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‘You’re not butting in on anything but memories, and none of them worth the proverbial penny,’ she quipped half under her breath, stilling an impulse to admit that she had lost her fancy to reacquaint herself with her former home.
The wind pushed the door back on its hinges. A steep staircase rose just a step away, the entrance the exact depth of the two doors that opened off it, one on either side.
Kitty pushed down the stiff handle on the parlour door. The three-piece suite was old as the hills but still new in appearance through rare use. It was a room rather pitifully set aside for the exclusive entertainment of guests in a tiny house where there had never been visitors.
She mounted the creaking stairs. The bathroom, put into the box-room when she was thirteen, was a slot above the scullery below. Time had been kind to the walls of her old room, fading the virulent green paint she had hated. The old bookcase was still crammed with childhood favourites, every one of which had originally belonged to a Tarrant child.
Steeling herself, she walked into her grandparents’ room. It was the same. The high bed, the nylon quilt, cracked linoleum complaining beneath her stiletto heels. Jake stood silently behind her, yet she was overpoweringly aware of his proximity and she shied automatically away from his tall, well-built body to pass back down the stairs.
One room remained, the kitchen-cum-dining-room where the day-to-day living had gone on. Despising her over-sensitivity, she thrust open the door. Jake moved past her to open the curtains. Light streamed in over the worn tiles on the floor, picking out the shabbiness of the sparse furniture.
‘I knew you’d come back,’ he said curtly.
She lifted her chin, denying the tension holding her taut. ‘Am I so predictable?’ she asked sweetly.
He dealt her a hard glance. ‘That wasn’t the word I would have used.’
Colouring, she avoided his steady appraisal and forced a determined smile. ‘Nothing here seems to have changed.’
His mouth twisted expressively. ‘Did you think it would have? Did you think it was enough for you to play Lady Bountiful from a safe distance?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she lied.
Black lashes partly obscured his glinting downward scrutiny. ‘Martha can only have cut you dead at Nat’s funeral out of some misguided sense of loyalty to him,’ he spelt out with cruel emphasis. ‘I’m sure she regretted doing it.’
‘She didn’t.’ Her contradiction was immediate.
‘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…’
