by Penny Jordan
She went downstairs and filled the kettle so that she could make herself a drink of herbal tea. Perhaps that might help her to get back to sleep.
She knew now that she would never have another child. How could she risk another man looking at her the way Jake Lucas had looked at her, when she told him about her past? She was too proud to want a relationship in which it remained a secret—that was not her ideal of marriage, of commitment, of sharing.
Once she realised what was happening she had, of course, tried to stop him, but he had pinned her to the bed, leaving dark bruises on her arms as he forced his way into her body, making her cry out in shock, not just at his unwanted, forced physical possession of her, but also at the emotional humiliation and degradation she was being made to suffer.
It had all been over within seconds, but those seconds had been long enough to change her life irretrievably. Even now, remembering...thinking about what had happened, Rosie was filled with self-disgust and guilt.
She had withdrawn into herself afterwards, earning for herself a reputation as a swot, as someone who would rather stay at home with her family than go out with her friends.
Her sense of shame and guilt over what had happened was so strong that she could not bear anyone else to know what she had done.
Rather then endure a repeat of the humiliation and shame, the sense of anguished guilt she had already known, she decided that her life must have another focus, that for the sake of her own sanity and self-respect she must accept that that commitment—marriage, a relationship that included a lover and the children they might have together—was not for her.
And most of the time she managed to convince herself that she was content. Except when she saw a small baby or a pregnant woman, except when she woke in the night remembering the past, except when something or someone reminded her of what had happened.
Her tea had gone cold. She looked at it with distaste.
It was fortunate that she was not superstitious, she told herself bitterly, because there could be no worse omen to precede her meeting with Ian Davies than what had happened today.
Tiredly she went back to bed, promising herself that this time she was not going to allow Jake Lucas to disturb her much-needed rest. That this time she was not going to lie there in the darkness remembering the way he had looked at her, the way he had spoken to her, the contempt and dislike with which he had treated her.
* * *
THIS WOULD HAVE to happen to her today of all days, Rosie fumed anxiously, as she waited on the full garage forecourt for a petrol pump to become free.
After all the careful preparations she had made for this morning’s meeting with Ian Davies, how on earth had she come to overlook something as vital as making sure her petrol tank was full?
The pump in front of her became free and she pulled quickly into it, ignoring the attempts of the driver behind her to cut in ahead of her.
As she unlocked the petrol cap and pushed the nozzle of the hose into the tank, for some contrary reason, instead of gushing smoothly into the tank, the strong-smelling liquid flooded backwards, spilling out on to her shoes and tights...
It was only a few small splashes, but they left a dismaying strong smell, Rosie acknowledged as she queued to pay for her petrol.
She always left herself with a good extra margin of time when she was travelling to an appointment, but this morning everything seemed to be against her. She had lost at least fifteen minutes getting petrol, and once she was actually on the motorway there was an unexpected hold-up where a lorry had shed its load and the mess was being cleaned up. She eventually arrived in Chester with only five minutes in which to find a parking spot and to get to Ian Davies’s offices, and Chester was a notoriously difficult place to park.
Luckily she found a spot just when she was beginning to panic and fear that she was going to be late, and even more luckily she found in the glove compartment a long-forgotten bottle of body lotion which a friend had given her to pass on to Chrissie for one of her jumble collections.
As she used it to clean the petrol stains and smell off her legs and shoes, Rosie winced a little at its strong scent. It was a perfume designed to be worn in the evening, not during the day, and it was certainly far too strong for her taste, but at least it had removed the malodorous smell of petrol.
She reached the offices with a minute to spare, and self-consciously checked her appearance in the lift mirror, to see if she looked as flushed and untidy as her hurried rush through the centre of Chester had made her feel.
A little to her own surprise, the reflection that stared back at her from the small mirror looked cool and composed.
Idly, as she waited for the lift to carry her to the top floor, she wondered if anyone had ever thought of placing a hidden camera or watching device in a lift, and then, remembering some of the very odd things she had heard that people sometimes got up to inside them, she reflected wryly that it was probably just as well they did not.
The lift doors opened and she stepped out into the carpeted foyer, composing her features into a calm, professional smile.
* * *
THE MEETING PROVED every bit as tricky as she had expected. Ian Davies was a chauvinist who, Rosie suspected, did not entirely approve of the new role that women were playing in the business world.
Had she been a secretary, a personal assistant, someone’s wife or woman friend, she had no doubt that he would have been perfectly charming to her and perhaps even have flirted with her in a courtly, old-fashioned sort of way, but it was plain to her that he was antagonistic not so much to her, but to what she represented.
But, for all his prejudices, he was still very much a business man, and Rosie saw how quickly he assimilated the advantages of using her as his broker.
‘Are you saying that, had you had our business, you would have got us more compensation from our insurers?’ he asked her at one point.
Firmly Rosie shook her head. She was not going to be caught out like that.
‘Without knowing the full details of the arrangements your previous brokers had with your insurers, I can’t say that,’ she told him equably, but smiling, a little grimly, inwardly to herself as she saw that he had caught the small hint she had dropped about his brokers’ private arrangements with the insurers.
She had a very shrewd idea that the brokers he was presently using adopted a policy which she herself refused to consider, and that was an agreement to let some claims go through unhindered in return for the brokers advising other clients not to proceed with theirs, or suggesting to them they should accept lower compensations.
It was her view that her primary loyalty was to her clients and, if that meant a less easy passage with some of the insurance companies, well, so be it.
‘I’ve brought some comparison quotes with me,’ she told him as she stood up. ‘If I may, I’ll leave them with you.’
A little to her surprise, he accompanied her out into the foyer, but after she had thanked him crisply for his time and turned round to leave she realised why.
Jake Lucas was seated in the foyer, obviously waiting to see him, because he was now standing up, and beyond her she could hear Ian Davies saying something about taking him to lunch.
For a moment the shock of seeing him had paralysed her completely, and then Rosie turned quickly on her heel, her heart hammering furiously fast as it drove the blood through her veins, overheating her pale skin.
She felt hot and sick, filled with panic and a frantic desire to escape. It had been bad enough seeing him yesterday, but this was worse.
Frantically she tried to cling to her self-control and professionalism, but in her haste to escape she moved too quickly, and the papers she was carrying slid from her hot, tense grasp.
She bent immediately to pick them up, her face flushing with angry mortification, and then, to h
er horror, she realised that two pages of paper had drifted to where Jake Lucas was standing.
For a moment she was too panic-stricken to move, and could only crouch where she was, staring numbly at them, filled with sickness and terror at the thought of having to retrieve them.
When Jake himself bent down and picked them up she could only stare at him, unable to drag her gaze from the flat metallic hardness of his grey eyes—like a rabbit trapped by a car’s headlights, she thought mechanically, as he came towards her.
She struggled to stand up, and then completed her self-humiliation by half losing her balance.
The shock of Jake’s hand curling round her arm was like a jolt of electricity. He was so close to her that she could see the dark line along his jaw where he shaved, smell the crisp, clean scent of his soap, see the masculine curl of the dark hairs on his arm where his wrist protruded from his shirt sleeve.
He was still holding her, still watching her... Do something, her brain screamed frantically. Do something...
Somehow she managed to find the willpower to get to her feet, but, as she did so, either because of her tension or the heat it had generated, she was suddenly sharply conscious of the smell of the body lotion she had used to clean her legs, and, she realised, Jake Lucas was aware of it too... She saw the slight, and very betraying, fastidious twitch of his nose, the way his eyes narrowed, the brief, downward glance he gave the lower half of her body and, while she automatically thanked him for his help and turned quickly to make her escape, she was sickly aware of the contempt that faint curl of his mouth had carried.
The look he had given her as she dragged her arm away from his grip had underlined that contempt.
He had never made any attempt to hide from her what he thought of her: that he thought she was sexually promiscuous, that she used her body as a means of getting what she wanted out of life...out of men. And he had just let her know quite plainly that by scenting her legs with that strong, voluptuous perfume she was amply confirming his judgment of her.
What business woman who wanted to be taken seriously at a professional level did anything like that? A discreet touch of something light and cool, a subtle message that said that she was a woman and proud of that fact—that was permissible and acceptable. To wear something so heavy and voluptuous gave off a very different message indeed.
On her way down in the lift, Rosie studied her reflection again. This time it was very different. Her face was flushed, especially along her cheekbones, her eyes huge and dark with emotion, the pupils enormously dilated. Even her mouth looked different somehow, softer, fuller...as though...as though she had been kissed.
Shuddering with distaste, she turned away, and when she stepped out into the street she acknowledged that she felt so emotionally raw and on edge that she was on the verge of tears.
It was just disappointment because Ian Davies had not responded more enthusiastically to her approach, she told herself as she walked back to her car. It wasn’t anything to do with seeing Jake Lucas. That had upset her of course, but she wasn’t going to let the fact that he despised her, that he was contemptuous of her, reduce her to tears.
It wasn’t, after all, his judgment of her that hurt so much; it was the fact that seeing him always reminded him so unbearably of what she had done, of the way she had demeaned herself.
It was bad enough that she knew of her shame and degradation, without him having to know of it too.
But he did know, and nothing she could do could ever erase that knowledge. When he looked at her, she knew as surely as though he were saying the actual words that he was seeing her not as she was now, but as she had been then, half-naked, stupid with drink and shock, lying across his aunt and uncle’s bed, while her partner, the boy who had deliberately given her that spiked drink and who had then equally deliberately semi-coaxed and semi-dragged her upstairs to his parents’ bedroom, had left her, after telling her triumphantly that he had won his bet to seduce her and bring her down off her high horse.
He had not said that to his cousin, though. No, it was a very different story he had told Jake Lucas. According to him, she had been more than willing to accompany him upstairs—she had been the one to suggest it, in fact, and Rosie, too shocked and distressed to defend herself, too humiliated physically and emotionally, had done nothing to defend herself.
Thank God that Ritchie Lucas and his family had emigrated to Australia so quickly afterwards.
And thank God also that Ritchie had apparently got so drunk that evening that it had appeared that he had no recollection of what had taken place and so had been unable to boast to anyone else about it.
No, only two people had remembered what had happened—herself and Jake Lucas—and Jake Lucas did not know the real truth.
He had assumed that she was a member of the rather wild crowd that Ritchie went around with, that she was one of those girls who was foolishly experimenting with sex and drink in the mistaken belief that she was showing everyone how grown-up she was and, beneath his anger at his cousin for taking advantage of his parents’ absence to throw an unauthorised party, and his obvious disgust that Ritchie had brought her upstairs to his parents’ room, Rosie had been sharply conscious of the contempt he had for her.
And yet his judgement of her couldn’t have been further off the mark. She had never even kissed a boy properly before that night, never mind done anything else, and, if it hadn’t been that for the previous few months a small group of girls in her class at school had been making her life a misery by taunting her about her ‘primness’ and her ‘goody-goodyness’ to the extent that she was slowly becoming alienated from all the other girls and treated as someone who was ‘different’...an outcast, she doubted that she would ever have allowed herself to be persuaded to even go to the party in the first place.
To discover later that she had been the subject of a cruel trick deliberately planned to hurt and humiliate her had been hard to bear, but not as hard as Jake Lucas’s contempt, and certainly not as hard as discovering that she was pregnant.
At least no one but her knew about that. She bit her lip as she bent to unlock her car door, hot tears stinging her eyes.
There had been no one to grieve with her over the loss of that baby, no one to share her complex and conflicting emotions, no one to tell that, while logically she knew that perhaps it was all for the best, a part of her ached with loss and pain for that unborn child.
No, that was something that no one else knew, and sometimes she wished they did... sometimes she ached inside to be able to talk about what she had experienced: her pain, her sense of loss...her sense of guilt.
Despite the fact that it was over fifteen years ago since it had happened, sometimes she felt as close to it as though it were less than fifteen weeks, as though the wound, the agony, was still so raw that she needed to be able to talk it through with someone...that she needed to be able to publicly and openly mourn the death of her child.
But someone like Jake Lucas would never be able to understand those kind of emotions. She could just imagine his reaction. No doubt he would have told her that she was lucky things had worked out as they had, that such luck was far in excess of what she actually deserved. He would have no pity, no compassion...no understanding... He would reject her pain and her need to express it in just the same contemptuous way as he had rejected her, turning away from her to talk to his cousin, ignoring her as though she simply did not exist.
But he had come to see her afterwards.
Yes, she told herself savagely, to make sure she wasn’t going to make any trouble for his precious cousin.
Angrily she put the car in gear and reversed out of her parking spot.
CHAPTER THREE
‘ANY LUCK WITH Ian Davies?’
Rosie looked wryly at her brother-in-law.
‘Well, I haven’t heard anything from h
im yet, but he didn’t give me the impression that he was interested. He’s one of those men who isn’t really comfortable with women holding positions of authority in business. If Dad had still been running things, it might have been different.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘Still, it’s his loss as much as ours. I suspect his existing brokers are using his business to get better terms for their other clients instead of reducing his premiums.’
‘Did you tell him that?’ Chrissie demanded.
Rosie shook her head.
‘I only suspect that that’s what they’re doing,’ she told her.
‘Well, I think it’s all wrong that men should still try to keep women down,’ Allison announced passionately with indignation. At fourteen she was just beginning to lay claim to her independence, and was staunchly pro women’s rights.
‘I wonder how Gran and Grandad are getting on. They’ll be in Japan now, won’t they?’ Paul chimed in.
‘Yes, they should have arrived there by now,’ Rosie agreed.
‘I never thought they’d actually do it,’ Chrissie marvelled. ‘Spending a whole year travelling round the world.’
‘It’s something they’ve been planning for and dreaming about for years,’ Rosie reminded her.
Chrissie had rung her earlier in the day to check that she was going round as usual to have supper with them, a regular Friday night ritual which Rosie always enjoyed.
‘Did you collect your hat from the Hopkinses?’ Chrissie asked her now.
‘No, not yet,’ Rosie told her.
‘There’s a car boot sale on tomorrow morning. Fancy coming?’
Rosie shook her head.
‘I can’t. I’ve promised to go over and see Mary Fuller to help her fill out some claim forms. Her garage was broken into on Wednesday and some things stolen.’
She stood up to leave and was surprised when Chrissie reached out to detain her.
‘Not yet,’ she muttered. ‘There’s something I want to tell you. Allison, Paul, upstairs both of you, to make a start on your homework,’ she instructed her children.
