Unexpected Pleasures by Penny Jordan Read Free Book Online Page B

her mind.
    ‘How could I love him after what he did to me? The way he forced himself on me...the way he ruined my life...?’
    She was crying now, raising her hand to dash the tears away impatiently as the rage continued to burn through her, fuelling the hot outburst of everything she had kept locked inside herself for so long.
    ‘Ritchie forced himself on you...?’
    The sharp question sliced through her hysteria, shocking her into silence.
    She was shivering, ice-cold with shock and reaction, Rosie realised shakily, as the icy disbelief in Jake Lucas’s voice cut through the heat of her emotional outburst.
    ‘Are you trying to claim that Ritchie raped you?’ he demanded acidly. ‘Because if so...’
    Nausea clawed at her stomach. She had to stretch out an arm towards the wall of the house to support herself and yet, despite the terror, the fear rising up inside her, despite the vivid image etched on her brain of the way this man had stood and watched her as she lay rigid on his aunt and uncle’s bed, her still only youthfully developed breasts partly revealed to him, her body numb with panic and shock but her brain, her emotions rawly vulnerable to the contempt, the disgust with which he was regarding her, Rosie suddenly knew that if she backed down now, if she allowed him to use her vulnerability and pain against her so that he could reject the truth, she would suffer for that weakness for the rest of her life. She had made that mistake once; she wasn’t going to make it a second time.
    Curling her fingers into the window sill, she willed herself to be strong, to stand up for herself. She was a woman now, not a child.
    ‘Because if so what?’ she challenged him bitterly. ‘You’d be more than happy to stand up in court and call me a liar...’ Her mouth trembled, but grimly she fought for control. ‘Maybe Ritchie didn’t knock me unconscious and drag me upstairs...and of course, to a man like you, that is what rape constitutes, isn’t it...’
    ‘You were drunk,’ Jake interrupted her flatly. He had gone pale beneath his tan, she noticed, and his eyes, the eyes she had always thought of as being so cold and unemotional, were blazing with heat.
    Somehow this sign that he was, after all, capable of betraying himself with human emotion instead of making her afraid that he might lose his temper actually strengthened her determination to stand up for herself.
    ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Because my drink had been spiked... Deliberately, as I discovered later.’ Her mouth twisted a little. ‘By my so-called friends with the connivance of your cousin.’ Her head lifted proudly as she tilted it back so that she could look directly at him. ‘Apparently your cousin thought that it was high time I learned what life...what sex was all about...’ Distaste shadowed her eyes as she looked away from him. ‘So, yes, I was drunk... Mercifully... But not so much that I didn’t know what was happening—’
    ‘Just enough to ensure that you didn’t do anything to stop it, is that what you’re saying?’
    The harshness of his voice made Rosie’s skin burn.
    ‘If Ritchie did, as you claim, force you...then why the hell didn’t you say something at the time?’
    ‘To whom?’ Rosie demanded. ‘You’d already shown me how people were likely to react,’ she told him bitterly. ‘All I wanted to do was to forget that it had ever happened. So, you see, if you’ve come here to warn me to keep away from your cousin because he’s married you needn’t have worried. Like you, he’s the last person I want anywhere near me.’
    She heard his indrawn breath, but didn’t bother to look at him. Suddenly she felt weak and drained, her anger dissipated by her explosion of temper. She felt sick inside and very close to tears, confused and shaken by her own reaction but, most of all, desperately wishing she had not allowed him to provoke her into that verbal outburst.
    What good had it done? It was obvious he didn’t believe