The Return of the Stranger

‘I did. And your husband would have been delighted to know that it was every bit as far from his aristocratic pedigree as he always believed it was.’

And he wasn’t going to enlighten her any further, his tone declared adamantly. He had no intention of letting her in on anything he had found out about himself. If anything marked how wide the chasm that divided them had become then it was that.

‘Are we having this tea or not?’

Isobel’s impatiently petulant voice broke in on the intense concentration of his gaze on her face, making those deep dark eyes blink just once, slowly, before he deliberately looked away, in the direction of her sister-in-law.

‘Perhaps not,’ he drawled silkily. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t stay. I have business to attend to.’

He was picking up his coat as he spoke, tossing it over his shoulders like a cloak as he had worn it on his arrival, and turning towards the door. That was the second time today he had mentioned business deals but never explained himself. Once more that icy sensation slid down her spine.

I’ll be back one day. And then you’ll see how everything you think you have can all be turned on its head.

Suddenly afraid that he would walk out of her life again as he had done once before and that this time he would never come back, she hurried after him.

‘Heath—wait …’

He was almost all the way down the long, tiled hall, never hesitating or looking back. But then, just at the last moment, he paused and turned back very slowly.

‘You never said why you came. What you are doing here.’

‘Why did I come to the Grange today? Surely the answer to that is obvious.’

‘Not to me.’ Her voice croaked embarrassingly as she forced out a response.

Heath smiled briefly once again. It was a smile of ice, totally without any hint of warmth in it.

‘I came to see you, of course. Why else would I be here?’ ‘To …’

‘To see you, Lady Katherine,’ Heath repeated, the words sliding over her like a stream of ice water, making her skin shiver miserably. ‘To look into your face just once and then walk away—this time for good.’

CHAPTER THREE

THAT had been the plan, Heath acknowledged.

He had told himself that he would just see what she had become, and then walk away. He would shake the dust of the Grange from his feet and go back to the life he now had—a life of success and power, so very different and so very distant from the life he had once lived—endured—here in Yorkshire. If her husband had still been alive then he might have stayed, to have the satisfaction of seeing his plans all fall into place, his revenge become complete. He would have enjoyed seeing Arthur Charlton and Joe Nicholls brought as low as they had once brought him. Nicholls already knew why he was here, knew that he had lost everything, and until now Heath had thought that that would have to be enough.

But that had been before he had come face to face with the woman that Katherine had become. Seeing her, seeing the stunning woman she was now, feeling his heartbeat quicken, his blood pulse through his veins, his body hardening in yearning hunger, he had known that he could no more turn and walk away than he could cut out his own heart and throw it at her feet as she had once made him feel he might.

He had thought that he was over her, but seeing her had taught him, in the space between one heartbeat and another, that that thought had been desperately deluded. There was no way he was ‘over’ this woman. It had nothing to do with revenge, and everything to do with passion, with the sexual hunger that ate him up from inside—and always had—just from knowing that Katherine Nicholls existed.

If he had wanted her once when she was a girl, before she had developed into the full power of her beauty, then now he felt that he would die if he didn’t have her in his bed, just once. If he didn’t know the full satisfaction of making love to her, feeling her soft body underneath him, opening to him, hearing her cries of delight as she reached her climax.

And she would come to orgasm; he had no doubt about that. No woman could look at him in the way she had done in the first moment that he had walked into the room without a blistering connection between them on the most basic, most primitive level. The burn of awareness that had been in his body had been reflected in her eyes. He had seen it looking back at him from their once-cool blue depths, turning them molten and cloudy, the pupils so wide they seemed to have darkened the whole of her eyes.

And he had known then that he couldn’t stick to his original plan and walk away. He wanted her too much to do so. More importantly he wanted her to want him as much as he had ever hungered for her. And most of all he needed her to acknowledge it. Publicly. Only then would it heal the scars of the slashing wounds she had once dealt him.

Fancy Heath? You have to be joking! she had said to Arthur Charlton and the scathing note on her tongue still burned like acid in his memory. I mean—look at him? No money, no job—no class! The Nicholls family may have fallen on hard times, but we do have some pride. How could anyone want him?

He had come here for revenge but his vendetta had been against her brother and her husband and that was being worked through just as he planned. The financial dealings that had yet to be revealed might have given him a darker satisfaction, one of the mind, but this was personal. This would bring a very different sort of fulfilment. A heated, sensual, carnal satisfaction. One that already had his body tightening and hardening in anticipation of the delights to come.

‘You did that once before,’ she said now, her voice unexpectedly rough at the edges. ‘The walking away bit. When you left I thought that was for good.’

‘So I did—and if I had had my way, had any sense, I would have stayed away.’

He’d meant to stay away. Meant to sever all connections with Hawden and the life he had had here but fate had intervened. The dirty tricks and bad deals Charlton and Nicholls had tried to pull on one of his companies, not knowing who owned it, had revived so many bitter memories. Once and for all he had resolved to deal with the two men who had made his early life such a hell. But he had taken some time to put his plans into place, make them watertight. And in that time Arthur Charlton had fallen victim to his decadent, sordid lifestyle so that now there was only Nicholls left to deal with.

But he hadn’t reckoned on the fact that Kat would still have this devastating hold over him. That he would take one look and find himself incapable of walking away.

‘But other matters brought me to Hawden …’

‘What other matters?’

Heath smiled down into her face.

‘I have scores to settle, as you must know.’

Looking into her defiant, long-lashed eyes, Heath suddenly knew a twist of the double-edged sword that his plan for revenge now offered him. All he had to do was to tell her why he was here. Reveal all the cards he held in his hand—and he did hold all of them; he had made damn sure of that before he had even left Brazil. Everything was signed, sealed, tied up so watertight that there was no chance of even a single item in this house, on this estate sliding out of his grasp. He had the Charltons and the Nicholls exactly where he wanted them and all he had to do was call in their debts.

But where was the satisfaction in using that against Kat? What sort of gratification could he get from taking a sledgehammer to this situation when he could do things so much more subtly? Much more enjoyably. No, he didn’t want her to know yet why he was really here.

Joe and Arthur had robbed him of money and position. Kat’s betrayal, her rejection of him, had been something different. A betrayal of the heart, of the soul. He would show her how it felt to have your heart taken and stamped on.

He would make her want him as much as he wanted her. After all, if she fell for him now it was only because he was wealthy, because of who he had become. She had never wanted the Heath he had been.

But he didn’t want to blackmail her into his bed. He needed her to come to him willing—wanted her to come to him wanting, needing, hungry. Because she couldn’t help herself. As he couldn’t help himself where she was concerned.

She already did; he could see it in her eyes. But she was damned if she’d admit it. She would admit it before he was done. She’d admit it and come to him and beg him to take her. He had never forced a woman in his life and he didn’t intend to start now.

The youth he had once been would have thrown any caution to the winds and reached for her, grabbed her … But he was no longer that adolescent. Time and experience had taught him the wisdom of holding his counsel, hiding his true feelings. Once he had told this woman how he felt and she had laughed in his face. There was no way he would ever risk that again. This way he would get what he wanted and more.

‘S—scores to settle.’ She took a step back from him, mentally at least even if she didn’t move at all physically. ‘Against who?’

She already knew the answer, Kat acknowledged privately. If he had come back to ‘settle scores’ then he could only have come looking for the men who had treated him so appallingly in the past. But how far did his need for vengeance go? Who else would be included in it?

Once again that cold cruel smile flickered over his lips, bringing no light to eyes that remained as cold as polished jet.

‘You have to ask? Your brother—your husband too, were he alive.’ ‘And me?’

‘I told you—I wanted to see you just once.’

It was so softly spoken it sounded almost gentle. But there was nothing gentle about the burn of those dark eyes, the way that his beautiful mouth was tightly compressed, taking all the sensuality from it and turning it into a cold, hard line.

‘So now you’ve seen me—what?’ She didn’t know what she was asking for. What she wanted the answer to be.

This time that smile was positively feral. It stripped away all the apparently civilised control he had imposed from the moment he’d walked into the room and replaced it with a cold, fierce anger. Under the veneer of sophistication and worldliness he was still the wild, untamed creature she had once known. The dangerous, wild-spirited creature who had answered to no one.

‘I told you—I’m leaving. You’ll have to forgive me if I decline your offer of tea.’