The Return of the Stranger

Could his voice have been any more mock-polite, the slap in the face effect any more deliberate?

‘You’re not coming back?’ The thought of losing him all over again tore at her heart.

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On you.’

‘What do I have to do with it?’

His impatient twist of his head, the brilliant emerald in his ear lobe catching the light and sending sparks flying, told her how irritated he was with the question.

‘I would have thought that that was obvious. Do you want me back—will you welcome me here?’

How she wished she could answer that straight. How she wished he could still be the Heath she had once known, the Heath she had longed to have back again. But that was not the Heath who now stood before her. And she was no longer the Kat she had been as a child.

‘I thought not.’

She had hesitated too long. And those cold black eyes had seen the doubt in her face, the way she had had to rethink her decision.

But what else could she say? She had looked into that dark closed face and known a new and very different feeling from one she had ever known before. One she had never experienced with Heath in all the time she had known him. She looked into his hard-boned face, into the deep black pools of his eyes, saw the jet-hard gleam that was in them and knew. Fear.

Fear was what she sensed, what she felt crawling over her skin like ice-cold footprints marking out a path along every nerve. A sense of dread that warned her that something was to come, something that brought danger and darkness into her life along with this man who had once been her friend.

Who was so obviously her friend no longer.

‘I will leave you to your tea.’

Heath was turning away again, obviously taking her response for dismissal and, for all the turmoil of emotions tangling inside her, Kat couldn’t let him go like this. Not with everything so raw between them. With so much she wished she could say if only she could find the words.

‘Don’t …’

She wanted to reach out and stop him, but at the same time the shivery warnings held her back so she didn’t know whether to move forward or not. Her legs seemed to tangle together, her feet tripping over each other as her body fought with her mind.

Suddenly several things happened at once and she didn’t quite register any of them until it was too late.

Her steps faltered, feet catching on a raw edge of one of the tiles, pitching her forward in the same moment that Heath paused, turned back. She was falling, heading for the floor and unable to do anything about it, her breath leaving her body in a shaken cry, when Heath’s instincts kicked in, swift and sharp. His arms came out to catch her, whipcord muscles taking her weight and holding tight, hauling her up before she hit the ground.

The movement swung her round, still off balance, so that she landed hard against the strong wall of his chest, her breasts crushed against his ribs, her head just over the heavy, rhythmic thud of his heart. The scent of his body, warm, clean skin mixed with some cologne that had a tang like lime, surrounded her, making her head swim. Only his strength held her upright, her eyes blurring in sudden confusion—and something else that shuddered through her like a heated pulse.

For the space of a couple of raw, uneven breaths, she felt him tense, distance himself as far as he could without actually moving away from her, knew that her own body had stiffened too, in shock and unease. She knew that she should pull away but couldn’t find the strength to do so. And in the same moment she felt a terrible sense of danger, blending with an equally stunning sense of having come home. The two sensations warred with each other, pulling her heart, her mind in different directions so that she didn’t know which one to act on. Indecision held her still, frozen, unable to think, scarcely able to breathe.

But then his grip on her arms loosened, hands smoothing down to where the skin was exposed by the short sleeves of her dress, the warmth of his palm stroking over her skin in a way that took that sense of shock and disorientation with it. The tension eased, changed, seeped away, and her heart skipped a beat, the sudden release letting her relax against him.

‘Kat …’

She heard his voice above her head, the warmth of his breath stirring her hair and she allowed herself a smile; her sense of relief a glow that lit her up from inside. Perhaps she had been reading everything so wrong. But she had barely recognised the sudden gentleness, given herself up to it, when a heartbeat later all that tension and more was back but in a new and very different way.

‘Katherine …’

From a distance she heard his voice again. A man’s voice, deep and husky and touched by that unexpected and totally foreign accent. A voice she knew and yet had never heard before.

Was this truly Heath? Was this her childhood friend; the companion of those wild, carefree days? This man looked like him. But Heath with the lighting of wildness burned out of him, the deep polished jet eyes cool and assessing, not flashing with fierce defiance as they had done in the past.

‘Heath …’

It was as if she was trying his name on for size. As if she had never spoken it before or the person she used it for were a stranger, a newcomer into her life. A man who filled her senses, surrounded her so that she inhaled him with each breath.

Somehow she managed to tilt her face up towards his, and this close there was no avoiding the changes in him. She could see the faint lines that time had etched round his nose and mouth, feel the scrape of the late afternoon’s growth of beard at his hard jawline, see the tiny flecks of grey at the temples of that black-as-night hair. From this angle the scar that Joe had inflicted on him was a distinct dent in his skin, a harsh white mark against the tan that he had brought back with him from wherever he had been.

But that was when her thought processes stopped. When something changed. She couldn’t have put a name to it, couldn’t have explained it in any way. She only knew that it was as if the air she breathed had become charged, filled with sensual electricity so that it burned its way down to her lungs, searing the ends of nerves on the way.

‘I …’ she tried but the electrical storm had melted her brain and no more words would follow the single syllable.

‘You?’

She saw that beautiful, sexy mouth twist, almost smile. But the next moment Heath’s grip tightened, cruel fingers digging into her arms. She was hauled up hard against him and fierce lips came down brutally on hers.

For a moment everything was wild heated delirium, running burning and demanding along her veins. The world spun round her, any sense of reality lost in its stinging haze. She was burning, melting, losing herself. Out of her mind and out of her body.

He had never kissed her before. She had never felt his lips on hers, only on her cheek, and once, awkwardly, on her hair. Their friendship had never been like that. They had held hands, hugged—hard—but never kissed. Not as a man kissed a woman. But she had never been kissed this way before. And she had never known that it could make her feel like this.

This was something she had never experienced. This flare of heat and power, this rush.

Of hunger?

Sexual hunger?

Was that the aching, burning sensation uncoiling in the pit of her stomach, spreading like wildfire along her nerves? A heady pulse seemed to have started between her legs, making her stir restlessly, her body as agitated as her mind that whirled in confusion and disorientation.

Was this what it really felt like? What a woman was supposed to feel for a man? Was this what had been missing in her marriage all along? Had Arthur been right? That she had never been a real woman—until now.

The thought shocked her, even frightened her, her heart thudding in a very different way. Her mind seemed to split in two, warring between wanting to sink into this, into his arms, into his kiss, take more of it, take all of it—and the almost panicked need to pull away, tear herself out of his grasp and put as much distance between herself and this shocking blaze of heat as she possibly could.

‘Heath …’

She muttered his name against his lips, meaning it as a protest but finding that it only added to the dangerously erotic sensations his mouth was creating. The taste of his skin against hers was a smoky, sensual tang, the movement of her lips opening to him so that his tongue slid along the seam of her mouth, then dipped in, tasted, teased. Tormented.

It was too much. Too intimate. Not what she wanted and yet so much what she craved. She tried to pull away, tried to twist from his arms, but he simply shifted his position, held her closer. One long powerful hand scored into her hair, grabbing at dark brown strands of it and twisting sharply, angling her head so that he had her exactly where he wanted her.

This time his kiss was very different. If that first kiss had been the kiss of a conqueror, a kiss of dominance, of power, then this was surprisingly, shockingly gentle. A kiss of enticement, seduction, of temptation. Slow and sensuous, provocative, arousing, it seemed to steal her soul out of her body, melt the bones in her legs so that his strength was the only thing keeping her upright. She softened against him, swayed. Too close. So close that she could feel the heat and strength of his body under the fine clothes.

Fine clothes that Heath had never worn, never owned before. Fine clothes that spoke of another man. A man so very different from her childhood friend that just the thought of him set up a fearful trembling in her limbs, tightening each nerve, stretching it almost to breaking point. She didn’t know this man. And yet he was so familiar.

His body seemed to call to hers, waking it and stirring it in a way no one else had ever done.

And hers to him. Because she was now so close that she could feel the hard, swollen evidence of his physical hunger for her pressed tight against the cradle of her pelvis.