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She closed her eyes and felt the bed shift under his weight. When she opened them again he had gone.
Sleep was a long time coming. She could hear Blake moving about in his own room; the noises of the old house as it settled into sleep disturbing tonight instead of vaguely comforting. Tomorrow she would have to tell Blake she was leaving him. No running away this time. She would tell him this time that she was going, and that she was never going to come back. A sob stuck in her throat and suddenly she was crying as she could not remember doing in a long time, tearing, painful sobs that left her chest aching and her eyes sore.
‘SAPPHIRE, are you awake?’
Slowly she turned her head. Blake was standing just inside the door, his hair ruffled and on edge, his shirt half-unfastened, a cup of tea in one hand. ‘I’ve brought you a drink,’ he told her unnecessarily when she lifted her head from the pillow.
‘What time is it?’ Sapphire glanced at her watch, dismayed to see that it was midmorning. ‘Shouldn’t you be out working?’
It was obviously the wrong thing to say. Blake’s mouth thinned, anger hardening his eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ she muttered huskily. ‘This time I’m not going to run away. This time when I leave …’ She broke off stunned by the sudden blaze of heat turning his eyes molten gold, which died just as quickly when she started to finish her sentence. Surely Blake couldn’t want her to stay? Not for herself, she told herself cynically, but perhaps for the farm. The thought sickened her as it had done ever since it had first come into her mind all those years ago.
‘I’d better get up.’
‘Sapphire we have to talk.’ Blake’s voice sounded thick and hoarse, and now that she looked at him properly she saw that beneath the healthy tan of his face he looked drawn and tired.
‘We can talk downstairs,’ she told him reasonably, feeling very much at a disadvantage in bed while he stood, virtually fully dressed, in front of her.
She hadn’t put another nightdress on after he had left her and the remnants of the one he had torn off her body lay on the floor at her side of the bed.
‘No, now …’ One stride brought him alongside the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight as he sat down next to her, one lean arm imprisoning her against his side should she have any thoughts of trying to turn away.
‘All right …’ he admitted tiredly when she said nothing. ‘I know I shouldn’t have done it … you’ve every reason to hate me for it, God knows, I knew when your father suggested it that it was a crazy idea, but then when a man’s as desperate as I was, any idea, no matter how crazy, has its appeal.
‘My forebears would be extremely flattered to know how eager you are to gain possession of Flaws’ land,’ Sapphire gritted at him. ‘Such a noble sacrifice …’ Some demon she had never suspected she possessed drove her on. ‘… even to the extent of giving up your mistress, but then that wouldn’t have lasted would it? How long did you intend to devote your attentions to me? Long enough to get me pregnant—to provide my father with a grandson? And we both know what a sacrifice that would have been, don’t we Blake? I should have remembered how much you loathed touching me, instead of deluding myself into …’ She broke off as Blake wrenched the bedclothes away, squirming away from him, trying to cover her naked breasts by folding her arms.
‘So I loathe touching you do I?’ Blake muttered huskily, tugging her arms away from her body and then cupping the rounded warmth of her breasts stroking their pink tips with rough thumb pads. A deep sensual warmth burgeoned somewhere deep within her, increasing in intensity when she felt the fine tremor in Blake’s hands. His eyes golden and fiery as the sun seemed to bathe her skin in molten heat, the expression she saw in their glowing depths as he bent his head to touch his lips first to one pink nipple and then the other making her wonder if she had suddenly completely lost her wits ‘Does this feel like I loathe the enticement of your skin beneath my fingers?’ Blake demanded rawly releasing her breasts to spread brown hands possessively against her rib cage. ‘Or this.’ Hot damp kisses filled the valley between her breasts, his lips exploring the tender column of her throat, teasing the line of her jaw, his teeth nipping delicately at the fullness of her bottom lip until her lips parted and the fine tremor of his body became an open spasm of need, his mouth savagely hungry as it possessed hers, his tongue pushing past her teeth to explore its inner sweetness.
Unable to stop herself Sapphire caressed the firm muscles under his skin, stroking his neck and shoulders and feeling the powerful surge of his body’s response.
‘I love you so much,’ Blake whispered as he lifted his mouth from hers, touching its swollen contours with his tongue as though unable to stop himself from doing so, ‘that’s my only defence. I nearly went crazy when you left me, hoping that you’d come back, telling myself that I’d find a way to get you back, and then when your father told me you were thinking of marrying again …’ She felt him swallow and saw the unmistakable truth darkening his eyes, shining in the unexpected tears that shimmered in his eyes.
‘You love me?’ She could hardly trust herself to say the words. How could that be true?
‘Always,’ he averred.
‘But you never made love to me, never …’
‘Because you were so young,’ he told her abruptly. ‘Because I knew I’d taken advantage of what was little more than an infatuation, using it to bind you to me when you’d barely had a chance to taste real life.’
‘I thought you didn’t want me.’
‘Not want you.’ He closed his eyes, and swallowed hard. ‘I wanted you so much I couldn’t trust myself within a hundred yards of you, but I wanted you as a man wants the woman he loves Sapphire, not as an adolescent boy wants the first girl he falls in love with. I was terrified of frightening you away, and yet I knew that once I touched you I wouldn’t be able to control myself; that I couldn’t play the controlled lover …’
‘And that was why you went to Miranda?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘I never “went to her” as you put it. Once, a long time before I fell in love with you she and I were lovers, but never since …’
‘But the other night …’
‘I wanted to make you jealous. To make you feel the same agony as I’ve endured over Alan. I spent the entire evening driving around in my car. After you’d gone out I rang her back cancelling the date.’
‘But you wrote her love letters,’ Sapphire told him, frowning as she remembered finding that incriminating evidence.
‘Love letters?’ Blake stared down at her.
‘Yes.’ Pain ached through her, her eyes clouding. ‘When my father told me you married me because you wanted the farm, and after I’d seen what you’d written, I knew I couldn’t stay … I saw the letter myself Blake, it was so full of … of need and love …’ She couldn’t go on, remembering as though it had been yesterday how she had felt.
Suddenly Blake’s frown cleared. ‘Stay here,’ he told her softly. ‘Don’t move.’
