The Return of the Stranger. Kate Walker

he was now the one with all the control in his hands.

      Katherine Nicholls—Katherine Charlton—could wait a while longer. He had to see her to close the door on what had once been between them and know that everything was now behind him. That would be the last thing he had to do before he could shake the dirt of Hawden from his feet. One look and then he could walk away for good.

      ‘There is someone to see you, Mrs Charlton.’

      Kat’s attention was on the papers in front of her so that she didn’t look up in response to Ellen’s arrival in the room, only frowning her confusion when the housekeeper paused inside the door with her announcement. She hadn’t heard the bell, or a knock at the door, so this hesitation, rather than going ahead and telling her just who had called, was puzzling. As was the strictly formal, ‘Mrs Charlton'. The housekeeper usually just called her Kat.

      Of course when Arthur had been alive, it had been different. He had always insisted on the strict formality that he had been brought up with. But Arthur had been gone for almost a year now, and the regime he had imposed had been one of the first things that Kat had got rid of as soon as she possibly could.

      ‘Who is it, Ellen?’

      ‘He said to say someone from London,’ Ellen said and her tone alerted Kat to the fact that this was not just any ‘someone'.

      But then she remembered just who was supposed to be arriving here today, and everything fell into place. Nothing had been the same around here for months now. Not since Arthur’s untimely death and the awful discoveries that had been made in the aftermath of that event. And today was the day when she found out just where she stood. If she stood at all and wasn’t lying flat on her face.

      ‘Show them in, Ellen.’

      She knew her tension showed in her voice. This was Arthur’s solicitor after all, the person who held the details of their futures in her hands. And Ellen’s future was tied up with the place every bit as much as Kat’s own, as was the future of so many of the workers on the estate. So many more people who had been let down by her husband. That was one of the reasons why today was so important.

      Her attention had drifted back to the papers on the table in front of her as she heard Ellen’s footsteps cross the hall. If it was the solicitor then she really hoped there was going to be some good news. Something she could hope to work with. Some way out of all the worry and the uncertainty that she had lived with over the past few months. So many people depended on her, and she would really love to be able to help them.

      The extent of the problems Arthur had left her with had made her mind spin. The gambling and other sordid ways he had spent his money had been bad enough, but the full details of appalling business debts that had followed one after another, like a row of dominoes falling, the foreign names, this one huge corporation—the Itabira Corporation in South America—involved in the financial dealings, had left her reeling. But one thing was clear. Her late husband had ruined the estate, spending every last penny they possessed on the secret life he had been hiding from her ever since they had married—even before then, she admitted. The truth was that she had never known Arthur Charlton at all.

      The man she had married—the man she had thought she was marrying—had never existed. If she had even suspected half of what she now knew about him she would never have considered his proposal.

      If their visitor was the solicitor, then she had had a sex change, she realised, as the footsteps that came back across the hall were much heavier and more forceful than Ellen’s had been. Definitely male. And definitely some male who put his feet down, as her grandmother had used to say, like ready money. Hard and firm and strongly in control.

      Behind her the footsteps had come to a halt. The sudden silence told her that her visitor was close, standing in the doorway. But before she could look up a voice spoke and the sound of it sent her world into a violent, dizzying spin.

      ‘Hello, Kat.’

      That voice …

      Her mind failed her, refusing to complete the sentence. The words wouldn’t form inside her head. There was no way it could be him.

      ‘Heath?’

      The word whispered from her mouth, the papers falling from her hands and onto the table as she forced herself to look up, to look towards the doorway. The man she saw there had an impact on her senses that made her whole world, her sense of reality, rock dangerously on its axis.

      Hello, Kat. When she had thought that she would never, ever hear that voice again, it was almost as if he had come back from the dead and had walked into the room in some disturbing ghostly form. Back to haunt her present as he had her past.

      ‘Heath!’

      It was Heath. The same and yet not the same at all. This was a bigger man, leaner, more muscled, stronger, darker. So different and yet so much the same. The wild boy he had been, the youth with lightning in his eyes, danger in his fists, and trouble in his heart, was still there. She could see him still in those molten ebony eyes. But the untamed, unkempt boy was now hidden, concealed under a more forceful, powerful, more polished veneer. A gorgeously sophisticated, polished veneer. A forcefully male, stunningly sexy appearance.

      This man stood tall and sleek, once wild jet-dark hair tamed into an elegant crop. The long, whipcord-lean body was sheathed in a superbly tailored steel-grey suit that hugged the contours of his powerful frame, clung to a narrow waist and long muscular legs that were now planted firmly on the soft surface of the cream and blue carpet, handmade leather boots gleaming black against the pastel colours. An immaculate white shirt heightened the darkness of his complexion, the tan that could only have been acquired from a long time—from life—in a country that had a much warmer climate than the Yorkshire moors. Around his shoulders hung a tailored black raincoat, unbuttoned and long, that made her think of some long-ago highwayman come to the door, pistols in his hand, ready to demand a ransom or that she hand over her jewellery. And—was that an earring that sparkled against the olive skin of one ear lobe? A brilliant, deep green emerald that winked in what little light there was from the window. An ornament as fantastic and unexpected—and as exotically beautiful—as the man who stood before her. ‘It really is you.’

      Once she would have been so happy to see him. But that had been in the days when they had been such friends. That was someone who was long gone, probably for ever. After the way they had parted, the dark threats he had tossed over his shoulder as he left, she knew that friendship was no longer what he felt for her or any member of her family. If his stiff and hostile body language, the cold glitter of those deep dark eyes, the unsmiling expression said anything it was that he had not come here for a nostalgic reunion.

      And because of how it had once been between them, that look left her feeling shockingly and shivering cold.

      From a distance she heard his voice again. A man’s voice, deep and husky and touched by that unexpected and totally foreign accent. A voice she knew and yet had never heard before.

      ‘Who else were you expecting?’ he said.

      The total lack of warmth in his tone sliced into her like a blade of ice, making the ground suddenly unsteady beneath her feet, her legs as unsupportive as cotton wool.

      This man who had been such a vital, and essential, part of her life. So much more than a friend who had shared her childhood with her, the loss of her father, the beginnings of her adolescence, stood with her against her brother’s tyranny, and had then just vanished. Walking out without a word of explanation, and making no effort at contact ever since. She’d cried her loss into her pillow for more nights than she cared to remember but he had put her right out of his mind, it seemed. She had not seen or heard from him in almost ten years.

      Now, ‘Hello, Kat,’ he’d said. And that was all it took to turn her world upside down.

      But then that was what he had threatened to do. He had said that one day he would be back and then he would turn the life they knew on its head.

      ‘Who else did you think it might be, Miss Katherine?’

      The