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‘You’re developing the most ridiculous crush on Jake and, really, it won’t do,’ Sophie had scolded sharply, contemptuously. ‘A childhood friendship is one thing, this pitiful infatuation of yours quite another. You are much too intense, Kitty, and I don’t want to see you hurt. What I’m trying to tell you for your own good is that you don’t move in the same social circles. You’re being a very silly little girl. For goodness’ sake, why don’t you have a mother to tell you these things?’
Had she listened? Had she learnt? Not a bit of it. With the stubborn insouciance of extreme youth, she had clung to her love and her dreams. Who could ever have guessed that her worst enemy had given her sound and sage advice?
With a shudder of self-contempt, Kitty drew her straying mind back to the present. The Ford sped over the stone bridge into the village. Mirsby was a straggling clutch of terraced granite cottages and other buildings climbing a bleak hillside. She accelerated up the steep incline without looking either left or right. At the top she turned down the lane siding the weathered, unadorned bulk of the church and parked outside the cemetery.
The wind tore at her hair as she climbed out. In the biting cold she shivered. The Colgans were all buried in the oldest part of the graveyard. Kitty was the last Colgan and, ironically, the only one ever to own the land. When the Tarrant estate had been broken up and sold, her grandfather had travelled all the way to London to demand that she give him the money to buy the farm. But his pride had insisted that the farm remain in her name.
One of the solicitor’s letters, awaiting her in London, had contained an offer to buy Lower Ridge. The naturally sultry line of her mouth compressed with bitterness. She wouldn’t sell. Year by year the buildings could crumble and the moors could inch back slowly over the fields. In her lifetime, Lower Ridge would never be Tarrant land again.
She arranged the roses in front of the plain gravestone. Her damp eyes stung in the breeze. After a moment’s pause, she retraced her steps. The traditional gesture was all that she had to offer, all that either of her grandparents had ever wanted from her. Respect and obedience—nothing more, nothing less.
She didn’t see the battered Land Rover sitting behind her car until she passed through the gate again. The storm-singed bulk of an ancient yew tree had hidden both it and the man propped up against the wall. There was no second of warning, no opportunity to avoid him.
He was very tall, very dark and very lean. Way back in the mists of time a Tarrant had reputedly stooped to marry a lady of gypsy origins and his forebears must have somersaulted inside their ancestral tombs. Jake Tarrant bore the stamp of that Romany heritage boldly against blonde, conventional siblings. His shaggily cut, overlong black hair framed a striking, sculpted bone-structure and dark mahogany eyes of animal direct intensity.
By any standards he was a sensationally attractive male. What made him exceptional was the almost brutal strength of character sheathed by formidable self-control that looked out of his hard stare. There was no trace of boyishness left in his features. The passions that had once run high enough to breach Jake’s principles of honourable fair play were leashed now by maturity.
Her lightning-fast appraisal braced her reed-slender figure into defensive stillness. ‘Surprise, surprise,’ she managed, her beautiful face discomposed for only a split second.
It didn’t show that her heart was pounding like a road drill and her stomach had cramped into sick knots. And that was all that mattered to Kitty. You didn’t betray weakness to an enemy. Especially not if he had once put you on an emotional rack and cruelly stretched you until every sinew snapped. That was part of the Colgan code she prided herself on.
Fluidly straightening, he closed the distance between them. His hand reached out and covered the clenched fingers she held against her abdomen. In shock she surveyed that hand, that flesh touching hers in a movement of silently expressed sympathy. This same male had turned on her with derisive distaste six years earlier at her grandfather’s funeral. Instinctively she stepped back, breaking the connection. Hatred that was a hard core of emotion inside her shot through her veins in an adrenalin boost that banished her exhaustion.
‘I saw you driving through the village.’ The well-bred, deep-pitched drawl was curiously clipped, lacking the measured resonance she recalled.
Kitty arched an imperious brow, several shades darker than her pale hair. ‘So?’ she challenged.
Guardedly he studied her. ‘Was it my fault that you didn’t attend her funeral?’
‘Your fault?’ she echoed with a brittle laugh. ‘Still a Tarrant to the backbone, aren’t you? You still have delusions about your own importance. I wasn’t at the funeral, Jake, because I didn’t know about it.’
He dug his lean hands deep into the pockets of his shabby, khaki jacket. ‘I spoke to Maxwell on the phone within hours of her death. At the time I thought you were over in London. You’d been on a talk show.’
‘It was pre-recorded.’
‘I did attempt to contact you personally. Maxwell was extremely unhelpful,’ he informed her with aggressive bite. ‘But I still assumed he’d pass on the message.’
She shrugged. ‘He did…when it suited him. I didn’t realise that it was you who had phoned. I suppose there was no one else,’ she conceded. ‘And I suppose it was a kindly thought, worthy of that well-known streak of Tarrant benevolence towards the less fortunately placed of the community—’
‘I happened to be her closest neighbour,’ he interrupted harshly.
‘For what it’s worth,’ she trailed the word out, ‘thanks.’
He planted a hand roughly against the pillar of the gate, imprisoning her between his long, powerful body and the wall. ‘Look, I didn’t follow you up here to play stooge to the smart-mouth lines!’ he slung.
Delighted to have got a rise out of him, Kitty leant back sinuou
sly against the pillar in taunting relaxation. ‘Exactly why did you follow me up here?’
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.’
