The Return of the Stranger. Kate Walker

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ