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Shakily Sapphire drank her tea. Why had Blake rung Flaws Farm? Had he perhaps gone back the house this morning and wondered where she was? She frowned, and then tensed as she heard the familiar sound of a Land Rover engine.
‘Here he is now,’ Mary announced going to look out of the window. ‘I’ll go down and tell him where we are. No, don’t you get up,’ she told Sapphire sternly. ‘I’m not too happy about that faint of yours. You must try and take things easy for a few days. Put on a few pounds, perhaps. I know it’s fashionable to be slim but you seem to have been overdoing things.’
‘Now she’s back with Blake, she’ll soon fatten up a bit,’ her father prophesied. ‘There’s nothing like a happy marriage.’
Sighing Sapphire turned her face away. What would her father say if he knew the truth? But he mustn’t know the truth, she thought in panic. She could already see the effect their re-marriage had had on his health; he was marvellously improved. It couldn’t last for long of course, but she daren’t take the risk of him discovering the truth.
She heard Mary go downstairs and then return several minutes later accompanied by Blake. Where earlier she had been shocked to see how much healthier her father had appeared than she had anticipated, now she was equally startled by the pallor of Blake’s skin and the tense, bitter, brooding darkness of his eyes.
‘Mary tells me you fainted.’ His voice was almost accusatory.
“It was just the shock of finding Dad out of bed,’ she told him knowing how feeble her explanation sounded, but not able to tell him in front of her father of her fears when she had entered the strangely silent house.
She started to get out of the chair, but Blake forestalled her, striding over and bending to pick her up, ignoring her protests.
‘Let him carry you,’ Mary placated. ‘I don’t want you falling down those steep stairs. No, she’s perfectly all right,’ she told Blake who had turned to question her, ‘she just needs to rest a little and get her strength back.’
When he had installed her in the passenger seat of his car Blake started the engine, his face grim as he drove the car out of the cobbled yard.
‘What did you want me for?’ Sapphire ventured once they were out on the road. ‘You rang Mary to find out if I was there,’ she pressed when he turned to frown at her. ‘You must have wanted me for something …’
‘When I went back to the house and found you missing,’ Blake told her harshly, ‘it struck me that you might have decided to renege on our bargain.’
It took several seconds for the words to sink in. ‘You mean you thought I had left with Alan?’ Sapphire said incredulously, ‘But …’
‘But he wouldn’t take you, believing that you and I are lovers?’ There was a cynically bitter twist to Blake’s mouth, his eyes as hard and cold as the snow-encrusted stone walls they were driving past.
‘No! I …’ Oh, what was the use trying to get through to him when he was in this sort of mood, Sapphire thought despairingly. Reaction from her faint had started to set in. She felt sick and tense; in no condition to cope with Blake’s biting sarcasm. This was the Blake she remembered, she thought miserably; this hard, cynical man who seemed to be driven by demons she could not comprehend; who seemed to take pleasure in humiliating her.
The moment the car stopped outside the backdoor, she reached for her seatbelt, but Blake was too quick for her, moving swiftly round to her door, and lifting her out of her seat, even as she protested that she could manage.
‘What made you faint, Sapphire?’ he demanded as he carried her upstairs to their room. ‘No wonder you put up so little fight when I suggested we re-marry. But you weren’t completely truthful with me were you? What happened? Wouldn’t he marry you when he knew that you were carrying his child?’
She was too stunned to answer him. He dropped her unceremoniously on the bed, where she simply lay, staring at him.
‘Oh, I confess you had me nicely fooled,’ Blake said bitterly. ‘It never occurred to me that you … We can hardly have our marriage annulled now,’ he continued sardonically, ‘and that being the case …’
He walked back to the bedroom door, calmly locking it and pocketing the key while Sapphire watched him in stupid disbelief. Blake couldn’t really believe that she was carrying Alan’s child, could he? If that had been the case she would never had consented to this ridiculous remarriage. Allan would have married her and willingly. Anger swept aside pain. How dare he accuse her of behaving so selfishly? She opened her mouth to tell him the truth and then closed it, her eyes rounding in surprise as he stripped off his sweater and shirt. His hands were on the buckle of his belt before Sapphire realised what was happening, her voice croaky and unsteady as she whispered, ‘Blake, just what do you think you’re doing?’
‘If you’re going to foist the responsibility for this child off on me, I might as well have some of the pleasure of fathering it,’ he snarled furiously at her. ‘It might not be my child, Sapphire, but you are my wife, and since it looks like this time I’m stuck with you, I might as well get whatever I can get out of it …’
‘I thought all you wanted was my father’s land,’ Sapphire gritted back at him. ‘I won’t make love with you, Blake,’ she warned him. ‘I …’ Her breath was trapped in her throat as he stepped out of his jeans, flinging them on to the floor. Clad only in dark briefs his body was that of a man used to an active life. Unwillingly Sapphire felt her glance slide helplessly over his broad shoulders, and down across the width of his chest. Dark hair arrowed downwards across the flat tautness of his stomach, and a mad desire to reach out and trace its erotic path rose up inside her. Quelling it, she tore her gaze away, shaken by the force of her reaction.
Two strides brought Blake to the edge of the bed. Leaning down he grasped the lapels of the cotton blouse she was wearing and Sapphire tensed, blue eyes meeting gold. Her breath stifled in her throat as Blake’s fingers curled into the fabric, the glitter in his eyes one of dark menace as he jerked forcefully at the cotton. Buttons flew in all directions as the blouse tore, unable to withstand the violence he was doing it. Sapphire knew she ought to have felt fear; terror even, but what she did feel was a wild surging excitement; a primaeval emotion that seemed to spring from her innermost being and burst into life, fuelled by the dark determination she could read in Blake’s eyes.
He found the waistband of her denim skirt, unsnapping it and sliding down the zip. She tried to push him away, tensing as she heard the almost feral snarl of anger he gave as he removed her clutching fingers and tossed aside her skirt.
Wearing only her bra and briefs she stared up at him as he loomed over her, willing her body not to communicate to his her unwilling arousal. Despite the rage she could feel emanating from him, she couldn’t forget that this was the man she loved; and that the mere sight of his body was enough to bring leaping pulses to life inside her, fuelling a burning ache that instinct told her only his possession could assuage. She remembered how he had deliberately aroused her only that morning and her eyes darkened unknowingly, her tongue touching the dry outline of her lips. Above her Blake growled menacingly, and her eyes met his, reading the eternal message of rage and desire that glinted there.
‘Thinking about him, were you? Pity you fainted so unpropitiously this morning,’ he taunted, ‘otherwise I’d never have suspected you could be pregnant. Despite it all you still have a look of … almost innocence about you.’
His eyes darkened over the last few words, almost as though they caused him pain, and mi
ngled with her own resentment that he could so easily think so little of her Sapphire felt a thread of aching response. She wanted to be in his arms, she acknowledged wistfully; she wanted the warm heat of his body against hers; his hands caressing her, his lips … A shudder seemed to tear through her, visible in the brief convulsion of her body, escaping in a faint sigh that was lost as Blake gripped her hair, tangling his fingers in it, forcing her face up so that he could look into her eyes as he muttered thickly, ‘Forget him,’ and then bent to silence her protest with the fierce possession of his mouth.
This was no tentative, explorative kiss, but an explosion of raw emotions, too strong to be confined in neat pigeonholes labelled ‘anger’ or ‘desire’, but instinctively Sapphire recognised and responded to them, unaware that her fingers were digging into the muscled smoothness of his shoulder, until Blake released her abruptly.
‘No wonder he wanted you,’ he told her hoarsely, his fingers stroking lightly down her shoulder and then erotically over the taut outline of her breast, his warm breath fanning her bruised lips. ‘If you always react like that I’m only surprised that he didn’t want to keep you—or was it the thought of the child that put him off? Is that why you were so quick to accept my offer, Sapphire? Because you knew he didn’t want to marry you?’
