She was suddenly possessed by an anger, a rage so intense that it overcame her fear of him, her awareness of his contempt and dislike, everything but her need to strike out against him, to make him suffer as she was suffering... to refute... It boiled and raged inside her, demanding an outlet, refusing to be suppressed any longer. She was literally shaking with the force of it when she opened her mouth and told him wildly.

"Love him...? I loathe him ... hate him... I've always hated him--always."

She was shaking violently now, barely aware of the small, frantic voice inside urging her to be more cautious, but suddenly she needed to vent her emotions, her bitterness, to tell Jake Lucas how she felt, how she hurt.

It was as though the injustice of his accusation, coming on top of all that she was already suffering, had driven everything but her need to defend herself from it out of 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 s.h.i.+vering, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 her self. 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 const.i.tutes, 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 de termination 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 socalled 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 s.e.x 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 h.e.l.l 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 wis.h.i.+ng she had not allowed him to provoke her into that verbal outburst.

What good had it done? It was obvious he didn't believe her, but then she had always known that he wouldn't. No, it had been for her own benefit that she had given in to her driven need to tell him the truth, not his.

She started to run away from him and then stopped as she heard him saying harshly.

"If what you're saying is true If. The anger reignited inside her. She turned her head and looked at him, her mouth curling with a pa.s.sable imitation of his own disdain.

'7f? How can it be, when you were there? When you saw everything. When you have al ready decided that I was just a cheap little tramp who ' "I never thought that..."

His denial took her by surprise. She stared at him, her expression momentarily unguarded and vulnerable.

"But you..."

Grimly Rosie compressed her lips, biting back the words she had been about to say.

"It doesn't matter now," she told him distantly.

"It was all a long time ago..."

"So long ago that you've forgotten all about it, is that it?"

Rosie tried not to s.h.i.+ver as she heard the sarcasm in his voice.

"Of course," she lied bleakly.

"After all, it's hardly the kind of thing I'd want to remember, is

it?"

CHAPTER FOUR.

'what do you mean, you're not going? Of course you are. The Simpsons are some of Mum and Dad's oldest friends," Chrissie said firmly.

Rosie tried to hold on to her temper. Chrissie's pregnancy seemed tobe making her bossier than ever, or was it simply that with heroutburst to Jake Lucas she had somehow lost a little of her protectivecoating ... her control? Rosie wondered uneasily.

She had noticed a disturbing tendency recently for her emotions to swing far more violently from one extreme to the other. She was constantly tense and on edge, looking over her shoulder, half expecting to find Jake Lucas watching her disapprovingly.

She cringed to think of that awful confrontation she had had with him.

Why had she told him about Ritchie? What had she hoped to achieve?

What had she expected him to do?

Apologise... Show regret, remorse, guilt? He hadn't even believed her.

He had made that plain enough.

"Rosie..." Guiltily she realised that Chrissie was still talking to her.

"The Simpsons' lunch party... You've got to go... I can't, because we're spending that weekend with Greg's mother."

"Chrissie--' "You're going," Chrissie told her firmly.

"Or are you trying to tell me that you've got some hot date? That you're sneaking off to spend the weekend romantically tete-a-tete with someone special?"

Rosie knew when she was beaten. Though she could have pleaded work, she told herself later in the week when she surveyed her desk tiredly.

She had heard nothing from Ian Davies and she knew better than to telephone him, but she had plenty of other work to keep her busy. There had been a spate of burglaries in the area, necessitating house calls on her clients, while she helped them to fill in their claim forms.

It was a time-consuming and non-profit- making task, but she was glad to be kept busy.

It kept her mind off Jake Lucas. Or at least it should have done.

Instead of relieving her tension and enabling her to put the past firmly behind her, her furious outburst against his cousin only seemed to have reactivated her pain and despair.

Would she have felt any different if he had believed her?

She frowned. No, of course she wouldn't. She didn't need absolution from him. And anyway, how could he believe her when doing so would mean having to admit that he had misjudged her? No, she didn't need his understanding, his acceptance. She didn't need anything from him, she told herself fiercely as she bent her head over her paperwork.

"And so I said to him, well, if you don't tell her, then I'm going to have to, whether she's your sister or not... I'm not having her telling me how to bring up my children..."

"Rosie.-.I am glad you could make it." A little guiltily, Rosie returned Louise Simpson's warm hug.

"Thank goodness the good weather has held, although Jim isn't too pleased. He's worried about people trampling on his precious lawn," Louise told Rosie ruefully.

The Simpsons' garden party was an annual event which normally Rosie enjoyed, but Jake Lucas had made her feel so hypersensitive that she felt reluctant to go anywhere, just in case she might run into either him or his cousin. Not that Ritchie was likely to be here, she re a.s.sured herself.

As far as she could remember the Simpsons, like her own parents, had never been particularly friendly with his.

Taking comfort from this rea.s.suring thought, she followed her hostess out into the sunny garden, and then froze as almost the first sound she heard was a child's voice with an unmistakable Australian accent. Panic hit her immediately.

Quickly she turned away, heading in the opposite direction, thankfully merging herself with a group of people around their host.

She stayed there as long as she could, determinedly asking Jim questions about his precious roses long after everyone else's interest had quite obviously faded.

"Better get back to my duties as barman," Jim told her.

"You haven't got a drink, Rosie. Come with me and I'll get you something."

She would have preferred to stay where she was, separated from most of the other guests by the rose-hung pergola which was Jim's pride and joy, but Jim already had his hand on her arm and she couldn't refuse.

The bar had been set up on the large, paved area just outside the house. Several large groups of people were congregated around it.

One of the Simpsons' grandsons had taken over as barman, but was now quite obviously pleased to be relieved of his duties and set free to enjoy himself with his friends.

He was a shy boy of around seventeen, who blushed fiercely as Rosie said h.e.l.lo to him.

"The lad's got a bit of a crush on you," Jim told her with a chuckle as his grandson disappeared.

"Can't say I blame him, mind... if I was twenty years younger..."

Dutifully Rosie smiled, refusing an alcoholic drink and asking for something cool and soft instead.