CHAPTER ONE
‘SAPPHIRE, YOU HAVEN’T heard a word I’ve said. What’s wrong?’ Alan asked her.
The densely blue, dark lashed eyes that were the reason for Sapphire’s unusual name turned in his direction, her brief smile not totally hiding the concern in their dark blue depths.
‘I’ve had a letter from home this morning, and apparently my father isn’t well.’
‘Home?’ Alan gave her a strange look. ‘Funny, that’s the first time I’ve heard you call it that in the four years that you’ve worked for me. Before it’s always been Grassingham.’
Frowning slightly, Sapphire left her desk, pacing restlessly. It was true that in the four years she had worked in London she had tried to wipe her memory clean of as much of the past as she could, and that included any foolishly sentimental references to the border village where she had grown up as ‘home’, but in times of crisis, mental conditioning, no matter how thorough, was often forgotten. Her father confined to bed and likely to remain a semi-invalid for the rest of his life!
Unconsciously she stopped pacing and stared through the large window of her office, but instead of seeing the vista of office blocks and busy London streets all she could see was her childhood home; the farm which had belonged to many generations of Bells and which had been handed down from father to son from the time of Elizabeth the First. But of course her father had no son to carry on farming the land he loved, that was why … Sapphire gnawed worriedly at her bottom lip. In the Borders people adapted to social changes very slowly. Those who lived there had a deeply ingrained suspicion of ‘new ideas’, but had she wanted to do so, she knew that her father would have encouraged her to undertake the agricultural degree needed to successfully run a farm the size of Flaws. However, although she had grown up on the farm she had had no desire to take over from her father.
Flaws valley was one of the most fertile in the area, and should her father decide to sell, there would be no shortage of buyers. But how could he sell? It would break his heart. After her mother had left him he had devoted himself exclusively to the farm and to her. Her mother. Sapphire sighed. She could barely remember her now, although she knew that she looked very much like her.
It was from her American mother that she had inherited her wheat blonde hair and long lithe body, both of which were viewed with a touch of scorn in the Borders.
‘She’s the looks and temperament of a race horse,’ one neighbour had once commented scornfully to her father, ‘but what you need for these valleys is a sturdy pony.’
Acutely sensitive, Sapphire had grown up knowing that the valley disapproved of her mother. She had been flighty; she had been foreign; but worst of all she had been beautiful with no other purpose in life but to be beautiful. Although she had been fiercely partisan on her father’s behalf as a child—after all she too had shared his sense of rejection, for when her mother left with her lover there had been no question of taking a four-year-old child with her—older now herself Sapphire could understand how the valley had stifled and finally broken a woman like her mother, until there had been nothing left for her other than flight.
A farmer’s hours were long hours, and her mother had craved parties and entertainment, whereas all her father wanted to do in the evenings was to relax. Her mother was dead now, killed in a car accident in California, and she … Despite the warmth of her centrally heated office Sapphire shivered. She knew she had never been wholly accepted by her peers in the valley and that was why she had responded so hungrily to whatever scraps of attention she had been given. A bitter smile curved her mouth and she looked up to find Alan watching her worriedly.
Dear Alan. Their relationship was such a comfortable one. She enjoyed working for him, and after the emotional minefields she had left behind her when she left the valley, his calm affection made her feel secure and relaxed. Their friends looked on them as an established couple although as yet they weren’t lovers, which suited Sapphire very well. She wasn’t sure if she was strong enough yet to involve herself too intimately with another human being. As she knew all too well, intimacy brought both pleasure and pain and her fear of that pain was still stronger than her need of its pleasure. Divorce was like that, so other people who had been through the same thing told her. Along with the self-doubts and anguish ran a deep current of inner dread of commitment.
‘Alan, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask for time off so that I can go and see my father.’
‘Of course. If we weren’t so busy, I’d drive you up there myself. How long do you think you’ll need? We’ve got quite a lot to get through before the end of the month and we’re away for all of March.’
Alan’s small import business had been very successful the previous year and he was rewarding himself and Sapphire with a month’s holiday cruising round the Caribbean; an idyll which Sapphire sensed would culminate in them becoming lovers. Without saying so outright Alan had intimated that he wanted to marry her. Her father seemed to have sensed it too because in his last letter to her he had teased her about the ‘intentions’ of this man she wrote about so often. She had written back, saying that they were ‘strictly honourable’.
r /> ‘Don’t worry too much.’ Alan comforted, misunderstanding the reason for her brief frown. ‘If your father’s well enough to write …’
‘He isn’t.’ Sapphire cut in, her frown deepening.
‘Then who was the letter from?’
‘Blake.’ Sapphire told him brittly.
When Alan’s eyebrows rose, she added defensively, ‘He and my father are very close. His land runs next to Flaws Farm, and his family have been there nearly as long as ours. In fact the first Sefton to settle there was a border reiver—a supporter of Mary Queen of Scots, who according to local rumour managed to charm Elizabeth enough to be pardoned.’
‘Do you still think about him?’
For a moment the quiet question threw her. She knew quite well who the ‘him’ Alan referred to was, and her face paled slightly under her skilful application of makeup. ‘Blake?’ she asked lightly, adopting the casual tone she always used when anyone asked her about her ex-husband. ‘We were married when I was eighteen and we parted six months later. I don’t think about him any more than I have to, Alan. He was twenty-six when we were married, and unlike me he knew exactly what he was doing.’
‘I hardly recognise you when you talk about him,’ Alan murmured coming across to touch her comfortingly. ‘Your voice goes so cold …’
‘Perhaps because when I talk about Blake that’s how I feel; terribly cold, and very, very old. Our marriage was a complete disaster. Blake was unfaithful to me right from the start. The only reason he married me was because he wanted Flaws’ land, but I was too besotted—too adolescently infatuated with him to see that. I thought he loved me, and discovering that he didn’t …’
She shuddered, unable to go any further; unable to explain even now the terrible sense of disillusionment and betrayal she had experienced when she discovered the truth about her marriage. It was four years since she had last seen her father, she reminded herself, mainly because she had refused to go home and risk meeting Blake, and her father had been too busy with the farm to come to London to see her. And now this morning she had received Blake’s letter, telling her about the pneumonia that had confined her father to bed.
A terrible ache spread through her body. It hurt to know that her father had been so ill and she had not known. He had not written or phoned to tell her. No, that had been left up to Blake, with the curt p.s. to his letter that he thought she should come home. ‘Although he doesn’t say so, I know your father wants to see you,’ he had written in the decisive, black script that was so familiar to her—familiar because of that other time she had seen it; the day she had discovered the love letter he had written to one of his other women. The tight ball of pain inside her chest expanded and threatened to explode, but she willed it not to. She had already endured all that; she wasn’t going to allow it to return. There was a limit to the extent of mental agony anyone could be expected to suffer, and she had surely suffered more than her share, learning in the space of six months that the husband she worshipped had married her simply because he wanted her father’s land, and that he had not even respected their marriage vows for a week of that marriage. While he left her untouched save for the brief kiss he gave her each morning as he left the farm, he had been making love to other women; women to whom he wrote intensely passionate love letters—love letters that had made her ache with longing; with pain; with jealousy. Even now she could still taste the bitterness of that anguished agony. She had gone straight from discovering the letters to her father, complaining that she did not believe that Blake loved her. Not even to him could she confide what she had found, and when he questioned her, she had simply told him of Blake’s preoccupation; of his darkly sombre moods, of the little time he spent with her. ‘I don’t know why he married me,’ she had cried despairingly, and her father taking pity on her had explained how worried he had been about the future of the farm once he was gone, and how he and Blake had agreed on their marriage, which was more the marriage of two parcels of land than two human beings.
She hadn’t told her father about discovering Blake’s infidelities, and for the first time in her life she had truly appreciated how her mother must have felt. From that to making the decision to leave Flaws valley had been a very short step. Blake had been away at the time buying a new ram and she vividly remembered, tiptoeing downstairs with her suitcase and out through the large flagged kitchen, leaving a note for him on the table. In it she had said simply that she no longer wanted to be married to him. Her pride wouldn’t let her write anything else, and certainly nothing about Miranda Scott who had been one of Blake’s regular girlfriends before he started dating her. She had bumped into Miranda in the library and the other girl had eyed her tauntingly as she told her about the night she had spent with Blake the previous week. Blake had told her that he was buying fresh stock and that he would have to stay in the Cotswolds overnight.
She had asked if she could go with him, thinking that away from the farm she might find it easier to talk to him about her unhappiness with their marriage. In the months leading up to it she had been thrilled by the way he kissed and caressed her and had looked forward eagerly to their wedding night, but she had spent it alone as she had all the nights that followed, and that had been one of the most galling things of all, the fact that her husband didn’t find her attractive enough to want to make love to her.
But he found Miranda attractive—so attractive that he had taken her to the Cotswolds with him.
At first when she reached London she had used an assumed name, terrified that Blake would try to find her, and terrified that if he did, she wouldn’t have the pride or strength of will to refuse to go back to him. Not that she was under any illusions any more that he wanted her. No, he wanted her father’s land!
Those first six months in London had been bitterly lonely. She had drawn all her money out of her bank account before leaving the valley and there had been enough to support her for the first three months while she took a secretarial course. Her first job she had hated, but then she had found her present job with Alan. She had also enough confidence by then to find herself a solicitor. She could have had her marriage annulled—after all it had never been consummated—but she hadn’t wanted anyone to know the humiliating truth—that her husband hadn’t found her attractive enough to want to consummate it—so instead she had patiently waited out the statutory time before suing for divorce. She had half expected, even then, some reaction from Blake but there had been none and their divorce had become final just five months ago.
Sapphire had been in London seven months before she wrote to her father. Before leaving the valley she had posted a letter to him telling him she was leaving Blake, and saying that nothing would make her come back.
With hindsight she could see how worried her father must have been when he didn’t hear from her, but at the time she had been so concerned with protecting herself both from Blake and from her own treacherous emotions that she hadn’t been able to think past them.
“Do you plan to drive North, or will you go by train?’
Jerked out of her reverie by Alan’s voice Sapphire forced herself to concentrate. ‘I’ll drive,’ she told him. ‘There isn’t a direct train service and driving will save time.’
‘Then you’d better take my car,’ Alan told her calmly, ‘I wouldn’t feel happy about you driving so far in yours.’
It was true that her battered VW had seen better times, and Sapphire felt the same warm glow she always experienced when Alan was so thoughtful. Being married to him would be like being wrapped in insulating fibre; protected. Protected from what? From her past? From her foolish adolescent craving for the love of a man who was simply using her? That’s all over now, Sapphire told herself sharply. Blake means nothing to me now. Nothing at all.
‘Look, why don’t you go home now and get yourself organised,’ Alan suggested. ‘You’re too strung up to be much use here, and you’ll need an early start in the morning. Here are my car keys.’ He frowned. ‘No, I’ll g
o and fill the tank up first. That should be enough to get you all the way there. And when you arrive, ‘phone me won’t you? I wish there was some way I could come with you.’
‘Dear Alan.’ Sapphire rested her head against his shoulder—a rare expression of physical affection for her. ‘You’re so good to me.’
‘Because you’re worth being good to,’ Alan retorted gruffly. Expressions of emotions always embarrassed him, and as she withdrew from him Sapphire wondered why she should remember so clearly the sensual seduction of the words Blake had written; words which still had the power to move her even now, and yet Blake too was a man of few words, but then unlike Alan, Blake’s words were always pithy and to the point. Blake deplored waste of any kind; a true Sefton; and yet there was something about him that had always attracted and yet frightened her. He had spent several years in the army after leaving university. Perhaps that was where he had developed that hard veneer that was so difficult to get past. Sapphire knew that he had been posted to Northern Ireland, and yet his experiences there were something he never did discuss—not even with her father. When she had commented on it once, her father had simply said, ‘There are some things a man can’t endure to remember, and so for the sake of his sanity he forgets them. War is one of them.’
AN HOUR LATER, gripping the cord of the telephone receiver as she waited for someone to answer the ‘phone, she felt her stomach muscles contract with tension. According to Blake’s letter her father didn’t know he had written, so she must try to pretend that she knew nothing of his illness. The ringing seemed to last for ever, and for one dreadful moment Sapphire pictured her father lying in bed, listening to the demanding sound, too ill to do anything about it, but then the receiver was lifted, the ringing abruptly cut off. Relief made her voice hesitantly husky, ‘Dad, it’s Sapphire.’
The cool male voice, edged with taunting mockery, wasn’t her father’s, and the tiny hairs on her arm stood up in prehensile alarm as she recognised it.