by Penny Jordan
She knew that a lot of people had been surprised when she had taken over from her father when he had retired, especially Chrissie. It had been one thing for her to work for him in his insurance agency business, but quite another for her to take over that business and run it single-handedly, despite the fact that she was professionally qualified to do so and had had several years of practical experience, working first for a much larger concern and then, for three years before he retired, for her father.
It had been very hard for her at first, getting the clients to accept her, but then she had managed to deal with a particularly complicated case and get compensation for a client who had come to her after being unable to get satisfaction from his insurance company through another broker. He had been so impressed that he had recommended her to his friends, but breaking down the barriers of male reserve and lack of faith in her abilities was a constant battle.
It didn’t help of course that in her normal, everyday life she was so quiet and unassertive, and she had to acknowledge that at barely five feet two, with a very small body frame and a sometimes irritatingly delicate and feminine set of facial features, her physical appearance was perhaps not that of a woman who could withstand the occasionally slightly sneaky tricks adopted by her clients’ insurers. Not that they would consider it like that.
Gamesmanship was how they preferred to think of it, a justifiable use of their power, and if someone was weak enough to be browbeaten into giving up a claim or settling for less than they had initially expected then tough luck.
But Rosie had no time for such tactics. She could be surprisingly ruthless and determined when she had to be, but there was no getting away from the fact that in the two years since her father’s retirement the business had lost out to some of the much larger agencies.
She had refused to be downhearted; there was still a market...a need for someone like her who was prepared to give specialised time and attention to a client’s needs. The problem was persuading the clients, not convincing herself that her skills were superior to those of a large, faceless organisation.
Which was what she was hoping to do at tomorrow’s meeting with Ian Davies.
She had heard in a roundabout fashion that he was dissatisfied with his existing brokers since they had amalgamated with another firm. A fire at one of his rental premises, which had resulted in his full claim being turned down by his insurers, had increased that dissatisfaction, and Rosie had seen her chance and taken it.
He was a contemporary of her father’s and, she suspected, not wholly comfortable with women taking a leading role in business. She knew that persuading him to give her his business was not going to be easy, but she was determined to at least try.
To prove to others that she was just as proficient as the equivalent male, or to prove to herself that, just because she was a failure as a woman, it did not mean that she had failed as a human being, that just because she had lost her self-respect, her sense of self-worth, her belief that she was worthy of being loved, it did not mean that every pleasure in life was denied her.
No, not every pleasure, she reflected bitterly. Just the ones she had always taken for granted that she would one day enjoy.
Like being loved and being able to love in return... Like having a child...a family.
As she opened the door and stepped into her small dark hallway, she could feel the angry, impotent tears beginning to sting her eyes.
Damn Jake Lucas... Why had he had to be there this afternoon...? Why wouldn’t the past let her go? Why couldn’t she ever seem to fight free of its destructive tentacles?
CHAPTER TWO
ROSIE WAITED UNTIL she felt comfortably sure that the party would be over and that all the other guests, but most especially Jake Lucas, would have left, and then rang for a taxi. There would be no need for her to disturb the Hopkinses—her car was parked outside their house and not on their drive.
It was just gone nine o’clock when the taxi driver dropped her off, the summer sky still light and the air warm.
Gemma and Neil had been lucky with the weather, Rosie acknowledged as she delved in her handbag for her car keys.
‘Aha...caught you.’
She tensed automatically and then relaxed as she recognised Neil’s teasing voice.
‘Gemma saw you arrive,’ he told her. ‘Why don’t you come in for a few minutes?’
Rosie started to protest, but Neil overruled her. A quick search of the road and drive had confirmed that the only other cars there beside her own belonged to Gemma and Neil, and that all the party guests had gone home.
‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ she started to protest, but Neil had already taken hold of her arm and was coaxing her towards the house.
‘There’s something we wanted to discuss with you anyway,’ he told her. ‘Abby has received quite a few gifts of money as christening presents and we were wondering about starting one of these baby bond things for her... What do you think?’
Ten minutes later she was sitting in the Hopkinses’ comfortable family kitchen, listening carefully as Gemma outlined their wish to provide some small lump sum for their new daughter when she was older.
The baby herself was fast asleep in Gemma’s arms. Neil had gone upstairs to discover what had caused the argument they could hear taking place between their two sons. The phone in the hall rang, causing the baby to stir and cry.
‘Here, hold her for me will you please, Rosie, while I go and answer the phone?’ Gemma asked her, thrusting the baby towards Rosie so that she had no option other than to take her from her.
She felt warm and solid, with that undefinable but instantly recognisable baby smell.
Tensely Rosie held her, her body rigid, her stomach churning, tremors convulsing her.
Unused to being held at such a distance, and missing the warmth of her mother, the baby’s cries increased.
She was still young enough to have that piercing, womb-aching cry of a new baby, and as she heard it Rosie reacted instinctively to it, cradling her against her shoulder, as she supported her small, soft head and soothed her rigid, tense body.
The baby turned her head, nuzzling into Rosie’s skin—an automatic reflex action that meant nothing, Rosie knew—and her own body’s reaction to it was so immediate and devastating that she could feel herself starting to shake.
Abby had stopped crying now, apparently content with her new surroundings, snuggling sleepily against Rosie’s shoulder, but for Rosie to overcome her emotions was not so easy.
She always deliberately avoided this kind of situation, making sure that she had as little physical contact with small babies as she could.
Once they were older it was different, the pain less devastating and primitive, the sense of loss, of deprivation, of agonising guilt, easier to deal with.
She heard Gemma coming back into the kitchen and immediately handed Abby back to her.
‘I must go,’ she told her quickly. ‘I’ve got an early start in the morning. I’ll do some work on some comparison tables for you and drop them around later in the week.’
It was only later, when she was on her way home, that she remembered that in her desperate anxiety to get away she had forgotten all about her hat.
Before going to collect her car she had meticulously gone over and over the proposals she planned to put before Ian Davies.
She was confident that they were at least as competitive as anything anyone could offer him; where she believed she had the advantage over much larger concerns was the personal touch.
It was almost eleven o’clock when she went upstairs to prepare for bed. She was just about to get undressed when the phone rang.
It was Chrissie, wanting to know how she was.
Firmly she assured her sister that she was feeling fine but, ten minutes later, when she had removed her make-
up and was studying her face in her bathroom mirror, she had to admit that her appearance belied her words.
She had always been pale-skinned, and for that reason had always had to protect her sensitive skin from the sun, but tonight her pallor was sharpened by tension and pain.
Shakily she turned away from the mirror, not wanting to see...to remember.
Jake Lucas. He had remembered. She had seen it in his eyes when he looked at her across the Hopkinses’ crowded sun-dappled garden, had seen the coldness and the contempt, the distaste and dislike. It didn’t matter how hard she worked at burying the past, at shutting herself off from it, at trying to forget it—Jake Lucas would never forget; she could not wipe his memory clean, could not erase his knowledge of her.
But at least there was one thing he did not know, one secret that was hers alone.
Rosie winced as she bit down too hard on her bottom lip and broke the skin.
Now she would have a swollen bruise there in the morning. She grimaced crossly in the mirror. She would have to remember to wear a concealing matt lipstick tomorrow. Her mouth was on the overfull side as it was and she had no wish to arrive at Ian Davies’s office looking like some pouting little doll.
Before getting in to bed, she checked that she had everything ready for the morning. Her suit was hanging up outside the wardrobe, and so was the silk shirt she intended to wear with it.
Underwear, tights, plus a spare pair in case of accidents, were laid out ready in the bathroom.
Her shoes were downstairs, cleaned and polished, her neat leather handbag-cum-attaché case filled with all the papers she would need.
Rosie did not believe in going for a high-powered female executive image. She felt it both theatrical and off-putting for some of her smaller clients. She preferred to dress neatly and unobtrusively, so that people paid attention to what she had to say, not the way she looked.
She flinched a little, remembering how Chrissie had commented not unkindly, some time ago, that men would never be oblivious to the way she looked.
‘They can’t help it,’ had been her half-indulgent remark. ‘It’s in their nature, poor dears, and let’s face it, Rosie, you are very attractive.’
She had eyed her younger sister judicially before adding, ‘In fact, you could be very sexy, if you wanted to be.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ had been Rosie’s fierce response.
And it was true. After all, what was the point in looking sexually attractive when she knew how impossible it was for her to follow through the promise of such looks, without at some stage having to reveal the truth.
‘Don’t think about it,’ she warned herself. ‘Just accept that that’s the way things are. You aren’t unhappy. You don’t lack for anything.’
Apart from a lover...someone to share her life on an intimate, one-to-one basis. A lover... And a child.
* * *
IT WAS THE crying that woke her up, bringing her bolt upright in her single, almost monastic little bed, her arms crossing protectively around her body as she tried to clear her brain.
There was the familiar oblong of light cast by the moon through her bedroom window, the familiar pale colours of her simply decorated bedroom with its white bed-linen, its plain, light-coloured walls and carpet, slightly stark against the darkness of the room’s oak beams.
She was not, after all, as she had been dreaming, there in that hospital ward, all around her the cries of the new-born babies, to remind her agonisingly of the child she had just lost... The child she had been so terrified she might have conceived, the child she had rejected with panic and shock, terrified of what its conception was going to mean of the way it would alter her life.
But now there was no child, and she was safe. She knew she ought to be glad...relieved. Only somehow she wasn’t, and the pain inside her wasn’t just caused by the physical shock of the haemorrhage which had preceded her miscarriage. And those piercing new-born cries scraped at her raw nerves like physical torture. No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape from him...or from what had happened.
She was shaking, Rosie recognised, her body icy-cold. Even though it was a softly mild night, and despite her shivers her body was drenched in sweat as she fought not to remember.
It was over fifteen years ago now, almost half her own lifetime. She had been sixteen, that was all—still a child in so many ways, and yet still woman enough to grieve tormentedly for the life that was lost, for the child she would never now hold, for the ache within her that came from the emptiness of what she had lost.
Sixteen... Sixteen, and a virgin. Innocent of any knowledge of male sexuality. And yet she should have known...should have recognised.
It had been all her own fault, as Jake Lucas had so contemptuously pointed out to her.
You didn’t go upstairs with someone, allow him to kiss and fondle you, without knowing where it was going to lead.
Her head had still been thick then with the cider she had had to drink. Only half a glass and she had not finished that, but she learned afterwards that it had been scrumpy, brought back from the south of England by one of the others, with heaven alone knew what added to it.
That still didn’t excuse her, though. She shouldn’t have drunk it, shouldn’t have even been at the party in the first place. If her parents had been at home instead of away at a conference, if her sister had not been staying in the north of England helping her mother-in-law to nurse the husband who was just beginning to recover from a stroke, she would never have been allowed to go.
But they hadn’t been there and, out of bravado and a fear of being laughed at by the others, she had given in to her friends’ cajoling and agreed to join them.
* * *
TIREDLY SHE got out of bed. There was no point in trying to get back to sleep again. Not now.
And no point in reliving the whole thing all over again, she reminded herself bitterly. What good had that ever done, other than to reinforce her feelings of guilt and shame, to conjure up in front of her the sharply vivid mental image of Jake Lucas’s cynical, condemnatory expression as he stared down at her half-naked body, the way she lay sprawled across his aunt and uncle’s bed?
Then, still in shock, her body still aching with pain, her mind still clouded with alcohol, she had not thought of pregnancy. That had come later in a sickening wave of panic and rejection, when she’d realised that she could have conceived.
She hadn’t told anyone; she had been too afraid, too aware by then of her own guilt and degradation.
A month went by and the panic became a certainty, but still she did nothing.
All around her life went on as normal, and she felt somehow that if she pretended it had simply not happened...if she said and did nothing, it would all magically go away. That the nausea she felt in the morning would stop, that her body’s rhythms would return to normal, that the mental pictures that filled her brain at night while she slept would disappear, and that she would once again be the girl she had been before.
No one said anything to her; no one seemed to be aware of what had happened.
Jake Lucas’s aunt and uncle had emigrated to Australia three weeks after the party, with their family.
Some days she almost managed to convince herself that it had never happened, and then something would remind her: she would see a woman pushing a pram on her way home from school...or see a small baby on television. Whenever she saw a heavily pregnant woman she found herself looking the other way, as the panic bubbled up inside her.
Her mother was concerned about her and feared that she had been studying too hard for her exams.
The guilt she felt when she heard this was the worst kind of punishment. Her parents loved and trusted her. How could she tell them the truth?
And then, while they were away visiting friends and Chrissie was still with her mother-
in-law, it happened.
Rosie had gone in to Chester for the day. She had some books she wanted to buy which were not available in their small market town.
She had bought the books and had just been walking out of the shop when it happened—a pain so searing and sharp that she dropped the books, her hand instinctively going to her stomach as she collapsed.
When she came round it was all over and she was in hospital.
She had lost her baby, a harassed young doctor had told her briskly, and they wanted to keep her in overnight just to check that there were no complications.
After that everyone seemed to ignore her, and it was only later that she learned that there had been an emergency that evening, with a major road accident locally.
In the confusion of that, no one realised that Rosie’s family had not been advised of what had happened, and when Rosie was discharged from the hospital the next day with a clean bill of health she realised numbly that no one but her knew or needed to know what had happened.
At first she was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude for that fact, but later, when the sound of crying babies brought her out of her sleep, when the guilt over what she had done was replaced by the far greater guilt and anguish of having lost her child, she ached for someone to talk to, someone to confide in, someone with whom she could share her confused feelings.
Logically she knew that her miscarriage was probably the best thing that could have happened. She was sixteen years old, she had attended a party without her parents’ knowledge, had had too much to drink and as a result... She shuddered, still not able to contemplate what had actually happened, and yet, despite knowing all that, she had still grieved for her lost child.
And still did.
