Yesterday's Echoes. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 willing, and 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 СКАЧАТЬ