An Insatiable Passion

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 sinuously 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.’

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.