An Insatiable Passion

And if she hadn’t been beautiful, Jake would have left her alone. At seventeen she had been defenceless. He had not even needed to lie about loving her to have his careless hour of satisfaction. There was nothing she would have denied him then. The knowledge made her stomach clench.

‘Will you stay at Torbeck?’ he prompted impatiently.

For a malicious second she savoured the prospect of his mother’s horror should she be saddled with her as a houseguest. Paula wouldn’t like it too much either. As quickly as she pictured the havoc she could wreak, she discarded the unattractive vision.

‘I’m going to stay at Lower Ridge,’ she told him flatly.

In the act of moving on the Range Rover, he stopped, his dark head whipping back to her in shock. ‘You can’t be serious!’ he said forcefully. ‘The house is falling down. The wiring’s dangerous.’

‘The house has stood for many years. I doubt if it will burn, blow up or collapse round my ears in the space of a few months,’ she scoffed.

‘A few months?’ he ejaculated. ‘Why the hell would you stay that long?’

‘I have plans which don’t entail returning to my career as an actress.’ Angrily she surveyed him, pushing up her chin in unconscious challenge. ‘I’m planning to write a book.’

A derisive incredulity slashed his taut features. ‘On the men you have known? You’d be wiser keeping your mouth shut.’

He didn’t remember the stories she used to scribble in her teens. He didn’t remember a dream she had been too shy to share with anyone but him. ‘Don’t worry, Jake. You won’t even get a footnote.’

Simmering with pain and indignation, she dug her shaky hands into her pockets.

In the charged silence he grated, ‘I’ll buy the farm from you. The money can be raised fast. You don’t need to hang around up here.’

‘No, thanks. You don’t like the idea of me as a neighbour much, do you?’

His teeth glimmered white against bronzed skin and it absently occurred to her that not even prolonged outdoor exposure to the elements had given him that depth of a tan in a Yorkshire winter. ‘How do you expect me to feel about it?’

Her violet-blue eyes stayed steady. ‘I don’t expect you to feel anything.’

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