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Looking back, she recoiled from her adolescent fantasies. She hadn’t even had the social pedigree to qualify as an acceptable girlfriend. Jake had been uncomfortable with her menial employment in his home. He hadn’t said so, though. He had known her grandparents had had a struggle to survive.
Had it been pity that brought him to her home that Christmas Eve with a present for her? An enchanting little silver bracelet, the first piece of jewellery she had ever had. There had been a light in his dark tawny eyes as he had given it to her, a light that had seemed to make nonsense of his casual speech. Her heart had sung like a dawn chorus while her grandfather had turned turkey-red. Letting her accept the gift had practically choked him.
Every New Year’s Eve the Tarrants had held open house for half the county. Jessie had persuaded Martha Colgan that Kitty should sleep over at the Grange as it would be a very late night.
Sophie Tarrant had been in a filthy mood that evening when her husband had failed to put in an appearance. She had continually phoned their London apartment and her anger had split over into sharp attacks on the staff. By then even Kitty had understood that for years Jake’s parents had lived virtually separate lives because of his father’s extra-marital affairs.
Shortly before midnight, a drunken guest had cornered Kitty in the hall and tried to kiss her. Jake had yanked him away, slamming him bruisingly back against the wall. ‘Keep your hands off her!’ he had snarled, scaring the wits out of Kitty and her assailant with an unnecessary degree of violence.
As the guest had slunk off, Jake had spun back to her where she had stood pale and trembling in the shadows of the stairwell. Just as suddenly he had reached for her, his lean, still boyish body hard and hungry against hers, his mouth blindly parting her lips. But she had barely received the tang of the whisky on his breath before he had pushed her away, a dark flush highlighting his cheekbones. ‘I’m not much better than that bastard I just tore off you,’ he had vented in self-disgust. ‘You’re still a kid.’
‘I’m almost eighteen,’ she had argued strickenly.
‘You’re six months off eighteen,’ he had gritted, and when she had attempted instinctively to slide back into his arms his hands had clamped to her wrists. ‘No!’ he had snapped in a near savage undertone. ‘And whose idea was it to bring you in here tonight? There are too many drunks about. You ought to be up in bed.’
Her vehement protests that every hand was needed had been ignored. Jake had been immovable. ‘I haven’t even had anything to eat yet,’ she had complained in humiliated tears. ‘I hope you’re pleased with yourself.’
At some timless stage of the early hours, distant noises still signifying the ongoing party downstairs, Jake had shaken her awake and presented her with a heaped plate of food. It had begun as innocently as a children’s midnight feast. She had sat up in bed eating while Jake had lounged on the foot of it, far from sober as he had mimicked some of his mother’s most important guests with his irreverent ability to pick out what was most ridiculous about them.
A rapt audience, she had got out of bed to put the plate back on the tray. When she had clambered back they had been mysteriously closer. Had that been her doing? His? He had touched her cheek, his hand oddly unsteady.
‘Kiss me,’ she had whispered shyly.
‘I’ll kiss you goodnight,’ he had breathed almost inaudibly. ‘Oh, God, Kitty,’ he had muttered raggedly into her hair on his passage to her readily parted lips. ‘I love you.’
Overwhelmed by his roughened confession, Kitty had pressed herself to him and clung. That first kiss had gone further than either of them intended. For her there had been more pain than pleasure, but that hadn’t mattered to her. Belonging to Jake had been a sufficient source of joy. She had na;auively believed that now there would be no need for him to date other girls. Her grasp of human interplay had been that basic. It had never occurred to her that she was simply satisfying an infinitely less high-flown need in Jake that night.
Only afterwards had she realised that Jake had been more drunk than he had been merely tipsy. She did remember him mumbling something along the lines of, ‘God, what have I done?’ in a dazed mix of shock and self-reproach.
Rousing herself shakily from her unwelcome recollections, Kitty started up her car, winding down the window to let cold air sting her pale cheeks. Both their lives had changed course irrevocably in the weeks that had followed.
Jake’s father had died suddenly, leaving a string of debts. Jake had had to leave university, abandon his training as a veterinary surgeon. He had had no choice. His mother and his sisters had become his responsibility. In the end the estate had still been sold. A financial whiz-kid couldn’t have saved it. She wondered vaguely where they all lived now. Torbeck, he had mentioned. That was a farm higher up the valley, no more than a mile from Lower Ridge across the fields. For the life of her, she couldn’t imagine Jake’s mother living in an ordinary farmhouse.
A rough, pot-holed track climbed steeply to Lower Ridge. A squat, stone-built cottage, backed by tumbledown outhouses came into view. The guttering sagged, the metal windows were badly rusted. In eight years she had not been welcome here. She stared at the cottage. It was lonely, sad. How had she ever believed that she could stay here to write her book? Her subconscious mind had somehow suppressed this unattractive reality.
‘What is with this desire to make a pilgrimage back to your roots?’ Grant had demanded furiously. ‘They’re better left buried and you certainly don’t owe that woman a sentimental journey.’
With sudden resolution, Kitty walked back to her car. But before she could execute her cowardly retreat, a Range Rover came up the lane. Jake sprung out. Clay-coloured Levis and a rough tweed jacket worn with an open-necked shirt had replaced his earlier attire. He had changed his clothes as well as his vehicle.
Dear God, could he be serious about the lunch invitation? A civilised exchange of boring small talk? It seemed he wasn’t quite averse to the legend of Kitty Colgan and the sex-symbol image Grant had worked so hard to create for her. If it hadn’t been so tragic, it would have been hysterically funny.
When a man kissed Kitty, she could plan a grocery list in her head. Her provocative image was a make-believe illusion. She had all the promise on the outside and she couldn’t deliver except for a camera. And here she was standing looking at the cruel bastard responsible for her inadequacy.
He unlocked the front door. ‘It took me longer than I estimated,’ he said wryly. ‘I’d mislaid the keys in a safe place.’
Had he taken more than half an hour? She hadn’t noticed. Time had lost its meaning for her outside the cemetery.
Tawny eyes met hers with merciless directness. ‘Perhaps you’d prefer to be on your own. I don’t want to butt in.’
‘You’re not butting in on anything but memories, and none of them worth the proverbial penny,’ she quipped half under her breath, stilling an impulse to admit that she had lost her fancy to reacquaint herself with her former home.
The wind pushed the door back on its hinges. A steep staircase rose just a step away, the entrance the exact depth of the two doors that opened off it, one on either side.
Kitty pushed down the stiff handle on the parlour door. The three-piece suite was old as the hills but still new in appearance through rare use. It was a room rather pitifully set aside for the exclusive entertainment of guests in a tiny house where there had never been visitors.
She mounted the creaking stairs. The bathroom, put into the box-room when she was thirteen, was a slot above the scullery below. Time had been kind to the walls of her old room, fading the virulent green paint she had hated. The old bookcase was still crammed with childhood favourites, every one of which had originally belonged to a Tarrant child.
Steeling herself, she walked into her grandparents’ room. It was the same. The high bed, the nylon quilt, cracked linoleum complaining beneath her stiletto heels. Jake stood silently behind her, yet she was overpoweringly aware of his proximity and she shied automatically away from his tall, well-built body to pass back down the stairs.
One room remained, the kitchen-cum-dining-room where the day-to-day living had gone on. Despising her over-sensitivity, she thrust open the door. Jake moved past her to open the curtains. Light streamed in over the worn tiles on the floor, picking out the shabbiness of the sparse furniture.
‘I knew you’d come back,’ he said curtly.
She lifted her chin, denying the tension holding her taut. ‘Am I so predictable?’ she asked sweetly.
He dealt her a hard glance. ‘That wasn’t the word I would have used.’
Colouring, she avoided his steady appraisal and forced a determined smile. ‘Nothing here seems to have changed.’
His mouth twisted expressively. ‘Did you think it would have? Did you think it was enough for you to play Lady Bountiful from a safe distance?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she lied.
Black lashes partly obscured his glinting downward scrutiny. ‘Martha can only have cut you dead at Nat’s funeral out of some misguided sense of loyalty to him,’ he spelt out with cruel emphasis. ‘I’m sure she regretted doing it.’
‘She didn’t.’ Her contradiction was immediate.
‘How would you know? You never came back again to find out!’ he dismissed brusquely. ‘Was your pride so great that in six years you couldn’t give her a second chance?’
His biting criticism stabbed into her. No matter what story had been put about by her grandparents, Kitty had been shown the door and firmly told that she was never to return. But there was no point in making a defence that would encourage questions that she couldn’t and wouldn’t answer. Jake would want to know why they had done that.
‘I didn’t fancy being turned from the door and I would have been,’ she said tightly. ‘I wrote to her…I wrote I don’t know how many times and she didn’t reply to one of my letters. Her silence spoke for her. She always was a woman of few words.’
He frowned. ‘You wrote to her?’
‘Didn’t the bush telegraph pick that up as well?’
‘I really did believe that she might have felt differently from Nat.’ His response lacked the acid sarcasm of hers.
Her eyes hardened. ‘Don’t talk about my grandparents as if you knew them. You never knew them on an equal footing. In their eyes you were always a Tarrant, a breed apart, what Gran used to call “our betters”. I doubt you ever had a single real conversation with either of them.’
Anger had paled his complexion. ‘You talk as though we’re living in the nineteenth century.’
‘But we did in this house.’ And in yours, her skimming look of scorn implied.
Although it visibly went against the grain to abandon the argument on class divisions, his mouth remained firmly shut.
‘I guess you’d like to know how I came to buy this place,’ she continued offhandedly. ‘Grandfather came to London and asked me to. He said it was the least of what I owed them.’
Jake quirked a black brow. ‘Do you blame him for his attitude? You ran away and you disappeared into thin air. Almost two years later you popped up in print at a movie premi;agere with Maxwell…’
And it felt good, so good, she affixed inwardly. Diamonds at my throat and a designer gown, the stuff of which dreams are made. ‘I imagine that set the natives back on their heels,’ she mocked.
‘Oh, yes, you were the sole topic of conversation locally for months,’ he agreed tongue in cheek. ‘Talk about rags to riches.’
She gave a little smile. ‘I try not to. Other people find the Cinderella story terribly boring.’
‘Are you casting Maxwell as the fairy godmother or the dashing young prince? Either way he made a pretty sordid match for a nineteen-year-old girl,’ he drawled with a derisive softness that stung. ‘And I still wouldn’t have thought that you had the money to buy this farm at that early stage of your…career.’
Ignoring that insolent hesitation, she shrugged. ‘I didn’t. Grant bought it for me.’ And it would knock you for six if you knew what else his representative bought at the same time, she thought with malicious amusement.
‘How very generous of him.’
‘He’s extremely generous.’ If anything irritated, inconvenienced or demanded, slap a cheque down hard on it. That was how Grant functioned. Unfortunately it usually worked for him. Back then it had worked with Kitty. She had confused generosity with caring. A bad mistake.
Jake’s dark, unfathomable gaze rested on her, ‘You treat me like an enemy.’
‘Do I?’ She produced a laugh worthy of applause. ‘We’re strangers now, Jake.’
He probed the bright smile that sparkled on her lips. ‘I never meant to hurt you, Kitty.’
‘Hurt me?’ she prompted, tilting her head back enquiringly.
He swore in sudden exasperation. ‘For God’s sake, will you drop the Heaven Rothman act? Or has that nymphomaniac superbitch you’ve been playing for so long somehow become you?’ he demanded crushingly. ‘There are no microphones or cameras about. Do you think Kitty could come out of the closet for five minutes?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I ONLY perform for my friends, and you’re not numbered among them.’ Stormily Kitty flung her head back, a line of pink demarcating the exotic slant of her cheekbones. Bitter resentment shuddered through her, fighting to the surface in spite of her efforts to contain it. ‘Since you came into this house your hypocrisy has amazed me! For a start, you didn’t like my grandparents. And at least you had the guts to be honest about that eight years ago. You thought Nat had a chip the size of a boulder on his shoulder. You thought Martha was a sour, cold woman. And you were right…you were right on both counts!’
Jake stood there, effortlessly dominating the cramped confines of the room. Dark and controlled, he murmured, ‘Martha mellowed a good deal after his death.’
‘Not towards me, she didn’t!’
‘You’re upset,’ he drawled flatly. ‘I’ll leave. I shouldn’t have stayed.’
Her hand sent the door crashing shut. ‘No, you won’t leave until I’ve had my say,’ she declared shakily. ‘Why have you decided to rewrite the past? I had the most miserable childhood here and you know it. Once in seventeen years my grandmother put her arms around me. She must have had to hold me to feed me when I was a baby, but I don’t remember it. I remember being a burden, a nuisance and an embarrassment. My grandfather didn’t get the chance to punish my mother, so he punished me instead…’
Her voice broke and she turned to the window, bracing her trembling hands on the dusty sill. ‘I remember it all,’ she muttered, forcing out the harshened syllables very low, ‘as if it were yesterday.’
The profound silence stretched on and on.
‘Why did you come up here?’
Numbly she fought to recapture her poise. ‘I just wanted…to see it.’
‘Well, now you’ve seen it…’
‘Do you have children?’ As soon as the question left her lips, she could have bitten her tongue out. That dangerous explosion of emotion had left her temporarily out of control.
‘A little girl.’ He hesitated. ‘She’s four years old.’
A sudden ache stirred in Kitty’s breasts, violent, unforgiving. But his admission iced back over her seething emotions. Her voice emerged quietly and cleanly. ‘If you don’t mind, I would like to be on my own now.’
‘No problem. I’ve got a lunch date to keep,’ he said curtly.
Her arrogant assumption that he had intended to invite her gave her a sharp pang. Of course she wouldn’t have gone. You didn’t dive when you were bleeding into a river full of crocodiles. All the same, it would have been nice to have been asked so that she could have refused. ‘Who is she?’ she asked lightly.
At the door he paused, his dark scrutiny hooded. ‘You wouldn’t know her. She wasn’t here in your time.’
‘My goodness, but you’re being coy, Jake,’ she purred, and she was Heaven Rothman to her fingertips, poised, indulgently amused.
Long, supple fingers flexed against the door-frame. ‘Her name’s Paula. She’s the nurse in the local practice.’
She smiled. ‘What does she look like?’
A suffocating tension alive with hostile undertones had thickened the atmosphere. A muscle jerked at the corner of his wide, sensual mouth. ‘Are you going to ask if I’ve slept with her as well?’ he slung at her caustically.
He shocked her into silence. Her startled gaze fled his aggressive stare. She looked away from him. In the interim, he walked out of the house, slammed into his car and drove off. She breathed again. Pain was still stabbing through her and she didn’t understand why. Two hours ago she had believed that Jake was married. Now she knew he was unmarried and involved. What was the difference? She couldn’t possibly be jealous. The very idea was laughable after all these years.
With a sigh she slumped down into an armchair. Hunger was making her dizzy. Common sense told her that she was in no fit state to drive. She would bring in the groceries and make herself a sensible snack before she left to find a hotel as far from here as she could get by evening.
He hadn’t said goodbye. But then they’d never said goodbye to each other. Ever. It seemed that habit remained. And without conscious volition Kitty was swept back to the aftermath of that night she had spent in his arms.
She had felt guilty, but she hadn’t felt ashamed… then. Innocently trusting in that confession he had made, she had believed there was no cause for shame where there was love.
It had taken him twenty-four hours to seek her out—a Jake who was a complete stranger to her. A bitter despair and a distaste that had pierced her to the very centre of her being had shown nakedly in his shadowed eyes before he had looked away.
‘What happened between us was very wrong. I wish to God I could wipe it out, but I can’t.’ His intonation had been low and precise, as if he had rehearsed the entire speech beforehand. ‘Your grandparents trusted me and I’ve broken that trust. I’ve got no excuse. I’m five years older and wiser and I should never have touched you.’
‘If you love me, it—’
‘But that’s just the point. I don’t love you in the way a man loves a woman. I care for you deeply as a friend…as a kid sister, if you like,’ he had forced out in harsh interruption.
‘I love you,’ she had whispered, not even able to absorb what he was telling her. It hadn’t seemed real. Nightmares had that quality.
‘It’s an infatuation and it will die,’ he had overruled fiercely. ‘Last night was a mistake, Kitty. I was drunk. That doesn’t excuse me, but that’s the only reason it happened. It wasn’t your fault, it was mine.’ He had stopped to clear his throat. ‘If there should be consequences…’
‘Consequences?’ she had repeated blankly.
‘If you prove to be pregnant,’ he had grated hoarsely, ‘I’ll stand by you, I’ll deal with your grandparents. But I won’t marry you. A marriage between us wouldn’t work. The risk of pregnancy isn’t that great, but if it should happen I promise you that I’ll look after everything. However, the pregnancy will have to be terminated,’ he had concluded harshly.
Three weeks later he had come to her with haunted eyes and gaunt cheekbones. ‘Thank God,’ he had muttered rawly, let off the hook.
He had married Liz quietly in London, the ceremony unattended by any of his family.
They said hearts didn’t break. Kitty’s had. The news of his marriage had shocked everybody, but it had devastated her. It was one thing to humbly accept that he didn’t love her, another thing entirely to accept that he could love and marry someone else. She had lost so much more than a lover. He had been closer to her than her own family. He had been her only real friend. And he had dropped her like a hot potato, retreating with appalled speed from the trap he had seen opening up in front of him. For him that night really had been a disastrous mistake.
He could have let her down more gently. She was convinced Liz hadn’t been in the background then. His own family had known nothing whatsoever about her. But what embittered Kitty most of all was his refusal to admit that he had ever wanted her. A man didn’t make love to a female firmly fixed in his mind as an extra sister. Then, had he employed any other excuse, she might still have harboured hopes. And Jake had been determined to kill even her hopes stone-dead.
