The Return of the Stranger. Kate Walker

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

СКАЧАТЬ