‘I doubt it.’
Suddenly he laughed, his puzzled frown vanishing. ‘I know what it is. You look like that actress, Kitty Colgan. You know the one—she plays Heaven in The Rothmans. My mum’s glued to the TV every week.’ He groaned, lifting the box of groceries off the counter before she could reach for it. ‘She takes those soaps so seriously, she’s really upset that Heaven’s being killed off.’
‘Let me take that,’ she interposed. ‘It’s not heavy.’
‘Heavy enough for a lady your size.’ From his lanky height he grinned down at her with the unabashed friendliness of a spaniel puppy. ‘I bet you get taken for Kitty Colgan regularly,’ he teased.
She pulled open the door. ‘No, this is the first time.’
‘I suppose she’d be driving a Merc,’ he mocked cheerfully as she unlocked the boot of the elderly, mud-spattered Ford parked outside. ‘Well, you wouldn’t want to be in her shoes right now anyway. She’s lost her job and that film star she was shacked up with has found someone else. If she’s got a Merc, she’s probably going to have to trade it in for a more modest set of wheels!’
‘Thanks.’ She slammed down the boot-lid one second after he removed his fingers from danger.
‘Are you staying somewhere round here?’
She settled back behind the wheel. ‘Just passing through.’
‘I wish I was,’ he grumbled, staring down the quiet country road.
As Kitty drove off, she was trembling. So much for the disguise! Tugging off the wool cloche, she slung it in the back seat and ran manicured fingertips jerkily through the silver-blonde, waterfall-straight hair that had tumbled down to her slim shoulders.
Her strained violet-blue eyes accidentally fell on the small decorative urn and the bunch of white roses on the passenger seat. Instantly she looked away again but the damage was done. The gremlins in her conscience wouldn’t leave her alone. She was coming home after eight years of exile…and she was arriving too late. All the wishing in the world wouldn’t change that fact.
Four incredibly short days ago she had been happy, blissfully unaware of what lay ahead. On the flight from Los Angeles, all that had been on her mind were the gloriously empty weeks stretching before her and the plot of the thriller she had long been anxious to sit down and actually try to write. Within an hour of entering the London town house, her mood of sunny anticipation had been shattered.
As an appetiser to his ambitious plans for her next career move, Grant had imparted the news of her grandmother’s death—one month too late for her to attend the funeral.
‘She died in her sleep,’ he had volunteered drily. ‘You weren’t deprived of a death-bed reconciliation.’
He had deliberately withheld the information from her. If she had walked off the set of The Rothmans to fly back to England, she would have held up the production schedule on her last show. Nor might she have been free to take advantage of the part Grant had lined up for her in his latest film. But then that hadn’t been the only reason why he had kept quiet about Martha Colgan’s death. And somehow it was those other unspoken and even less presentable reasons which had contributed to her bitter attack on him and the subsequent violence of the argument which had followed.
They had both said things which would have been better unsaid. Censure rarely came Grant’s way. He was an internationally acclaimed star of twenty years’ solid standing. Humility wasn’t his strong point. When crossed he had the malice of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. But the split between them had been coming for a long time, Kitty acknowledged unhappily.
Neither of them had known that his valet had had his ear to the door. Or that the same man had been snooping and prying for months behind their backs so that he could make his fortune selling lurid revelations of their life together to one of the murkier tabloids. What he had overheard that afternoon had been juicy enough to send him out from cover to the nearest phone.
The story of their break-up had made headlines the next day. The night before she had unwittingly lent credence to the tale by leaving the town house in disgust to check into a hotel. Yesterday, Grant had flown out to the South of France with his arm round his glamorous co-star, Yolanda Simons. The sensationalised instalments in the newspaper had run for three agonising days.
None of it would bother Grant. With the single exception of the leak about his chin tuck last year, Grant saw all publicity as good publicity and he didn’t think of a woman’s reputation as a fragile thing. In all likelihood he would be laughing over the fact that, despite the household spy, the probing searchlight of the Press hadn’t even come close to digging up the biggest secret of all.
But the recent media coverage had appalled Kitty. It had finally brought home to her that she had lived a lie for too long and she was now reaping the benefits of that notoriety.
Her car ate up the miles, steadily taking her deeper into the familiar windswept desolation of the moors. By twelve, sunlight was banishing the overcast clouds, dispelling all gloom from the rugged landscape, but the closer Kitty got to her destination, the more tense she became.
Two unalterable realities had shadowed her childhood. One was that her mother had died the day she was born, the other that Jenny Colgan hadn’t been married. Kitty’s grandparents had raised her solely out of a sense of duty, and love had played small part in her upbringing. A lonely child, she had been ignored at home and had found it difficult to mix with the other children in the village school.
No matter how hard she tried to shut them out, the memories were flooding back—memories inextricably interwoven with the haunting image of a man’s darkly handsome features. Jake…Jake! Angrily she crushed back her over-sensitivity. But Jake Tarrant had preoccupied her every waking thought for more adolescent years than she cared to recall.
Her grandparents had been the poorest tenants on the Tarrant estate, her grandfather an embittered, antisocial man who blamed the landlord and his neighbours for his own inefficient farming methods. Kitty had first met Jake when she was five. She had been hiding behind a hedge watching him ride. A lordly, lanky and intimidating ten-year-old, he had trailed her home, assuming that she was lost and that someone would be looking for her.
In those days, Jake had boarded during the week at an exclusive public school, coming home at weekends and holidays to be left very much to his own devices. After the fright he had given her at their first meeting, it had taken him months to persuade her to come willingly close again.
He had bribed her into giving him her trust with sweets set down at strategic distances in her favourite haunts. She had had the shy, distrustful wildness of an animal, unused to either attention or company. Years later he had confessed that he had once tried the same routine with a fox. Well, he had failed to tame the fox, but he hadn’t failed with Kitty.
Starved as she was of affection, Jake had won her ardent devotion with ease. He had brought her out of her shell and school had become far less of an ordeal. Jake had improved her poor grasp of grammar. Jake had helped her to read. She had trailed in his wake with jam jars when he had gone fishing, tagged at his heels when he had gone exploring, a sounding-board for Jake’s ideas and ambitions. A scraggy little thing she’d been, all eyes and lank, long hair in jumble-sale clothes.
Loving Jake had come as naturally as breathing to her. She couldn’t even remember when the child’s blind adoration had become something much deeper, something so powerful that it had hurt sometimes just to look at him. It hadn’t been a sudden infatuation. Then there hadn’t been a time in her life when she could remember not loving Jake.
At an early age she had learnt the difference between them. She could still picture his mother looking at her with well-bred repulsion from the threshold of her elegant drawing-room.
‘You can’t bring that dirty little brat indoors, Jake. She can wait for you outside. Really, I do have to draw the line somewhere,’ Sophie Tarrant had reproved shrilly.
Jessie, the Tarrant housekeeper, had given her a glass of milk on the back kitchen step. The lines of demarcation had been drawn then while she sat listening to Mrs Tarrant complaining to Jessie about her as if she were deaf.
‘I don’t know what he sees in the child…yes, I know, neglected. She’s quite pathetic but I refuse to have her in the house. You know the family, Jessie. Very odd birds, I’ve been told. Take some of Merrill’s outgrown clothes up to them. One does feel it’s one’s duty to do something.’
She had wanted to run away and sob her heart out, but she hadn’t because she was waiting for Jake. Even then Jake had taken precedence over her self-respect. And even then Sophie Tarrant had been warning her off. When Kitty had reached sixteen, Jake’s mother had cornered her one day and she had been even more blunt.
‘You’re developing the most ridiculous crush on Jake and, really, it won’t do,’ Sophie had scolded sharply, contemptuously. ‘A childhood friendship is one thing, this pitiful infatuation of yours quite another. You are much too intense, Kitty, and I don’t want to see you hurt. What I’m trying to tell you for your own good is that you don’t move in the same social circles. You’re being a very silly little girl. For goodness’ sake, why don’t you have a mother to tell you these things?’
Had she listened? Had she learnt? Not a bit of it. With the stubborn insouciance of extreme youth, she had clung to her love and her dreams. Who could ever have guessed that her worst enemy had given her sound and sage advice?
With a shudder of self-contempt, Kitty drew her straying mind back to the present. The Ford sped over the stone bridge into the village. Mirsby was a straggling clutch of terraced granite cottages and other buildings climbing a bleak hillside. She accelerated up the steep incline without looking either left or right. At the top she turned down the lane siding the weathered, unadorned bulk of the church and parked outside the cemetery.
The wind tore at her hair as she climbed out. In the biting cold she shivered. The Colgans were all buried in the oldest part of the graveyard. Kitty was the last Colgan and, ironically, the only one ever to own the land. When the Tarrant estate had been broken up and sold, her grandfather had travelled all the way to London to demand that she give him the money to buy the farm. But his pride had insisted that the farm remain in her name.
One of the solicitor’s letters, awaiting her in London, had contained an offer to buy Lower Ridge. The naturally sultry line of her mouth compressed with bitterness. She wouldn’t sell. Year by year the buildings could crumble and the moors could inch back slowly over the fields. In her lifetime, Lower Ridge would never be Tarrant land again.
She arranged the roses in front of the plain gravestone. Her damp eyes stung in the breeze. After a moment’s pause, she retraced her steps. The traditional gesture was all that she had to offer, all that either of her grandparents had ever wanted from her. Respect and obedience—nothing more, nothing less.
She didn’t see the battered Land Rover sitting behind her car until she passed through the gate again. The storm-singed bulk of an ancient yew tree had hidden both it and the man propped up against the wall. There was no second of warning, no opportunity to avoid him.
He was very tall, very dark and very lean. Way back in the mists of time a Tarrant had reputedly stooped to marry a lady of gypsy origins and his forebears must have somersaulted inside their ancestral tombs. Jake Tarrant bore the stamp of that Romany heritage boldly against blonde, conventional siblings. His shaggily cut, overlong black hair framed a striking, sculpted bone-structure and dark mahogany eyes of animal direct intensity.
By any standards he was a sensationally attractive male. What made him exceptional was the almost brutal strength of character sheathed by formidable self-control that looked out of his hard stare. There was no trace of boyishness left in his features. The passions that had once run high enough to breach Jake’s principles of honourable fair play were leashed now by maturity.
Her lightning-fast appraisal braced her reed-slender figure into defensive stillness. ‘Surprise, surprise,’ she managed, her beautiful face discomposed for only a split second.
It didn’t show that her heart was pounding like a road drill and her stomach had cramped into sick knots. And that was all that mattered to Kitty. You didn’t betray weakness to an enemy. Especially not if he had once put you on an emotional rack and cruelly stretched you until every sinew snapped. That was part of the Colgan code she prided herself on.
Fluidly straightening, he closed the distance between them. His hand reached out and covered the clenched fingers she held against her abdomen. In shock she surveyed that hand, that flesh touching hers in a movement of silently expressed sympathy. This same male had turned on her with derisive distaste six years earlier at her grandfather’s funeral. Instinctively she stepped back, breaking the connection. Hatred that was a hard core of emotion inside her shot through her veins in an adrenalin boost that banished her exhaustion.
‘I saw you driving through the village.’ The well-bred, deep-pitched drawl was curiously clipped, lacking the measured resonance she recalled.
Kitty arched an imperious brow, several shades darker than her pale hair. ‘So?’ she challenged.
Guardedly he studied her. ‘Was it my fault that you didn’t attend her funeral?’
‘Your fault?’ she echoed with a brittle laugh. ‘Still a Tarrant to the backbone, aren’t you? You still have delusions about your own importance. I wasn’t at the funeral, Jake, because I didn’t know about it.’
He dug his lean hands deep into the pockets of his shabby, khaki jacket. ‘I spoke to Maxwell on the phone within hours of her death. At the time I thought you were over in London. You’d been on a talk show.’
‘It was pre-recorded.’
‘I did attempt to contact you personally. Maxwell was extremely unhelpful,’ he informed her with aggressive bite. ‘But I still assumed he’d pass on the message.’
She shrugged. ‘He did…when it suited him. I didn’t realise that it was you who had phoned. I suppose there was no one else,’ she conceded. ‘And I suppose it was a kindly thought, worthy of that well-known streak of Tarrant benevolence towards the less fortunately placed of the community—’
‘I happened to be her closest neighbour,’ he interrupted harshly.
‘For what it’s worth,’ she trailed the word out, ‘thanks.’
He planted a hand roughly against the pillar of the gate, imprisoning her between his long, powerful body and the wall. ‘Look, I didn’t follow you up here to play stooge to the smart-mouth lines!’ he slung.
Delighted to have got a rise out of him, Kitty leant back sinuously against the pillar in taunting relaxation. ‘Exactly why did you follow me up here?’
Shooting her a hard, driven glance, he swung restively away from her. ‘All right, I owe you an apology for what I said at Nat’s funeral.’ His tone was abrasive, quite unapologetic.
She strolled away from the wall to stand at the thorn hedge boundary on the other side of the lane. The scent of him was still in her sensitive nostrils. He smelt of horses and soap and fresh air. Mentally she suppressed the unwelcome awareness. ‘Is there anything else?’ she enquired coldly. ‘I have to call with Gran’s solicitor.’
‘I have the only set of keys for Lower Ridge.’
Her incredulous eyes flew to him. ‘What are you doing with them?’
He looked steadily back at her. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on the place. Not by choice. Your grandmother made me executor of her will.’
Kitty vented a shaken laugh. ‘Oh, really?’
‘I didn’t find out until then that you bought the farm for them. Where they got the money to buy it was a mystery round here for a long time afterwards.’ He absorbed her shuttered, uninterested stare, and his nostrils flared. ‘You know that I want to buy Lower Ridge. The offer is over the market price. Morgan personally checked that out before he passed it on to you.’
‘He took a lot on himself without my instructions,’ she noted cuttingly.
‘You couldn’t get away from that farm fast enough or far enough eight years ago,’ he countered. ‘I can’t see what you’d want with it now.’
The wind blew the floating panels of her black Italian knit cape taut against the full swell of her breasts and the shapely curve of her hips. Stonily she looked at him. ‘No, Rodeo Drive is much more my style. That’s where I belong.’ With bitter relish she threw his own words at her grandfather’s funeral back in his teeth. ‘What right had you to say that to me?’
‘Maybe no right, but it was the truth,’ he stated unflinchingly. ‘What kind of a reception did you expect when you rolled up in your fancy limousine with a pack of reporters baying at your heels? You could have come up here quietly, but you didn’t. You managed to turn a solemn occasion into a riotous publicity stunt.’
Fury spurred her into an emotional response. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t think!’
Meeting his cool, unimpressed gaze, she spun her head away and stared out blindly across the fells, but even with her back turned to him she could feel his disruptive presence as strongly as she could feel the rebellious breeze clawing at her hair.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t got the keys on me, but if you want them…’ he murmured.
‘I want them,’ she said flatly.
‘I’ll go back to Torbeck and pick them up,’ he completed.
‘Good.’ Without warning she turned her head back and intercepted the fierce glitter of gold in his unscreened gaze before he could conceal it. Countless men had looked at Kitty with acquisitive desire over the years. None of them had incited the smallest interest in her. But that instant of weakness on his part filled her with wild exhilaration. Eat your heart out, Jake, she urged inwardly; just look at what you threw away.
His dark skin was stretched taut over his hard bone-structure. ‘My God, Kitty, we used to be friends,’ he condemned in a scathing undertone.
‘Past tense still operative,’ she spelt out.
‘Have you had lunch?’ he asked abruptly, glancing fleetingly at his watch.
‘No, but I suggest you go back to your wife for yours,’ she responded, softly sibilant. ‘That is where you belong.’
He stiffened. Antagonism sizzled in the air. Hot and seething.
‘Liz is dead, Kitty. She died in a car crash almost two years ago.’
A pregnant pause ensued, unbroken by any conventional offer of sympathy. She surveyed him impassively, her ability to control her features absolute. Dead, she’s dead. Kitty didn’t want to think about that. She had never met Liz Tarrant. Liz had managed to live and die without ever finding out how much Kitty Colgan had once hated her for having what she had foolishly believed should have been hers. She had got over that mindless loathing. Why hate the faceless Liz? Jake had married her; Jake had let Kitty down. So he was a widower now, a one-parent family of x number of kids…so what?
In the silence impatience mastered him first. He drove long, supple fingers through the black hair falling over his brow. ‘I’ll meet you up at Lower Ridge in half an hour with the keys.’
She conveyed agreement with a mute nod, watched him spring up into the Land Rover, worn denim closely sheathing his long, straight legs to accentuate the well-honed muscularity of his lean, athletic build. He didn’t need designer clothes to look good. An intensely masculine specimen, Jake was a compellingly handsome man. It galled her that she should still notice the fact.
When he was gone, she got into her car. Her hands were shaking. Weakly she rested her head back, her throat thick and full.
Her grandparents had insisted that she leave school at sixteen, but jobs had been hard to find locally. By then she had already been waiting table the odd evening at the Grange. Sophie had suggested it. Sophie had deliberately put Kitty in her social place for her son’s benefit.
Jake had been at university and he had often brought friends home for the weekend. A new, disturbing dimension had gradually entered their once close friendship, throwing up barriers that hadn’t existed before.
Jake had avoided her. When he had seen her, his reluctance to touch her had been pronounced. Abrupt silences would fall where once dialogue had been easy. A crazy heat that alternately frightened and excited her would electrify the air between them.
Correctly interpreting that sexual tension had made her misinterpret the strength of Jake’s feelings. She had convinced herself that Jake was only waiting for her to grow up and that she didn’t really have to worry about those sophisticated girls with their cut glass accents, who regularly appeared in the passenger seat of his sports car.
Looking back, she recoiled from her adolescent fantasies. She hadn’t even had the social pedigree to qualify as an acceptable girlfriend. Jake had been uncomfortable with her menial employment in his home. He hadn’t said so, though. He had known her grandparents had had a struggle to survive.
Had it been pity that brought him to her home that Christmas Eve with a present for her? An enchanting little silver bracelet, the first piece of jewellery she had ever had. There had been a light in his dark tawny eyes as he had given it to her, a light that had seemed to make nonsense of his casual speech. Her heart had sung like a dawn chorus while her grandfather had turned turkey-red. Letting her accept the gift had practically choked him.
Every New Year’s Eve the Tarrants had held open house for half the county. Jessie had persuaded Martha Colgan that Kitty should sleep over at the Grange as it would be a very late night.
Sophie Tarrant had been in a filthy mood that evening when her husband had failed to put in an appearance. She had continually phoned their London apartment and her anger had split over into sharp attacks on the staff. By then even Kitty had understood that for years Jake’s parents had lived virtually separate lives because of his father’s extra-marital affairs.
Shortly before midnight, a drunken guest had cornered Kitty in the hall and tried to kiss her. Jake had yanked him away, slamming him bruisingly back against the wall. ‘Keep your hands off her!’ he had snarled, scaring the wits out of Kitty and her assailant with an unnecessary degree of violence.
As the guest had slunk off, Jake had spun back to her where she had stood pale and trembling in the shadows of the stairwell. Just as suddenly he had reached for her, his lean, still boyish body hard and hungry against hers, his mouth blindly parting her lips. But she had barely received the tang of the whisky on his breath before he had pushed her away, a dark flush highlighting his cheekbones. ‘I’m not much better than that bastard I just tore off you,’ he had vented in self-disgust. ‘You’re still a kid.’
‘I’m almost eighteen,’ she had argued strickenly.
‘You’re six months off eighteen,’ he had gritted, and when she had attempted instinctively to slide back into his arms his hands had clamped to her wrists. ‘No!’ he had snapped in a near savage undertone. ‘And whose idea was it to bring you in here tonight? There are too many drunks about. You ought to be up in bed.’
Her vehement protests that every hand was needed had been ignored. Jake had been immovable. ‘I haven’t even had anything to eat yet,’ she had complained in humiliated tears. ‘I hope you’re pleased with yourself.’
At some timless stage of the early hours, distant noises still signifying the ongoing party downstairs, Jake had shaken her awake and presented her with a heaped plate of food. It had begun as innocently as a children’s midnight feast. She had sat up in bed eating while Jake had lounged on the foot of it, far from sober as he had mimicked some of his mother’s most important guests with his irreverent ability to pick out what was most ridiculous about them.
A rapt audience, she had got out of bed to put the plate back on the tray. When she had clambered back they had been mysteriously closer. Had that been her doing? His? He had touched her cheek, his hand oddly unsteady.
‘Kiss me,’ she had whispered shyly.
‘I’ll kiss you goodnight,’ he had breathed almost inaudibly. ‘Oh, God, Kitty,’ he had muttered raggedly into her hair on his passage to her readily parted lips. ‘I love you.’
Overwhelmed by his roughened confession, Kitty had pressed herself to him and clung. That first kiss had gone further than either of them intended. For her there had been more pain than pleasure, but that hadn’t mattered to her. Belonging to Jake had been a sufficient source of joy. She had na;auively believed that now there would be no need for him to date other girls. Her grasp of human interplay had been that basic. It had never occurred to her that she was simply satisfying an infinitely less high-flown need in Jake that night.
Only afterwards had she realised that Jake had been more drunk than he had been merely tipsy. She did remember him mumbling something along the lines of, ‘God, what have I done?’ in a dazed mix of shock and self-reproach.
Rousing herself shakily from her unwelcome recollections, Kitty started up her car, winding down the window to let cold air sting her pale cheeks. Both their lives had changed course irrevocably in the weeks that had followed.
Jake’s father had died suddenly, leaving a string of debts. Jake had had to leave university, abandon his training as a veterinary surgeon. He had had no choice. His mother and his sisters had become his responsibility. In the end the estate had still been sold. A financial whiz-kid couldn’t have saved it. She wondered vaguely where they all lived now. Torbeck, he had mentioned. That was a farm higher up the valley, no more than a mile from Lower Ridge across the fields. For the life of her, she couldn’t imagine Jake’s mother living in an ordinary farmhouse.
A rough, pot-holed track climbed steeply to Lower Ridge. A squat, stone-built cottage, backed by tumbledown outhouses came into view. The guttering sagged, the metal windows were badly rusted. In eight years she had not been welcome here. She stared at the cottage. It was lonely, sad. How had she ever believed that she could stay here to write her book? Her subconscious mind had somehow suppressed this unattractive reality.
‘What is with this desire to make a pilgrimage back to your roots?’ Grant had demanded furiously. ‘They’re better left buried and you certainly don’t owe that woman a sentimental journey.’
With sudden resolution, Kitty walked back to her car. But before she could execute her cowardly retreat, a Range Rover came up the lane. Jake sprung out. Clay-coloured Levis and a rough tweed jacket worn with an open-necked shirt had replaced his earlier attire. He had changed his clothes as well as his vehicle.
Dear God, could he be serious about the lunch invitation? A civilised exchange of boring small talk? It seemed he wasn’t quite averse to the legend of Kitty Colgan and the sex-symbol image Grant had worked so hard to create for her. If it hadn’t been so tragic, it would have been hysterically funny.
When a man kissed Kitty, she could plan a grocery list in her head. Her provocative image was a make-believe illusion. She had all the promise on the outside and she couldn’t deliver except for a camera. And here she was standing looking at the cruel bastard responsible for her inadequacy.
He unlocked the front door. ‘It took me longer than I estimated,’ he said wryly. ‘I’d mislaid the keys in a safe place.’
Had he taken more than half an hour? She hadn’t noticed. Time had lost its meaning for her outside the cemetery.
Tawny eyes met hers with merciless directness. ‘Perhaps you’d prefer to be on your own. I don’t want to butt in.’
‘You’re not butting in on anything but memories, and none of them worth the proverbial penny,’ she quipped half under her breath, stilling an impulse to admit that she had lost her fancy to reacquaint herself with her former home.
The wind pushed the door back on its hinges. A steep staircase rose just a step away, the entrance the exact depth of the two doors that opened off it, one on either side.
Kitty pushed down the stiff handle on the parlour door. The three-piece suite was old as the hills but still new in appearance through rare use. It was a room rather pitifully set aside for the exclusive entertainment of guests in a tiny house where there had never been visitors.
She mounted the creaking stairs. The bathroom, put into the box-room when she was thirteen, was a slot above the scullery below. Time had been kind to the walls of her old room, fading the virulent green paint she had hated. The old bookcase was still crammed with childhood favourites, every one of which had originally belonged to a Tarrant child.
Steeling herself, she walked into her grandparents’ room. It was the same. The high bed, the nylon quilt, cracked linoleum complaining beneath her stiletto heels. Jake stood silently behind her, yet she was overpoweringly aware of his proximity and she shied automatically away from his tall, well-built body to pass back down the stairs.
One room remained, the kitchen-cum-dining-room where the day-to-day living had gone on. Despising her over-sensitivity, she thrust open the door. Jake moved past her to open the curtains. Light streamed in over the worn tiles on the floor, picking out the shabbiness of the sparse furniture.
‘I knew you’d come back,’ he said curtly.
She lifted her chin, denying the tension holding her taut. ‘Am I so predictable?’ she asked sweetly.
He dealt her a hard glance. ‘That wasn’t the word I would have used.’
Colouring, she avoided his steady appraisal and forced a determined smile. ‘Nothing here seems to have changed.’
His mouth twisted expressively. ‘Did you think it would have? Did you think it was enough for you to play Lady Bountiful from a safe distance?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she lied.
Black lashes partly obscured his glinting downward scrutiny. ‘Martha can only have cut you dead at Nat’s funeral out of some misguided sense of loyalty to him,’ he spelt out with cruel emphasis. ‘I’m sure she regretted doing it.’
‘She didn’t.’ Her contradiction was immediate.
‘How would you know? You never came back again to find out!’ he dismissed brusquely. ‘Was your pride so great that in six years you couldn’t give her a second chance?’
His biting criticism stabbed into her. No matter what story had been put about by her grandparents, Kitty had been shown the door and firmly told that she was never to return. But there was no point in making a defence that would encourage questions that she couldn’t and wouldn’t answer. Jake would want to know why they had done that.
‘I didn’t fancy being turned from the door and I would have been,’ she said tightly. ‘I wrote to her…I wrote I don’t know how many times and she didn’t reply to one of my letters. Her silence spoke for her. She always was a woman of few words.’
He frowned. ‘You wrote to her?’
‘Didn’t the bush telegraph pick that up as well?’
‘I really did believe that she might have felt differently from Nat.’ His response lacked the acid sarcasm of hers.
Her eyes hardened. ‘Don’t talk about my grandparents as if you knew them. You never knew them on an equal footing. In their eyes you were always a Tarrant, a breed apart, what Gran used to call “our betters”. I doubt you ever had a single real conversation with either of them.’
Anger had paled his complexion. ‘You talk as though we’re living in the nineteenth century.’
‘But we did in this house.’ And in yours, her skimming look of scorn implied.
Although it visibly went against the grain to abandon the argument on class divisions, his mouth remained firmly shut.
‘I guess you’d like to know how I came to buy this place,’ she continued offhandedly. ‘Grandfather came to London and asked me to. He said it was the least of what I owed them.’
Jake quirked a black brow. ‘Do you blame him for his attitude? You ran away and you disappeared into thin air. Almost two years later you popped up in print at a movie premi;agere with Maxwell…’
And it felt good, so good, she affixed inwardly. Diamonds at my throat and a designer gown, the stuff of which dreams are made. ‘I imagine that set the natives back on their heels,’ she mocked.
‘Oh, yes, you were the sole topic of conversation locally for months,’ he agreed tongue in cheek. ‘Talk about rags to riches.’
She gave a little smile. ‘I try not to. Other people find the Cinderella story terribly boring.’
‘Are you casting Maxwell as the fairy godmother or the dashing young prince? Either way he made a pretty sordid match for a nineteen-year-old girl,’ he drawled with a derisive softness that stung. ‘And I still wouldn’t have thought that you had the money to buy this farm at that early stage of your…career.’
Ignoring that insolent hesitation, she shrugged. ‘I didn’t. Grant bought it for me.’ And it would knock you for six if you knew what else his representative bought at the same time, she thought with malicious amusement.
‘How very generous of him.’
‘He’s extremely generous.’ If anything irritated, inconvenienced or demanded, slap a cheque down hard on it. That was how Grant functioned. Unfortunately it usually worked for him. Back then it had worked with Kitty. She had confused generosity with caring. A bad mistake.
Jake’s dark, unfathomable gaze rested on her, ‘You treat me like an enemy.’
‘Do I?’ She produced a laugh worthy of applause. ‘We’re strangers now, Jake.’
He probed the bright smile that sparkled on her lips. ‘I never meant to hurt you, Kitty.’
‘Hurt me?’ she prompted, tilting her head back enquiringly.
He swore in sudden exasperation. ‘For God’s sake, will you drop the Heaven Rothman act? Or has that nymphomaniac superbitch you’ve been playing for so long somehow become you?’ he demanded crushingly. ‘There are no microphones or cameras about. Do you think Kitty could come out of the closet for five minutes?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I ONLY perform for my friends, and you’re not numbered among them.’ Stormily Kitty flung her head back, a line of pink demarcating the exotic slant of her cheekbones. Bitter resentment shuddered through her, fighting to the surface in spite of her efforts to contain it. ‘Since you came into this house your hypocrisy has amazed me! For a start, you didn’t like my grandparents. And at least you had the guts to be honest about that eight years ago. You thought Nat had a chip the size of a boulder on his shoulder. You thought Martha was a sour, cold woman. And you were right…you were right on both counts!’
Jake stood there, effortlessly dominating the cramped confines of the room. Dark and controlled, he murmured, ‘Martha mellowed a good deal after his death.’
‘Not towards me, she didn’t!’
‘You’re upset,’ he drawled flatly. ‘I’ll leave. I shouldn’t have stayed.’
Her hand sent the door crashing shut. ‘No, you won’t leave until I’ve had my say,’ she declared shakily. ‘Why have you decided to rewrite the past? I had the most miserable childhood here and you know it. Once in seventeen years my grandmother put her arms around me. She must have had to hold me to feed me when I was a baby, but I don’t remember it. I remember being a burden, a nuisance and an embarrassment. My grandfather didn’t get the chance to punish my mother, so he punished me instead…’
Her voice broke and she turned to the window, bracing her trembling hands on the dusty sill. ‘I remember it all,’ she muttered, forcing out the harshened syllables very low, ‘as if it were yesterday.’
The profound silence stretched on and on.
‘Why did you come up here?’
Numbly she fought to recapture her poise. ‘I just wanted…to see it.’
‘Well, now you’ve seen it…’
‘Do you have children?’ As soon as the question left her lips, she could have bitten her tongue out. That dangerous explosion of emotion had left her temporarily out of control.
‘A little girl.’ He hesitated. ‘She’s four years old.’
A sudden ache stirred in Kitty’s breasts, violent, unforgiving. But his admission iced back over her seething emotions. Her voice emerged quietly and cleanly. ‘If you don’t mind, I would like to be on my own now.’
‘No problem. I’ve got a lunch date to keep,’ he said curtly.
Her arrogant assumption that he had intended to invite her gave her a sharp pang. Of course she wouldn’t have gone. You didn’t dive when you were bleeding into a river full of crocodiles. All the same, it would have been nice to have been asked so that she could have refused. ‘Who is she?’ she asked lightly.
At the door he paused, his dark scrutiny hooded. ‘You wouldn’t know her. She wasn’t here in your time.’
‘My goodness, but you’re being coy, Jake,’ she purred, and she was Heaven Rothman to her fingertips, poised, indulgently amused.
Long, supple fingers flexed against the door-frame. ‘Her name’s Paula. She’s the nurse in the local practice.’
She smiled. ‘What does she look like?’
A suffocating tension alive with hostile undertones had thickened the atmosphere. A muscle jerked at the corner of his wide, sensual mouth. ‘Are you going to ask if I’ve slept with her as well?’ he slung at her caustically.
He shocked her into silence. Her startled gaze fled his aggressive stare. She looked away from him. In the interim, he walked out of the house, slammed into his car and drove off. She breathed again. Pain was still stabbing through her and she didn’t understand why. Two hours ago she had believed that Jake was married. Now she knew he was unmarried and involved. What was the difference? She couldn’t possibly be jealous. The very idea was laughable after all these years.
With a sigh she slumped down into an armchair. Hunger was making her dizzy. Common sense told her that she was in no fit state to drive. She would bring in the groceries and make herself a sensible snack before she left to find a hotel as far from here as she could get by evening.
He hadn’t said goodbye. But then they’d never said goodbye to each other. Ever. It seemed that habit remained. And without conscious volition Kitty was swept back to the aftermath of that night she had spent in his arms.
She had felt guilty, but she hadn’t felt ashamed… then. Innocently trusting in that confession he had made, she had believed there was no cause for shame where there was love.
It had taken him twenty-four hours to seek her out—a Jake who was a complete stranger to her. A bitter despair and a distaste that had pierced her to the very centre of her being had shown nakedly in his shadowed eyes before he had looked away.
‘What happened between us was very wrong. I wish to God I could wipe it out, but I can’t.’ His intonation had been low and precise, as if he had rehearsed the entire speech beforehand. ‘Your grandparents trusted me and I’ve broken that trust. I’ve got no excuse. I’m five years older and wiser and I should never have touched you.’
‘If you love me, it—’
‘But that’s just the point. I don’t love you in the way a man loves a woman. I care for you deeply as a friend…as a kid sister, if you like,’ he had forced out in harsh interruption.
‘I love you,’ she had whispered, not even able to absorb what he was telling her. It hadn’t seemed real. Nightmares had that quality.
‘It’s an infatuation and it will die,’ he had overruled fiercely. ‘Last night was a mistake, Kitty. I was drunk. That doesn’t excuse me, but that’s the only reason it happened. It wasn’t your fault, it was mine.’ He had stopped to clear his throat. ‘If there should be consequences…’
‘Consequences?’ she had repeated blankly.
‘If you prove to be pregnant,’ he had grated hoarsely, ‘I’ll stand by you, I’ll deal with your grandparents. But I won’t marry you. A marriage between us wouldn’t work. The risk of pregnancy isn’t that great, but if it should happen I promise you that I’ll look after everything. However, the pregnancy will have to be terminated,’ he had concluded harshly.
Three weeks later he had come to her with haunted eyes and gaunt cheekbones. ‘Thank God,’ he had muttered rawly, let off the hook.
He had married Liz quietly in London, the ceremony unattended by any of his family.
They said hearts didn’t break. Kitty’s had. The news of his marriage had shocked everybody, but it had devastated her. It was one thing to humbly accept that he didn’t love her, another thing entirely to accept that he could love and marry someone else. She had lost so much more than a lover. He had been closer to her than her own family. He had been her only real friend. And he had dropped her like a hot potato, retreating with appalled speed from the trap he had seen opening up in front of him. For him that night really had been a disastrous mistake.
He could have let her down more gently. She was convinced Liz hadn’t been in the background then. His own family had known nothing whatsoever about her. But what embittered Kitty most of all was his refusal to admit that he had ever wanted her. A man didn’t make love to a female firmly fixed in his mind as an extra sister. Then, had he employed any other excuse, she might still have harboured hopes. And Jake had been determined to kill even her hopes stone-dead.
Other later memories intruded and she struggled fiercely to close them out…only it didn’t work. She had lied to him when she had told him that she wasn’t expecting his child. Of course she had lied. He had given her no other choice. And ironically, in the end, that lie hadn’t made any difference. A few months later, she had had a miscarriage. Nature’s way, the doctor had said bracingly. For a long time afterwards she had suspected that, had she enjoyed proper medical attention during those crucial early weeks of pregnancy, the outcome might have been very different. She had grieved deeply for that loss, but she had grieved alone.
Grant had said it was for the best, quite unable to understand how she could possibly have wanted the baby after Jake had married Liz. But she had wanted that baby. She had wanted that baby more than she had ever wanted anything either then or since. Slowly she sank back to the present, raising chilled hands to her tear-wet face. Without realising it, she drifted slowly into sleep.
It was pitch-dark when she awoke, freezing cold and stiff. Stumbling up on woozy legs, she fumbled for the light switch. No light came on. The scullery light was equally unresponsive.
‘You idiot,’ she muttered, realising what the problem was. The electricity was off. Indeed, she hadn’t been thinking clearly when she had impulsively planned her stay here.
Luckily her grandmother had been a very methodical woman. The torch still hung above the fridge. Kitty’s watch told her it was nearly ten. It was too late to drive off in search of a hotel. There was food in the car, probably coal or wood in the fuel shed, and she could bring a mattress downstairs to sleep by the fire. She emptied the car and then parked it in the barn out of sight.
With damp matches, she needed perseverance to light a fire. Once she had a promising glow in the grate, she lit the bottled gas cooker and put a now defrosted dish of lasagne into the oven. That done, she located candles in an upper cupboard and switched on the water below the sink. There she came unexpectedly on an unopened bottle of sherry.
By midnight she was sitting cross-legged on top of her makeshift bed, washing back her lasagne with a glass of sherry. Grant would have cringed in fastidious horror from the sight, she conceded ruefully. Already her anger with him was fading. Grant couldn’t help being self-centred, possessive and manipulative.
Eight years ago she had hurled herself into Grant’s arms in a London hotel suite. A frightened and lost teenager, she had been perilously close to a nervous breakdown. The responsibility must have horrified him, but Grant hadn’t been the star of a dozen box-office hits on the strength of looks alone. He had hidden his feelings well. If Grant had rejected her, she would have thrown herself in the Thames. She had had too many rejections to bear one more.
His greatest pleasure had been the successful stage-management of her career. Grant loved to play God. He had made her over from outside in before sending her to drama school in New York. That first year had been a chaotic whirl of new experiences and some truly terrifying ordeals.
The fire was making her uncomfortably warm. Getting up, she removed a silk nightshirt from her case and undressed, ruefully wondering how long it would take her to get to sleep. Insomnia had been her most pressing problem of late. Ironically, it was also what was responsible for the short story she had written and had published in a magazine the previous year. She had sat up scribbling until exhaustion had taken its toll.
As she poured herself another sherry, she tried to concentrate on the intricate plot of the thriller she was planning. It shouldn’t have been difficult. She had been dreaming about the book for months, impatient to sit down and write without distractions.
A faint noise jerked her head up from her notepad. Her eyes dilated, a stifled gasp of fear fleeing her lips. A large dark shape had filled the scullery doorway.
‘I don’t believe this.’ Jake strode into the flickering shadows of mingled fire and candlelight. He towered over Kitty like a dark avenging angel. ‘I could see the light from the road. I thought someone had broken in.’
Behind her breastbone, her heart was still involved in terrified palpitations. ‘How did you get in? The doors are both bolted!’
‘There probably isn’t a catch on a window in this entire house that’s secure. I climbed in through the scullery window,’ he supplied grimly.
‘You can go out by the front door. I’m feeling even less hospitable than I felt this afternoon,’ she flared. ‘You frightened me out of my wits!’
‘Be glad it was me and not a real intruder. God, you can’t be planning to stay here tonight!’ Taking in the evidence around him, he glowered down at her. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Why don’t you go down the road and ask all your other neighbours what they’re doing in their houses after midnight?’ she returned angrily. ‘You’ve got no right to walk in here.’
He bent his dark, arrogant head to avoid the shade on the central light above. ‘I had no idea that you were here,’ he growled. ‘No idea at all.’
‘Well, now that you’ve established that I’m not a gang of bikers in search of a new clubhouse, you are free to go.’ Pointedly she sipped at her drink.
Long fingers coiled round the bottle. He gave it a cursory inspection, his mouth hardening. He straightened, sending her a savage look. ‘You’ve picked up some bad habits since you left home.’
‘You’ll be relieved to know that one of them isn’t inviting strange men to join me for a drink. Now will you get out of here?’ Her voice rose steeply on the demand.
Jake lowered himself smoothly down into the chair at the foot of the mattress and crossed one booted ankle across his knee, stretching back in a relaxed pose that set her teeth on edge.
Incensed she got up on her knees. ‘Did you hear what I said?’
The firelight glistened on the magenta silk shirt that came no lower than her shapely thighs, the thin fabric moulding the tip-tilted swell of her breasts. As she registered where those dark, intent eyes were resting without apology, her face burned. She sat back again, alarm bells ringing in her head.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked again.
A sinuous, silk-clad shoulder shifted. ‘Maybe I’m too lazy to shift to a hotel.’
‘I’d have thought that comfort would have persuaded you to choose more suitable accommodation.’ Cool, shrewd eyes studied her unreadably. ‘What are you planning on doing now that you’re out of The Rothmans?’
‘If I’m out, I’m out by choice,’ she snapped, flicked on the raw by his choice of words.
‘As I understand it, Maxwell told you that if he had anything to do with it you wouldn’t work ever again,’ Jake reminded her with a calm that mocked her own loss of temper.
Her chin came up in a defensive thrust. ‘I wanted some time off. I haven’t had many holidays since you last saw me.’
‘This is a peculiar location for a holiday.’
‘Each to their own.’ It was none of his business that she would be leaving again in the morning.
‘Why the beat-up car?’ he enquired idly.
She gave him a superior glance. ‘It’s camouflage. That’s all.’
‘As camouflage it’s a little excessive.’
‘Maybe I’m broke,’ she parried with sarcastic bite. ‘And this is the only place that I’ve got to go. Bring on the violins.’
The aggressive gleam in her eyes challenged him, letting him see just how much she resented his questions. His level gaze narrowed, faint colour aligning his hard cheekbones. As she had meant to, she had embarrassed him with her nonsensical response. For of course it was ridiculous. She had to resist a cringingly uncouth urge to tell him exactly what she was worth.
He rested his dark head back. ‘It isn’t healthy to drown your sorrows alone,’ he drawled softly.
She arched a brow. ‘I do unhealthy things all the time. They’re usually the most fun.’
He loosed his breath audibly. ‘Heaven sounds pretty painful at this time of night, Kitty. Does Maxwell know where you are?’
‘He knew I was heading north.’
‘I assume that you have split up with him.’
She let sherry moisten her throat. ‘You’re free to assume whatever you like. Grant and I have this unbreakable rule. We don’t discuss each other with anybody. That’s one of the reasons why there’s so much rubbish in the papers. What can’t be got through a legitimate interview is invented.’
‘You don’t say. Was the extraordinary revelation of the separate bedrooms made up?’ Jake prompted silkily. ‘Taking out the obvious exaggerations—I mean, I can’t believe that you entertained his women, but I can believe that you bought his ties—well, in short it’s obvious that the affair’s been dead on his side for a very long time. So why were you still in residence?’
She stroked a forefinger over the open-weave blanket she was sitting on. ‘So you read the papers. I suppose it was too much to hope that you wouldn’t try to satisfy your curiosity at source.’
‘Fascination would be a more apt tag for my feelings. Some of the bits relating to Maxwell were quite hilariously entertaining. But there were other parts next door to tragic,’ he murmured bleakly. ‘If he’s finally chucked you out the door, he’s done you a favour.’
‘What would you know about it?’ she exploded. ‘You know nothing about my life with Grant. Nothing!’
He stared steadily back at her. ‘You can’t tell me that you’ve been happy with a man who’s been running round with other women ever since you met him.’
Her delicate profile tensed. She gazed into the fire. All over again she was hearing Grant’s raging and bitter accusations of ingratitude. She had turned down the surprise part he had offered her in his film, reiterating her ambition to become a writer. His fury had been perfectly understandable. He had taught her, encouraged her, pushed her hard when she would have dropped back. Everything she was today, she owed to him.
But Grant had still failed to give her the one thing that she really wanted from him. And that wasn’t the adrenalin thrill of public recognition, the use of his luxurious homes or even the thousand and one costly gifts he continually pressed on her. It was a father’s love she had wanted, not what that same father could give her in material terms.
Suddenly tears flooded her shadowed eyes. Perhaps it wasn’t her father’s fault, perhaps it was hers. There had to be some element lacking in her. The people she loved never loved her back. Grant had pulled the same rug from under her feet all over again.
‘Kitty—’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, go away and leave me alone!’ she gasped, despising her self-pitying mood. ‘You’ve had your superior little say and now you can get out!’
With a sound of impatience he folded forward, settling down on the edge of the mattress to slant an arm round her hunched-up figure. ‘I didn’t intend to sound superior—’
‘Didn’t you?’ she interrupted accusingly.
He sighed. ‘God knows I don’t receive any satisfaction from seeing you like this. I just don’t think you should be on your own right now.’
The weight and warmth of his arm had shocked her into defensive rigidity, but as he plucked her glass away her overbright eyes flamed. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘I believe you’ve had enough.’ Long fingers speedily enclosed her wrist, preventing her from retrieving the glass. ‘Booze will only make you more depressed.’
At his peremptory bidding her hand had automatically withdrawn again. It infuriated her to appreciate that the habit of doing as Jake told her could have survived the years to exercise that influence. ‘Two small glasses of sherry isn’t boozing and I’m not depressed,’ she rebutted stridently.
‘No?’ he queried.
‘No! I’ve just had a rough couple of days.’
As he belatedly released her wrist he balanced his other hand on her shoulder. His touch remained, branding her sensitive skin. Bemusedly stilled by his disturbing nearness, she felt her breath tickle in her throat, her mind a sluggish mass of half-formed thoughts. As she glanced up, dimly wondering what was the matter with her, she connected with black-lashed golden eyes and a sliding sensation pulled at the pit of her stomach. Silence buzzed, broken only by the crackle of the fire. The pink tip of her tongue delved out to moisten the dryness of her lower lip.
Jake groaned, muttered something ferocious under his breath. His dark, hard features clenched, his glittering gaze burning over her upturned face. Something stronger and older and infinitely more powerful than she was held her utterly still as long fingers twined into her hair and his dark head bent.
His hand settled impatiently on her spine, tipping her back. His mouth parted hers with a hot, hard urgency that sent sensation coursing through her in wild, primitive response. His tongue thrust a demanding passage between her lips and her head spun. He was above her and then he lowered his long, hard-boned frame, his unmistakable maleness as he shuddered against her yielding curves, making her blood race and throb through her veins in delight. Suddenly her arms were closing round him in collusion and acceptance.
As he slid on to his side, he carried her with him. He continued to hungrily probe her mouth, his hand curving over her breast to invoke an electrifying excitement that dragged a sharp little cry unawares from her throat.
The old mantel clock high above wheezed and rang out a tinny stroke of one. Instantly both of them froze. Jake lifted away without warning, sinking back on his heels, his breathing thick and fast as he studied her with smouldering charcoal eyes.
Sitting up, Kitty gave herself a faint shake, smoothing down the rumpled shirt, abysmally conscious of the betraying peaks of her breasts and the shocking unsteadiness of her hands. Yet, even flushed and tumbled, she managed to look like an exotic little cat, grooming herself with controlled cool.
‘The line you’re looking for is, “God, what have I done?”’ Never had Kitty’s ready tongue come more welcomely to her rescue than in that intense, lacerating silence.
‘Why the hell did you have to come back?’ he demanded with a raw, unexpected violence that made her flinch, flat savagery in his eyes.
An antipathy as potent as the passion they had shared had sprung up with equal suddenness.
‘I should keep this from Paula. Women are notoriously unforgiving creatures,’ Kitty hissed back at him.
Colour seared his blunt cheekbones, accentuating eyes still brilliant with unsettled emotions. ‘I was actually worried about you,’ he derided with a curled lip.
‘And just think, you don’t even have a teeny glass of sherry to use as an excuse for your lapse.’ She ignored the arrow of pain that that stinging taunt drove into her own heart.
He went white. ‘You poisonous little bitch,’ he bit out. ‘If you think that I’ve ever forgotten that night, you’re wrong. It’s never left me.’
But it had not marked him as it had marked her. He had had a wife, a child and now he was back inside another relationship. Where were his scars? They didn’t exist. Her head bent, silk-fine hair shimmering forward to hide her pinched profile. Dear heaven, why hadn’t she felt physically ill when he had touched her?
‘Go away,’ she whispered.
‘That is an invitation I don’t need.’ The door thudded on his exit.
She didn’t hear a car start up. But then she hadn’t heard one arriving. He must have walked up from the road, planning to take the intruder by surprise. Last of the macho heroes! Her bitter humour was short-lived. How could she respond to Jake when she couldn’t respond to other men? Admittedly the latter situation had risen very rarely to be tested. Jake had burnt her so badly that she had shrunk from putting her hand in the fire again. Was that why she had stayed with Grant for so long? Had she been sheltering her own inadequacy? Was it really fair of her to have accused her father of using her?
When she had moved into the town house, it had never occurred to her that the world would assume she was Grant’s mistress. She had honestly believed that, once she was presentable, Grant would be prepared to acknowledge their relationship openly. But Grant would never own up to fatherhood. He was extremely sensitive about his age, even more self-aware of his pin-up status. That he was closer to the half-century mark than forty was almost as big a secret as his possession of a twenty-five-year-old daughter.
And Kitty had become his defensive shield against persistent women. Kitty, though he had vehemently denied the accusation, was his excuse when one of his light-hearted affairs became too heavy. For so long all her energy had gone into her career. If she had been in no hurry to test herself out as an unattached woman, a large part of it had been lack of interest and the suspicion that she was frigid.
Frigid, she echoed dismally, shamed heat slinking through her in waves. Neither repulsion nor inhibition had attacked her in Jake’s arms. Was she some kind of masochist? Where had that absolutely terrifying response come from? In all this time she had never forgotten the humiliation and shame that Jake’s rejection had once taught her, forever afterwards making her repress her sexuality. She had feared an involvement with another man. She had to face that truth now.
Feeling intensely vulnerable, she curled up in a tight ball. Jake had hurt her savagely and those wounds were still raw. Drowsiness was overcoming her heavily. He was right, she allowed on her last coherent thought, I am depressed.
* * *
The aroma of coffee was in the air when she awakened. China rattled and she came bolt upright, clutching a quilt she didn’t remember bringing downstairs. Her mattress had moved during the night as well. It was now several feet away from the fire. But what made those puzzling developments absolutely unimportant was the sight of Jake emerging from the scullery bearing two cups.
‘What on earth…?’ she began incredulously.
‘I was worried about you. I came back.’ He set one of the cups down beside her on the floor and straightened lithely again to carry his own to his hard-set mouth.
Dark stubble shadowed his strong jawline. A half-unbuttoned shirt revealed a strip of tawny skin and a crisp sprinkling of black chest hair. Never had she been more achingly, agonisingly conscious of his disruptive sexuality. Some natural barrier had tumbled down since last night. Her pulses were racing in an atmosphere that suddenly felt unbearably claustrophobic.
‘What time is it?’ Disorientated, she had to say it twice to get it out and she studied the quilt, not even sure what day of the week it was.
‘Half-eight.’
She pushed a hand through her hair. ‘What’s going on?’
‘You were sleeping like the dead when I came back,’ he asserted abrasively.
‘Is there something wrong with sleeping in the middle of the night?’ she muttered, seeking the cup with a blind hand. Her mouth was dry as a bone.
He released his breath in a sudden hiss. ‘You should have woken up when I came back. You didn’t. You obviously carried on drinking after I left.’
That did penetrate her mental fog. Her head flew up. ‘I what?’
‘You heard me. You were dead to the world.’ Fierce anger laced each harsh syllable.
‘Why don’t you take your assumptions somewhere where they’ll be less offensive?’ she snapped, equally angry. ‘I didn’t have anything more to drink!’
A dubious dark brow elevated. ‘No?’
She flung him an infuriated stare. ‘No!’ she repeated. ‘Do you have any idea how long it is since I had a decent night’s sleep? I was exhausted last night. I fell asleep within minutes of your departure.’
Dark eyes aimed a derisive and renewed challenge. ‘You can still be grateful that I did come back. You left the candles burning. Didn’t you realise that the electricity was only switched off at the meter? You didn’t even put a guard up on that fire,’ he informed her grimly. ‘This house has wood partition walls. You’re fortunate it wasn’t your funeral pyre last night!’
Pale now, she hunched under the quilt, her hands cupped round the coffee. ‘I’m not normally so careless, but if you’re looking for gratitude, you’re in the wrong place. Nobody asked you to interfere. How long have you been here?’
‘Since about three,’ he admitted shortly. ‘I didn’t like to leave you again until I was sure you were all right.’
Pinned to her mattress, sluggish and dishevelled, she felt grossly disadvantaged. ‘Have you turned nocturnal?’ she enquired. ‘Won’t someone have missed you?’
‘Sophie’s used to my being out at night.’
Really? He stayed overnight with Paula, did he? Times must have changed in Mirsby. You’d have been a scarlet woman the length and the breadth of the neighbourhood if you had behaved like that when Kitty had lived here. Hating him, she let coffee scald her tongue. Why wouldn’t he leave her alone? Yesterday had been a truly ghastly day and Jake had clogged up far too much of it.
‘Throw on some clothes. I’ll take you home for breakfast. A neighbourly act,’ he specified drily.
She nearly choked on her coffee. ‘Breakfast?’
Abruptly he dropped down on a level with her. ‘I’ve had enough drama in the last twenty-four hours to last me into the next century,’ he warned abrasively. ‘I also have a suggestion I want to put to you.’
‘Keep it. Keep breakfast as well,’ she advised, bending her head to evade a collision with rich, dark eyes far too close for comfort.
‘Is it so hard for you even to be civil to me?’ he raked, low and rough.
Her eyes closed. Every minute she spent in his radius heightened her inner turmoil. It would not be long before he questioned the depth of her bitter sensitivity to an episode he had firmly set behind him under the forgivable heading of misspent youth. She was terrified of exposing her vulnerability to that extent. But she would never be able to forgive him for the impossible choice he had once laid before her. How could she forget the agony of losing her baby?
Her eyelids smarted with sudden stinging moisture. That was a period of her life that she did not want to recall in his presence. It made her too vulnerable.
Jake expelled his breath, searching the drawn tension of her shielded profile. ‘Look, I can understand that you feel pretty raw right now, but I’m not the enemy.’
With a shaken sound of disagreement, she pushed back the quilt. ‘Give me ten minutes.’
CHAPTER THREE
UP IN the bathroom Kitty shivered as she washed and tugged clothes on clumsily over goose-fleshed limbs. If she had one personal hate, it was a bathroom like a fridge. She combed her hair, grateful for the excellence of a cut that made the long, gleaming strands fall smoothly back into style. She rubbed her cheeks, saw some pink appear.
Downstairs again, she looked round the empty room thoughtfully. She could be comfortable enough here. She had hot and cold running water and the means to eat and keep warm. She wasn’t so soft that she had to have the luxuries. As she tossed her toiletries bag back into her case, she noticed the phone sitting on one of the chairs tucked under the table and she smiled. Now that was a necessity.
She climbed into the Range Rover, slim and bright in her black jeans and a red sweater, worn under a soft leather jerkin. His cloaked gaze whipped over her, leaving her feeling curiously self-conscious.
‘When did Gran get the phone in?’ she asked.
‘I persuaded her to get it in after your grandfather died,’ Jake answered, filtering the vehicle slowly down the lane to avoid the deepest pot-holes. ‘I’m fairly certain she never used it, but it gave her a feeling of security.’
Kitty had stiffened. ‘Something else I need to thank you for?’
‘I don’t want your thanks,’ he parried flatly. ‘To get down to my suggestion—I think you ought to stay up at Torbeck for a few days.’
In sharp disconcertion she turned to look at him. ‘At your farm?’
His hard-set profile was impassive. ‘As I understood it, you’ve nowhere else to go until you get yourself sorted out.’
She stole a startled glance at him under her lashes, oxygen trapped in her convulsed throat. Dear heaven, had he taken her derisive plea of poverty seriously last night? Only a spendthrift fool could have been broke after the well-paid employment she had enjoyed. Too late she recalled how the Press had lovingly interpreted Grant’s roared assurance that without him she wouldn’t have a penny to bless herself with. Furthermore, Jake had two sisters and a mother, who had reputedly run up debts everywhere locally before he had been able to convince them that they could no longer afford the costly extras they had once taken for granted. Jake had no experience of women possessed of financial common sense.
Carefully she breathed in, oddly reluctant to subject him to the full absurdity of his misapprehension. ‘You know, I was joking last night. I’m not suffering from a cash-flow problem, Jake.’
He interrupted her drily, paying no heed to her firmly voiced assurance. ‘Possibly the invitation didn’t come out quite as I intended, but it was well meant. You need peace and privacy right now. It’s available at Torbeck. Sophie spends half her day in bed and the other half down at Merrill’s. You’re welcome to take up the offer. There are no strings attached to it, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘No, that wasn’t what—’
‘I won’t touch you again. Neither of us really knew what we were doing last night,’ he cut in grimly.
‘Speak for yourself.’ Did he have a whole list of excuses? she wondered in disgust. I was drunk; I didn’t know what I was doing. Did maniacal passion resulting in temporary insanity only strike him in her radius?
Something far from cold had leapt into his incisive gaze. ‘You mean it didn’t matter who it was? Any port in a storm?’
Tempted to slap the unpleasant smile off his darkly handsome features, she curled her fingers tightly into her palm. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’m not a sailor.’
‘You’re right there,’ he conceded smoothly. ‘You were drowning last night.’
The muscles in her stomach contracted sickly. Had he noticed something surprisingly inexperienced in her response? Determined not to show her shrinking discomfiture over the suspicion, she breathed mockingly, ‘Did that give you a buzz? I like men. Do you have a problem with that, Jake? Human sexual response is all about pressing the right buttons, and you’re not exactly without virtuosity in the field, are you?’ Warming up, she let a languorous smile form on her lips. ‘Surely you’re not complaining because I enjoyed the demonstration?’
A white tension had hardened his jawline. ‘You sound like a tramp.’
‘No, you don’t like women who enjoy it. Do I make you feel threatened in some way?’ Kitty dealt him a condescendingly interested appraisal from beneath her curling lashes. ‘Do you need the pretence of fumbling innocence to turn you on? Is that what Paula—’
The Range Rover suddenly shot to a bone-jolting emergency stop. Snaking out both his hands, he yanked her forward. Wide-eyed and pale, she stared up at him. Rage burned in his blazing dark scrutiny. His hand rested with whiplash accuracy against her slender throat. ‘Leave Paula out of this. One more word and, so help me God, Kitty, I’ll…’
‘You’ll what?’ Shaken by the tenor of her own cheap taunts, she was trembling. But on a secret level a hand-in-the fire exhilaration had gripped her to power her through her verbal assault on his masculinity.
Abruptly his hands left her. ‘That is one bait I won’t bite. No games, Kitty. I warn you,’ he gritted.
Sliding back, she jerked a shoulder, mutinously silent. At least her scornful attack had obliterated any unfortunate impression she might have left behind. Woodenly she stared out of the windscreen. Games? That was his department. Or it had been eight years ago. Stop it…stop it, a voice shrieked inside her head. Eight years ago, Kitty. Eight years ago.
Brown fingers drummed a soundless tattoo on the wheel. Without looking at him, she could tell that he was shaken up as well. The vibrations in the air were suffocating. ‘We don’t have to be at each other’s throats. I want to be a friend. That is all,’ he said roughly.
‘Don’t put your hand on a Bible and say it if you’re hoping to get through the Pearly Gates unchallenged.’
He bit out a humourless laugh. ‘You’ve got no make-up on and you ought to look like hell after the last week, but you’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. Is that what your ego needs to hear from me?’ he demanded scathingly. ‘Is that what you wanted last night? You don’t need that confirmation from me or anybody else.’
Unmovingly she watched him, her oval face clean of all expression. Her looks had brought her more disillusionment than happiness. Beauty had been a necessary passport into her father’s superficial affections. It had been her possibilities, not her personality which had persuaded Grant to take her under his wing.
And if she hadn’t been beautiful, Jake would have left her alone. At seventeen she had been defenceless. He had not even needed to lie about loving her to have his careless hour of satisfaction. There was nothing she would have denied him then. The knowledge made her stomach clench.
‘Will you stay at Torbeck?’ he prompted impatiently.
For a malicious second she savoured the prospect of his mother’s horror should she be saddled with her as a houseguest. Paula wouldn’t like it too much either. As quickly as she pictured the havoc she could wreak, she discarded the unattractive vision.
‘I’m going to stay at Lower Ridge,’ she told him flatly.
In the act of moving on the Range Rover, he stopped, his dark head whipping back to her in shock. ‘You can’t be serious!’ he said forcefully. ‘The house is falling down. The wiring’s dangerous.’
‘The house has stood for many years. I doubt if it will burn, blow up or collapse round my ears in the space of a few months,’ she scoffed.
‘A few months?’ he ejaculated. ‘Why the hell would you stay that long?’
‘I have plans which don’t entail returning to my career as an actress.’ Angrily she surveyed him, pushing up her chin in unconscious challenge. ‘I’m planning to write a book.’
A derisive incredulity slashed his taut features. ‘On the men you have known? You’d be wiser keeping your mouth shut.’
He didn’t remember the stories she used to scribble in her teens. He didn’t remember a dream she had been too shy to share with anyone but him. ‘Don’t worry, Jake. You won’t even get a footnote.’
Simmering with pain and indignation, she dug her shaky hands into her pockets.
In the charged silence he grated, ‘I’ll buy the farm from you. The money can be raised fast. You don’t need to hang around up here.’
‘No, thanks. You don’t like the idea of me as a neighbour much, do you?’
His teeth glimmered white against bronzed skin and it absently occurred to her that not even prolonged outdoor exposure to the elements had given him that depth of a tan in a Yorkshire winter. ‘How do you expect me to feel about it?’
Her violet-blue eyes stayed steady. ‘I don’t expect you to feel anything.’
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