Jake intercepted her in the hall. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘Merrill’s,’ she answered in bewilderment.

His dark features rigid with anger, he clamped a steel-fingered hand to her arm and pressed her into the lounge, slamming the door shut behind them. He didn’t know his own strength. She massaged her benumbed forearm with unsteady fingers, her eyes wide. ‘What’s wrong?’

He faced her with his long, straight legs braced slightly apart. Aggression wrote high-wire tension into every lean, sinuous line of his body. As dark, intent eyes settled fiercely on her, her heartbeat speeded up, a lurch of fearful apprehension filling her.

‘Bob Creighton’s boss was up at the Grange yesterday with a surveying team. Apparently Barker let your name slip in conversation and then tried to swear Creighton to secrecy.’

In the throbbing silence, a surge of guilty crimson slowly stained her cheekbones. Her eyes fell from his.

‘My God,’ he whispered in a seething undertone. ‘It’s true. You’re behind Colwell Holdings. You own the estate!’

Her teeth had drawn blood from her lower lip. ‘I didn’t want you to find out like this. I was going to…surprise you…’

‘Surprise me? You wanted to surprise me with the news that you thought you could buy and sell me ten times over?’ His raw incredulity sliced into her like a physical blow.

‘Who told you?’

‘Creighton. The man is worried about the security of his job. He approached me. Word of our marriage has leaked out locally. Creighton seemed to think that I would be taking over the estate. I could put my hands round that scrawny, lying little throat of yours and squeeze hard!’ he swore with sudden savagery. ‘Everything you’ve done since you came back here has been based on lies and duplicity. But God, did you need to go to such lengths to make a fool of me?’

‘I didn’t! I didn’t know how to tell you!’ she gasped, devastated by the suspicions he had about her motive for silence. ‘It’s your home, Jake, and I want it to be ours. I just want you to have it back!’

‘You want me to have it back. And you actually believed that I would accept it?’ he demanded, his dangerously quiet inflexion fracturing with the charge of his anger. ‘It didn’t occur to you that I might have some reservations about living off the proceeds of immoral earnings?’

‘W…what?’ Her swimming violet eyes were fixed pleadingly to him. Her brain was functioning in slow motion. Mrs Tarrant had left her feeling weak and vulnerable.

‘Col—well. Colgan-Maxwell,’ he spelt out with derisive bite. ‘He did indeed pay generously for his pleasure. I can hardly believe that you ceded me the same privileges without a price-tag attached! You’ve got the principles of a whore, Kitty. And I will tell you now that I am not living with them.’

Ashen pale, she protested, ‘Jake, you have to listen to me. This has gone far enough. Grant’s not my—’

A graphic expletive cut her off mid-speech. ‘Do you really think that I care any more whether he is past or present? I told you how I felt last week. You can take your ill-gotten gains out of this house and march that little carcass of yours up the road to the Grange, but you will go alone!’

‘I might just do that!’ she threatened wildly.

He wrenched open the door with a flourish. ‘Go ahead, and while you’re up there have the grace to recall some of the elementary manners I instilled in you. Apologise to your manager. Employees deserve a little respect and consideration.’

‘You swine!’ she sobbed. ‘It would serve you right if I did leave you!’

She fled upstairs, almost toppling the vacuum cleaner on the landing. The crash of the bedroom door reverberated through the entire house as she flung herself across the bed.

A minute later the door swung wide.

‘I wish I’d never married you!’ she threw at him painfully.

‘And I’d like to know why you did. Was it one big ego trip? You didn’t marry me for any of the usual reasons. You don’t need security and you don’t want children. Couldn’t you resist the appeal of falling between the sheets with someone younger and more virile?’ he shot at her fiercely. ‘Am I that hot in bed?’

Her eyes stung. He towered over her where she lay. Tall and dark and very, very still. As he studied her prone body, an odd little chill ran over her. ‘I meant what I said a few days ago,’ he delivered harshly.

She was choking on a volatile mix of rage and savaged pride and pain. ‘You weren’t so particular last night!’

He dug a long-fingered hand into his pocket. A handful of notes fluttered down on the bed. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know the going rate,’ he said insolently softly. ‘But I wouldn’t want you to feel that I appreciated your beautiful body less than Maxwell. But then he wasn’t over-scrupulous, was he? Why the hell should I be?’

He flayed her skin from her bones and tore her heart from its moorings. She clashed sickly with glittering eyes that had not a shred of compassion. As she attempted to scramble off the bed, he caught her with powerful hands and pinned her flat. ‘This appears to be the only avenue of communication which you recognise,’ he intoned hardly. ‘And we are about to communicate.’

‘Don’t you dare!’ she gasped.

‘I thought the relationship between sex and money was the biggest addiction you had. But you made one cardinal error. I’m not for sale,’ he grated. ‘This is the last move in the game, Kitty. And it is mine. It’s too bad you’re not the shining prize I thought you were.’

With every harsh syllable he heaped humiliation on her. She shuddered, she bled from that final brutal indictment. He was rejecting her. That he could still desire her was merely another subtle and cruel way to weight the punishment. Rejection was an old friend to her. She had feared and anticipated it. Subconsciously she had been waiting for this moment, this torment from the beginning, and it was not within her power to fight those feelings.

But still her body burned when he touched her. It did not differentiate between anger and passion. He stormed her defences and she was too weak to deny him. The brilliance of a falling star blinded her and then there was nothing. Less than nothing. And she was lost somewhere in the terrifying emptiness that was swallowing her up.

She pretended to be asleep until he left. A bank-note lay crumpled beneath her rigid fingers as she raised herself. She crawled upright on hollow legs and all that drove her was an overpowering need to be gone before he returned. She threw a

few handfuls of clothes pell-mell into a single case.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ Jessie whispered from the doorway.

‘I’m leaving.’ Kitty’s voice sounded far away to her.

‘You’ve had an argument and his temper got the better of him, but whatever he said he won’t have meant it,’ Jessie argued in desperation. ‘He asked me if I knew about the estate. I think he was praying that it was all a misunderstanding. Why didn’t you tell him, Kitty? You’ve run up against that pride of his and he’s raw with it.’

Jessie’s voice was an intrusive drone in Kitty’s ears. She gave the older woman a blank look from dulled, dead eyes as she closed her case with trembling hands. She was adrift on a sea of all-encompassing pain. Jake had hurt her when she was at her most loving and giving. Jake despised her. Jake had shown her that she was nothing more than a body from which he could extract only a physical and transient fulfilment.

Jessie was still talking to her when she climbed into her car and she still wasn’t relating to a single thing she said. It was late evening before she arrived in London. Mrs Stuart accepted her arrival without comment. After fifteen years in Grant’s employment, his housekeeper had developed an almost robotic air of detachment to the various events that disturbed the peace of the household she ran so efficiently.

In the exquisitely furnished familiarity of her own suite of rooms, the rigid discipline Kitty had imposed on herself for hundreds of miles collapsed. But there was no release in tears. She was engulfed by a depression, blacker and more frightening than anything she had ever known. The following day passed without her noticing it. She didn’t eat from the trays that appeared and she didn’t sleep in her bed.

That evening Mrs Stuart came to speak to her. ‘Mr Maxwell has arranged for you to fly out to France tomorrow afternoon, Miss Colgan.’

Kitty frowned. ‘How did he know I was here?’

‘Mr Maxwell’s secretary telephoned this morning,’ Mrs Stuart divulged, neglecting to add that Becky had phoned every day at her employer’s request to find out whether or not Kitty had arrived.

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