Sinful Nights: The Six-Month Marriage / Injured Innocent / Loving

The restaurant wasn’t a large one, the proprietors preferring not to expand and risk losing their excellent reputation. As they studied their menus, Sapphire glanced covertly round the room, wondering if she would recognise any of their fellow diners. A couple sat at one table talking and Sapphire stiffened as she recognised Miranda.

Four years ago this woman had been her husband’s mistress, and she was still as beautiful as ever Sapphire recognised, and still obviously bemusing the opposite sex if her table companion’s expression was anything to go by. Just as Sapphire was about to look away, she raised her head, her eyes narrowing as they met Sapphire’s. Conscious that she was staring Sapphire tried to look away and found that she could not. A familiar nausea started to well up inside her, and she fought it down. She was over all that now. She wasn’t going to let it happen again, and yet against her will her mind kept on relaying to her mental images of Blake and Miranda together, of Blake’s long-legged, narrow-hipped body making love to Miranda’s, in all the ways it had never made love to hers. The menu dropped from her fingers as she tried to stem the flood of images. She was over this; she had been over it for years … She knew now that most of her anguish sprang not from the fact that Blake and Miranda had been lovers, but rather from the knowledge that he had desired Miranda as intensely as he had not desired her. If Blake had made love to her she would not have suffered this torment; she and Miranda would have met as equals; as women, not as adult and child.

‘Sapphire?’

She realised that Blake was talking to her; watching her and her face closed up. How much had she already given away? She glanced desperately at him but he was looking at Miranda.

Sapphire followed his look, tensing as she saw the other couple stand up and head towards them.

‘Blake.’ Miranda’s companion held out his hand to Blake, who rose to shake it, but it was at Sapphire that he looked.

‘Sapphire.’ Miranda’s greeting to her was coolly mocking. ‘You’ve barely changed.’

The words were designed to hurt, but Sapphire chose to turn the barb back on its sender. ‘In four years?’ she murmured, ‘How flattering. I must confess I barely recognised you.’

A blatant lie, but she could always use it to explain away her too lengthy scrutiny of the other woman. And she had aged, Sapphire noted now. Although she was still very beautiful, she was now more obviously a woman well into her thirties. She must be a year or two older than Blake. Her companion was in his forties, and although he looked pleasant enough, physically he could not compare with Blake.

‘Sapphire, let me introduce you to Miranda’s husband.’ Blake’s words were a shock. Her husband? Her eyes went automatically to Miranda’s ring hand where a huge diamond solitaire nestled against an obviously new wedding ring.

‘Jim is the Senior Registrar at Hexham General.’ Blake told her. ‘He and Miranda got married a couple of months ago.’

‘What brings you back up here Sapphire?’ Miranda questioned her.

She stared to reply but Blake beat her to it, drawing her hand through his arm, pulling her into the warmth of his side as he said calmly, ‘We’ve decided to give our marriage another try.’

‘A rather sudden decision surely?’ Icy blue eyes swept over Sapphire, Miranda’s tone intimating disbelief.

‘Not really.’ Blake’s voice was as smooth as silk and for the first time, Sapphire was grateful for his ability to conceal the truth. ‘It’s been on the cards for some time. Sapphire just took a bit of convincing that’s all.’ His possessive smile was meant to indicate that he considered himself lucky to get her back, but Sapphire wasn’t deceived for one moment. There was a subtle tension between Blake and Miranda which suggested to Sapphire that getting her father’s land wasn’t the sole reason Blake wanted a ‘reconciliation’. Had Miranda married to spite Blake? To prove to him that if he didn’t want marriage then other men did, and was he now retaliating by announcing their reconciliation? Even worse, had he known that Miranda and Jim would be here tonight?

‘Well congratulations to you both.’ Jim smiled warmly at them, and took Miranda’s arm.

‘Yes indeed, better luck this time.’ The words were innocuous enough but Sapphire wasn’t deceived. She read the venom behind them, and knew that Blake had too.

When the other couple had gone she sat down and picked up her menu. Eating was the last thing she felt like but she was determined not to let Blake see how much seeing Miranda again had disturbed her.

‘I’m sorry about that.’ His terse apology stunned her and Sapphire looked up at him. There were deep grooves of tension running from his nose to his mouth. ‘I didn’t know they’d be here.’

Sapphire shrugged dismissively, ‘It doesn’t matter. I didn’t realise Miranda was married.’

‘Why should you?’ Blake was curt and abrupt, ‘I didn’t realise that …’ He broke off, his mouth grim. ‘Look I don’t think coming out tonight was such a good idea. Let’s leave shall we? I don’t think either of us is in the mood for the type of celebration your father had in mind.’

‘But what about Miranda?’ Sapphire objected. ‘If we leave now, she’ll never believe what you said about us being reconciled.’

Blake shrugged, standing up to come round and hold her chair as she got to her feet. ‘Does it matter what she thinks?’ He sounded tense. ‘As a matter of fact, what she probably will think is that we’ve decided we’d rather be making love than eating.’

‘Because that’s what you’d be doing if you were with her?’ The words were out before Sapphire could stop them. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something,’ she added bitterly. ‘Miranda knows exactly how undesirable you find me. You told her—remember?’

‘I told her nothing,’ Blake grated back. ‘She tricked that admission out of you, but if it worries you so much I can take you back to Sefton House right now and make you my wife in every sense of the word.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ Somehow she managed to inject just the right amount of scathing indifference into her voice, but it was hard not to react to his words; not to shiver beneath the rough velvet urgency of his voice, nor to turn to him in blind acceptance of the pleasure it promised, but instead to simply precede him and walk out of the restaurant as calmly as though she were completely unaffected by his words.

Were he and Miranda still lovers? Somehow Sapphire didn’t think so; there hadn’t been the complicity between them she would have expected had they been. Instead there had been something almost approaching antagonism.

They drove back along the road they had come in a silence which remained unbroken until Sapphire realised that Blake had taken the turning for his own house instead of carrying on to her father’s farm.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not kidnapping you,’ he told her sardonically as she turned to him in protest. ‘It’s barely ten o’clock. If I take you home now your father will think there’s something wrong.’

‘And he’d be right.’ Sapphire muttered the words under her breath but Blake heard them.

‘This isn’t easy for me either you know,’ he told her grittily, ‘but why should I expect you to realise that? You were never any good at seeing the other person’s point of view.’

‘Meaning what exactly?’ The anger that had been burning inside her all evening burst into destructive flames. ‘That I should have played the “understanding” wife and turned a blind eye to your affair?’

Light spilled out into the cobbled courtyard as Blake pulled up outside his house. He stopped the engine and Sapphire saw him tense almost as though he were bracing himself to do something. ‘Sapphire, look, my “affair” as you call it never …’

‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ She cut across him quickly. She didn’t want to exhume the past; it was far too painful. Talking about his relationship with Miranda forced her to remember how intensely she had once longed to have those brown hands touching her body, exploring its contours, giving her the pleasure her feverishly infatuated senses had told her she could find in his arms. ‘It’s over Blake,’ she reminded him determinedly. ‘We’re two different people now.’

‘If you say so.’ He unfastened his seat belt and opened his door. ‘Hungry?’

Sapphire shook her head.

‘Come inside and have a cup of coffee then, I’ve got a mare waiting to foal in the barn, I’ll check up on her and then I’ll take you home.’

He didn’t invite her to go with him, and Sapphire stood forlornly in the immaculate kitchen of Sefton House listening to the sound of his footsteps dying away as he crossed the yard and entered the large barn.

Once she had been part of this world, and he would have thought nothing of inviting her to join him. Together they had shared the miracle of birth on many occasions in the past, but now she was deliberately being excluded. It baffled Sapphire that the anger she sensed churning inside him should be directed against her. Blake had no rational reason for being angry with her: had someone asked her she would have said he was incapable of feeling any emotional response towards her whatsoever.

More to keep herself occupied than because she wanted any she started to make some coffee. The kitchen was immaculate, but somehow impersonal. Presumably he had his own reasons for not replacing his aunt with a housekeeper. At least that was one complication she wouldn’t have to face this time. Sarah Sefton had never made any secret of the fact that she considered her far too young for Blake. She had disapproved of her right from the very start, Sapphire mused, watching the aromatic dark-brown liquid filter down into the jug, and breathing in the heavenly smell.

‘That smells good.’ She hadn’t heard Blake return, and she swung round tensely, trying to mask her automatic reaction to him by asking after the mare.

‘She’s fine. This will be her third foal, and we don’t anticipate any problems, but like any other female she needs the reassurance of knowing someone cares.’

He said the words carelessly but the look in his eyes was far from casual as he added softly, ‘Does Alan let you know he cares Sapphire?’

‘All the time.’ She managed a cool smile, ‘I’ve made us some coffee, I hope your “help” won’t mind my rummaging in her cupboards.’

‘I’m sure she won’t,’ Blake responded equally blandly, ‘but when my aunt retired I decided I preferred having the place to myself. A woman comes up from the village to clean; apart from that I’m self-sufficient.’ He saw the assessing glance Sapphire slid over the immaculate kitchen, and said softly, ‘I don’t spend enough time here to make it untidy. In fact recently I’ve been eating as many meals at Flaws as I have here.’

‘Yes, I haven’t thanked you yet for taking on the responsibility for the farm.’

He smiled sardonically at her, as though he knew just how hard she had found it to mutter the words.

‘That’s what neighbours are for. Your father would have done the same thing for me had our positions been reversed.’ He pulled off his jacket, dropping it carelessly on to the table, and then checking and picking it up again. ‘One special licence,’ he told her withdrawing a piece of paper from an inner pocket. ‘Special dispensation from the Bishop of Hawick. I went to see him today.’

‘So we’ll be married …’

‘The day after tomorrow,’ Blake told her. ‘In Hexham, everything’s arranged, the vicar …’