way a dog eyes a particularly juicy and unobtainable bone.’
‘My relationship with Charles has nothing to do with you,’ Jaime choked out. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘No? Aren’t you forgetting something?’ He picked up her left hand and raised it until she was looking at the narrow gold wedding ring she still wore. ‘You are still my wife, Jaime.’
‘That can soon be changed,’ she responded, goaded into making the declaration. Didn’t he know how much he was hurting her with his careless lovemaking that stirred her body into an acutely painful response, and his equally careless assumption that she was still his for the taking, as though he had looked into her heart and seen the foolish love for him that still lived there. ‘I can quite easily get an uncontested divorce. We’ve been separated long enough.’
‘An uncontested divorce requires a separation of two years without any marital relations between the divorcing couple.’
‘Meaning…’ She was shivering all over now, wondering if Blake really meant the threat hidden in his dulcet comment.
‘Meaning that just at the moment it suits me to remain a married man, and moreover that I intend to remain a married man, and that I’m fully prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that I do so.’
He saw her expression and smiled derisively.
‘While you’ve been busy with your life, Jaime, I’ve been busy with mine. My first two books have been extremely successful in the States, and I’m now a comparatively wealthy man. A healthy bank balance makes a man appealing husband material. I have no intention of being trapped into a marriage it will cost a great deal to extricate myself from and, while I remain married to you, that won’t happen.’
‘Unless of course I decide to sue you for alimony.’
‘Coming from the woman who’s refused to accept a penny support from me for the last four years, that’s hardly likely is it? I think we’d better go downstairs before your mother puts the wrong interpretation on our absence, don’t you?’
When he left half an hour later, Blake turned to Jaime in the privacy of the cottage door and said, ‘Remember, you’ve got two days to come to a decision about Fern. You know where to find me, Jaime, and if you don’t, I’ll have to come looking for you.’
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