by Lynne Graham
So she was always at the mercy of elements outside her control? No, she wasn’t, she told herself fiercely. She would conclude this insanity before it went any further, and to reinforce that necessity she reminded herself painfully of the baby she had wanted to bring into the world in spite of his wishes. Then she had been infinitely less desirable. Jake had wanted neither her nor any child she might have been carrying. It was some minutes before she registered that Jake was taking a long time to join her.
‘Jake!’ Her call echoed hollowly in the dark hall.
She heard his steps a moment later. He strode down to her and tossed the bag casually into her hands. ‘I’d forgotten what the view was like up there.’
The dark flush along his cheekbones, the rawness of his voice told its own story. There was no view to admire from that room. He was as over-sensitive to their surroundings as she had been.
‘I want to talk to you about what happened then,’ he imparted tautly.
‘What is there to talk about?’ There were years of training in the deprecating movement of her slim shoulder. ‘We both made a mistake.’
His jawline clenched hard. ‘It wasn’t a mistake on my part.’
‘At least you’ve become that honest with the passage of time.’
‘Damn you, Kitty,’ he said savagely. ‘You’re deliberately twisting my words.’
‘Possibly because I don’t want to discuss pre-history. The prospect makes me feel slightly tacky,’ she replied coldly.
Dark eyes rested on her inscrutably. ‘When you feel the need to shoot these world-weary lines, you really ought to aim them at someone who didn’t know you when you were a child.’
Her colour heightened. She swung on her heel, her knees maddeningly wobbly. ‘It’s almost dark, Jake, and I’m tired.’
‘Until I tell you why I married Liz, what happened eight years ago will still lie between us,’ he bit out impatiently. ‘Now are you going to make this easy or are you determined to make it difficult?’
She turned back to him. A band of steel tension was enclosing her pounding temples. ‘I’m a dinosaur where forgiveness is concerned,’ she whispered tightly. ‘I’ve only got one question for you. Did you ever love her?’
Hooded dark eyes held hers unflinchingly. ‘No.’
He hadn’t lied and she was weak enough still to wish he had. She wasn’t vain. He could easily have fallen in love with a more outgoing and mature girl than she had been then. ‘So you got what you deserved,’ she condemned very low.
‘Liz got what I deserved,’ he contradicted harshly. ‘I should never have married her.’
A stifled laugh fell from her lips. ‘I don’t know, Jake. From where I stand you made a pretty cut-and-dried decision. You saw a chance and you took it and there was no way you were going to let me get in your path.’
His lean features hardened. ‘Exactly what are you saying?’
‘If you didn’t marry her for love, you married her for money, and if it didn’t work out too well, you’ve only got yourself to thank for it,’ she said bitterly.
‘Is that what you believe?’ Although the demand was ominously quiet, the icy rage in his stare struck out at her in a chilling blast. He gazed at her with generations of bred-in-the-bone hauteur. ‘Of course I should make allowances for you, Kitty. Selling yourself at nineteen to the highest bidder wasn’t evidence of a more delicate frame of mind. Maxwell doesn’t appear to have done much to raise the tone of those mercenary little brain cells.’
‘How dare you talk to me like that?’
His dark head spun to the ajar front door. ‘I heard a car.’
She swept past him, shaking with indignation. Bob Creighton appeared in the path of his car headlights and treated them both to a speculative scrutiny.
‘I didn’t realise you were still up here until I saw the car. Don’t worry, I’ll lock up.’ The amused grin on his florid face brought heat to Kitty’s skin even in the icy air.
She thanked him woodenly. ‘Any time, Miss Colgan,’ he breezed as she stepped into Jake’s car.
Jake took his time about joining her. Indifferent to the cold, he lingered in the scant shelter of the porticoed entrance. Their gruelling exchange of words had left her raw and shaking. Jake, on the other hand, was coolly capable of trading casual conversation with the estate manager. Had he been attempting to deny her accusation? Or insidiously suggesting that at heart there was very little difference between them? His opinion of her was no higher.
When he swung in beside her, she couldn’t help saying tartly, ‘What was he grinning at?’
‘Take your choice. It was either the movie queen exit or he was wondering what we were doing in the dark. I wouldn’t be too hard on him,’ he drawled. ‘His suspicions weren’t too far off beam.’
She pressed a moist palm to her throbbing brow. ‘I don’t want people talking about us—’
‘There has to be an us to talk about,’ he cut in coldly. ‘And I really don’t think that there is.’
Illogically, that hurt. It was what she ought to want to hear, what her sane mind wanted to tell him. Any relationship between them now would be utter madness. Yet still it hurt. She felt as if once again she had been tried and found wanting. His withdrawal filled her with a demeaning sense of rejection and a panicky sense of loss. Yet she had brought it on herself. she knew that. A sharp pang of anguish currented through her, wounding wherever it touched.
He drew up outside the cottage, his dark features impassive. ‘It’s going to snow again and you could well be drifted in up here. I assume you’re well stocked up with food and fuel?’
‘I can look after myself.’
‘If you need help, ask for it. I can’t see you defrosting frozen pipes in your four-inch heels and your designer raincoat,’ he said drily.
Kitty couldn’t get out of the car quickly enough. ‘I can manage.’
‘I wish I could believe that, but your track record for managing by yourself hasn’t been too good in the last eight years,’ he countered bleakly.
She slammed into the cottage. Behind the door her whole body slumped. She stumbled through to the scullery to dissolve a couple of pain-killers. Her headache abated steadily. An hour later she built up the fire again and sat down at her typewriter with driven resolution. What had she achieved in two weeks? One miserable chapter. The next opened on a blazing row between two complete strangers and she was just in the mood to attack that difficult scene with the spirit it required.
Late evening, she massaged her aching spine and surveyed the fat pile of manuscript paper with dulled satisfaction. She was in the bath when the insistent ring of the phone penetrated her thoughts. A frantic rush to answer it earned her only the frustrating click as the caller rang off. You thought it might be him, you flew down those stairs. Her own weakness tortured her.
Lying in bed with the radio for company, she reached a decision she would have been prouder to have reached a week ago. She would leave tomorrow. She would sell Lower Ridge. She would even sell the estate. There would be no ties left here then and no excuse ever to return. She had stopped bolstering up her pride with empty pretences.
The choices Jake had made at twenty-two had not killed her love for him. For too long she had sheathed her emotions in a forcing house of bitterness. And now the walls of her castle were falling down. Her black and white view of the past had blurred into disturbing grey shades.
An adoring and willing teenage girl could be an overpowering temptation to a virile young man. Jake had not deliberately set out to use and discard her. Fate had given them opportunity and mutual attraction had plunged them both into what followed. Afterwards, Jake had made an astonishingly clumsy attempt to deal with the situation, but ravaged by his conscience he had been out of his depth.
Had he already been planning on a rich wife? Jake had a bone-deep strength that could be uncommonly hard, and strength was frequently partnered by a composite degree of ruthlessness. He had always been fiercely loyal to his fa
mily. He had filled the gaps that his father had refused to fill. Even at seventeen Kitty had recognised his instinctive protectiveness towards his mother while she had fought to maintain a long-dead marriage. When the crash came, his sisters and his mother must have clung to him like drowning swimmers. Dear God, did she now start to excuse him for marrying Liz to rescue the family fortunes?
Kitty tasted the full force of her own weakness. If there was a defence to be made for Jake, she was pathetically keen to build up the case. A faint creak somewhere beyond the bedroom lifted her head. Frowning, she turned down the radio. When the door swung wide without any warning whatsoever, her heart leapt into her mouth. There was a split second of terror before she realised incredulously that it was Jake surveying her from the threshold.
‘I did knock but you can’t have heard me above the music. The front door’s on the latch. You don’t take many precautions for your own safety,’ he censured. ‘I’m not about to apologise for giving you a fright. I could have been anybody!’
‘I forgot to lock up.’ She was having difficulty breathing, never mind thinking. It was after midnight. What did he want, for goodness’ sake?
His tailored suit had been replaced by a pair of tight-fitting black jeans that hugged his perfectly proportioned male physique with disturbing fidelity. The collar of his dark green weatherproof jacket was turned up. Melting snowflakes lent a crystalline shimmer to the black luxuriance of his hair.
He looked devastatingly dark and smoulderingly sexy, and as that unsought awareness occurred to her she was shaken afresh by her own shameless susceptibility. His keen gaze roamed boldly over her lace-edged sheets and pillowcases, glided over the ridiculous mound of quilts piled on top of the blankets for extra warmth, and lingered finally on the incongruity of the woolly shawl covering what little was visible of her.
‘It’s a little like the princess and the pea in reverse,’ he quipped, strolling lazily forward, apparently impervious to her electrified tension. ‘I certainly don’t need to ask if you’re feeling the cold.’
‘Would you mind telling me what you’re doing here?’ She had intended to sound scornful but her treacherous voice emerged thin and shrill.
The glow of the lamp revealed a haggard tinge to his complexion. His wine-dark eyes had a reckless glitter, but the tense slant of his expressive mouth belied his air of slumbrous relaxation. He withdrew a bottle from one laden pocket and deposited it on the bedside cabinet. From his other pocket he produced a pair of twisted-stem, etched champagne goblets which gleamed with the fragile beauty of old glass. He slotted them neatly into her unprepared hands.
‘Jake, I…what am I supposed to do with these?’
‘I am trying to make an occasion of this.’ Repossessing the bottle he sank down calmly on the side of the bed and flourished a corkscrew.
She clutched stupidly at the glasses. ‘An occasion?’
‘Maybe you do this all the time. I don’t,’ he extended flatly. ‘And no, I wasn’t trying to insult you—’
‘You don’t need to try, you’re doing just fine!’ she gulped, twisting abruptly to put the goblets down. Only a man would have pulled two such exquisite items out of an unprotected pocket with no more respect than he would have employed with a pair of tumblers.
His well-shaped dark head was bent, his chiselled profile turned to her. ‘It might help if you stopped cringing and cowering back against the pillows like some pantomime Victorian virgin facing a violent intruder. My sense of humour isn’t what it usually is tonight,’ he confided.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BOTH incensed and mortified by the scathing description, Kitty gaped at Jake. Fortunately he wasn’t looking at her. He was having a battle royal with the champagne cork. His lean hands were ever so slightly lacking in their usual dexterity. A pang of treacherous tenderness stole through her twanging emotional disarray. He couldn’t stay; he couldn’t possibly stay. He just couldn’t walk in here when he felt like it, sling a bottle of vintage bubbly at her and expect to share her bed for the night. But that’s what he’s doing, a little voice screeched.
‘Why are you here?’ she probed breathlessly. ‘I thought— ‘
‘Thinking’s dangerous. Where we are concerned, it ought to be outlawed altogether. I should know.’ Rising with the bottle, he let champagne froth into the waiting glasses. Black-lashed tawny eyes nailed themselves to her flushed face with inherent sensuality and her pulses started to race, her stomach turning over in a crazy little somersault. ‘I could give you a dozen reasons why, but they all melt down to the same ego-zapping bottom line. I couldn’t stay away,’ he confessed with harsh sincerity. ‘I also had the feeling that you might be contemplating doing a runner on me.’
Her tongue slunk out to moisten her dry lower lip. ‘A runner?’
He slid a goblet between her nerveless fingers. ‘You ran away from here once. You ran back here from Maxwell,’ he specified. ‘But you’re not about to do the same to me. I’m not giving you that amount of space.’
The golden obduracy of his eyes held her in mesmerised thrall. A mouse waking up to find the cat’s paw firmly placed on its twitching tail could not have been more paralysed. ‘It’s cold up here,’ she said abruptly. ‘We’d be more comfortable downstairs. We could talk—’
‘Talk?’ His laugh was richly appreciative and yet somehow embittered as well. ‘You want to talk about eight years that neither of us wants to live with? It was rather na;auive of me to imagine that we could talk. In any case, I’m not cold, Kitty.’ A brilliant smile lifted the hardness from his expressive mouth. ‘And I promise that you won’t be either.’
Shrugging gracefully out of his jacket, he cast it carelessly across the footboard before lifting his own glass. Stalled in her clumsy attempt to defuse an explosive situation, she unwittingly twirled her glass back and forward, forward and back between her fingers in a revealing metronome of her inner perturbation. She wanted the impossible. She wanted to send him away but she wanted him to come back. With hindsight that was cold comfort now, she saw how provocative her behaviour must have seemed to him.
Would he credit that that had been neither conscious nor deliberate? Would he not be more inclined to believe that her present reluctance was another unpleasant step in some despicable game? She snatched a sip of champagne, dying bubbles tickling her throat. With a casual yank of a hand, he displaced the abundance of quilts and cast them on to a nearby chair where they promptly spilled to the floor.
He studied her tense stillness in the bed quizzically. ‘I could be forgiven for suspecting that now that you’ve got me you don’t quite know what to do with me,’ he murmured softly. ‘Isn’t that a crazy idea?’
She tried and failed to laugh, her eyes mirroring her confusion. ‘Did you try to phone earlier?’
‘No. It wasn’t me. I was too busy driving fifty miles in pursuit of a presentable bottle of champagne. I really don’t know why I bothered.’ His intent gaze rested on her with a sudden flash of savage, undisguised hunger and she felt as if she had gone down in a lift too fast, her breathing quickening, her stomach clenching. ‘Now that I’m here, I don’t even want to drink it. I don’t want to think about tomorrow or the next day either. I just want you…or as much of you as I can have,’ he completed in a husky growl.
‘I can understand how things might have seemed to you, but I’m really not in the habit of leaping into—’ a brown hand deftly deprived her of her glass and tripped her into startled repetition ‘—leaping into bed with men.’
‘I hope not in the plural sense.’ It was a mocking intercession. ‘And you don’t have to leap anywhere, Kitty. You’re exactly where I want you to be.’
Sinking down on the bed again, he leant forward. His hands braced on the pillow on either side of her face, his warm breath fanning her cheek. He slowly circled her damp lips with the tip of his tongue, delving expertly between to tease her and taste her until her senses swam with dizziness and she had to put her hands up to his broad shoulder
s to convince herself that she was still on solid earth.
‘Jake,’ she mumbled dazedly.
‘You can’t possibly be shy with me.’ His fingers sensuously cradled the nape of her neck, and this time he kissed her with a shockingly sexual urgency that drained her woolly brain of rational thought for endless minutes.
She opened her eyes and he was undressing, peeling off his shirt to reveal the smattering of black, curling hair that sprinkled his well-muscled chest and arrowed down in an intriguingly silky furrow over his flat belly to disappear tantalisingly beneath his low-slung belt. Her moral principles took her to the door on a hurried exit…but her body stayed where it was on the bed, strangely weighted and unmoving. She was spellbound by his masculine beauty. Tawny skin blended perfectly over sleek, strong bones and whipcord muscles. Words like spectacular and gorgeous seethed in her chaotic thoughts, embarrassing her into tearing her attention from him. Sanity made one last attempt to be heard. ‘This isn’t sensible.’
‘I’m feeling many things at this moment,’ he admitted. ‘Sensible isn’t one of them.’
Her heart was beating so fast it scared her. The mattress depressed again with his weight. Just this once, just this once, she bargained wildly with herself, and she knew even then that she was lying. She was hooked on Jake and he was a dangerous addiction. Time had only deepened her dependency.
He drew her slowly into the heat of his embrace, pressing his lips to a sensitive spot just below her ear. Her entire body began to dissolve. As his fingers dropped to the buttons on her nightshirt, she trembled and wondered crazily what he was likely to say when he came to her bedsocks. Her feet squirmed together, endeavouring to push the offending articles off before he ran across them, until it occurred to her that her pedestrian apparel was the very least of what she had to worry about. Suppose she froze up on him? Suppose he realised just how very inexperienced she was? Dear God, how could he not realise?
