The Return of the Stranger. Kate Walker

‘Things are no longer the same.’

      ‘They’re most definitely not.’

      Mental discomfort pushed the words from Kat’s mouth. She didn’t know quite how to behave in front of this man who was and was not Heath. Certainly not the Heath she had known.

      The ice in his eyes told its own story. And there was something in that ‘didn’t know any better’ that turned her blood cold in her veins. She was not dealing with the Heath she had known, or anyone like him. The new lines on his face, etched around his mouth and eyes, lines that could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as laughter lines, told their own story.

      ‘How could anything be the same after so long?’ she demanded, hardening her tone to match his expression. ‘You don’t deserve a welcome after ten years’ absence and silence. To be silent all that time, you can never have thought of me.’

      ‘A little more than you have thought of me, Miss Katherine.’

      Brutal cynicism made a dark mockery of the once respectful way that her brother had insisted that Heath should address her. This Heath, this man who had so obviously made a success of his life, would never now submit to calling her Miss Katherine or the deference that her brother had once so insisted on. This man clearly stood tall and proud, looking the world right in the eye. And the way he used that polite title lashed at her, seeming to scour off a layer of skin, leaving her feeling raw and exposed underneath.

      ‘Or perhaps I should call you Lady Charlton, now.’ ‘It is my name!’

      Nervousness made her toss it at him in a way that even she acknowledged sounded cold and distant. It was a tone worthy of Arthur Charlton himself, and as such it made her wish she’d never spoken. But then it only matched Heath’s own approach tone for tone. If he had not come back as a friend, then he could only be an enemy, and she suddenly felt the need to be very wary of this almost complete stranger. He had prospered, that much was evident. But prospered in what way, in what field?

      ‘You know about my marriage, then?’

      And she could just imagine how he would interpret it. But he had no idea how her life had been since he had left. No idea of the hole he had left in her existence and the ways she had tried so desperately to fill it.

      Heath nodded slowly, his dark face set and cold as if carved from the rock on the moor outside; his eyes just shards of flint, opaque and unrevealing.

      ‘I heard of it and decided that one day I would call to offer you my congratulations. I didn’t think that your husband would have left you a widow before I could do so, and that those congratulations would instead mean that I had to offer my condolences.’

      ‘Arthur’s death was a shock to us all.’

      What else could she say? It was just the truth after all. And the words were the polite fiction she had been hiding behind ever since the day the police had arrived at the Grange with the shocking news. But the real truth was that she had been hiding the reality of her marriage for far longer than that. So much so that the instinct to conceal, not to let anyone see what had been hidden behind the respectable, elegant doors of ‘The Big House’ had become second nature to her now. Her instinctive, fall-back position. The one that protected her from things that were so much worse.

      That was what marriage to Arthur had reduced her to. The marriage that the whole of the neighbourhood—the county—had considered the wedding of the decade but had soon proved to be such a bitter lie from start to finish. The marriage she had been hoping to try to move on from when the discovery of just how Arthur had left things had knocked her right back.

      ‘And it has rather changed things.’

      ‘It has? How?’

      But Heath offered no answer to that question, instead he moved into the room, prowling across the carpet in a way that revived her thoughts of the predatory wild cat of moments before. Standing before the huge windows, he affected an absorbed interest in the scene before him, the wide expanse of the garden, the swimming pool tucked away at the side of the house, and beyond that the range of fields where sheep grazed contentedly in spite of the rain.

      Where he stood in the light from the window she could see the marked skin of his cheek, the thin scar that spoiled it, running along one cheekbone. And the memory of how he had come by that, who had put it there, caught at her nerves and tugged them hard. The mark that had been made by the glancing blow of a cast-off horseshoe, flung with deliberate viciousness at him by her brother Joseph in one of his irrational rages. The horse Joe owned and had ridden at a local show-jumping championship had been well and truly beaten by Heath’s own mount, loaned to him by her father. Typically, Joseph had taken out his fury and his jealousy in an act of violence that had horrified her.

      Had Heath been to see her brother as well as coming here? Just the thought of the confrontation between them made a sensation like cold footprints slide down her spine, making her shiver in uncomfortable response.

      That ‘decided that one day I would call to offer you my congratulations’ scraped painfully against her already too-taut nerves. It implied that he had been planning his return for some time. If he had come back earlier would anything have been any different?

      A bitter memory sliced into her mind. That of arriving at the village church on her wedding day not quite four years before, and standing at the back of the aisle, just inside the doors. The organ had already begun the familiar notes of the ‘Wedding March’ but just for those seconds she had paused, looked around. Looking for one dark, harsh but infinitely familiar face. Allowing herself just a moment’s—what?

      Hope?

      But of course Heath hadn’t been there. Her brother and Arthur had treated him appallingly. There was no way he would want to be there to witness the joining of their two families in marriage. He had been the only one to warn her against the Charlton family. If she had listened to him then she might have spared herself so much heartache.

      ‘How has that changed things?’ she repeated, her tone insisting on an answer.

      ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

      His turn was slow, almost dance-like, pivoting on his heel as he came face to face with her again. ‘You own all of this.’

      A gesture of one strong hand took in the whole of the house, the garden and the estate beyond the window.

      ‘Little Miss Kat has got everything she wanted. The big house, the status, the oh-so-elegant way of life …’

      He wielded his words like a rapier, flashing, stabbing, making her wince inwardly. Everything he said revived the memories of the last time she had seen him, the anger that had flared in him then. And later his total rejection of her. The bitter burn of the knowledge of how far she had been from having ‘everything she wanted’ made her lash out in self-defence.

      ‘Not everything I wanted!’

      If only he knew that she had never had any sort of a marriage, not in the real sense of the word. That the man who had been such charming, witty and attentive company through her teenage years, helping to distract her from the empty space in her life where Heath himself had once been, had turned into a petty and increasingly malicious tyrant almost from the moment that he had put a wedding ring on her finger on her twenty-first birthday. That the big house had become a hated prison; the elegant way of life nothing but a lie.

      ‘My husband died!’

      ‘I know … But that’s no great loss. Though originally it was your husband that I thought I would have come to see.’

      ‘Why? What did you want with Arthur?’

      ‘We had—business to discuss.’

      The emphasis on that word ‘business’ sent a shiver of warning down her spine. So many ‘business’ meetings lately had resulted in worse news piling on bad news.

      ‘What sort of business?’

      ‘It’s hardly relevant now.’