The Return of the Stranger

He could have her now. Kiss her into submission, take her up against the dark, dirty wall of this neglected hallway, and he would swear that she wouldn’t even fight him.

And he would have gone that way once. In his youth he wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Young and wild, he had operated only on instinct, on hunger, on need. But Katherine Charlton was a very different matter.

He had sensed that hunger in her kiss. In the tiny whimper she had made under his mouth, the way her body had melted against him. And he hadn’t even touched her. But one day he would. One day she would leave all her pride in the dust and she would beg for his touch. And the waiting, the anticipation, would only make the fulfilment all the more delicious, more satisfying.

He could wait. And enjoy that anticipation.

Dear Reader

You’ll see the book is partly dedicated to a Mr Grogan, who first introduced me to the story of Wuthering Heights. I was just ten years old, and living just down the road from where the Brontë sisters grew up. One day, to distract us from the heavy storms outside, our teacher started to read us Wuthering Heights. We only ever heard the start of the story—up to the moment when Heathcliff turned his back on Cathy and walked away to make his fortune—so I didn’t know what happened until I found a copy on my mother’s bookshelves and found myself caught up in the story.

I had always hoped that Wuthering Heights would have a happy-ever-after for Cathy and Heathcliff. But even from the start I had somehow known that that wasn’t going to be—that, whatever else it was, Wuthering Heights wasn’t really a love story but a story about passion and possession. So when I was asked to rework Wuthering Heights I could take the wild, strong-willed Cathy and the dark, brooding, dangerous Heathcliff and let them learn about love, so as to give them give them the happy ending Emily Brontë's original story could never have had.

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was a vital part my life right from that day in my childhood, and I still reread the book at least once a year, so writing THE RETURN OF THE STRANGER was a dream come true for me. I’ve loved reworking this classic story, and I hope you’ll love the result when you read it.

Kate Walker

http://www.kate-walker.com

The Return of the Stranger

Kate Walker

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For my junior school teacher, Mr Grogan, who first told me the story of Wuthering Heights, and for Michelle Styles, who always believed. (Not forgetting Heathcliff the Cat!)

HE WAS back.

Heath stood on the moorland rise that was positioned almost exactly halfway between the two houses that had shaped his life in the past. Up above him, high on the steep hill, was the big old-fashioned stone building known as High Farm. Neglected now, and desperately in need of repair, the window frames crumbling, the garden overgrown, it looked bleak and unwelcoming as the winds lashed the trees behind it. Further down in the valley was the Grange, elegant, well cared for, with sweeping lawns, a flourishing rose garden and there, at the side of the big golden-stoned house, the glint of blue where the swimming pool gleamed in the sunlight.

One of these houses had been the place he had grown up in but had never truly been able to call home. He had spent most of his childhood and adolescence there but he had never belonged. Always been on the outside. And once the man who had brought him there had died, any trace of warmth or ‘family’ had vanished with him.

The other house he’d been totally excluded from. Not even allowed through the door, never mind into any of the elegant, expensively decorated rooms. Just once he’d crossed the threshold, getting as far as the hall and that was as far as he’d managed. That time he had been ejected with a hand on the collar of his shirt, a knee in his back, thrown out onto the rain-soaked gravel driveway, landing on his face with such force that he had been picking bits of stone out of the grazes for days to come.

He was back but there was no way that he was home.

‘Home! Hah!’

He kicked a pebble out of his way, watched it bounce along the path then fall into a rough patch of grass. This had never been his home even when he had thought, had hoped that it was. Ten years before, a penniless adolescent, he had turned his back on it without a second thought, driven out by one last betrayal, one last rejection, that had been more than he could take. Heading out into a night so vile it had seemed as if all the devils in hell were howling in the wind that whirled across the moor, and the icy rain had almost blinded him as it swept into his eyes, plastered his hair to his skull.

With only the clothes he stood up in and his paltry savings in his pocket, the amount so small that he would now think more than twice about even tossing it into a beggar’s collection pot, he had vowed that one day he would be back. That one day he would return. But not until he had the status, the wealth, the power, that meant that neither the Nicholls family nor the Charltons would ever be able to make a move against him again.

It had taken him ten years, but now he was ready. They said that revenge was a dish best served cold and in those years he had had time to become as cold as ice, and more than ready to make a meal of his vengeance. Already things were set in place, he had played the first card, moved the first domino that would soon have his enemies’ every last defence crashing down to the ground.

Once again the blustering wind fretted at his hair, blasting it across his frowning forehead and into his narrowed eyes. As he pushed it back he felt the ridge of the scar that ran along his cheekbone, smiling grimly as he recalled just who had put it there and why.

Before the week was out, Joseph Nicholls would regret that blow—and many more.

And Joseph’s sister? What about Kat?

‘Katherine …’

Thinking of her had been a mistake. He found that he was shaking his head roughly in an attempt to drive away the memories that simply thinking of her had dragged up from the dark chambers of his mind. Chambers where he had thought that he had buried them for good.

He had things to do; plans to put into action. And he was not about to let the memory of the girl—the woman now—who had once taken what little was left of his heart and trampled it under her feet distract him from his purpose now that his aim was almost achieved. He would see her later of course. How could he come back to Hawden and not come face to face with her? He could never leave without exorcising the bitter legacy she had left him with, the scars that went deeper than the ones on his body, on his face that her brother and her husband had put there.

He would have to see her one last time before he left Hawden Valley for good. But he had other things to do first. Other memories to erase, cruelties and injustices to avenge. He was ready to show the families who had treated him as less than the dirt beneath their feet that they no longer had any power over him. Instead, 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 touch of cynical humour, the dark mockery was new. Like his appearance it was so far from everything she had ever known of him. Her Heath had never looked like this. The Heath she had known had never had that sleek, sophisticated grooming that made him look like some glossy honed predator, who had prowled on silent paws, dangerous and alien, into the very civilised atmosphere of the home she had built. But then, she of all people knew how ‘civilised’ appearances could be misleading.

But in spite of that sophistication, that grooming, he still looked like some creature of the wild that was barely under control, eyes watchful, every muscle poised and taut ready for fight or flight—whichever was necessary.

No, looking into his eyes she saw no hint of flight at all. The old Heath was there in the burn of defiance in those golden eyes. A rebelliousness that no sophisticated clothing, however he had come by that, could ever conceal. When she looked up into his face it was to see a man who had the features of her long-ago friend and yet none of the warmth that had ever shone between them. Heath was here, but the boy she had known was gone and she missed him. The pain of it was like a stab to her heart.

‘Miss Katherine!’ she managed, breathless and uneven. Mocking the stiffness of his tone in the same moment that her heart lurched in discomfort at the sound of it. ‘You always used to call me Kat!’

‘You were Kat then.’

It was shockingly cold and distant and his eyes might have been shards of black-coffee ice in his tanned face. He slid the long coat from his shoulders, tossed it over the back of a nearby chair, and the sudden transformation from bold highwayman to sleek gentleman was such a shock that it actually had her breath catching in her throat.

‘But it was a long time ago,’ she told him stiffly. ‘We were nothing but children. Didn’t know any better.’

And in all that time had he learned nothing? Heath could only ask himself. He should have known better than to come here like this. He had told himself that he had come back for one reason only, vowed that he would deal only with the two men who had made his early years such misery. The men who had treated him like an animal and not a human being. He would come back to Hawden to show them what he had become, to reveal the power he now had over them, throw their insults, their cruelty, in their faces, and walk away, never once glancing back.

That plan was well in hand, at least as far as Joseph Nicholls was concerned. Arthur Charlton was a different matter. When he had learned of the other man’s death he had felt like a hunter thwarted of his prey. Denied the satisfaction of facing down the earl, he had burned with frustration. And that frustration had driven him where he had sworn that he would never go again.

Back into the presence of Katherine Charlton, who had once been Katherine Nicholls. The woman who had taken what little was left of his heart when life, her brother and his best friend had finished with it, and stamped on it, crushing it cruelly under her slender foot.

‘We are no longer children.’ He nodded. ‘And we haven’t been for a long time.’

And that was where the mistake he had made had been born. With memories of the few happy years of his childhood surfacing once he was back in England, he hadn’t been able to resist coming to the Grange just once. Hadn’t been able to fight against the need to come here and see just what Kat had become, what the years had made of her.

Just one look, he had told himself. One look at the woman she was now and then he would walk away.

But that one look had been fatal to his peace of mind. Fatal to his determination to walk away from Hawden and all it had once meant to him, shaking the dust of the place from his feet. That one look had told him that he couldn’t walk away from Katherine Charlton. One look was all that it had taken to show him that he still wanted her, still hungered for her more than he had ever wanted any women in his life. He had to put her away from him, move back from her both mentally and physically before the hunger that burned along every nerve destroyed his ability to think with the cold logic that he knew this situation demanded.

He had known that she would still be attractive. How could she have ever been anything else? Even as a girl she had always drawn all eyes.

He hadn’t known that she would turn into such a beauty.

Time had taken her long-limbed form and made it softer, more womanly, with the sort of curves that made his pulse rate kick into heated action. In the years since he had last seen her, her wild coltish, tomboy looks had been smoothed down, refined into this elegant ladylike creature who looked like a pale reflection of the Kat he had once known. Her long dark hair that had once hung untamed around her face, tumbling onto her shoulders, was now smoothed back into a sleek ponytail that swung when she moved her head. Her face had thinned, creating slashing cheekbones under the deep blue eyes, and those eyes looked huge, wider than ever, framed by lush thick black lashes. Even dressed in a simple blue cotton dress she looked every inch the lady of the manor, totally at home in the house where they had once peered in through the windows from the outside, fascinated by being forbidden to enter.

‘Oh, we’re definitely not children any more!’ Kat laughed, though it was a laugh with no humour in it. ‘We’ve left all that well behind us.’

He could practically feel the chill from her words, the bite of her response and her eyes had darkened in angry rejection of him.

The curt, sharp words might be flung into his face, meant to distance her from him as clearly as the way that she stepped back, away, but they did nothing to quell the heated sting of attraction that spiralled through him. Senses burning in instinctive response, he surveyed her from the indignant, defiant face her chin brought up so that she was looking down her aristocratic nose at him, to where her feet, in delicate blue sandals, were placed firmly on the thickly carpeted floor.

‘You are certainly no child. Every inch the lady.’

The flare of something in her eyes told him that she recognised the way his tone had deliberately been pitched so that the words were not a compliment. She must know so well what had been behind them.

Because the exclusion from the Grange had been just for him, he remembered on a twist of savage bitterness. Kat had never been barred from what the locals called ‘The Big House'. The night that the guard dogs had heard them in the garden, racing to attack the intruders, and grabbing Kat by the leg, powerful teeth ripping her skin, she had been taken into the house and made welcome, her hurts tended to, a bed provided for the night. He had been ejected forcibly, tossed out into the lashing rain like a stray, unwanted, flea-ridden cur. And when he had returned to High Farm, Joseph had taken a riding crop to him for daring to have the nerve to trespass on their aristocratic neighbour’s land.

That was the last time that he and Kat had ever been truly close. That experience had taught her what luxury money could bring, the pleasures of being cared for in the soft comfort of the Grange. When she had come home she had seemed like a different person, more like her brother’s sister rather than the untamed tomboy she had once been. She had moved further away from him with each day that had passed, and now here she was, still reserved, still distant, with her cool blue eyes showing that she too regarded him as an intruder into her elegant world.

Well, he was more than an intruder. And one day soon she would learn just how completely their positions had been reversed. Once he would have rushed to tell her. The man he had become knew how to wait, knowing it was worth it in the end.

‘I’ve grown up,’ she threw at him now. It was like ice, cold and sharp as her gaze. ‘I should hope that we both have.’

Oh she’d grown up all right. Grown up and further away from him than ever. The childhood friends they had once been no longer existed. If in fact they had ever truly been as close as he imagined. Looked at her coldly, he could well imagine that she had just been whiling away her time with him while the fancy took her.