An Insatiable Passion
Autor
Lynne Graham
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19,4K
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10
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?’
