Unexpected Pleasures

by Penny Jordan

  Rosie frowned as her brother-in-law, too, disappeared from the kitchen, saying something about having a phone-call to make.

  Chrissie had been on edge all evening, flustered and quick-tempered in a way which was out of character for her, and immediately they were on their own Rosie demanded anxiously, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  When Chrissie sat down, her eyes filling with tears, Rosie stared at her.

  ‘Chrissie,’ she exclaimed reaching out towards her. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Chrissie told her tearfully. ‘I’ve only found out this morning. I thought it was just my age... I mean, I am forty...but I’ve been feeling so uncomfortable, so bloated and sick, that I decided I’d go and see Dr Farrar. When she asked me if I could possibly be pregnant, I laughed at first...

  ‘Oh, Rosie, what on earth are people going to say? Allison and Paul? I feel such a fool. A baby at my age... Would you believe it? Greg is thrilled... Isn’t that just like a man?’ she complained as she sniffed and blew her nose vigorously.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she apologised. ‘It’s just been such a shock...’

  ‘You’re not that old,’ Rosie assured her automatically. ‘Lots of women have babies at your age, some of them for the first time, and as for Allison and Paul... You wait... I’m sure they’ll understand.’

  Chrissie pregnant... Chrissie having a baby... Although outwardly she knew she appeared calm, her words warm and soothing, inwardly her reaction was very, very different.

  She could not be jealous of Chrissie, she told herself later as she drove home, having congratulated her slightly shamefaced brother-in-law who, as Chrissie had said, was quite obviously thrilled at the idea of another child.

  Jealous of Chrissie... She could not be... She must not be. And yet, as she parked her car outside her own home, she acknowledged that she was.

  Not jealous in the way that one might be of someone else’s material possessions or even someone else’s apparently more fortunate lifestyle; no, this jealousy wasn’t like that—it went deeper, bit more sharply, hurt her in so many different ways that she almost felt as though she wanted to scream her pain and misery to the world.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want Chrissie to have her baby. She shuddered at the thought. It was just... It was just that she... It was just that she what? Wanted a child of her own. A child she would have to bring up single-handedly. A child to whom she would one day have to explain and apologise for its lack of a father. Was that what she really wanted?

  She didn’t know what she wanted, she acknowledged later; all she did know was that the control she had always been so careful to exercise over herself and her deepest innermost feelings was dangerously close to splintering. That the pain she had thought she had buried so deep that it would never, ever surface was growing inside her, threatening to overwhelm her.

  She must not let it. She must not let anyone...anyone guess what she was feeling, especially Chrissie who, for all her strength, was right now feeling very vulnerable, and who needed her love and support.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING she woke up heavy-eyed and on edge. Her sleep had been disturbed by confusing, unhappy dreams from which she had woken up with tears on her face.

  She must stop this, she told herself as she prepared to go and see her client. She had heard about, read about women who became obsessed with their need to fulfil their primary biological function and have a child. It filled and sometimes destroyed their whole lives, occupying them to such an extent there was no room left for other things, other relationships which might have offered them comfort and compensation.

  But, deep down inside her, Rosie knew that it wasn’t so much the desire to have a child that was causing her emotional anguish, but that somehow her feelings were all connected with the child she could have had but had lost. It was not just that she felt pain and on her own behalf; she felt it on that child’s as well. Pain and guilt, sorrow, anger almost, because her child had never been properly grieved for, had never been allowed to be acknowledged...because she had never been able to mourn its loss and share what she was feeling with others.

  But how could she have shared it? To share it would have meant admitting what had happened, revealing what she had done, how she had behaved.

  Did she really want other people to know about that? Look how Jake Lucas had reacted. Did she really want to see that same contempt in other people’s eyes, to know that people were talking about her behind her back, discussing what she had done...? And besides, it was all too late, over fifteen years too late.

  But no matter how logically she tried to argue with herself, she still felt emotional and on edge. The thought of having to spend the next eight months or so listening to her sister talking about her pregnancy and making plans for the eventual birth of her baby made her stomach churn with tension and anxiety.

  She felt as though emotionally she was stretched so tightly, so over-wound inside, that she was almost on the verge of snapping completely.

  What had happened to her? This time last week she had been perfectly all right... Hadn’t she? All right, so she hadn’t wanted to attend the Hopkinses’ christening, and thinking about it had brought everything back, resurrected the pain she was increasingly conscious of having to suppress, but she had been to other christenings and had coped. What had been so special about this one, other than the fact that Jake Lucas had been there?

  Jake Lucas. It was his fault she was feeling like this, she decided bitterly. It was because of him that she couldn’t enjoy the news of her sister’s pregnancy, couldn’t react with the unshadowed pleasure and enthusiasm she wanted to feel.

  Jake Lucas... If only he hadn’t been there that night... If only he hadn’t opened the door and seen... It had all been over then anyway, her frightened struggles to escape from his cousin’s too powerful grip long since subdued and the damage done.

  Jake Lucas. She hated and loathed him almost as much as he despised her. She smiled bitterly to herself. Much he would care. Still, she very much doubted that he was used to being on the receiving end of such a negative emotion from her sex. He was, physically at least, a very attractive and compelling man—even she could see that—the kind of man she would have expected to have had a string of women passing through his life, but oddly he seemed not to do so. He had a wide social circle of friends, but if he had a serious personal relationship with anyone it had not reached the town’s very efficient grapevine.

  Good-looking, comparatively wealthy and, according to everyone else, with the kind of personality that immediately drew others towards him, he still remained single.

  ‘Rumour has it that he fell in love with someone years ago and that he’s never got over it,’ Chrissie had once remarked, but Rosie had found it hard to believe her. Jake Lucas, in love? He was too hard, too detached, his opinion of himself far too high to allow him to admit into his life the turbulence of an emotion like love.

  It took most of the morning for her to help her client fill in her claims forms. The burglary had upset her, and left her feeling nervous and insecure, and Rosie, who had come across the same thing with other clients who had suffered similar robberies, let her talk, knowing that this was the best thing she could do.

  Would she have felt any different, would her life been any different, if there had been someone for her to talk to? But how did you tell someone, anyone, anything like that? To explain what had happened, how her baby had been conceived in the first place, would have been hard enough, but then to go on to discuss her mixed and contradictory feelings over her miscarriage... How could she tell anyone of the relief she had first felt...relief at the death of her child, and then go on to expect them to believe how later her feelings had changed completely, and how guilty she had felt? As though in some way she had actually willed the miscarriage on herself.

  Had ther
e been any repercussions? Jake Lucas had asked her curtly the day he had come to see her.

  ‘No,’ she had told him stoically, denying the truth, keeping it secret and hidden, just as she had gone on keeping it secret and hidden ever since; but she had lied: there had been repercussions then and there still were now, echoing agonisingly through her life, through her.

  These days there was counselling available to people who suffered trauma, but at sixteen she had been too young, and much too ashamed and frightened, to have sought out any kind of professional advice even if she had been aware that she could have done so.

  All she had wanted to do when she left the hospital was to put the whole thing behind her, to lock it away in the darkest, most hidden recesses of her mind, where it could lie forgotten.

  Only her guilt had not allowed her to forget it; it had driven her, relentlessly sharpened by pain. And it had been a twofold guilt.

  Initially she had felt shame and anxiety because of what she had done because, even though she knew they would do all they could to help her, her parents would be hurt. She had not thought about the baby then, that had come later...a secondary and much, much worse guilt, a deep, more intense feeling of having failed another human being, of having let them down and caused them to suffer. Her baby had died and, even though logically she knew such things happened, she still felt that she was to blame, that somehow her baby had known that it was not loved...not wanted and that because of that...

  And now Chrissie was having a third child. Rosie gripped the steering-wheel tightly.

  She was not going to allow herself to be envious of her sister, to spoil the relationship she had with her with feelings of useless envy, to spoil the relationship she would one day have with her new niece or nephew with unhappiness for the child she had lost.

  It was just gone lunchtime when she got home. On Saturday morning she normally got up early and drove into town to do her food shopping, while everywhere was relatively quiet, but today, because of her business appointment, that had not been possible, and now she realised she was virtually out of fresh food.

  Not that it mattered. She didn’t really feel very hungry.

  But she really ought to have something to eat, an inner voice nagged her. Neglecting her health wasn’t going to solve anything or make her feel any better, was it?

  Grimly she pulled open the fridge door and surveyed its contents without any real enthusiasm and then closed it again.

  The hot, sunny weather had continued all week, and her garden, especially the pots of flowers and herbs by the back door, all needed watering.

  Originally built to house farm workers, her cottage had a very good-sized rear garden, which had been one of the main reasons Rosie had bought it in the first place.

  Last summer, much to Chrissie’s exasperation, she had painstakingly laid a pretty, small, stone-paved area outside the back door.

  It had taken up virtually all her spare time for the whole of the summer, and Chrissie had told her forthrightly that she would have been wiser to pay someone else to do the work, leaving herself with enough free time to concentrate on her own social life.

  ‘Honestly, Rosie,’ she had told her. ‘Anyone would think you wanted to be on your own. Every time anyone asks you for a date you tell them that you can’t because you’re working on that patio.’

  Rosie had said nothing, not wanting to admit to her sister that inadvertently she had hit upon the truth.

  Rosie assumed that it was because her job brought her into contact with so many men that she was constantly being asked out, unaware that it was her looks and personality that were really responsible for their interest.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Chrissie had demanded with sisterly candour.

  ‘I just don’t want to get involved,’ Rosie had responded quietly.

  Outwardly she had been calm, and even slightly withdrawn, but only because that was the sole way she had of controlling her inner pain.

  She ached to be able to confide in her sister, to tell her what she was suffering, but she had been too embarrassed, and besides, keeping her emotions, her fears, the truth hidden had become so much a part of her that the mere thought of discussing it with anyone else caused her to feel acute terror and panic.

  Instead of having some lunch she made herself a cup of coffee and then, changing into her jeans and a

  T-shirt, she went outside and connected up the hose-pipe.

  She had a small vegetable plot which she was diligently tending at the bottom of the garden.

  She was working busily in it and just starting to relax, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the peace, when suddenly she heard children’s voices as some people walked past, and immediately she began to feel her tension return.

  This was getting ridiculous, she told herself shakily, as she put down her fork. She was getting ridiculous.

  Even so, she couldn’t stay where she was. She hurried back to the house, angry with herself and frightened at the same time. If she couldn’t bear to hear the sound of other people’s children, things were getting worse, she acknowledged as she stripped off her gardening gloves outside the back door. It was the news about Chrissie’s baby that had thrown her into this mood, but somehow she must come to terms with it to...

  She tensed as she heard someone walking down the path that ran alongside her house.

  She heard the gate squeak as it was opened, and firm, male footsteps.

  She moved forward to see who her visitor was at the same moment as he came round the corner.

  Jake Lucas!

  Rosie froze.

  ‘I couldn’t get any answer when I rang the bell at the front,’ she heard him saying. ‘But your car was outside, so I thought I’d just check to see if you were in the garden.’

  The shock was beginning to recede now, slowly and painfully, so that it was as though her numbed brain was only gradually coming back to life; her thought processes were slow and disjointed.

  ‘I’ve brought you this. You left it at the Hopkinses’ last weekend.’

  Rosie stared at the hat he was holding in his hand. Her hat.

  She lifted her head and looked at his face.

  Why had Jake Lucas brought her hat back? What was he doing here? What did he want?

  Suddenly her thoughts began to accelerate and then to skid frantically out of control as panic gripped her.

  ‘There’s something else I wanted to discuss with you as well.’

  His voice was deep and calm...controlled...but Rosie still caught the note of hidden tension within it, her perceptions sharpened by her own tension and fear.

  ‘There isn’t anything you and I could possibly have to discuss,’ she told him fiercely.

  It was too much, his coming round here like this, invading her privacy, her peace...just as his memory constantly invaded her thoughts...her dreams...or, rather, her nightmares.

  She saw that he was frowning and her heart gave a frantic bound, but she wasn’t going to let him intimidate her any more with his disdain...his contempt...

  Like her he was dressed casually in jeans and a cotton T-shirt but, where hers was large and loose, his clung lovingly to a torso that was surely far too athletically, firmly muscled for a man of close to forty.

  His arms—tanned, no doubt by the time he spent in Greece—made his T-shirt look even whiter in contrast.

  It was all very well knowing that pale skin was far healthier, safer than that which was tanned, but even so she couldn’t help contrasting the cream pallor of her own arms with the warm golden-brown of his, and feeling slightly envious, Rosie admitted.

  As she spoke, she stretched out her hand to take her hat from him, making no attempt to conceal her hostility and bitterness.

  Why should she, after all? He had never made any attempt to conceal how he fe
lt about her. She made it plain by her body language that she expected him to hand over her hat and leave without saying whatever it was he seemed to think they had to discuss. But, instead of responding to the message of her tense muscles and shuttered face, he kept hold of her hat and took a step further into the garden, a step closer to her, so that her fingertips accidentally brushed against the flesh of his forearm.

  His skin felt warm and smooth like velvet, so that for a moment she was actually tempted to stroke it and savour the pleasure it gave her to touch it. The dark hair covering his skin was much softer than she had expected. Somehow she had thought it must feel abrasive... Because that was how she saw him? Instead it felt silkily fine, distracting and confusing her.

  The sensation of him jerking his arm away from her touch, just a heartbeat before she herself removed her fingers, made her face burn with shamed confusion and panic.

  She should have been the one to withdraw first, instead of standing there, practically caressing him deliberately. As though...as though...as though she had actually wanted to touch him. And that would be what he was thinking of course... That she hadn’t changed at all...that she was still the person he had believed her to be at sixteen, and so avaricious for sensual, sexual sensation that she would offer herself to any male...initiating intimacy where none was wanted.

  ‘Ritchie is coming back.’

  She was so wrapped up in her own anger that it was several seconds before she realised what he had said, what the hard, flatly delivered short sentence actually meant.

  When she did she reacted automatically, shock turning her skin even paler, as she stepped back from him instinctively, looking directly into his face, searching it frantically, half expecting to find he was simply tormenting her. But, as she met his eyes, she saw that he was speaking the truth.

  Her heart started beating frantically fast, her stomach churning nauseously.

  ‘Why... How?’

  She seemed to hear her own voice from outside her body, thin and weak, taut with tension, as fear and shock poured reactively through her.