LITMIR.BIZ

      Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       Copyright

       CHAPTER ONE

      AS she unlocked the door of her Mini, Jaime glanced quickly at her watch, expelling a faint sigh of relief. Three o’clock. She still had plenty of time to pick up her three-year old-daughter, Fern, from playschool.

      At first, when her mother had suggested she move back to Dorset, she had been dubious. She and Blake had lived in London during the brief eighteen months of their marriage and she had been reluctant to move away. Now she could acknowledge that her reluctance had stemmed from her hope that Blake would come looking for her and beg her to go back to him. For a girl of twenty-three she had been extremely naive, she thought sardonically. The unflattering alacrity with which Blake had accepted the challenge she had flung at him in the heat of her tempestuous outburst ought to have warned her, but it hadn’t. It had taken Suzy Monteith to do that. Suzy had worked with Blake on the Globe’s Foreign Affairs team for several years and Blake had never made any secret of the fact that they had at one time been lovers. Suzy had never liked her Jaime realised with the benefit of hindsight, and no doubt she had thoroughly enjoyed telling her of her husband’s request to his editor that he be sent abroad to cover the war in El Salvador, only twenty-four hours after she had accused him of putting his job before his marriage, more or less giving him an ultimatum to choose between her and working for the Globe.

      Suzy had called round on the pretext of inviting them both to a party she was giving. But Jaime hadn’t even waited for Blake to come home that evening, she had simply packed her things and gone round to a friend’s flat where she had stayed for two weeks, willing Blake to appear and beg her to come back to him.

      Of course he hadn’t done and by then she had known that the possibility that she might be pregnant was a certainty. She had written to him then, an angry bitter letter to which he didn’t reply, making it obvious that he didn’t want her or their child—she had offered him a choice and he had made one—excluding her completely from his life. Her pregnancy had wrapped her in an anaesthetising shawl which numbed all pain. Blake’s letters she returned unopened, accepting her mother’s suggestion that she return home simply because she had no means of supporting herself, and was was determined not to accept any money from Blake. He hadn’t wanted a child—he had made that more than clear to her. His lifestyle could barely accommodate a wife, never mind the responsibility of children, and that had been another subject for contention between them.

      The truth was that they should never have married, Jaime thought as she manoeuvred her car down the bumpy lane that led from the old school hall she used for her dance and exercise studio to the village. And it was her fault that they had married. All Blake had wanted was an affair—but she had been naive and very much in love. When he discovered that she was still a virgin he had given in to the subtle pressure she had put on him and, within six months of meeting, they had been married.

      Right from the start she had known that she wasn’t really equipped to enter Blake’s world. Shy and rather retiring by nature, she had gone to London at the urgings of a schoolfriend and her mother, and although she quite enjoyed her job as a secretary in a busy advertising agency, she had never really lost her longing for the peace and relative simplicity of the village she had grown up in. She had met Blake at a party, flattered and slightly bemused that he should single her out for attention. She knew she wasn’t exactly unattractive but she had lived in London long enough by then to realise that London males expected more than a heart-shaped face, deep blue eyes, black hair and a willow-slim body. They wanted women who could converse with them on their own level, sharp witty women who didn’t blush and fumble awkwardly; women who were as sophisticated and worldly as they were themselves.

      She had recognised Blake instantly from a current affairs television programme he had participated in, but the effect of his lean, suntanned features and his air of cool cynicism were far more devastating in real life man they were on the television screen. She had had the impression that his green eyes were laughing at her, but when, seconds later, they roved her body with a sensual appraisal that was almost a physical caress, she hadn’t been able to hide her response from him. Blake! Even now, just thinking about him made her pulses race and her mouth go dry. He had been, at first, a patient and then a very passionate lover, drawing her out of her shell of shy reserve, teaching her to please him and find joy in her own pleasure. As befitted a man who lived on the edge of danger, he brought excitement and challenge into her life, but she was constantly worried that she would never be enough for him; that after a while her inability to meet him as an equal would lead him to grow bored with her. Before their marriage he had dated sophisticated, glamorous women, and Jaime had always secretly compared herself to them and found herself wanting. If she hadn’t blurted out to him that she loved him and that he would be her first lover, would he still have wanted to marry her?

      ‘He married you because that was the only way he could get you into bed,’ Suzy had told her tauntingly, ‘but you’ll never keep him—he’s bored already. You see, Blake’s like that. When he wants something, he goes after it single-mindedly, that’s what makes him such a good reporter. He wanted you because you were a challenge.…’

      And she, instead of trying to understand him, had begged him to give up his job and find another one that would mean less travel. That had been the cause of their final row.… Perhaps, because her own father had died when she was so young, she had always cherished in her mind a clear picture of what she wanted her life to be, and that picture contained herself, her husband and their two children, living cosily in a village very like the one she had been brought up in; a safe, secure little world, a universe away from Blake’s lifestyle.

      People thought she had got over him and her marriage to him. She talked openly to Fern about her father; she answered whatever questions people asked her, but only she knew the truth. She still loved Blake as desperately now as she had done the day she left him. But at least in the intervening four years she had achieved some maturity, she reflected as she brought her Mini to a halt outside the playschool building. At least she had finally accepted that Blake had the right to make his own decisions about his career and his life, but that didn’t stop her regretting her folly in leaving him. If she had stayed, perhaps they could have worked something out… perhaps.… Angrily, she dragged her mind away from the past. Blake had made it more than clear how much he regretted their marriage. He had never even asked to see Fern. He hadn’t wanted a child and, although he had offered to support them financially, he had made no attempt to get to know his daughter.

      Charles had told her she ought to get a divorce. She had known Charles Thomson since her schooldays, and she knew, without any conceit, that

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