by Lynne Graham
Her mouth opened and shut again soundlessly. For a stricken second she suspected him of cracking a macabre black joke at her expense.
‘And if you laugh, so help me God, Kitty, you’d better do it from behind a steel-plated door this time,’ he warned.
It was the most extraordinary proposal of marriage she had ever heard—the only one. She couldn’t have laughed to save her life. He had shocked her witless. He stood tall, rock-steady and straight. The vulnerability in his unshielded gaze was hard, not soft. He expected her to turn him down. It wouldn’t break him. Jake was a survivor. Tarrant pride and Tarrant obstinacy were an unbeatable combination.
Her tongue wet her lips in a snaking forage. She was feeling faint, a rushing noise interfering with her hearing. ‘Are you saying that you’re in love with me?’
He stared steadily back at her. ‘I’m saying no to some grubby little affair with no commitment on either side. I want an end to sleepless nights and futile arguments. I’d like you to be there when I wake up in the morning. I want to make a life with you,’ he stated levelly. ‘I don’t care if you’re on the rebound from Maxwell. I still think we’ve got enough to build on.’
Her restless fingers rubbed abstractedly at an old scorch mark on the scarred table. ‘After one night?’
‘I’ve never wanted a woman as much as I want you. I can admit that. You’ve haunted me for eight years and, after last night, you’ll probably haunt me for the next eighty, but there’s a lot more to marriage than sex.’ Ebony-framed dark eyes intercepted her under-the-lashes glance and held it by pure force of will. ‘I would still want to buy this place from you. I wasn’t thinking of it as your dowry.’
Hot pink banished her pallor. ‘Jake, that’s not—’
He forged on in a gritty drawl. ‘And by the way, Liz’s inheritance is all tied up in a trust fund for Tina. I put it there. I never touched a penny of it while Liz was alive and I didn’t change my mind when she was gone.’
Dear heaven, he still had small grasp of her real financial situation. She was a wealthy woman, some might say a very wealthy woman. Would he have proposed if he had known her true worth? Would she be more desirable or less desirable to him? A sick nausea cramped her stomach. Had he learnt his lesson with Liz? And had not her own past taught her an even harder lesson? Jake had not wanted her baby and then he had not even considered asking her to be his wife.
‘You don’t love me.’ In her turmoil she barely knew what she was saying. It was difficult enough to actually accept that they were having this conversation.
He vented a humourless laugh. ‘Are you telling me that I’d win points with you if I said I did?’
‘No. I’m grateful that you didn’t mention anything like that,’ she whispered truthfully.
‘Meaning?’ he queried curtly.
‘You were with Paula only a few days ago,’ she protested, tautly defensive.
‘Paula’s a red herring,’ he dismissed abrasively. ‘I didn’t come to your bed fresh from another woman’s.’
‘No,’ she conceded half under her breath.
‘You wanted me, Kitty. Just as much as I wanted you.’
Colouring, she walked over to the window. He had thrown the unanswerable and he knew it. ‘That still doesn’t mean that I’d want to marry you.’
‘But it does mean more than you’re prepared to admit. Why me?’ he asked silkily. ‘I don’t believe you’ve had a whole host of lovers anywhere except in your own imagination.’
‘I’ve been in a very emotional state of mind recently.’ She stumbled over the confession in her haste to deflect him from that dangerous line of enquiry.
Firm hands spun her back to face him. She pulled away, drifting hurriedly out of reach. If he touched her, it would be fatal. Before she knew where she was, she would be feeding the hens for Jessie and sewing on his buttons. Her efforts to inwardly arouse her own sense of humour fell on stony ground. Her thoughts were too centred on panic and another emotion that she flatly refused to recognise.
His attention did not stray from her flushed profile. ‘There’s also Tina to consider. And your career. I’d be surprised if you couldn’t get television work here in the UK…’
Kitty would have been astonished. The Rothmans had turned her into a household name. Jake was really talking about something which he knew precious little about.
‘But I’ll be frank. I don’t fancy a commuter marriage. At least not in the beginning. It wouldn’t be giving us much of a chance. It’s something we’d have to discuss,’ he completed unemotionally.
She turned away again, wishing that he would stop watching her. All he lacked was an interrogator’s light, and she was desperate to hide the tumultuous state of her emotions. But no…no, she wasn’t even toying with the idea of saying yes. She wasn’t that stupid. Absolutely not, absolutely not that stupid by any stretch of the imagination. She cleared her throat, steadied by the inner certainty. ‘I don’t really see myself as housewife material.’
‘There is such a thing as compromise. I can manage to maintain a housekeeper and a wife,’ he said drily. ‘Just as you could manage to have a career without putting in a seven-day week.’
‘An acting career requires one hundred per cent commitment. If you can’t be in the right place at the right time as often as the opportunity comes up, you might as well forget about it,’ she countered, and as swiftly questioned why she was bothering to argue.
He expelled his breath. ‘I thought you wanted to be a writer.’
‘I mightn’t make it as a writer.’ She ran her fingers jerkily through her hair. ‘I don’t know why I’m even talking about this.’
She was moving about the room in an aimless circle, giving his tall, dark figure as wide a berth as possible. He had the element of surprise when he caught her to him with a lean hand and probed her mouth in a shockingly hungry assault. Her resistance was nil. Her fingers slid beneath his jacket and burrowed helplessly under his shirt to find skin. Crushed to the all-male heat of his long, powerful length, she was in seventh heaven. Her sensory perceptions centred entirely on him within seconds. The room, the hour and the reasons why she had been trying to avoid this exact development vanished along with self-dominion.
* * *
She awoke from an uneasy slumber alone. As she sat up, she reeled dizzily and lifted a questing hand to her woozy head. She wasn’t feeling very well. Understatement. She was feeling ghastly. Shivering, she crawled out of bed to plug in the electric fire. Every aching muscle she possessed complained at the activity. A hot drink. That was what she needed.
Dear God, how long had she slept? It was late afternoon and she had only the vaguest recollection of Jake’s departure. Weak and perspiring from the virulent cold symptoms assailing her, she went downstairs.
The phone was making a peculiar noise. The receiver was hooked off the cradle. Jake must have left it that way. With a rueful hand she replaced it. While she was still in mental turmoil Jake had ruthlessly swept her back to bed. Within twenty-four hours he had separated her from sanity. In the night desire had a silent voice sufficient to quiet her misgivings…but at four in the afternoon she was appalled by the extent of the power he had over her. He had mentioned marriage and what common sense she had retained had gaily gone walkabout.
That final, treacherous surrender of hers could conceivably have convinced him that she was thinking in terms of a positive answer. In actuality, if she was brutally honest with herself, she hadn’t had to think at all. Within her heart her answer had never been in doubt, but she had an instinctive terror of such inner promptings.
His proposal could only have been motivated by the devastating physical hunger they shared. In other words, demeaning as the thought was, Jake was currently a slave to his own sexual appetite. After a failed marriage of convenience with Liz, he doubtless didn’t think that he could have very much to lose in a second risky venture.
In addition he was violently jealous of Grant. How much had her father’s
phone call contributed to Jake’s primitively possessive need to mark her out as exclusively his property? Hadn’t this morning merely been an agonising replay of an eight-year-old catastrophe? A drunk had tried to kiss her and Jake had gone overboard, crossing the boundary lines he had carefully set up between them over the preceding months.
She flinched as the phone trilled an intrusive summons. It was cowardice, but she didn’t want to answer it. The persistent trill needled her sore head. With an exclamation of defeat she lifted the receiver.
‘Miss Colgan?’ Grant’s stalwart secretary, Becky, sounded unusually harassed and waited for Kitty to confirm her presence before saying with ritualistic precision, ‘Call from Mr Maxwell.’
‘Don’t even think of telling me that I’m not entitled to demand an explanation!’ Grant’s transatlantic drawl sizzled down the line with whiplash accuracy and pitch. ‘Tarrant!’ A harsh expletive seared her sensitive eardrums.
She put a hand up to her throbbing brow. It came away wet with perspiration. It was little wonder that her brain had the elasticity of sludge, she thought dully. ‘He’s not married any more,’ she said tightly.
‘Is that supposed to make me feel better? Have you gone right out of your mind?’ he demanded. ‘I tried to stop you going back up there. Why didn’t you listen to me?’
She decided that he might as well have the lot at once. ‘I still love him.’
‘Oh, my God.’ It was an agonised groan and she could picture his handsome face, composed in pained lines of cynicism and scorn, discomfiture lurking somewhere at the back of his green eyes. With the sole exception of anger, overt emotion made Grant extremely ill at ease.
‘That’s how I feel,’ she persisted unsteadily. ‘I won’t let you put me down.’
‘By the sound of it, you don’t need my assistance to do that,’ he parried with cutting satire. ‘We may have had our disagreements recently, but I’ve never been less than straight with you.’
‘I don’t need this right now,’ she muttered wearily. ‘I just wanted to be honest with you.’
‘Honesty like that I can do without. You’re making a complete ass of yourself. I suppose you do realise that?’ he probed with remorseless contempt. ‘Do you need your memory refreshed? He ran rings round you and he dumped you, Kitty. He probably hasn’t that in mind this time. After all, you’ve had your rough edges smoothed off and you just happen to be worth a few million. I’m not surprised to hear that he’s made a move on you, but I’m very surprised that you can be feeble enough to fall for the same lines a second time.’
Static buzzed on the line. In an expression of silent torment, she had squeezed her eyes shut. Not one derisive word had missed target. ‘Stop it,’ she whispered.
‘I’m sorry if you don’t like the bad news, but I’m damned if I’m going to apologise for it,’ he continued hardly. ‘What is it about this guy? You could have any man you wanted and yet it’s still him. Is he the one that got away? If this is an ego trip I could understand that, but I don’t understand anything else.’
‘You never have understood me,’ she murmured tautly.
‘You’ve been working too hard, Kitty. I’ll even allow that maybe I put on too much pressure there for a time,’ he conceded, obviously feeling generous after shredding her. ‘Pull yourself together and jump on the first plane over here, hmm? It’s too late for the film but I wouldn’t say no to a house guest. Your agent’s been in touch with me. There’s an offer of a mini-series pending…’
‘I can’t leave, I can’t run away from this!’
‘Tell him to drop dead and then catch the plane,’ Grant suggested drily. ‘I’m really not particular about how you do it. How’s the great literary work going?’
She started to tell him, but he wasn’t interested enough to listen and he cut her off to talk about his film. Ten minutes later, she slumped down in sick dizziness on the settee. She had never felt more alone and isolated. Or more wretched. Feeble, yes, she supposed, looking back over the past weeks; feeble was almost too kind a description.
There had never been the remotest possibility of her marrying Jake. Not a spoken-out-loud possibility. Did she punish herself now for harbouring a dream? A loveless union with Jake would kill her by degrees. Inch by inch, hour by hour. She attempted to console herself with the knowledge of the misery she would save herself from by cutting loose now. But since the prospect of not seeing him again today, never mind tomorrow, was capable of depressing her, it was a rather pointless procedure.
He had mentioned something about a trip to York and he was sure to be working tonight. She would leave tomorrow first thing. She had to make herself believe that. Staggering upright, she lifted the first two chapters of her book off the dresser and thrust the folder beneath her portable typewriter. She trudged out to the car with her burden. Her legs threatened to crumple under her and she sagged back down on to the settee again to catch her breath.
In a minute she would go back upstairs and pack. By tomorrow she was sure to be feeling stronger. She wasn’t planning to join her father in the South of France. But in her disorientation her lack of a decided destination really didn’t seem at all important. The minute of rest slid unnoticed into a few minutes and her aching eyes slowly closed.
She awakened without ever knowing she had been asleep, and she couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t breathe at all. Her fingers torturously clawed at the fabric beneath her cheek in a weak attempt to raise herself. The rasping agony of her own lungs controlled her. Her frantic movements sent her rolling on to the floor, the invisible smoke in the darkness choking her.
Glass splinters flew out from the window. Hands dragged at her. She didn’t feel them. The top of her head was flying off and she lapsed into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOMEBODY was shouting at Kitty, shaking her. She started to cough and gasp in wrenching, painful spasms that jerked her whole body. She recognised Jake’s arms by sense and touch alone, her eyes opening on a blurred vision of the night that was reminiscent of a view of hell. It was no longer dark. Incredible noise was bombarding her ears. A fizzling and a crackling joined in the roar of the orange and yellow flames shooting up into the skies, sending multi-coloured sparks showering down in all directions. She couldn’t see the cottage, couldn’t even grasp that it was in there somewhere feeding the thick, swirling smoke and the awesome flames.
There was a sudden flash and an ear-splitting report and she ducked her head into the shelter of Jake’s jacket, her arms tightening round him as she gasped for oxygen that hurt her raw throat. He was trembling against her and she could feel the ferocious anger he was fighting to contain. He was struggling to breathe and shout at the same time and somebody was bundling her into a blanket.
She wasn’t sure whether that somebody was Jake or not. She was floating in a poppy field awash with glorious scarlet flowers, the sun a drenching warmth on her skin. She couldn’t see Jake, but she could sense his presence. It was a paradise of a place and the far-off voices around her penetrated her mystic vision not at all.
‘Yes,’ she croaked to nobody in particular. ‘I said yes.’
She surfaced briefly in a strange, brightly lit room. Hazily she focused on Jake. His face was all black. He was arguing about something. A female in a white coat as wide as she was tall was towering over his chair, loudly telling him not to be obstreperous. She couldn’t keep her eyes open on that intriguing sight. With a little smile she drifted off again in search of her poppy field.
‘How does you feel?’
An anxious little face was hovering over her. Tina? With a groan, Kitty moved her head. Her temples pounded and there was a razor at the back of her throat. She winced.
‘Are you really coming to live at my house forever and ever?’ Tina demanded excitedly.
‘Put it like that and she might change her mind.’ Jake appeared and swept Tina off the bed. He gave her a hug before setting her down again. ‘Go and ask Jessie very nicely for a cup of
tea.’
Kitty plucked at the duvet and stole a dazed look round the pleasantly furnished unfamiliarity of her surroundings. ‘Where am I?’ she whispered.
‘Torbeck. It’s five in the afternoon, day one after the conflagration.’
Her brow indented. She had only the haziest memory of it all, disconnected snatches that didn’t make much sense. ‘You mean,’ she swallowed with difficulty, ‘it was real—there really was a fire?’
‘Either that or there are an awful lot of people suffering from a mass hallucination.’ Poised at the foot of the bed, he surveyed her, his dark beautiful eyes intent on her pallor. ‘I’ve spent most of the day dealing with the police and the fire department. I’m afraid they arrived too late. The house is a shell. Everything’s gone,’ he told her almost conversationally. ‘Do you realise just how lucky you are to be alive?’
She pushed a shaking hand through her tangled hair. ‘My God…the last thing I recall is sitting on the settee…well, there are one or two other bits…’ her voice tailed off.
‘You have Tina’s flu. Of course it would never have occurred to you to call a doctor,’ he breathed, flexing long fingers expressively on the brass foot-rail of the bed. ‘The fire started in your bedroom. You wouldn’t have had a prayer if you’d been up there.’
Her evasive gaze arrowed to the sprigged floral pattern on the duvet. ‘I left the electric fire burning,’ she mumbled.
‘Correction,’ he contradicted. ‘You left a faulty electric fire burning. Your grandmother put it away. She knew it was dangerous but she was too stingy to dump anything!’ A rise of strong emotion was betrayed by the ground-out syllables. ‘If the door between the hall and the kitchen hadn’t been shut, you’d be dead.’
Her stomach was feeling fragile. ‘Will you stop saying that?’
‘I just want it to sink in. I got you out with minutes to spare,’ he advanced tautly.
‘I wasn’t feeling well. I forgot that I’d put on the fire to heat the room.’
