it can sometimes be hard denying oneself, when one’s been used to …’
‘Stop it!’ Sapphire demanded, goaded almost beyond endurance, her cheeks scarlet with rage. ‘How dare you suggest that …’
‘That you’d be so hungry for sex that you’d turn to me?’ Blake finished coolly for her. ‘Why not? After all it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’
He turned his back on her as he spoke, calmly pulling off his sweater and unfastening his shirt, leaving Sapphire seething with temper and pain. How could he throw that in her face? He always had been a cruel bastard, she thought bitterly, but she had never expected anything like this …’
‘Go on.’ His voice was amused rather than contrite. ‘Why don’t you throw something at me, if that’s how you feel.’
‘Go to hell,’ Sapphire told him thickly. ‘God, I hate you, Blake …’
‘Really?’ He paused in the act of unfastening his belt, sitting down on the bed, his eyebrows arching as he studied the warm curves of her body. ‘Then perhaps you ought to have a word with your hormones,’ he tormented blandly, ‘they seem to be getting the wrong message.’
Sapphire had forgotten her nudity, and she froze to the spot, the image of her own body faithfully reflected in the long pier-glass on the other side of the room. Her skin glowed milky pale, her breasts full and softly feminine, crowned with deeply pink nipples that betrayed all too clearly the correctness of Blake’s taunt.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ Blake told her, standing up and shedding his jeans. Frantically Sapphire dragged her gaze away from the muscled contours of his body, not sure who she hated the most; Blake for tormenting her as he was doing, or herself for being so vulnerable to that torment.
‘You can always join me if you want to cool down.’ The mocking taunt followed him across the room as he closed the bathroom door behind him. Once he was gone Sapphire struggled into her nightdress. The fine pearl grey silk seemed to emphasise her curves rather than conceal them, the deeply decolleté, lace-trimmed neckline outlining the curves of her breasts in explicit detail. One thing she was sure of. When Blake came back from the bathroom he would find her deeply and safely asleep. As she lay down and pulled the covers over her, keeping as close to the edge of the bed as possible she wondered bitterly if he had come to her room deliberately to torment her, or if he genuinely did believe if he wasn’t there to prevent her she might have gone to Alan.
Letting him think that she and Alan were lovers was her only means of protection, she acknowledged, closing her eyes, her body tense. Once Blake found out they weren’t, it wouldn’t take him long to discover that she still loved him and then she would be completely at his mercy.
Nothing had changed, she thought bitterly, forcing herself to breathe evenly, and then a small inner voice corrected her, one thing had changed apparently. Blake, for some reason, now seemed to find her physically desirable. Or was his desire for her simply a frustrated sexual longing for Miranda who presumably now shared her favours between Blake and her husband? Nausea, deep and wrenching, tore into her as Sapphire pictured them together. No, please God not that, she whispered squeezing her eyes closed as though she could blot out the pictures. She had been through all this once before and suffered all the torments of the damned picturing Blake with Miranda, imagining their bodies entwined in the act of love; sharing its heated ecstasy and its languorous aftermath—pleasures which had been denied to her, and she wasn’t going to endure them again. She couldn’t.
She heard Blake come back into the room and tensed as he snapped off the lamp, and pulled back the covers. The sarcastic comments she had expected about the way she was huddled on the edge of the bed never came, and to her chagrin within minutes of getting into bed, Blake appeared to be fast asleep!
As she struggled up through dense layers of sleep the first thing Sapphire realised was that at some time during the night she must have turned instinctively towards Blake, because now, instead of lying with her back to him, curled up on the edge of the bed she was actually curved against his body, her head pillowed on his shoulder.
Luckily Blake was still asleep and therefore unable to witness her weakness. As she started to move away from him, the second thing Sapphire realised was that he was sleeping nude. Perhaps she ought to have expected it; but during the brief days of their marriage he had always worn pyjamas, the jackets of which he had invariably tugged off at some time during the night, she remembered. Lost in her thoughts; seduced into inert languor by the warmth of his body, she was reluctant to move, even while acknowledging that she should; surely there could be no real harm in indulging herself in these few brief seconds of pleasure. But her conscience prodded her, and unwillingly she started to move away.
‘Going somewhere?’ Blake’s voice, still husky with sleep, rasped tantalisingly against her sensitive skin, making her shiver with a reaction somewhere between delight and dread.
‘It’s light,’ Sapphire told him unnecessarily, trying to edge away from him without drawing his attention to what she was doing, and failing abysmally as he rolled on to his side, pinning her against him with one arm.
He was so close now that she could feel the intimacy of his body heat; the warm, muskily male scent of his skin clouding her reasoning processes, so that it no longer seemed quite so imperative for her to move. Much more pleasant to give in to the allure of remaining where she was.
‘I thought you’d want to be out, checking on the stock.’ Conscience made her make the feeble concession to saying what she felt she should, but Blake brushed her protest aside.
‘The men will be doing that, because I did the last round last night—we’re very democratic up here,’ he drawled teasingly. ‘I must say it was quite a surprise to wake up and find you in my arms. I seem to remember that last night you couldn’t get far enough away from me.’
‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ Sapphire defended herself, ‘I must have turned over in my sleep and when …’
‘You’re used to sharing a bed with someone? Like you do with your lover?’ Blake accused harshly, ‘Is that what you were going to say?’
‘And if it was?’ Sapphire flung back at him recklessly. Anything to keep him from discovering just how much she was affected by his proximity.
‘Then there must be other things you’re missing, beside a warm body in bed beside you at night,’ Blake countered softly. Sapphire couldn’t tell if it was challenge or anger that turned his eyes to molten gold, but even as she moved away from him, his fingers clamped into her waist, refusing to let her go. As she struggled to free herself her breasts brushed the taut skin of his chest and even through the fabric of her nightdress she was overwhelmingly conscious of the contact, closing her eyes against a sudden too-painful image of skin against flesh, of Blake stroking and caressing her.
‘Open your eyes,’ Blake demanded harshly, shattering the erotic bubble of her thoughts. ‘You aren’t going to pretend it’s someone else who’s holding you in his arms, Sapphire.’
‘Who was it who taught you to be so arousingly responsive?’ he muttered, his eyes on the swift rise and fall of her breasts, her nipples pressing urgently against the fine fabric of her nightdress, in wanton supplication of the caresses her mind had envisioned so very recently.
Sapphire felt a wave of shame course through her. How could she be behaving in such an abandoned fashion?
‘Who?’ Blake pressed. ‘Your precious Alan, or another lover?’
‘Does it matter?’ Hot tears stung her eyes, caused as much by his cruel blindness as her own weakness. He was the only man she had ever met who could touch the deep inner core of her femininity; he was the only man with the ability to unleash her desire.
‘Perhaps not.’ The heat had gone from his voice to be replaced by a cynical blandness. ‘That it has been achieved at all is miracle enough I suppose. When I think of the way you used to shy away from me.’
Shy away? Sapphire stared