Marriage: To Claim His Twins by Penny Jordan Page A

want?’
    â€˜I’ve come to say goodnight to my sons.’
    â€˜They’re asleep.’ She got up and walked to the door, intending to go through it and then close it, excluding him, but Sander was holding it and she was the one forced to leave and then watch as he went to kiss their sleeping faces.
    Turning on her heel, Ruby headed for her own room. But before she stepped inside it her self-control brokeand she whirled round, telling Sander, ‘You had no right to take the boys out without asking me first.’
    â€˜They are my sons. I have every right. And as for telling you—’
    Telling her, not asking her. Ruby noted his correction, consumed now by the kind of anger that followed the trauma of terrible shock and fear, which was a form of relief at discovering that the unthinkable hadn’t happened after all.
    â€˜You were asleep.’
    â€˜You could have woken me. You should have woken me. It’s my right as their mother to know where they are.’
    â€˜Your right ? What about their rights? What about their right to have a mother who doesn’t put her own needs first? I suppose a woman who goes out at night picking up men needs to sleep during the day. And knowing you as I do, I imagine that is what you do.’
    Sickened by what he was implying, Ruby said fiercely, ‘ Knowing me? You don’t know me at all. And the unpleasant little scenario you have just outlined has never and would never take place. I have never so much as gone out at night and left the twins, never mind gone out picking up men. The reason I was asleep was because I haven’t been feeling well—not that I expect you to believe me. You’d much rather make up something you can insult me with than listen to the truth.’
    â€˜I’ve had firsthand experience of the truth of what you are.’
    Ruby’s face burned. ‘You’re basing your judgement of me on one brief meeting, when I was—’
    â€˜Too drunk to know what you were doing?’
    His cynical contempt was too much for Ruby’s composure. For years she had tortured and tormented herself because of what she had done. She didn’t need Sander weighing in to add to that self-punishment and pain. She shook her head in angry denial.
    â€˜Foolish and naive enough to want to create a fairy story out of something and someone belonging in reality to a horror story,’ she said bitterly. Too carried away by the anger bursting past her self-control, she continued, ‘You need not have wasted your contempt on me, because it can’t possibly match the contempt I feel for myself, for deluding myself that you were someone special.’
    Ruby felt sick and dizzy. Memories of what they had once shared were rushing in, roaring over her mental barriers and springing into vivid life inside her. She had been such a fool, so willing and eager to go to him, seeking in his arms the security and safety she had lost and thinking in her naivety that she would find them by binding herself to him in the most intimate way there was.
    â€˜So much drama,’ Sander taunted her, ‘and all of it so unnecessary, since I know it for the deceit that it is.’
    â€˜You are the one who is deceiving yourself by believing what you do,’ Ruby threw at him emotionally.
    â€˜You dare to accuse me of self-deception?’ Sander demanded, stepping towards her as he spoke, forcing her to step back into her bedroom. She backed up so quickly that she ended up standing on the trailing belt of her dressing gown. The soft, worn fabric gave way immediately, exposing the pale curve of her breast and the darker flesh of her nipple.
    Sander saw what had happened before Ruby was aware of it herself, and his voice dropped to a cynical softness as he said, ‘So that’s what you want, is it? Same old Ruby. Well, why not? You certainly owe me something.’
    Ruby’s despairing, ‘No!’ was lost, crushed