Seductive Stranger

'Don't you shout at m

e!' seethed Prue, tempted to hit him with something. 'Things are never as simple as they may look to an outsider, and that's what you are, Mr Killane—an outsider! You only know one part of the story, my father's, and I'm ready to bet you don't even know his for certain. I think you're guessing at what he feels.

You certainly know nothing about what was going on in my mind—or my life, come to that—over the last ten years. You don't know what you're talking about, so until you know something more about me, will you please . . .' She drew breath, fighting with her temper, then it got away from her and she snapped, 'Butt out, Mr Killane!'

He had slowed and was staring at her, his face hard. A lorry snarled passed them and that pulled his attention back to the road. He accelerated again, his eyes on the cars coming towards them, and didn't say anything much for a while, then he said coolly, 'You may see me as an outsider, but I doubt if your father would. I've known him all my life, remember; he's not just one of our tenants, he's an old family friend.'

The flush on her cheeks deepened. Was he hinting at the long affair between her father and his mother? Or was he blind to the truth? She had asked her mother how the Killane family felt, and her mother had laughed bitterly. They were too stupid to see what went on right under their noses, she had said, but could they really have been?

'Is your m . . . Are your parents still alive?' she asked him, sliding a sideways look at him, her lashes down over her green eyes. His face hadn't changed; she could see ho uneasiness or awareness in those hard features. If he knew, wouldn't he betray it somehow?

'My mother is,' he said. 'My father died just over four years ago.'

So his mother had been a widow for over four years? Prue frowned.

Yet Mrs Killane and her father had not got married once she was free? Was their affair over? Prue thought of the way her father had looked yesterday: grey and a little weary, beginning to show his age.

He had still been a very attractive man ten years ago, it had been easy to believe that Mrs Killane might love him, but now he was definitely middle-aged; after all, he was well past fifty. Had their feelings for each other burnt out or faded away with time?

Of course, she couldn't ask Josh Killane any of these questions. She had just told him to wait until he knew more about her before coming to any conclusions; the same advice applied to her. If her father and Mrs Killane were still emotionally involved, she wasn't likely to miss it when she saw them together. People couldn't hide their feelings.

Her green eyes were wry. Or could they? If the Killane family hadn't noticed anything going on all those years, maybe the lovers were good at hide and seek!

It was all academic now, anyway! Her mother was dead; and it couldn't matter to her now whether or not she had been right in her suspicions.

Prue's mouth tightened. It matters to me, though! she thought. I want to know, for my mother's sake. I want to know if she was imagining things all those years, if she was just a neurotic with a suspicious mind—or if she was cleverer than anyone else around here. It's time I knew the whole truth, and I owe it to her to find out, if I can.

'There's the farm,' Josh Killane said, and she glanced upward automatically, without realising for a moment that she had remembered exactly where the farmhouse stood on the hillside they were climbing.

'It hasn't changed,' she said huskily.

'Things don't, around here,' Josh Killane said with satisfaction.

For some reason that made her laugh, a little jaggedly, and he looked at her, narrow-eyed.

'What's funny about that?'

'I don't know,' she muttered. 'Nothing, I suppose! You just sounded so pleased about it!'

'Why shouldn't I be?' he asked with faint aggression.

Prue didn't answer for a moment, her green eyes roving around the hills and sky, the autumnal trees, the faintly misty valley.

Her mother would have been appalled to hear that nothing in this valley had changed; she had hated it here! But Prue was glad to find the landscape, the farmhouse, everything she had seen on this drive from the hospital, so deeply familiar. The world changed fast; events rushed people onwards as if they were riding a whirlwind. While she was making her plans to come home, she had often warned herself to expect changes. In ten years this part of England could have been altered beyond recognition, and she felt amazingly comforted to find that it had not.

She looked round at Josh Killane. 'As it happens, I'm rather glad too,'

she ruefully admitted. 'I was afraid I wouldn't recognise anything, it would all be different, and I badly wanted it to be just the way I remembered it.'

He grimaced, his dark eyes wry. 'Oh, I wouldn't hope for that—what you've been remembering may not be what you really knew. We tend to idealise what we've left behind.'

She looked at the tussocky heather, the gorse, the almost leafless thorn trees on the hillside they were climbing. It was hardly an idyllic landscape; indeed, it was rough and forbidding, a landscape of survival rather than one of rich fertility, such as she and David had seen down south, on their way here.

Yet this countryside had its own beauty, one to which her heart instinctively responded. This was where she had first opened her eyes, and she saw beauty where a stranger might not.

'Oh, I don't think I've idealised anything,' she said, smiling, and Josh Killane smiled back at her, a spontaneous smile, full of warmth and charm.

'Welcome home, then,' he said, and she felt a strange leap of the heart.