The Return of the Stranger. Kate Walker

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СКАЧАТЬ hurts tended to, a bed provided for the night. He had been ejected forcibly, tossed out into the lashing rain like a stray, unwanted, flea-ridden cur. And when he had returned to High Farm, Joseph had taken a riding crop to him for daring to have the nerve to trespass on their aristocratic neighbour’s land.

      That was the last time that he and Kat had ever been truly close. That experience had taught her what luxury money could bring, the pleasures of being cared for in the soft comfort of the Grange. When she had come home she had seemed like a different person, more like her brother’s sister rather than the untamed tomboy she had once been. She had moved further away from him with each day that had passed, and now here she was, still reserved, still distant, with her cool blue eyes showing that she too regarded him as an intruder into her elegant world.

      Well, he was more than an intruder. And one day soon she would learn just how completely their positions had been reversed. Once he would have rushed to tell her. The man he had become knew how to wait, knowing it was worth it in the end.

      ‘I’ve grown up,’ she threw at him now. It was like ice, cold and sharp as her gaze. ‘I should hope that we both have.’

      Oh she’d grown up all right. Grown up and further away from him than ever. The childhood friends they had once been no longer existed. If in fact they had ever truly been as close as he imagined. Looked at her coldly, he could well imagine that she had just been whiling away her time with him while the fancy took her.

      But thinking coldly was almost impossible. He had once wanted this woman with the hunger and need of a lonely boy’s heart. But she had turned away from him, choosing instead to give herself to a man with the money and the position she craved. He was no longer that lonely boy who had fought himself for her as well as the rest of the world. And the feelings she stirred in him were nothing to do with youth but the hard, demanding hunger of a mature man. A man hardened by life and experience.

      A man who wanted the woman before him with a hunger that had been growing inside him for ten long years, even when he had tried to deny that it existed.

      Even when he had told himself that he would just take one look at her and walk away. He had actually believed that he could do just that. But that had been before he had seen the woman she had become. A woman who in the space of a few moments had woken a hunger in him that he knew would never subside easily or stay under control for very long.

      He had come for revenge on her brother, on her husband who had escaped him by dying unexpectedly. But the truth was that he still had unfinished business with Lady Charlton. Unfinished business that he had refused to let himself recall how deep it went until now.

      ‘A lot of water has passed under the bridge since we were last together,’ he said, ironing every trace of what he had been thinking from his tone. ‘Things are no longer the same.’

      ‘They’re most definitely not.’

      Mental discomfort pushed the words from Kat’s mouth. She didn’t know quite how to behave in front of this man who was and was not Heath. Certainly not the Heath she had known.

      The ice in his eyes told its own story. And there was something in that ‘didn’t know any better’ that turned her blood cold in her veins. She was not dealing with the Heath she had known, or anyone like him. The new lines on his face, etched around his mouth and eyes, lines that could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as laughter lines, told their own story.

      ‘How could anything be the same after so long?’ she demanded, hardening her tone to match his expression. ‘You don’t deserve a welcome after ten years’ absence and silence. To be silent all that time, you can never have thought of me.’

      ‘A little more than you have thought of me, Miss Katherine.’

      Brutal cynicism made a dark mockery of the once respectful way that her brother had insisted that Heath should address her. This Heath, this man who had so obviously made a success of his life, would never now submit to calling her Miss Katherine or the deference that her brother had once so insisted on. This man clearly stood tall and proud, looking the world right in the eye. And the way he used that polite title lashed at her, seeming to scour off a layer of skin, leaving her feeling raw and exposed underneath.

      ‘Or perhaps I should call you Lady Charlton, now.’ ‘It is my name!’

      Nervousness made her toss it at him in a way that even she acknowledged sounded cold and distant. It was a tone worthy of Arthur Charlton himself, and as such it made her wish she’d never spoken. But then it only matched Heath’s own approach tone for tone. If he had not come back as a friend, then he could only be an enemy, and she suddenly felt the need to be very wary of this almost complete stranger. He had prospered, that much was evident. But prospered in what way, in what field?

      ‘You know about my marriage, then?’

      And she could just imagine how he would interpret it. But he had no idea how her life had been since he had left. No idea of the hole he had left in her existence and the ways she had tried so desperately to fill it.

      Heath nodded slowly, his dark face set and cold as if carved from the rock on the moor outside; his eyes just shards of flint, opaque and unrevealing.

      ‘I heard of it and decided that one day I would call to offer you my congratulations. I didn’t think that your husband would have left you a widow before I could do so, and that those congratulations would instead mean that I had to offer my condolences.’

      ‘Arthur’s death was a shock to us all.’

      What else could she say? It was just the truth after all. And the words were the polite fiction she had been hiding behind ever since the day the police had arrived at the Grange with the shocking news. But the real truth was that she had been hiding the reality of her marriage for far longer than that. So much so that the instinct to conceal, not to let anyone see what had been hidden behind the respectable, elegant doors of ‘The Big House’ had become second nature to her now. Her instinctive, fall-back position. The one that protected her from things that were so much worse.

      That was what marriage to Arthur had reduced her to. The marriage that the whole of the neighbourhood—the county—had considered the wedding of the decade but had soon proved to be such a bitter lie from start to finish. The marriage she had been hoping to try to move on from when the discovery of just how Arthur had left things had knocked her right back.

      ‘And it has rather changed things.’

      ‘It has? How?’

      But Heath offered no answer to that question, instead he moved into the room, prowling across the carpet in a way that revived her thoughts of the predatory wild cat of moments before. Standing before the huge windows, he affected an absorbed interest in the scene before him, the wide expanse of the garden, the swimming pool tucked away at the side of the house, and beyond that the range of fields where sheep grazed contentedly in spite of the rain.

      Where he stood in the light from the window she could see the marked skin of his cheek, the thin scar that spoiled it, running along one cheekbone. And the memory of how he had come by that, who had put it there, caught at her nerves and tugged them hard. The mark that had been made by the glancing blow of a cast-off horseshoe, flung with deliberate viciousness at him by her brother Joseph in one of his irrational rages. The horse Joe owned and had ridden at a local show-jumping championship had been well and truly beaten by Heath’s own mount, loaned to him by her father. Typically, Joseph had taken out his fury and his jealousy in an act of violence that had horrified her.

      Had СКАЧАТЬ