Unexpected Pleasures by Penny Jordan

told herself shakily, as Jake brought his car to a halt on the brick-set drive to his house.
    The house, although modern, was built on traditional lines, and like its neighbors was set in a mature wooded landscape, so that the warmth of its brick façade blended comfortably with its green backdrop.
    His manners, at least, were very different from his cousin’s, Rosie acknowledged, as Jake opened the car door for her and waited courteously for her to get out. Where Ritchie had terrified her with his physical strength and brutality, Jake intimidated her with his watchful distancing of himself from her, with the contempt she had believed he had always felt for her.
    She had been conscious of that watchful distance even before he had found her with Ritchie, nervously wondering what it was she had done wrong that made him focus on her like that. She had been in awe of him even before that night, she admitted as she waited for him to unlock his front door.
    But she wasn’t in awe of him any more. Why should she be? And she wasn’t going to allow him to intimidate and browbeat her into retracting what she had said about Ritchie.
    The house had a good-sized rectangular hallway, immaculately decorated and furnished, but bare of any signs of being lived in.
    There was no evidence of any family clutter, no pictures, no flowers, none of the things which, in Rosie’s view, went to make a home.
    As though he had read her mind, Jake turned his head and said wryly, ‘Sterile, isn’t it? That’s partly because I’m away so much in Greece, and partly because Mrs Lindow, who comes in to clean for me once a week, says she “can’t be doing with clutter and flowers making a mess all over the place”.’
    ‘I can see her point,’ Rosie responded tactfully.
    ‘But you’d have them anyway...mess notwithstanding.’
    His comment startled her. She looked up at him, confused by the expression in his eyes, but still unwilling to admit how often she did buy flowers, simply for the pleasure that seeing and smelling them gave her, and then kept them even when their petals had actually started to fall, reluctant to condemn them to the dustbin until the very last one had died.
    ‘I thought we’d be more comfortable in the sitting-room,’ she heard Jake saying as he opened one of the doors off the hallway and waited for her to precede him into the room.
    Like the hall, it was immaculately decorated and furnished, and like the hall it too was somehow too perfect and sterile, apart from the huge Knole settee in front of the fire.
    ‘It belonged to my grandmother,’ Jake told her, watching her study it. ‘The designer who organised the décor here for me wanted to throw it out, but I wouldn’t let her. Instead we compromised and had it recovered, although in some ways I still prefer the original scuffed velvet...’
    ‘It looks very comfortable,’ Rosie responded inanely.
    Why was he treating her like this, almost...almost gently, as though he was concerned...afraid for her...?
    ‘It is,’ he assured her. ‘Try it...’
    Without ever having intended to do so, Rosie discovered that she was sitting down on the settee and being dwarfed by the depth and comfort of it.
    She heard Jake laugh. ‘You look like a little girl on her best behaviour at her grandmother’s Sunday tea party,’ he told her.
    Rosie flushed because that was exactly how she had been feeling, uncomfortably aware of the elegance of the settee’s silk covering and the fact that her lack of height meant that when she sat back in it her feet could not comfortably reach the ground.
    ‘You can’t sit on it like that,’ Jake told her. ‘Take off your shoes and make yourself comfortable.’
    ‘Oh, no...I couldn’t...the fabric...’
    ‘The fabric is only fabric,’ Jake told her wryly. ‘Possessions are never more important than people. We’ve got a lot to talk about, Rosie. Would you like something to eat? You missed the buffet at the Simpsons’.’
    Rosie shook her