Unexpected Pleasures by Penny Jordan Page A

head, knowing that, despite the fact that she had eaten nothing since her breakfast, she was far too on edge to do so now.
    ‘A drink then...tea...coffee...?’
    Why didn’t he just get on with it? Rosie wondered grimly. Was he deliberately playing on her tension, trying to gain the upper hand so that when the crunch came...?
    She shook her head.
    ‘Well, I’m going to have something,’ she heard him say. ‘I shan’t be a minute.’
    He was barely that, returning just as she had finally decided she couldn’t stand the excruciating agony of either sitting with her back ramrod-straight or being unable to bend her knees and had admitted that he was right and that the only way she was going to be able to sit comfortably on the settee was if she removed her shoes and curled up on it.
    She was just doing this when he walked in, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses.
    When he filled them both and offered one to her, she shook her head.
    ‘It’s only wine,’ he told her mildly. Instantly her face was suffused with colour, as she wondered if he was deliberately taunting her with what she had told him about her drink being spiked the night of the party. She couldn’t tell him that alcohol was something she never touched. It would make her look too weak and vulnerable.
    Instead, reluctantly, she accepted the glass from him. The dark red liquid glowed richly in its plain glass, the only touch of colour in the otherwise neutral room. When she held the glass in her hand, the liquid almost seemed to warm her flesh through it.
    She took a sip, surprised to discover how much she liked the warm, fruity taste.
    It was only wine, she reminded herself, and only one glass, and then, as Jake seated himself at the other end of the settee and turned to face her, she took another nervous sip.
    This was it. This was the moment when he challenged her, demanding that she retract what she had said about Ritchie.
    ‘Rosie...the night of the party—’
    ‘I don’t care what you say to me...how much pressure you put on me, I’m not going to change what I said,’ she told him fiercely. ‘What I told you was the truth.’
    ‘Yes, I know...’
    His quiet words silenced her. She stared at him and then took a hasty, tense gulp of her wine, grateful for the warmth that spilled through her from it, driving out the icy fingers clutching apprehensively at her muscles.
    ‘You... You believe me...’
    He nodded his head and she felt a huge surge of emotion rush through her. She took another gulp of wine.
    ‘You believe me now, but you wouldn’t have believed me then...’
    She saw the look on his face and deep within her something splintered sharply, painfully.
    ‘You wouldn’t,’ she repeated, denying what she had seen in his eyes.
    He bowed his head.
    ‘I saw the way you looked...the disgust...the contempt...’
    She watched as he twisted his glass in his hands. There was something different about him now, as though...as though the distance he had always placed between them had somehow gone.
    ‘Those were for me,’ he told her in a low voice. ‘Not for you. I did think you’d gone with Ritchie willingly, though. I thought you believed you were in love with him.’
    Rosie shuddered. ‘I hated him even then. He was always making fun of me...taunting me because I didn’t...’ She ducked her head uncomfortably.
    ‘Because you were a virgin,’ Jake supplied for her.
    She couldn’t speak, her emotions too raw and painfully close to the surface to allow her to. She nodded instead, taking another sip of wine, hoping it would steady her.
    When Jake had brought her here to talk, the last thing she had expected was that they would be having such an extraordinarily intimate conversation...that he would accept so readily, so easily what she had to say...that he would say, and mean it, that he believed her.
    She felt dizzy with the unexpectedness of it, light-headed... light-hearted almost, as though some huge weight had been lifted from