Unexpected Pleasures (7 page)

‘It is,’ he assured her. ‘Try it...’

Without ever having intended to do so, Rosie discovered that she was sitting down on the settee and being dwarfed by the depth and comfort of it.

She heard Jake laugh. ‘You look like a little girl on her best behaviour at her grandmother’s Sunday tea party,’ he told her.

Rosie flushed because that was exactly how she
had
been feeling, uncomfortably aware of the elegance of the settee’s silk covering and the fact that her lack of height meant that when she sat back in it her feet could not comfortably reach the ground.

‘You can’t sit on it like that,’ Jake told her. ‘Take off your shoes and make yourself comfortable.’

‘Oh, no...I couldn’t...the fabric...’

‘The fabric is only fabric,’ Jake told her wryly. ‘Possessions are never more important than people. We’ve got a lot to talk about, Rosie. Would you like something to eat? You missed the buffet at the Simpsons’.’

Rosie shook her head, knowing that, despite the fact that she had eaten nothing since her breakfast, she was far too on edge to do so now.

‘A drink then...tea...coffee...?’

Why
didn’t he just get on with it? Rosie wondered grimly. Was he deliberately playing on her tension, trying to gain the upper hand so that when the crunch came...?

She shook her head.

‘Well, I’m going to have something,’ she heard him say. ‘I shan’t be a minute.’

He was barely that, returning just as she had finally decided she couldn’t stand the excruciating agony of either sitting with her back ramrod-straight or being unable to bend her knees and had admitted that he was right and that the only way she was going to be able to sit comfortably on the settee was if she removed her shoes and curled up on it.

She was just doing this when he walked in, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses.

When he filled them both and offered one to her, she shook her head.

‘It’s only wine,’ he told her mildly. Instantly her face was suffused with colour, as she wondered if he was deliberately taunting her with what she had told him about her drink being spiked the night of the party. She couldn’t tell him that alcohol was something she never touched. It would make her look too weak and vulnerable.

Instead, reluctantly, she accepted the glass from him. The dark red liquid glowed richly in its plain glass, the only touch of colour in the otherwise neutral room. When she held the glass in her hand, the liquid almost seemed to warm her flesh through it.

She took a sip, surprised to discover how much she liked the warm, fruity taste.

It
was
only wine, she reminded herself, and only one glass, and then, as Jake seated himself at the other end of the settee and turned to face her, she took another nervous sip.

This was it. This was the moment when he challenged her, demanding that she retract what she had said about Ritchie.

‘Rosie...the night of the party—’

‘I don’t care what you say to me...how much pressure you put on me, I’m not going to change what I said,’ she told him fiercely. ‘What I told you was the truth.’

‘Yes, I know...’

His quiet words silenced her. She stared at him and then took a hasty, tense gulp of her wine, grateful for the warmth that spilled through her from it, driving out the icy fingers clutching apprehensively at her muscles.

‘You... You
believe
me...’

He nodded his head and she felt a huge surge of emotion rush through her. She took another gulp of wine.

‘You believe me now, but you wouldn’t have believed me then...’

She saw the look on his face and deep within her something splintered sharply, painfully.

‘You wouldn’t,’ she repeated, denying what she had seen in his eyes.

He bowed his head.

‘I
saw
the way you looked...the disgust...the contempt...’

She watched as he twisted his glass in his hands. There was something different about him now, as though...as though the distance he had always placed between them had somehow gone.

‘Those were for me,’ he told her in a low voice. ‘Not for you. I
did
think you’d gone with Ritchie willingly, though. I thought you believed you were in love with him.’

Rosie shuddered. ‘I hated him even then. He was always making fun of me...taunting me because I didn’t...’ She ducked her head uncomfortably.

‘Because you were a virgin,’ Jake supplied for her.

She couldn’t speak, her emotions too raw and painfully close to the surface to allow her to. She nodded instead, taking another sip of wine, hoping it would steady her.

When Jake had brought her here to talk, the last thing she had expected was that they would be having such an extraordinarily intimate conversation...that he would accept so readily, so easily what she had to say...that he would say, and mean it, that he believed her.

She felt dizzy with the unexpectedness of it, light-headed...
light-hearted
almost, as though some huge weight had been lifted from her.

‘I felt so ashamed...so...so guilty and afraid...’

‘The guilt was Ritchie’s.’ He paused as he looked at her, and then added in a low voice, ‘And the shame mine.’

‘It’s all a long time ago...and none of it matters now,’ Rosie told him jerkily.

What on earth was she saying? Of
course
it mattered.
She
had never forgotten what had happened...his disgust...his contempt... Only he had just said that they had never been directed at her, but at himself.

‘This afternoon...were you leaving the party because you’d seen Ritchie?’

His abrupt switch from the past to the present caught her off guard.

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I saw you both...’ She bit her lip when she realised what she had admitted, and realised from the bleak look he gave her that he had recognised all that she had not said.

‘I suppose I deserved that,’ he told her. ‘I’m sorry if Ritchie upset or frightened you.’

‘Well, at least he didn’t remember...about the party. He was very drunk that night.’

‘But not too drunk to rape you.’

The harshness of his voice startled her, making her body go tense.

‘I can understand why you want to protect Naomi,’ she told him. ‘But I’m no threat to Ritchie’s marriage.’ She gave him a small, bitter smile. ‘Far from it. Your Draconian measures this afternoon to keep me away from him really weren’t necessary. He’s the last man I’d want in my life, even if he wasn’t married...’

She drank her wine quickly.

‘I wish you hadn’t said what you did in front of him, implying that you and I... If it gets round and people start to gossip... I know it isn’t supposed to matter these days, that a woman is as entitled as a man to enjoy her sexuality—’ She knew her face was burning, but she was determined to say what she felt must be said.

‘But you don’t want anyone thinking that you’re enjoying
yours
with me, is that what you’re trying to say?’ he interrupted.

He sounded angry now, more like the Jake she knew, his voice harsh and tense.

‘This is a small town,’ she told him uncomfortably, ‘where people sometimes still make old-fashioned judgements. If it weren’t for the business... I—’

‘You’d what?’ he demanded. ‘Be quite happy for people to think that you and I are lovers?’

He moved towards her and automatically she jerked back from him, her skin burning red beneath the cynicism in his eyes.

‘It isn’t that,’ she protested automatically. ‘It isn’t you...’

Helplessly she saw the way he tensed, pouncing on her words.

‘Not me,’ he repeated softly. She saw him breathe in, awareness glinting in his eyes as he asked her quietly, ‘Tell me something, Rosie. How many men...how many lovers have there been since my cousin raped you?’

To her horror, Rosie felt her whole body start to tremble. She could feel the emotion welling up inside her, the tears clogging her throat, the pain, the panic, the grief, all burning through her in a relentless, unstoppable tide.

‘None... None... I didn’t... I couldn’t... There wasn’t—’

‘Rosie... Rosie...’

Almost before she could even blink Jake had covered the distance between them, taking her gently in his arms, removing the now empty glass from her hand, holding her as tenderly and carefully as though she were merely a child...a baby...

A baby...

The sound of anguish she made was smothered against his shirt, the tears she hadn’t realised she was crying soaking through the cloth.

She tried to stop, to pull away, to regain control of herself and her emotions, but Jake wouldn’t let her. Instead he was talking to her, crooning almost, soft, reassuring words, telling her that it was all right for her to cry, that it was all right for her to show him her pain, to share her anguish and bitterness.

Distantly she heard the small warning voice that urged her to think, to stop, to cease this act of idiotic self-betrayal with a man whom she had always thought of as her enemy.

And yet who better to share what she was feeling with? Who could understand more...know more?

‘Let it all go, Rosie,’ she heard him telling her gently. ‘There’s no need to hide it any more. You have every right to feel pain and anger.’

She realised that he was stroking her hair, the slow movement of his hand not just reassuring her but giving her as well a physical contact with him that some part of her needed.

It was as though by touching her, holding her, talking to her he had almost become a part of her as well as a part of her past.

Words, phrases, emotions, all of them jumbled and turbulent, tumbled from her lips as her control broke. Somehow she was sixteen again and saying all the things she had not been able to say then, expressing all the agony, the guilt, the anger he had caused her to feel.

Once she actually bunched up her fist and pummelled it fiercely against his chest as she relived physically the emotions he had caused her to suffer then, which she had never been able to express.

It didn’t occur to her to question
why
the focus of all those emotions should be Jake and not Ritchie. She was not capable of such logical thought, but Jake was.

As he held her and let her emotions pour from her like poison from a lanced wound, he ached with sorrow and guilt for all that she had suffered.

Why
had it never occurred to him that she might not have gone willingly with Ritchie? Had it been any other girl but Rosie, he must surely have done, but, in the seething torment of love and jealousy which had seized him, in the blinding belief that she felt for his cousin the desire she would never feel for him, he had not stopped to question her willingness to be there.

Now he realised that the dazed, transfixed stillness of her body had not been caused, as he had so jealously believed, by sensual satisfaction, and was not the aftermath of sexual completion, but on the contrary had been caused by terror and shock and had been her mind’s way of escaping from the horror of what had happened to her.

Ritchie hadn’t been violent with her, just rough, she had told him when he gently probed her memories. He had used force to overpower her, but the sexual act itself had been over quickly.

Her memory of it was not one of pain but one of shock and shame that she had not somehow guessed what he had intended and been able to stop him.

As he held her and listened to her, he knew that there were no words to express what he was feeling, no relief from the burden of his own guilt.

He couldn’t bear to think of what it must have done to her to have kept such a traumatic event to herself, to have felt that there was no one she could confide in, no one who could support and help her, and he could bear it even less knowing that
he
should have been that someone and knowing that, far from being that someone, as he ought to have been, he had actually caused her trauma to increase.

All these years she had kept all that locked away inside her. No one knew better than he how hard it was to lock away any kind of emotional pain, and he considered himself to be an expert on the subject, but somehow
she
had done so, stoically bearing the burden of self-contempt and guilt he had unknowingly given her.

He knew without her having to tell him why there had been no other men in her life, no other man who might have shown her that she had every right to enjoy her sexuality, to take pleasure and joy in it.

He
was to blame for that as well.

She was still leaning against him, her body a sweet, warm weight against his own. She was trembling slightly, physically exhausted by the intensity of her emotional turmoil and by reliving the past.

He held her closer, resting his jaw against the top of her head, closing his eyes against the acid burn of his own tears. Not tears for himself—he didn’t deserve them—but for her.

He tried not to think about how it could have been...how she might have turned to him, how they could have been united by a close bond of friendship and understanding, even if she could never have loved him.

Or maybe even that might have happened as well... Maybe she
might
even have trusted him enough to let him show her what the physical expression of love and desire between two people really should be.

He felt his muscles tense his desire for her—no longer an old hunger, but a sharp, immediate need.

He was old enough now to know that his love for her would never disappear...never change, and he knew enough of his own nature to accept that he was not the kind of man who could ever inflict on someone else, even if they never actually realised it, the role of being second best. Better to remain on his own than do that.

He looked down at the silky russet wing of hair that concealed Rosie’s face.

He had hurt her, almost destroyed her.
He,
not Ritchie. It had been
his
reaction,
his
imagined judgement of her...
his
imagined contempt for her that she remembered far more clearly than Ritchie’s offence.