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‘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.
