The Return of the Stranger
Kate Walker
Standing high on the windswept moors, the lone figure of Heath Montanha vows vengeance on the woman who destroyed the last fragments of his heart…Lady Katherine Charlton has never forgotten the stable hand with dangerous fists and a troubled heart from her childhood. Now the rebel is back, his powerful anger concealed under a polished and commanding veneer.When ten years of scandal and secrets are unleashed, with a passionate, furious kiss, Heath’s deepest, darkest wish crystallizes: revenge—and Kathy—will be his!
He could have her now. Kiss her into submission, take her up against the dark, dirty wall of this neglected hallway, and he would swear that she wouldn’t even fight him.
And he would have gone that way once. In his youth he wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Young and wild, he had operated only on instinct, on hunger, on need. But Katherine Charlton was a very different matter.
He had sensed that hunger in her kiss. In the tiny whimper she had made under his mouth, the way her body had melted against him. And he hadn’t even touched her. But one day he would. One day she would leave all her pride in the dust and she would beg for his touch. And the waiting, the anticipation, would only make the fulfilment all the more delicious, more satisfying.
He could wait. And enjoy that anticipation.
Dear Reader
You’ll see the book is partly dedicated to a Mr Grogan, who first introduced me to the story of Wuthering Heights. I was just ten years old, and living just down the road from where the Brontë sisters grew up. One day, to distract us from the heavy storms outside, our teacher started to read us Wuthering Heights. We only ever heard the start of the story—up to the moment when Heathcliff turned his back on Cathy and walked away to make his fortune—so I didn’t know what happened until I found a copy on my mother’s bookshelves and found myself caught up in the story.
I had always hoped that Wuthering Heights would have a happy-ever-after for Cathy and Heathcliff. But even from the start I had somehow known that that wasn’t going to be—that, whatever else it was, Wuthering Heights wasn’t really a love story but a story about passion and possession. So when I was asked to rework Wuthering Heights I could take the wild, strong-willed Cathy and the dark, brooding, dangerous Heathcliff and let them learn about love, so as to give them give them the happy ending Emily Brontë's original story could never have had.
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was a vital part my life right from that day in my childhood, and I still reread the book at least once a year, so writing THE RETURN OF THE STRANGER was a dream come true for me. I’ve loved reworking this classic story, and I hope you’ll love the result when you read it.
Kate Walker
http://www.kate-walker.com
The Return of the Stranger
Kate Walker
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For my junior school teacher, Mr Grogan, who first told me the story of Wuthering Heights, and for Michelle Styles, who always believed. (Not forgetting Heathcliff the Cat!)
CHAPTER ONE
HE WAS back.
Heath stood on the moorland rise that was positioned almost exactly halfway between the two houses that had shaped his life in the past. Up above him, high on the steep hill, was the big old-fashioned stone building known as High Farm. Neglected now, and desperately in need of repair, the window frames crumbling, the garden overgrown, it looked bleak and unwelcoming as the winds lashed the trees behind it. Further down in the valley was the Grange, elegant, well cared for, with sweeping lawns, a flourishing rose garden and there, at the side of the big golden-stoned house, the glint of blue where the swimming pool gleamed in the sunlight.
One of these houses had been the place he had grown up in but had never truly been able to call home. He had spent most of his childhood and adolescence there but he had never belonged. Always been on the outside. And once the man who had brought him there had died, any trace of warmth or ‘family’ had vanished with him.
The other house he’d been totally excluded from. Not even allowed through the door, never mind into any of the elegant, expensively decorated rooms. Just once he’d crossed the threshold, getting as far as the hall and that was as far as he’d managed. That time he had been ejected with a hand on the collar of his shirt, a knee in his back, thrown out onto the rain-soaked gravel driveway, landing on his face with such force that he had been picking bits of stone out of the grazes for days to come.
He was back but there was no way that he was home.
‘Home! Hah!’
He kicked a pebble out of his way, watched it bounce along the path then fall into a rough patch of grass. This had never been his home even when he had thought, had hoped that it was. Ten years before, a penniless adolescent, he had turned his back on it without a second thought, driven out by one last betrayal, one last rejection, that had been more than he could take. Heading out into a night so vile it had seemed as if all the devils in hell were howling in the wind that whirled across the moor, and the icy rain had almost blinded him as it swept into his eyes, plastered his hair to his skull.
With only the clothes he stood up in and his paltry savings in his pocket, the amount so small that he would now think more than twice about even tossing it into a beggar’s collection pot, he had vowed that one day he would be back. That one day he would return. But not until he had the status, the wealth, the power, that meant that neither the Nicholls family nor the Charltons would ever be able to make a move against him again.
It had taken him ten years, but now he was ready. They said that revenge was a dish best served cold and in those years he had had time to become as cold as ice, and more than ready to make a meal of his vengeance. Already things were set in place, he had played the first card, moved the first domino that would soon have his enemies’ every last defence crashing down to the ground.
Once again the blustering wind fretted at his hair, blasting it across his frowning forehead and into his narrowed eyes. As he pushed it back he felt the ridge of the scar that ran along his cheekbone, smiling grimly as he recalled just who had put it there and why.
Before the week was out, Joseph Nicholls would regret that blow—and many more.
And Joseph’s sister? What about Kat?
‘Katherine …’
Thinking of her had been a mistake. He found that he was shaking his head roughly in an attempt to drive away the memories that simply thinking of her had dragged up from the dark chambers of his mind. Chambers where he had thought that he had buried them for good.
He had things to do; plans to put into action. And he was not about to let the memory of the girl—the woman now—who had once taken what little was left of his heart and trampled it under her feet distract him from his purpose now that his aim was almost achieved. He would see her later of course. How could he come back to Hawden and not come face to face with her? He could never leave without exorcising the bitter legacy she had left him with, the scars that went deeper than the ones on his body, on his face that her brother and her husband had put there.
He would have to see her one last time before he left Hawden Valley for good. But he had other things to do first. Other memories to erase, cruelties and injustices to avenge. He was ready to show the families who had treated him as less than the dirt beneath their feet that they no longer had any power over him. Instead, he was now the one with all the control in his hands.
Katherine Nicholls—Katherine Charlton—could wait a while longer. He had to see her to close the door on what had once been between them and know that everything was now behind him. That would be the last thing he had to do before he could shake the dirt of Hawden from his feet. One look and then he could walk away for good.
‘There is someone to see you, Mrs Charlton.’
Kat’s attention was on the papers in front of her so that she didn’t look up in response to Ellen’s arrival in the room, only frowning her confusion when the housekeeper paused inside the door with her announcement. She hadn’t heard the bell, or a knock at the door, so this hesitation, rather than going ahead and telling her just who had called, was puzzling. As was the strictly formal, ‘Mrs Charlton'. The housekeeper usually just called her Kat.
Of course when Arthur had been alive, it had been different. He had always insisted on the strict formality that he had been brought up with. But Arthur had been gone for almost a year now, and the regime he had imposed had been one of the first things that Kat had got rid of as soon as she possibly could.
‘Who is it, Ellen?’
‘He said to say someone from London,’ Ellen said and her tone alerted Kat to the fact that this was not just any ‘someone'.
But then she remembered just who was supposed to be arriving here today, and everything fell into place. Nothing had been the same around here for months now. Not since Arthur’s untimely death and the awful discoveries that had been made in the aftermath of that event. And today was the day when she found out just where she stood. If she stood at all and wasn’t lying flat on her face.
‘Show them in, Ellen.’
She knew her tension showed in her voice. This was Arthur’s solicitor after all, the person who held the details of their futures in her hands. And Ellen’s future was tied up with the place every bit as much as Kat’s own, as was the future of so many of the workers on the estate. So many more people who had been let down by her husband. That was one of the reasons why today was so important.
Her attention had drifted back to the papers on the table in front of her as she heard Ellen’s footsteps cross the hall. If it was the solicitor then she really hoped there was going to be some good news. Something she could hope to work with. Some way out of all the worry and the uncertainty that she had lived with over the past few months. So many people depended on her, and she would really love to be able to help them.
The extent of the problems Arthur had left her with had made her mind spin. The gambling and other sordid ways he had spent his money had been bad enough, but the full details of appalling business debts that had followed one after another, like a row of dominoes falling, the foreign names, this one huge corporation—the Itabira Corporation in South America—involved in the financial dealings, had left her reeling. But one thing was clear. Her late husband had ruined the estate, spending every last penny they possessed on the secret life he had been hiding from her ever since they had married—even before then, she admitted. The truth was that she had never known Arthur Charlton at all.
The man she had married—the man she had thought she was marrying—had never existed. If she had even suspected half of what she now knew about him she would never have considered his proposal.
If their visitor was the solicitor, then she had had a sex change, she realised, as the footsteps that came back across the hall were much heavier and more forceful than Ellen’s had been. Definitely male. And definitely some male who put his feet down, as her grandmother had used to say, like ready money. Hard and firm and strongly in control.
Behind her the footsteps had come to a halt. The sudden silence told her that her visitor was close, standing in the doorway. But before she could look up a voice spoke and the sound of it sent her world into a violent, dizzying spin.
‘Hello, Kat.’
That voice …
Her mind failed her, refusing to complete the sentence. The words wouldn’t form inside her head. There was no way it could be him.
‘Heath?’
The word whispered from her mouth, the papers falling from her hands and onto the table as she forced herself to look up, to look towards the doorway. The man she saw there had an impact on her senses that made her whole world, her sense of reality, rock dangerously on its axis.
Hello, Kat. When she had thought that she would never, ever hear that voice again, it was almost as if he had come back from the dead and had walked into the room in some disturbing ghostly form. Back to haunt her present as he had her past.
‘Heath!’
It was Heath. The same and yet not the same at all. This was a bigger man, leaner, more muscled, stronger, darker. So different and yet so much the same. The wild boy he had been, the youth with lightning in his eyes, danger in his fists, and trouble in his heart, was still there. She could see him still in those molten ebony eyes. But the untamed, unkempt boy was now hidden, concealed under a more forceful, powerful, more polished veneer. A gorgeously sophisticated, polished veneer. A forcefully male, stunningly sexy appearance.
This man stood tall and sleek, once wild jet-dark hair tamed into an elegant crop. The long, whipcord-lean body was sheathed in a superbly tailored steel-grey suit that hugged the contours of his powerful frame, clung to a narrow waist and long muscular legs that were now planted firmly on the soft surface of the cream and blue carpet, handmade leather boots gleaming black against the pastel colours. An immaculate white shirt heightened the darkness of his complexion, the tan that could only have been acquired from a long time—from life—in a country that had a much warmer climate than the Yorkshire moors. Around his shoulders hung a tailored black raincoat, unbuttoned and long, that made her think of some long-ago highwayman come to the door, pistols in his hand, ready to demand a ransom or that she hand over her jewellery. And—was that an earring that sparkled against the olive skin of one ear lobe? A brilliant, deep green emerald that winked in what little light there was from the window. An ornament as fantastic and unexpected—and as exotically beautiful—as the man who stood before her. ‘It really is you.’
Once she would have been so happy to see him. But that had been in the days when they had been such friends. That was someone who was long gone, probably for ever. After the way they had parted, the dark threats he had tossed over his shoulder as he left, she knew that friendship was no longer what he felt for her or any member of her family. If his stiff and hostile body language, the cold glitter of those deep dark eyes, the unsmiling expression said anything it was that he had not come here for a nostalgic reunion.
And because of how it had once been between them, that look left her feeling shockingly and shivering cold.
From a distance she heard his voice again. A man’s voice, deep and husky and touched by that unexpected and totally foreign accent. A voice she knew and yet had never heard before.
‘Who else were you expecting?’ he said.
The total lack of warmth in his tone sliced into her like a blade of ice, making the ground suddenly unsteady beneath her feet, her legs as unsupportive as cotton wool.
This man who had been such a vital, and essential, part of her life. So much more than a friend who had shared her childhood with her, the loss of her father, the beginnings of her adolescence, stood with her against her brother’s tyranny, and had then just vanished. Walking out without a word of explanation, and making no effort at contact ever since. She’d cried her loss into her pillow for more nights than she cared to remember but he had put her right out of his mind, it seemed. She had not seen or heard from him in almost ten years.
Now, ‘Hello, Kat,’ he’d said. And that was all it took to turn her world upside down.
But then that was what he had threatened to do. He had said that one day he would be back and then he would turn the life they knew on its head.
‘Who else did you think it might be, Miss Katherine?’
The touch of cynical humour, the dark mockery was new. Like his appearance it was so far from everything she had ever known of him. Her Heath had never looked like this. The Heath she had known had never had that sleek, sophisticated grooming that made him look like some glossy honed predator, who had prowled on silent paws, dangerous and alien, into the very civilised atmosphere of the home she had built. But then, she of all people knew how ‘civilised’ appearances could be misleading.
But in spite of that sophistication, that grooming, he still looked like some creature of the wild that was barely under control, eyes watchful, every muscle poised and taut ready for fight or flight—whichever was necessary.
No, looking into his eyes she saw no hint of flight at all. The old Heath was there in the burn of defiance in those golden eyes. A rebelliousness that no sophisticated clothing, however he had come by that, could ever conceal. When she looked up into his face it was to see a man who had the features of her long-ago friend and yet none of the warmth that had ever shone between them. Heath was here, but the boy she had known was gone and she missed him. The pain of it was like a stab to her heart.
‘Miss Katherine!’ she managed, breathless and uneven. Mocking the stiffness of his tone in the same moment that her heart lurched in discomfort at the sound of it. ‘You always used to call me Kat!’
‘You were Kat then.’
It was shockingly cold and distant and his eyes might have been shards of black-coffee ice in his tanned face. He slid the long coat from his shoulders, tossed it over the back of a nearby chair, and the sudden transformation from bold highwayman to sleek gentleman was such a shock that it actually had her breath catching in her throat.
‘But it was a long time ago,’ she told him stiffly. ‘We were nothing but children. Didn’t know any better.’
And in all that time had he learned nothing? Heath could only ask himself. He should have known better than to come here like this. He had told himself that he had come back for one reason only, vowed that he would deal only with the two men who had made his early years such misery. The men who had treated him like an animal and not a human being. He would come back to Hawden to show them what he had become, to reveal the power he now had over them, throw their insults, their cruelty, in their faces, and walk away, never once glancing back.
That plan was well in hand, at least as far as Joseph Nicholls was concerned. Arthur Charlton was a different matter. When he had learned of the other man’s death he had felt like a hunter thwarted of his prey. Denied the satisfaction of facing down the earl, he had burned with frustration. And that frustration had driven him where he had sworn that he would never go again.
Back into the presence of Katherine Charlton, who had once been Katherine Nicholls. The woman who had taken what little was left of his heart when life, her brother and his best friend had finished with it, and stamped on it, crushing it cruelly under her slender foot.
‘We are no longer children.’ He nodded. ‘And we haven’t been for a long time.’
And that was where the mistake he had made had been born. With memories of the few happy years of his childhood surfacing once he was back in England, he hadn’t been able to resist coming to the Grange just once. Hadn’t been able to fight against the need to come here and see just what Kat had become, what the years had made of her.
Just one look, he had told himself. One look at the woman she was now and then he would walk away.
But that one look had been fatal to his peace of mind. Fatal to his determination to walk away from Hawden and all it had once meant to him, shaking the dust of the place from his feet. That one look had told him that he couldn’t walk away from Katherine Charlton. One look was all that it had taken to show him that he still wanted her, still hungered for her more than he had ever wanted any women in his life. He had to put her away from him, move back from her both mentally and physically before the hunger that burned along every nerve destroyed his ability to think with the cold logic that he knew this situation demanded.
He had known that she would still be attractive. How could she have ever been anything else? Even as a girl she had always drawn all eyes.
He hadn’t known that she would turn into such a beauty.
Time had taken her long-limbed form and made it softer, more womanly, with the sort of curves that made his pulse rate kick into heated action. In the years since he had last seen her, her wild coltish, tomboy looks had been smoothed down, refined into this elegant ladylike creature who looked like a pale reflection of the Kat he had once known. Her long dark hair that had once hung untamed around her face, tumbling onto her shoulders, was now smoothed back into a sleek ponytail that swung when she moved her head. Her face had thinned, creating slashing cheekbones under the deep blue eyes, and those eyes looked huge, wider than ever, framed by lush thick black lashes. Even dressed in a simple blue cotton dress she looked every inch the lady of the manor, totally at home in the house where they had once peered in through the windows from the outside, fascinated by being forbidden to enter.
‘Oh, we’re definitely not children any more!’ Kat laughed, though it was a laugh with no humour in it. ‘We’ve left all that well behind us.’
He could practically feel the chill from her words, the bite of her response and her eyes had darkened in angry rejection of him.
The curt, sharp words might be flung into his face, meant to distance her from him as clearly as the way that she stepped back, away, but they did nothing to quell the heated sting of attraction that spiralled through him. Senses burning in instinctive response, he surveyed her from the indignant, defiant face her chin brought up so that she was looking down her aristocratic nose at him, to where her feet, in delicate blue sandals, were placed firmly on the thickly carpeted floor.
‘You are certainly no child. Every inch the lady.’
The flare of something in her eyes told him that she recognised the way his tone had deliberately been pitched so that the words were not a compliment. She must know so well what had been behind them.
Because the exclusion from the Grange had been just for him, he remembered on a twist of savage bitterness. Kat had never been barred from what the locals called ‘The Big House'. The night that the guard dogs had heard them in the garden, racing to attack the intruders, and grabbing Kat by the leg, powerful teeth ripping her skin, she had been taken into the house and made welcome, her hurts tended to, a bed provided for the night. He had been ejected forcibly, tossed out into the lashing rain like a stray, unwanted, flea-ridden cur. And when he had returned to High Farm, Joseph had taken a riding crop to him for daring to have the nerve to trespass on their aristocratic neighbour’s land.
That was the last time that he and Kat had ever been truly close. That experience had taught her what luxury money could bring, the pleasures of being cared for in the soft comfort of the Grange. When she had come home she had seemed like a different person, more like her brother’s sister rather than the untamed tomboy she had once been. She had moved further away from him with each day that had passed, and now here she was, still reserved, still distant, with her cool blue eyes showing that she too regarded him as an intruder into her elegant world.
Well, he was more than an intruder. And one day soon she would learn just how completely their positions had been reversed. Once he would have rushed to tell her. The man he had become knew how to wait, knowing it was worth it in the end.
‘I’ve grown up,’ she threw at him now. It was like ice, cold and sharp as her gaze. ‘I should hope that we both have.’
Oh she’d grown up all right. Grown up and further away from him than ever. The childhood friends they had once been no longer existed. If in fact they had ever truly been as close as he imagined. Looked at her coldly, he could well imagine that she had just been whiling away her time with him while the fancy took her.
But thinking coldly was almost impossible. He had once wanted this woman with the hunger and need of a lonely boy’s heart. But she had turned away from him, choosing instead to give herself to a man with the money and the position she craved. He was no longer that lonely boy who had fought himself for her as well as the rest of the world. And the feelings she stirred in him were nothing to do with youth but the hard, demanding hunger of a mature man. A man hardened by life and experience.
A man who wanted the woman before him with a hunger that had been growing inside him for ten long years, even when he had tried to deny that it existed.
Even when he had told himself that he would just take one look at her and walk away. He had actually believed that he could do just that. But that had been before he had seen the woman she had become. A woman who in the space of a few moments had woken a hunger in him that he knew would never subside easily or stay under control for very long.
He had come for revenge on her brother, on her husband who had escaped him by dying unexpectedly. But the truth was that he still had unfinished business with Lady Charlton. Unfinished business that he had refused to let himself recall how deep it went until now.
‘A lot of water has passed under the bridge since we were last together,’ he said, ironing every trace of what he had been thinking from his tone. ‘Things are no longer the same.’
‘They’re most definitely not.’
Mental discomfort pushed the words from Kat’s mouth. She didn’t know quite how to behave in front of this man who was and was not Heath. Certainly not the Heath she had known.
The ice in his eyes told its own story. And there was something in that ‘didn’t know any better’ that turned her blood cold in her veins. She was not dealing with the Heath she had known, or anyone like him. The new lines on his face, etched around his mouth and eyes, lines that could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as laughter lines, told their own story.
‘How could anything be the same after so long?’ she demanded, hardening her tone to match his expression. ‘You don’t deserve a welcome after ten years’ absence and silence. To be silent all that time, you can never have thought of me.’
‘A little more than you have thought of me, Miss Katherine.’
Brutal cynicism made a dark mockery of the once respectful way that her brother had insisted that Heath should address her. This Heath, this man who had so obviously made a success of his life, would never now submit to calling her Miss Katherine or the deference that her brother had once so insisted on. This man clearly stood tall and proud, looking the world right in the eye. And the way he used that polite title lashed at her, seeming to scour off a layer of skin, leaving her feeling raw and exposed underneath.
‘Or perhaps I should call you Lady Charlton, now.’ ‘It is my name!’
Nervousness made her toss it at him in a way that even she acknowledged sounded cold and distant. It was a tone worthy of Arthur Charlton himself, and as such it made her wish she’d never spoken. But then it only matched Heath’s own approach tone for tone. If he had not come back as a friend, then he could only be an enemy, and she suddenly felt the need to be very wary of this almost complete stranger. He had prospered, that much was evident. But prospered in what way, in what field?
‘You know about my marriage, then?’
And she could just imagine how he would interpret it. But he had no idea how her life had been since he had left. No idea of the hole he had left in her existence and the ways she had tried so desperately to fill it.
Heath nodded slowly, his dark face set and cold as if carved from the rock on the moor outside; his eyes just shards of flint, opaque and unrevealing.
‘I heard of it and decided that one day I would call to offer you my congratulations. I didn’t think that your husband would have left you a widow before I could do so, and that those congratulations would instead mean that I had to offer my condolences.’
‘Arthur’s death was a shock to us all.’
What else could she say? It was just the truth after all. And the words were the polite fiction she had been hiding behind ever since the day the police had arrived at the Grange with the shocking news. But the real truth was that she had been hiding the reality of her marriage for far longer than that. So much so that the instinct to conceal, not to let anyone see what had been hidden behind the respectable, elegant doors of ‘The Big House’ had become second nature to her now. Her instinctive, fall-back position. The one that protected her from things that were so much worse.
That was what marriage to Arthur had reduced her to. The marriage that the whole of the neighbourhood—the county—had considered the wedding of the decade but had soon proved to be such a bitter lie from start to finish. The marriage she had been hoping to try to move on from when the discovery of just how Arthur had left things had knocked her right back.
‘And it has rather changed things.’
‘It has? How?’
But Heath offered no answer to that question, instead he moved into the room, prowling across the carpet in a way that revived her thoughts of the predatory wild cat of moments before. Standing before the huge windows, he affected an absorbed interest in the scene before him, the wide expanse of the garden, the swimming pool tucked away at the side of the house, and beyond that the range of fields where sheep grazed contentedly in spite of the rain.
Where he stood in the light from the window she could see the marked skin of his cheek, the thin scar that spoiled it, running along one cheekbone. And the memory of how he had come by that, who had put it there, caught at her nerves and tugged them hard. The mark that had been made by the glancing blow of a cast-off horseshoe, flung with deliberate viciousness at him by her brother Joseph in one of his irrational rages. The horse Joe owned and had ridden at a local show-jumping championship had been well and truly beaten by Heath’s own mount, loaned to him by her father. Typically, Joseph had taken out his fury and his jealousy in an act of violence that had horrified her.
Had Heath been to see her brother as well as coming here? Just the thought of the confrontation between them made a sensation like cold footprints slide down her spine, making her shiver in uncomfortable response.
That ‘decided that one day I would call to offer you my congratulations’ scraped painfully against her already too-taut nerves. It implied that he had been planning his return for some time. If he had come back earlier would anything have been any different?
A bitter memory sliced into her mind. That of arriving at the village church on her wedding day not quite four years before, and standing at the back of the aisle, just inside the doors. The organ had already begun the familiar notes of the ‘Wedding March’ but just for those seconds she had paused, looked around. Looking for one dark, harsh but infinitely familiar face. Allowing herself just a moment’s—what?
Hope?
But of course Heath hadn’t been there. Her brother and Arthur had treated him appallingly. There was no way he would want to be there to witness the joining of their two families in marriage. He had been the only one to warn her against the Charlton family. If she had listened to him then she might have spared herself so much heartache.
‘How has that changed things?’ she repeated, her tone insisting on an answer.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
His turn was slow, almost dance-like, pivoting on his heel as he came face to face with her again. ‘You own all of this.’
A gesture of one strong hand took in the whole of the house, the garden and the estate beyond the window.
‘Little Miss Kat has got everything she wanted. The big house, the status, the oh-so-elegant way of life …’
He wielded his words like a rapier, flashing, stabbing, making her wince inwardly. Everything he said revived the memories of the last time she had seen him, the anger that had flared in him then. And later his total rejection of her. The bitter burn of the knowledge of how far she had been from having ‘everything she wanted’ made her lash out in self-defence.
‘Not everything I wanted!’
If only he knew that she had never had any sort of a marriage, not in the real sense of the word. That the man who had been such charming, witty and attentive company through her teenage years, helping to distract her from the empty space in her life where Heath himself had once been, had turned into a petty and increasingly malicious tyrant almost from the moment that he had put a wedding ring on her finger on her twenty-first birthday. That the big house had become a hated prison; the elegant way of life nothing but a lie.
‘My husband died!’
‘I know … But that’s no great loss. Though originally it was your husband that I thought I would have come to see.’
‘Why? What did you want with Arthur?’
‘We had—business to discuss.’
The emphasis on that word ‘business’ sent a shiver of warning down her spine. So many ‘business’ meetings lately had resulted in worse news piling on bad news.
‘What sort of business?’
‘It’s hardly relevant now.’
Heath’s expression deliberately blanked off so that she could have no idea what was going on behind those opaque ebony eyes.
‘I can’t believe that Arthur would ever want to do any business deals with you. He never said anything about it.’
‘Your husband talked about his business with you?’ Was there something else behind that question? Something that put the darker note into his voice? ‘Well—no.’
Arthur hadn’t talked to her about anything if the truth was told. He had issued orders, insisted on how things were to appear. But she had only been a couple of weeks into her marriage when she had discovered that a trophy wife was all her husband wanted. A woman who could look elegant at his side, display around her neck or dangling from her ears the jewellery that was the Charlton heirlooms everyone knew about, and organise the society parties he put so much emphasis on.
Of course she now knew just why those parties were so important to him. The image they had been planned to present to the world while he hid the reality behind a smokescreen. The truth had been that he had never really wanted a wife, not in the true sense of the word. Their marriage had been as fake as the ‘heirlooms’ that were really only paste copies, the originals sold long ago.
‘That—wasn’t Arthur’s way.’
‘I thought not.’
His response caught on her nerves. It took her back to his declaration that he had business to discuss with her late husband. What connection had he had with Arthur’s business dealings?
The question had formed on her lips only to be caught back sharply as the sound of light, hurrying footsteps in the hall gave notice of a new arrival. And knowing who it must be, Kat knew she couldn’t continue her questioning now.
CHAPTER TWO
THE door swung open and the slim, blonde-haired figure of her sister-in-law came into the room. Isobel had obviously been into town on a shopping spree. Half a dozen elegant carrier bags swung from her hands and she had the smug look of someone who had just given her credit cards a hammering.
Inwardly Kat sighed at the thought that she and Isobel were going to have to have a heart to heart about their situation. Obviously the younger woman had not taken in—or had refused to accept—the gravity of their situation. Quite frankly she was amazed that those credit cards hadn’t bounced. They very soon would. Once all their creditors realised the seriousness of the situation there would be a huge number of final demands for payment.
But that was a showdown she didn’t want to have in front of Heath. Isobel was so like Arthur in her determination to go her own way and listen to no one. So she forced herself to keep calm, even to smile at Isobel while inside every nerve was screaming a protest at her sister-in-law’s actions.
‘I’ve had a fantastic time!’ Isobel declared. ‘Lacey’s had their new summer range in and they had some gorgeous stuff. I …’
Her voice trailed off as she caught sight of the tall, dark man standing by the window, a silent, watchful observer of this new arrival in the room.
‘Hello!’ she said, the rising lift in her voice, the sparkle of her smile making Kat’s heart twist, her nerves tugging painfully as she recognised the signs she knew only too well.
Isobel had spotted someone she fancied. That much was obvious. And the man who had sparked her interest was none other than Heath. Which Kat supposed shouldn’t have surprised her. Compared with the skinny, scruffily dressed boys her sister-in-law usually hung around with, Heath was all man. His height and his bearing seemed to fill the room, those deep-set black eyes burned like burnished jet under dark, arched brows and when he smiled …
Dear heaven, when he smiled, his face was transformed, Kat admitted, feeling her stomach twist and lurch almost as if she were on board a ship that had suddenly pitched sharply downwards in the waves. It was shocking to realise that this was the very first time that his sexy mouth had even curved into any sort of a smile or that his forcefully carved face had shown any warmth, since he had appeared in the room so unexpectedly.
‘Hello, Isobel.’
It seemed as if that trace of the accent on Heath’s words had deepened, darkened, making him sound so much more exotic, so much more foreign.
‘You know who I am?’ her sister-in-law was definitely intrigued and the smile that played over her mouth was a blend of curiosity and provocation.
‘Of course. You are young Isobel all grown up.’
‘And you are?’
Isobel fluttered her long, mascaraed eyelashes flirtatiously, and Kat felt the twist of something cruel in her heart as she saw Heath switch on another swift, easy smile in response.
It was even more shocking to realise that the sharp burn of reaction had a double-edged source, one that made her mouth dry in horror as she recognised it for what it was. When he smiled, Heath looked so very different, so devastatingly sexy that the heat of her response was like a flash of electricity along her nerves. But it was blended with something else, something that was far less comfortable to endure. Deep in her memory where she had tried long ago to bury it, she could hear the echo of Arthur’s voice, vicious and savage-toned. You’re still dreaming of your bit of rough—that gipsy. That’s what turns you on.
‘Don’t you recognise Heath?’ she put in hastily, rather too sharply.
‘Heath?’ her sister-in-law queried. ‘Heath who?’ And the jolt of realisation brought Kat up sharp against the fact that she had no idea how to answer that question. She hadn’t even thought about what Heath might be calling himself now.
She hadn’t thought of anything beyond the fact that he was here, back in her life again.
‘Heath Montanha,’ Heath supplied, those dark eyes of his still fixed on Isobel.
And no wonder. The girl who had been little more than a child at eleven when Heath had left the village all those years before had blossomed in the time he had been away. She was a small blonde bombshell, curvy and sensually glamorous, beside whom Kat always felt too tall and rangy, taken back to the tomboyish adolescent she had been who had never quite fitted in anywhere.
Anywhere but with Heath.
Remembered pain twisted in her gut as she recalled how once he had always been at her side, her friend, her support. Heath had never needed to belong in the way that she had longed to. He had laughed at the girls who had thought they were so cool, turned his back on any need to be conventional or fashionable. It had been her own need to find the femininity that she had felt had been so lacking in herself that had drawn her to the sort of society offered by the Charltons. That had ultimately led to the ‘dream wedding’ that was supposed to give her everything she had ever fantasised about.
A dream wedding that had opened the door to a private nightmare.
‘Heath Montanha?’
Not Nicholls, Kat added to herself. Well, who could blame him? Obviously the thing he had most wanted to do once he was away and free of the village was to discard the name of the family he had never belonged to in the first place. And the name of the man who had once made his life such hell.
‘Such an exotic name! What nationality is that?’
Isobel was openly flirting now, her voice light and teasing, her smile straight into those dark, watchful eyes.
‘It’s Brazilian.’
‘You went to Brazil? Why there?’
It was Kat who asked, unable to suppress her curiosity.
‘Why not? After all you were the one who once told me that my father could have been an emperor of China.’
Memory stabbed like the sharpest stiletto as she recalled the light-hearted way they had created an imaginary ancestry for him. A rich, powerful background that would enable him to hold his own against Joseph and Arthur’s tyranny. They had been on the same side then. And she had believed that nothing could come between them.
‘You remember that?’
‘I remember,’ Heath acknowledged and the emphasis he put on the words sent a shiver down her spine.
What else did he remember? And more importantly, how did he remember it?
‘I’d love to go to Brazil.’
Isobel was determined to drag Heath’s attention back to her. Not that there was any dragging needed, Kat acknowledged. Isobel had always had the effect of an open honeypot on men. Men who had never looked at Kat in quite that way. Certainly men of the type that Heath had become had never looked at her like that.
Even her husband had never looked at her in that way. Not even on her wedding day, when every woman had the right to feel beautiful. As soon as they had been alone, he had criticised her appearance and set himself to try to change everything about her. It was only later that she had come to realise just why he had been that way.
‘Rio de Janeiro … the sun—the sea—samba dancing.’
Isobel let her curvaceous body sway in time to imaginary music inside her head.
‘But don’t you think you should offer our visitor some refreshment, Kat? How long has he been here and you haven’t even offered him a drink?’
‘I was just about to.’
It wasn’t the truth and a quick sidelong glance from Heath’s dark eyes told her that he knew that only too well. The thought of her sister-in-law reproving her for her neglect of hospitality for the man who as a boy had always had the door of this house slammed in his face twisted something deep inside. She had no doubt that exactly that thought had come to him too.
She had once promised herself that if she had ever found herself in a position of wealth and comfort where she could welcome Heath then she would do so with open arms. Now she was exactly where she dreamed of being but too much had come between them to ever let that happen.
‘Perhaps I should ring for tea. If you would like that …’
The words were barely out of her mouth before she was hearing in her own head how they must have sounded to Heath. And seeing the way that his lips curled she could almost read just what was going through his mind. That she had deliberately played the ‘lady of the manor’ card, offering afternoon tea as if she were her mother-in-law and not a young woman of nearly twenty-five. Though the truth was that she hadn’t felt young for too long. Not for almost four years.
‘Tea?’ he drawled mockingly. ‘How very English.’
‘Well I am—we are English,’ Kat snapped defensively, her tone too sharp for politeness as the suddenly vicious twist to his beautiful mouth said only too clearly.
‘While I am just a mongrel, hmm?’
There was open challenge in those blazing jet eyes now. Challenge and a dark, cynical derision that had all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stiffening in wary sensitivity.
‘That isn’t at all what I meant!’
‘And why not? It is true after all. I am of mixed blood as you always suspected—and not pure-bred English like you and your family.’
Memory stabbed again at the thought of how they had once speculated on just what his ancestry might be, what exotic background could have created his dark dramatic looks.
‘You found out about your true background?’
‘I did. And your husband would have been delighted to know that it was every bit as far from his aristocratic pedigree as he always believed it was.’
And he wasn’t going to enlighten her any further, his tone declared adamantly. He had no intention of letting her in on anything he had found out about himself. If anything marked how wide the chasm that divided them had become then it was that.
‘Are we having this tea or not?’
Isobel’s impatiently petulant voice broke in on the intense concentration of his gaze on her face, making those deep dark eyes blink just once, slowly, before he deliberately looked away, in the direction of her sister-in-law.
‘Perhaps not,’ he drawled silkily. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t stay. I have business to attend to.’
He was picking up his coat as he spoke, tossing it over his shoulders like a cloak as he had worn it on his arrival, and turning towards the door. That was the second time today he had mentioned business deals but never explained himself. Once more that icy sensation slid down her spine.
I’ll be back one day. And then you’ll see how everything you think you have can all be turned on its head.
Suddenly afraid that he would walk out of her life again as he had done once before and that this time he would never come back, she hurried after him.
‘Heath—wait …’
He was almost all the way down the long, tiled hall, never hesitating or looking back. But then, just at the last moment, he paused and turned back very slowly.
‘You never said why you came. What you are doing here.’
‘Why did I come to the Grange today? Surely the answer to that is obvious.’
‘Not to me.’ Her voice croaked embarrassingly as she forced out a response.
Heath smiled briefly once again. It was a smile of ice, totally without any hint of warmth in it.
‘I came to see you, of course. Why else would I be here?’ ‘To …’
‘To see you, Lady Katherine,’ Heath repeated, the words sliding over her like a stream of ice water, making her skin shiver miserably. ‘To look into your face just once and then walk away—this time for good.’
CHAPTER THREE
THAT had been the plan, Heath acknowledged.
He had told himself that he would just see what she had become, and then walk away. He would shake the dust of the Grange from his feet and go back to the life he now had—a life of success and power, so very different and so very distant from the life he had once lived—endured—here in Yorkshire. If her husband had still been alive then he might have stayed, to have the satisfaction of seeing his plans all fall into place, his revenge become complete. He would have enjoyed seeing Arthur Charlton and Joe Nicholls brought as low as they had once brought him. Nicholls already knew why he was here, knew that he had lost everything, and until now Heath had thought that that would have to be enough.
But that had been before he had come face to face with the woman that Katherine had become. Seeing her, seeing the stunning woman she was now, feeling his heartbeat quicken, his blood pulse through his veins, his body hardening in yearning hunger, he had known that he could no more turn and walk away than he could cut out his own heart and throw it at her feet as she had once made him feel he might.
He had thought that he was over her, but seeing her had taught him, in the space between one heartbeat and another, that that thought had been desperately deluded. There was no way he was ‘over’ this woman. It had nothing to do with revenge, and everything to do with passion, with the sexual hunger that ate him up from inside—and always had—just from knowing that Katherine Nicholls existed.
If he had wanted her once when she was a girl, before she had developed into the full power of her beauty, then now he felt that he would die if he didn’t have her in his bed, just once. If he didn’t know the full satisfaction of making love to her, feeling her soft body underneath him, opening to him, hearing her cries of delight as she reached her climax.
And she would come to orgasm; he had no doubt about that. No woman could look at him in the way she had done in the first moment that he had walked into the room without a blistering connection between them on the most basic, most primitive level. The burn of awareness that had been in his body had been reflected in her eyes. He had seen it looking back at him from their once-cool blue depths, turning them molten and cloudy, the pupils so wide they seemed to have darkened the whole of her eyes.
And he had known then that he couldn’t stick to his original plan and walk away. He wanted her too much to do so. More importantly he wanted her to want him as much as he had ever hungered for her. And most of all he needed her to acknowledge it. Publicly. Only then would it heal the scars of the slashing wounds she had once dealt him.
Fancy Heath? You have to be joking! she had said to Arthur Charlton and the scathing note on her tongue still burned like acid in his memory. I mean—look at him? No money, no job—no class! The Nicholls family may have fallen on hard times, but we do have some pride. How could anyone want him?
He had come here for revenge but his vendetta had been against her brother and her husband and that was being worked through just as he planned. The financial dealings that had yet to be revealed might have given him a darker satisfaction, one of the mind, but this was personal. This would bring a very different sort of fulfilment. A heated, sensual, carnal satisfaction. One that already had his body tightening and hardening in anticipation of the delights to come.
‘You did that once before,’ she said now, her voice unexpectedly rough at the edges. ‘The walking away bit. When you left I thought that was for good.’
‘So I did—and if I had had my way, had any sense, I would have stayed away.’
He’d meant to stay away. Meant to sever all connections with Hawden and the life he had had here but fate had intervened. The dirty tricks and bad deals Charlton and Nicholls had tried to pull on one of his companies, not knowing who owned it, had revived so many bitter memories. Once and for all he had resolved to deal with the two men who had made his early life such a hell. But he had taken some time to put his plans into place, make them watertight. And in that time Arthur Charlton had fallen victim to his decadent, sordid lifestyle so that now there was only Nicholls left to deal with.
But he hadn’t reckoned on the fact that Kat would still have this devastating hold over him. That he would take one look and find himself incapable of walking away.
‘But other matters brought me to Hawden …’
‘What other matters?’
Heath smiled down into her face.
‘I have scores to settle, as you must know.’
Looking into her defiant, long-lashed eyes, Heath suddenly knew a twist of the double-edged sword that his plan for revenge now offered him. All he had to do was to tell her why he was here. Reveal all the cards he held in his hand—and he did hold all of them; he had made damn sure of that before he had even left Brazil. Everything was signed, sealed, tied up so watertight that there was no chance of even a single item in this house, on this estate sliding out of his grasp. He had the Charltons and the Nicholls exactly where he wanted them and all he had to do was call in their debts.
But where was the satisfaction in using that against Kat? What sort of gratification could he get from taking a sledgehammer to this situation when he could do things so much more subtly? Much more enjoyably. No, he didn’t want her to know yet why he was really here.
Joe and Arthur had robbed him of money and position. Kat’s betrayal, her rejection of him, had been something different. A betrayal of the heart, of the soul. He would show her how it felt to have your heart taken and stamped on.
He would make her want him as much as he wanted her. After all, if she fell for him now it was only because he was wealthy, because of who he had become. She had never wanted the Heath he had been.
But he didn’t want to blackmail her into his bed. He needed her to come to him willing—wanted her to come to him wanting, needing, hungry. Because she couldn’t help herself. As he couldn’t help himself where she was concerned.
She already did; he could see it in her eyes. But she was damned if she’d admit it. She would admit it before he was done. She’d admit it and come to him and beg him to take her. He had never forced a woman in his life and he didn’t intend to start now.
The youth he had once been would have thrown any caution to the winds and reached for her, grabbed her … But he was no longer that adolescent. Time and experience had taught him the wisdom of holding his counsel, hiding his true feelings. Once he had told this woman how he felt and she had laughed in his face. There was no way he would ever risk that again. This way he would get what he wanted and more.
‘S—scores to settle.’ She took a step back from him, mentally at least even if she didn’t move at all physically. ‘Against who?’
She already knew the answer, Kat acknowledged privately. If he had come back to ‘settle scores’ then he could only have come looking for the men who had treated him so appallingly in the past. But how far did his need for vengeance go? Who else would be included in it?
Once again that cold cruel smile flickered over his lips, bringing no light to eyes that remained as cold as polished jet.
‘You have to ask? Your brother—your husband too, were he alive.’ ‘And me?’
‘I told you—I wanted to see you just once.’
It was so softly spoken it sounded almost gentle. But there was nothing gentle about the burn of those dark eyes, the way that his beautiful mouth was tightly compressed, taking all the sensuality from it and turning it into a cold, hard line.
‘So now you’ve seen me—what?’ She didn’t know what she was asking for. What she wanted the answer to be.
This time that smile was positively feral. It stripped away all the apparently civilised control he had imposed from the moment he’d walked into the room and replaced it with a cold, fierce anger. Under the veneer of sophistication and worldliness he was still the wild, untamed creature she had once known. The dangerous, wild-spirited creature who had answered to no one.
‘I told you—I’m leaving. You’ll have to forgive me if I decline your offer of tea.’
Could his voice have been any more mock-polite, the slap in the face effect any more deliberate?
‘You’re not coming back?’ The thought of losing him all over again tore at her heart.
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On you.’
‘What do I have to do with it?’
His impatient twist of his head, the brilliant emerald in his ear lobe catching the light and sending sparks flying, told her how irritated he was with the question.
‘I would have thought that that was obvious. Do you want me back—will you welcome me here?’
How she wished she could answer that straight. How she wished he could still be the Heath she had once known, the Heath she had longed to have back again. But that was not the Heath who now stood before her. And she was no longer the Kat she had been as a child.
‘I thought not.’
She had hesitated too long. And those cold black eyes had seen the doubt in her face, the way she had had to rethink her decision.
But what else could she say? She had looked into that dark closed face and known a new and very different feeling from one she had ever known before. One she had never experienced with Heath in all the time she had known him. She looked into his hard-boned face, into the deep black pools of his eyes, saw the jet-hard gleam that was in them and knew. Fear.
Fear was what she sensed, what she felt crawling over her skin like ice-cold footprints marking out a path along every nerve. A sense of dread that warned her that something was to come, something that brought danger and darkness into her life along with this man who had once been her friend.
Who was so obviously her friend no longer.
‘I will leave you to your tea.’
Heath was turning away again, obviously taking her response for dismissal and, for all the turmoil of emotions tangling inside her, Kat couldn’t let him go like this. Not with everything so raw between them. With so much she wished she could say if only she could find the words.
‘Don’t …’
She wanted to reach out and stop him, but at the same time the shivery warnings held her back so she didn’t know whether to move forward or not. Her legs seemed to tangle together, her feet tripping over each other as her body fought with her mind.
Suddenly several things happened at once and she didn’t quite register any of them until it was too late.
Her steps faltered, feet catching on a raw edge of one of the tiles, pitching her forward in the same moment that Heath paused, turned back. She was falling, heading for the floor and unable to do anything about it, her breath leaving her body in a shaken cry, when Heath’s instincts kicked in, swift and sharp. His arms came out to catch her, whipcord muscles taking her weight and holding tight, hauling her up before she hit the ground.
The movement swung her round, still off balance, so that she landed hard against the strong wall of his chest, her breasts crushed against his ribs, her head just over the heavy, rhythmic thud of his heart. The scent of his body, warm, clean skin mixed with some cologne that had a tang like lime, surrounded her, making her head swim. Only his strength held her upright, her eyes blurring in sudden confusion—and something else that shuddered through her like a heated pulse.
For the space of a couple of raw, uneven breaths, she felt him tense, distance himself as far as he could without actually moving away from her, knew that her own body had stiffened too, in shock and unease. She knew that she should pull away but couldn’t find the strength to do so. And in the same moment she felt a terrible sense of danger, blending with an equally stunning sense of having come home. The two sensations warred with each other, pulling her heart, her mind in different directions so that she didn’t know which one to act on. Indecision held her still, frozen, unable to think, scarcely able to breathe.
But then his grip on her arms loosened, hands smoothing down to where the skin was exposed by the short sleeves of her dress, the warmth of his palm stroking over her skin in a way that took that sense of shock and disorientation with it. The tension eased, changed, seeped away, and her heart skipped a beat, the sudden release letting her relax against him.
‘Kat …’
She heard his voice above her head, the warmth of his breath stirring her hair and she allowed herself a smile; her sense of relief a glow that lit her up from inside. Perhaps she had been reading everything so wrong. But she had barely recognised the sudden gentleness, given herself up to it, when a heartbeat later all that tension and more was back but in a new and very different way.
‘Katherine …’
From a distance she heard his voice again. A man’s voice, deep and husky and touched by that unexpected and totally foreign accent. A voice she knew and yet had never heard before.
Was this truly Heath? Was this her childhood friend; the companion of those wild, carefree days? This man looked like him. But Heath with the lighting of wildness burned out of him, the deep polished jet eyes cool and assessing, not flashing with fierce defiance as they had done in the past.
‘Heath …’
It was as if she was trying his name on for size. As if she had never spoken it before or the person she used it for were a stranger, a newcomer into her life. A man who filled her senses, surrounded her so that she inhaled him with each breath.
Somehow she managed to tilt her face up towards his, and this close there was no avoiding the changes in him. She could see the faint lines that time had etched round his nose and mouth, feel the scrape of the late afternoon’s growth of beard at his hard jawline, see the tiny flecks of grey at the temples of that black-as-night hair. From this angle the scar that Joe had inflicted on him was a distinct dent in his skin, a harsh white mark against the tan that he had brought back with him from wherever he had been.
But that was when her thought processes stopped. When something changed. She couldn’t have put a name to it, couldn’t have explained it in any way. She only knew that it was as if the air she breathed had become charged, filled with sensual electricity so that it burned its way down to her lungs, searing the ends of nerves on the way.
‘I …’ she tried but the electrical storm had melted her brain and no more words would follow the single syllable.
‘You?’
She saw that beautiful, sexy mouth twist, almost smile. But the next moment Heath’s grip tightened, cruel fingers digging into her arms. She was hauled up hard against him and fierce lips came down brutally on hers.
For a moment everything was wild heated delirium, running burning and demanding along her veins. The world spun round her, any sense of reality lost in its stinging haze. She was burning, melting, losing herself. Out of her mind and out of her body.
He had never kissed her before. She had never felt his lips on hers, only on her cheek, and once, awkwardly, on her hair. Their friendship had never been like that. They had held hands, hugged—hard—but never kissed. Not as a man kissed a woman. But she had never been kissed this way before. And she had never known that it could make her feel like this.
This was something she had never experienced. This flare of heat and power, this rush.
Of hunger?
Sexual hunger?
Was that the aching, burning sensation uncoiling in the pit of her stomach, spreading like wildfire along her nerves? A heady pulse seemed to have started between her legs, making her stir restlessly, her body as agitated as her mind that whirled in confusion and disorientation.
Was this what it really felt like? What a woman was supposed to feel for a man? Was this what had been missing in her marriage all along? Had Arthur been right? That she had never been a real woman—until now.
The thought shocked her, even frightened her, her heart thudding in a very different way. Her mind seemed to split in two, warring between wanting to sink into this, into his arms, into his kiss, take more of it, take all of it—and the almost panicked need to pull away, tear herself out of his grasp and put as much distance between herself and this shocking blaze of heat as she possibly could.
‘Heath …’
She muttered his name against his lips, meaning it as a protest but finding that it only added to the dangerously erotic sensations his mouth was creating. The taste of his skin against hers was a smoky, sensual tang, the movement of her lips opening to him so that his tongue slid along the seam of her mouth, then dipped in, tasted, teased. Tormented.
It was too much. Too intimate. Not what she wanted and yet so much what she craved. She tried to pull away, tried to twist from his arms, but he simply shifted his position, held her closer. One long powerful hand scored into her hair, grabbing at dark brown strands of it and twisting sharply, angling her head so that he had her exactly where he wanted her.
This time his kiss was very different. If that first kiss had been the kiss of a conqueror, a kiss of dominance, of power, then this was surprisingly, shockingly gentle. A kiss of enticement, seduction, of temptation. Slow and sensuous, provocative, arousing, it seemed to steal her soul out of her body, melt the bones in her legs so that his strength was the only thing keeping her upright. She softened against him, swayed. Too close. So close that she could feel the heat and strength of his body under the fine clothes.
Fine clothes that Heath had never worn, never owned before. Fine clothes that spoke of another man. A man so very different from her childhood friend that just the thought of him set up a fearful trembling in her limbs, tightening each nerve, stretching it almost to breaking point. She didn’t know this man. And yet he was so familiar.
His body seemed to call to hers, waking it and stirring it in a way no one else had ever done.
And hers to him. Because she was now so close that she could feel the hard, swollen evidence of his physical hunger for her pressed tight against the cradle of her pelvis.
‘Kat!’
From inside the sitting room, Isobel’s impatient voice floated out to them. ‘What are you doing?’
Shock froze Kat’s thoughts, startled her into total stillness, her mouth still captive under Heath’s, her mind lost in the sensual haze that had taken possession of it. She felt his sudden check too, the jolt that brought him back to the present, the stiffening of the powerful frame that just a heartbeat before had been pressed so tight against hers that it was as if they were blended into each other, not two spirits, but one.
For the space of a couple of whirling seconds the world seemed to hang suspended, out of focus, all sense of reality lost. But then Isobel spoke again, her tone more petulant and discontented.
‘Kat, I really need that tea.’
As if from a distance she heard Heath’s sudden, sharp bark of laughter, harshly cynical, drawn from some deep shadowy place inside him. And the mood that had held her captive and lost shattered once and for all. Heath lifted his dark head, took a step back. He distanced her from him too, setting her back on the floor so that only now did she become aware of the way that she had actually been lifted right off her feet, her toes barely keeping contact with the decorative tiles underneath her.
With a sudden snatching breath reality came back to her and she was dropped back into the world. But a world that no longer seemed the same. A world that now seemed turned upside down and inside out and she was suddenly sure would never be the same again.
What was happening to her? Who was the woman who had just gone up in flames in Heath’s arms? Surely that couldn’t truly be her?
Without thought her hands went to her hair, trying to smooth tumbled strands that he had twisted and tangled up so mercilessly. The band that had held her ponytail was lost, pulled free and abandoned somewhere on the floor. So she had to content herself with the rough and ready combing out of the knots that those powerful fingers had created. Her dress too was crumpled, caught up high on her thighs when he had lifted her and now she tugged nervously at the material, trying to restore it to some sort of decency. And all the time she didn’t dare to lift her eyes to look at Heath; to meet the burning ebony gaze that she knew by fearful instinct was fixed firmly on her face.
He waited, silent and dark, an ominous shadow on the outer edges of her vision while she struggled with her appearance, making no comment, taking no action. Just waiting and watching. Until at last she could find nothing else to force her attention onto, nothing to keep her from looking in his direction. And she had, unwillingly, to lift her eyes to his.
Immediately she felt as if she had lost herself in the darkness of his gaze. His focus was intense, his lids half lowered, hiding the full force of his stare behind the fringe of lush, thick lashes. A faint smile played over the sensual mouth, his lips still stained by the rush of blood that the pressure of their kiss had created. But that smile had nothing of warmth in it, nothing of concern. It was a dark sense of triumph that curled the corners of his lips. The smile of a predator who had the tastiest sample of prey right in front of him, just within perfect pouncing distance.
And in the back of her mind, echoing cold and cruel, Kat heard again the words he had tossed at her only a short time before.
I have scores to settle, as you must know.
They had sounded dangerously ominous then. And they sounded so very much worse now. How could she have let this happen—with Heath? The Heath who had come back to settle scores, and had stated it openly. So had that kiss been part of that aim for revenge? He couldn’t fake his arousal but what had been behind his actions in the first place?
She felt as if a cruel hand were squeezing her heart, twisting it inside her. How was it possible that at long last she had reached out and touched something of what it really meant to be a woman—but with this man? A man whom she couldn’t trust with that stunning, newly tasted sensuality any more than she could ever have trusted her husband?
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