Free Sinful Nights by Penny Jordan Page A

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, whatshe 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 barelyten 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 gota 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