‘How would you know? You never came back again to find out!’ he dismissed brusquely. ‘Was your pride so great that in six years you couldn’t give her a second chance?’
His biting criticism stabbed into her. No matter what story had been put about by her grandparents, Kitty had been shown the door and firmly told that she was never to return. But there was no point in making a defence that would encourage questions that she couldn’t and wouldn’t answer. Jake would want to know why they had done that.
‘I didn’t fancy being turned from the door and I would have been,’ she said tightly. ‘I wrote to her…I wrote I don’t know how many times and she didn’t reply to one of my letters. Her silence spoke for her. She always was a woman of few words.’
He frowned. ‘You wrote to her?’
‘Didn’t the bush telegraph pick that up as well?’
‘I really did believe that she might have felt differently from Nat.’ His response lacked the acid sarcasm of hers.
Her eyes hardened. ‘Don’t talk about my grandparents as if you knew them. You never knew them on an equal footing. In their eyes you were always a Tarrant, a breed apart, what Gran used to call “our betters”. I doubt you ever had a single real conversation with either of them.’
Anger had paled his complexion. ‘You talk as though we’re living in the nineteenth century.’
‘But we did in this house.’ And in yours, her skimming look of scorn implied.
Although it visibly went against the grain to abandon the argument on class divisions, his mouth remained firmly shut.
‘I guess you’d like to know how I came to buy this place,’ she continued offhandedly. ‘Grandfather came to London and asked me to. He said it was the least of what I owed them.’
Jake quirked a black brow. ‘Do you blame him for his attitude? You ran away and you disappeared into thin air. Almost two years later you popped up in print at a movie premi;agere with Maxwell…’
And it felt good, so good, she affixed inwardly. Diamonds at my throat and a designer gown, the stuff of which dreams are made. ‘I imagine that set the natives back on their heels,’ she mocked.
‘Oh, yes, you were the sole topic of conversation locally for months,’ he agreed tongue in cheek. ‘Talk about rags to riches.’
She gave a little smile. ‘I try not to. Other people find the Cinderella story terribly boring.’
‘Are you casting Maxwell as the fairy godmother or the dashing young prince? Either way he made a pretty sordid match for a nineteen-year-old girl,’ he drawled with a derisive softness that stung. ‘And I still wouldn’t have thought that you had the money to buy this farm at that early stage of your…career.’
Ignoring that insolent hesitation, she shrugged. ‘I didn’t. Grant bought it for me.’ And it would knock you for six if you knew what else his representative bought at the same time, she thought with malicious amusement.
‘How very generous of him.’
‘He’s extremely generous.’ If anything irritated, inconvenienced or demanded, slap a cheque down hard on it. That was how Grant functioned. Unfortunately it usually worked for him. Back then it had worked with Kitty. She had confused generosity with caring. A bad mistake.
Jake’s dark, unfathomable gaze rested on her, ‘You treat me like an enemy.’
‘Do I?’ She produced a laugh worthy of applause. ‘We’re strangers now, Jake.’
He probed the bright smile that sparkled on her lips. ‘I never meant to hurt you, Kitty.’
‘Hurt me?’ she prompted, tilting her head back enquiringly.
He swore in sudden exasperation. ‘For God’s sake, will you drop the Heaven Rothman act? Or has that nymphomaniac superbitch you’ve been playing for so long somehow become you?’ he demanded crushingly. ‘There are no microphones or cameras about. Do you think Kitty could come out of the closet for five minutes?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I ONLY perform for my friends, and you’re not numbered among them.’ Stormily Kitty flung her head back, a line of pink demarcating the exotic slant of her cheekbones. Bitter resentment shuddered through her, fighting to the surface in spite of her efforts to contain it. ‘Since you came into this house your hypocrisy has amazed me! For a start, you didn’t like my grandparents. And at least you had the guts to be honest about that eight years ago. You thought Nat had a chip the size of a boulder on his shoulder. You thought Martha was a sour, cold woman. And you were right…you were right on both counts!’
Jake stood there, effortlessly dominating the cramped confines of the room. Dark and controlled, he murmured, ‘Martha mellowed a good deal after his death.’
‘Not towards me, she didn’t!’
‘You’re upset,’ he drawled flatly. ‘I’ll leave. I shouldn’t have stayed.’
Her hand sent the door crashing shut. ‘No, you won’t leave until I’ve had my say,’ she declared shakily. ‘Why have you decided to rewrite the past? I had the most miserable childhood here and you know it. Once in seventeen years my grandmother put her arms around me. She must have had to hold me to feed me when I was a baby, but I don’t remember it. I remember being a burden, a nuisance and an embarrassment. My grandfather didn’t get the chance to punish my mother, so he punished me instead…’
Her voice broke and she turned to the window, bracing her trembling hands on the dusty sill. ‘I remember it all,’ she muttered, forcing out the harshened syllables very low, ‘as if it were yesterday.’
The profound silence stretched on and on.
‘Why did you come up here?’
Numbly she fought to recapture her poise. ‘I just wanted…to see it.’
‘Well, now you’ve seen it…’
‘Do you have children?’ As soon as the question left her lips, she could have bitten her tongue out. That dangerous explosion of emotion had left her temporarily out of control.
‘A little girl.’ He hesitated. ‘She’s four years old.’
A sudden ache stirred in Kitty’s breasts, violent, unforgiving. But his admission iced back over her seething emotions. Her voice emerged quietly and cleanly. ‘If you don’t mind, I would like to be on my own now.’
‘No problem. I’ve got a lunch date to keep,’ he said curtly.
Her arrogant assumption that he had intended to invite her gave her a sharp pang. Of course she wouldn’t have gone. You didn’t dive when you were bleeding into a river full of crocodiles. All the same, it would have been nice to have been asked so that she could have refused. ‘Who is she?’ she asked lightly.
At the door he paused, his dark scrutiny hooded. ‘You wouldn’t know her. She wasn’t here in your time.’
‘My goodness, but you’re being coy, Jake,’ she purred, and she was Heaven Rothman to her fingertips, poised, indulgently amused.
Long, supple fingers flexed against the door-frame. ‘Her name’s Paula. She’s the nurse in the local practice.’
She smiled. ‘What does she look like?’
A suffocating tension alive with hostile undertones had thickened the atmosphere. A muscle jerked at the corner of his wide, sensual mouth. ‘Are you going to ask if I’ve slept with her as well?’ he slung at her caustically.
He shocked her into silence. Her startled gaze fled his aggressive stare. She looked away from him. In the interim, he walked out of the house, slammed into his car and drove off. She breathed again. Pain was still stabbing through