Shooting her a hard, driven glance, he swung restively away from her. ‘All right, I owe you an apology for what I said at Nat’s funeral.’ His tone was abrasive, quite unapologetic.
She strolled away from the wall to stand at the thorn hedge boundary on the other side of the lane. The scent of him was still in her sensitive nostrils. He smelt of horses and soap and fresh air. Mentally she suppressed the unwelcome awareness. ‘Is there anything else?’ she enquired coldly. ‘I have to call with Gran’s solicitor.’
‘I have the only set of keys for Lower Ridge.’
Her incredulous eyes flew to him. ‘What are you doing with them?’
He looked steadily back at her. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on the place. Not by choice. Your grandmother made me executor of her will.’
Kitty vented a shaken laugh. ‘Oh, really?’
‘I didn’t find out until then that you bought the farm for them. Where they got the money to buy it was a mystery round here for a long time afterwards.’ He absorbed her shuttered, uninterested stare, and his nostrils flared. ‘You know that I want to buy Lower Ridge. The offer is over the market price. Morgan personally checked that out before he passed it on to you.’
‘He took a lot on himself without my instructions,’ she noted cuttingly.
‘You couldn’t get away from that farm fast enough or far enough eight years ago,’ he countered. ‘I can’t see what you’d want with it now.’
The wind blew the floating panels of her black Italian knit cape taut against the full swell of her breasts and the shapely curve of her hips. Stonily she looked at him. ‘No, Rodeo Drive is much more my style. That’s where I belong.’ With bitter relish she threw his own words at her grandfather’s funeral back in his teeth. ‘What right had you to say that to me?’
‘Maybe no right, but it was the truth,’ he stated unflinchingly. ‘What kind of a reception did you expect when you rolled up in your fancy limousine with a pack of reporters baying at your heels? You could have come up here quietly, but you didn’t. You managed to turn a solemn occasion into a riotous publicity stunt.’
Fury spurred her into an emotional response. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t think!’
Meeting his cool, unimpressed gaze, she spun her head away and stared out blindly across the fells, but even with her back turned to him she could feel his disruptive presence as strongly as she could feel the rebellious breeze clawing at her hair.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t got the keys on me, but if you want them…’ he murmured.
‘I want them,’ she said flatly.
‘I’ll go back to Torbeck and pick them up,’ he completed.
‘Good.’ Without warning she turned her head back and intercepted the fierce glitter of gold in his unscreened gaze before he could conceal it. Countless men had looked at Kitty with acquisitive desire over the years. None of them had incited the smallest interest in her. But that instant of weakness on his part filled her with wild exhilaration. Eat your heart out, Jake, she urged inwardly; just look at what you threw away.
His dark skin was stretched taut over his hard bone-structure. ‘My God, Kitty, we used to be friends,’ he condemned in a scathing undertone.
‘Past tense still operative,’ she spelt out.
‘Have you had lunch?’ he asked abruptly, glancing fleetingly at his watch.
‘No, but I suggest you go back to your wife for yours,’ she responded, softly sibilant. ‘That is where you belong.’
He stiffened. Antagonism sizzled in the air. Hot and seething.
‘Liz is dead, Kitty. She died in a car crash almost two years ago.’
A pregnant pause ensued, unbroken by any conventional offer of sympathy. She surveyed him impassively, her ability to control her features absolute. Dead, she’s dead. Kitty didn’t want to think about that. She had never met Liz Tarrant. Liz had managed to live and die without ever finding out how much Kitty Colgan had once hated her for having what she had foolishly believed should have been hers. She had got over that mindless loathing. Why hate the faceless Liz? Jake had married her; Jake had let Kitty down. So he was a widower now, a one-parent family of x number of kids…so what?
In the silence impatience mastered him first. He drove long, supple fingers through the black hair falling over his brow. ‘I’ll meet you up at Lower Ridge in half an hour with the keys.’
She conveyed agreement with a mute nod, watched him spring up into the Land Rover, worn denim closely sheathing his long, straight legs to accentuate the well-honed muscularity of his lean, athletic build. He didn’t need designer clothes to look good. An intensely masculine specimen, Jake was a compellingly handsome man. It galled her that she should still notice the fact.
When he was gone, she got into her car. Her hands were shaking. Weakly she rested her head back, her throat thick and full.
Her grandparents had insisted that she leave school at sixteen, but jobs had been hard to find locally. By then she had already been waiting table the odd evening at the Grange. Sophie had suggested it. Sophie had deliberately put Kitty in her social place for her son’s benefit.
Jake had been at university and he had often brought friends home for the weekend. A new, disturbing dimension had gradually entered their once close friendship, throwing up barriers that hadn’t existed before.
Jake had avoided her. When he had seen her, his reluctance to touch her had been pronounced. Abrupt silences would fall where once dialogue had been easy. A crazy heat that alternately frightened and excited her would electrify the air between them.
Correctly interpreting that sexual tension had made her misinterpret the strength of Jake’s feelings. She had convinced herself that Jake was only waiting for her to grow up and that she didn’t really have to worry about those sophisticated girls with their cut glass accents, who regularly appeared in the passenger seat of his sports car.
Looking back, she recoiled from her adolescent fantasies. She hadn’t even had the social pedigree to qualify as an acceptable girlfriend. Jake had been uncomfortable with her menial employment in his home. He hadn’t said so, though. He had known her grandparents had had a struggle to survive.
Had it been pity that brought him to her home that Christmas Eve with a present for her? An enchanting little silver bracelet, the first piece of jewellery she had ever had. There had been a light in his dark tawny eyes as he had given it to her, a light that had seemed to make nonsense of his casual speech. Her heart had sung like a dawn chorus while her grandfather had turned turkey-red. Letting her accept the gift had practically choked him.
Every New Year’s Eve the Tarrants had held open house for half the county. Jessie had persuaded Martha Colgan that Kitty should sleep over at the Grange as it would be a very late night.
Sophie Tarrant had been in a filthy mood that evening when her husband had failed to put in an appearance. She had continually phoned their London apartment and her anger had split over into sharp attacks on the staff. By then even Kitty had understood that for years Jake’s parents had lived virtually separate lives because of his father’s extra-marital affairs.
Shortly before midnight, a drunken guest had cornered Kitty in the hall and tried to kiss her. Jake had yanked him away, slamming him bruisingly back against the wall. ‘Keep your hands off her!’ he had snarled, scaring the wits out of Kitty and her assailant with an unnecessary degree of violence.
As the guest had slunk off, Jake had spun back to her where she had stood pale and trembling in the shadows of the stairwell. Just as suddenly he had reached for her, his lean, still boyish body hard and hungry against hers, his mouth blindly parting her lips. But she had barely received the tang