"Rosie..."

She felt rather than heard him say her name, through the movement of his mouth against her own, her body automatically stiffening in furious reaction at his kiss, her eyes wide open and brilliantly angry; but he ignored the out raged message of her body language, sliding his hand along her jaw, stroking her hair back off her face in a slow, deliberately caressing movement, and all the time he kept on kissing her, moving his mouth lingeringly over her own, caressing her tightly closed lips with gentle deliberation, ignoring the rigid rejection of her body. He was kissing her with a mixture of tenderness and determination that was come that instinct was too far outside the capabilities of her shock-exhausted muscles.

It was easier simply to stay where she was, to let him guide her towards his parked car.

She was muzzily pondering on why it should feel so comforting to be held so securely against him when she loathed and disliked him so much, when he suddenly stopped walking and cursed briefly under his breath. She lifted her head automatically to look at him, forgetting how close to him she already was.

"It's Ritchie and Naomi," he told her.

"They've seen us and they're heading this way."

His breath felt coolly pleasant against her hot skin. He was smiling at her, she recognised with an odd, frantic skipped beat of her heart, his eyes suddenly soft and warm.

"Rosie..."

He had never said her name like that before, and she was startled to discover how different it sounded when he did.

She looked enquiringly at him, her brain, her emotions, her responses still not fully're covered from the fear Ritchie had caused her to feel.

Jake bent his head towards hers; his free hand cupped her face, his skin cool and firm against the nervous heat of hers.

She looked at him questioningly, and then froze as she realised what he was going to do.

It was too late to avert her face and push him away. He was holding her too closely, the arm which had felt so protective and comforting now imprisoning her against him.

Anger took the place of her earlier numb shock. She opened her mouth to demand that he release her.

"Rosie..."

She felt rather than heard him say her name, through the movement of his mouth against her own, her body automatically stiffening in furious reaction at his kiss, her eyes wide open and brilliantly angry; but he ignored the out raged message of her body language, sliding his hand along her jaw, stroking her hair back off her face in a slow, deliberately caressing movement, and all the time he kept on kissing her, moving his mouth lingeringly over her own, caressing her tightly closed lips with gentle deliberation, ignoring the rigid rejection of her body. He was kissing her with a mixture of tenderness and determination that was completely unfamiliar to her, his mouth stroking over her own again and again until it was impossible for her to keep her lips rigid any longer.

She felt them start to tremble, and so, obviously, did he, because the movement of his mouth stilled for a second and lifted from hers, his thumb stroking gently against her lips, ap plying just enough pressure to make them part slightly.

Rosie glared angrily up at him, letting him know that, while physically he might be able to dominate her, he could not control her men tally.

His eyes were open too. She saw the way they glinted between his lowered lashes as he looked first into her eyes and then down at her mouth, as though to remind her that, despite her mental and emotional dislike and rejection of him, physically she had not been able to do so, and not because of any use of brute force.

He was still looking at her mouth, and an exquisite thrill of horror ran through her as she realised he was going to kiss her again.

"No." Her denial of him was an anguished, shaken whisper.

"Still not gone yet, Jake?"

"We were just leaving, Ritchie."

Ritchie!

Rosie could feel the tension gripping her spine, enclosing it with ice-cold fingers of dread. Without being aware of it, she moved closer to Jake, only realising what she was doing when she felt his arm move slightly to accommodate her, and recognised with a tiny dart of disbelief that she had pressed herself so close to him that she could actually feel his heartbeat and the solid strength of the bones and muscles that underlaid his flesh. Was she really seeking protection from her fear of Ritchie with Jake?

"Ritchie, the boys are tired and hungry."

Rosie could hear the irritation in Ritchie's Australian wife's voice.

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake, Naomi, stop nagging, will you?"

The obvious lack of love or respect in Ritchie's voice made Rosie wince. Even without knowing her, Rosie felt sorry for his wife.

She could just imagine how she would have felt had she been the recipient of that kind of comment, spoken in front of a stranger from a man who professed to love her, and not just in front of her, a stranger, but in front of their children as well.

She could feel Jake starting to release her, and for one blind, panicky moment she actu ally wanted to hold on to him, to beg him not to let her go, not while Ritchie was still here, and then she realised that he was reaching round her to open the pa.s.senger door of his car for her.

Gratefully she got in, her legs un steady, her face flus.h.i.+ng, as she inadvertently caught a glimpse of the leering expression on Ritchie's face.

"Looks like you made the right decision, mate," she heard Ritchie saying to his cousin.

"Seems to me that a fella can have a h.e.l.l of a lot more fun single than married."

Rosie saw the nervous, half pleading look his wife gave him and her pity for her in creased. She obviously loved him, Rosie acknowledged compa.s.sionately. And that love quite obviously made her very vulnerable. Even the two boys seemed slightly nervous of their father and yet, as Rosie watched them walk away, she saw that, young as they were, they were already beginning to adopt their father's bullying and contemptuous att.i.tude to wards their mother.

"Poor woman..."

She spoke the words out loud without realising that Jake could hear them.

"Yes," he agreed tersely as he slid into the driver's seat of his car and closed his door.

"Ritchie treats her abominably, and she's terrified of losing him. Part of the reason she wanted this trip to England was because she hoped that it would give them time alone together as a family.

Apparently when they're at home Ritchie prefers to spend his time with his mates."

The obvious disapproval in his voice made Rosie turn her head to look at him, a small frown pleating her forehead.

In the past she had thought there was little to choose between Ritchie and Jake; they were related by blood and, it seemed, shared a common att.i.tude towards s.e.x. Of the two of them she had disliked Jake more than Ritchie because Jake had been the one to more openly show his contempt of her and to condemn her. Now Jake's reaction to Ritchie's treatment of his wife confused her.

"Naomi is very vulnerable where her relations.h.i.+p with her husband is concerned.

Ritchie's obvious interest in you won't help her."

Rosie stared at him.

"Ritchie's interest in met But "He followed you into the Simpsons'

house," Jake told her coolly.

"And Naomi saw him do so. If I hadn't intervened..."

Was that why he had held her, kissed her... implied that they were

lovers... not to protect her from Ritchie's unwanted attentions, but to

protect Ritchie's wife from the pain her husband was causing her? A pain she hadn't known she was capable of feeling unfolded achingly inside her. Her fingers curled tightly into her palms, nails pressed against her skin to prevent her crying out with the intensity of it. If they hadn't been travelling at some speed she would have been tempted to wrench open the door and fling her self bodily out of the car.

She frowned as she suddenly realised that they weren't travelling in the direction of her home.

"This isn't the way to where I live," she protested.

"No," Jake agreed calmly, pausing for a few seconds before adding, "I'm taking you home with me. We need to talk."

"To talk?" Rosie stared at him, infuriated by his high-handedness."What about?"The look Jake gave her made her toes curl in nervous self-protection."The past..." he told her shockingly."And the future..."

CHAPTER FIVE.

the past! Rosie trembled. What was he planning to do? Grill her so relentlessly that she broke down and retracted the statements she had made about what had really happened with Ritchie?

She had already seen in his face how little he had enjoyed hearing the truth. She knew how much it must have infuriated him, hurt his pride.

And it wasn't just for the sake of his pride that he would want her to retract, either.

She had read into his comments about Ritchie's marriage a none too subtle warning off. Did he really think after what she had told him that she would want anything... anything to do with his precious cousin?

He must do, otherwise why the charade about pretending they were a couple? Why that kiss?

That kiss... Her heart started to thump unevenly. Against her will, an unfamiliar mixture of languor and sensuality spilled slowly through her.

She had received other kisses, and yet she could not remember a single one of them affecting her as his had done.

There had been a new dimension to it, an awareness within her of an aching sadness and pain, as though she had suddenly become aware that there could be something in a man's kiss that could stir her so deeply that she was helpless to resist it.

But she had to resist it. She had to remember just who Jake Lucas was, and just what the situation between them really was. That hadn't changed just because she had lost her temper and challenged his perception of past events.

He had not followed her into the Simpson's house to protect her, as she had initially so naively imagined. He had followed her to protect his cousin's marriage.

From her?

She was the last person who wanted to threaten it. As far as she was concerned, she would have much preferred Ritchie to stay where he was in Australia.

At least he seemed to have no memory of what had happened between them. Thank G.o.d, but then, remembering how much he had had to drink, it was perhaps not as surprising that he should have forgotten, as she had once thought.

She remembered how terrified she had been all those years ago, dreading hearing that he had been boasting about what had happened, and then how stunned, how disbelieving, when it first began to dawn on her that he couldn't even remember the incident.

She had been glad, of course, but at the same time bitterly resentful that something which should have had such a devastating effect on her and her whole life had had so little effect on his.

For him there had been no guilt, no pain, no suffering, and certainly no remorse.

From what she had seen of him today, she doubted that he was capable of feeling any of those emotions, and for the first time she was thankful that the child she had conceived had been spared the discovery of what his or her father was.

No child should have to suffer that kind of burden; she could see already the effect he was having on his own children.

She s.h.i.+vered suddenly in reaction to what she was thinking.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jake's head turn in her direction as though he had seen that small physical betrayal.

His terse, "Almost there," might almost have indicated concern coming from any other man.

But he had already shown her how little concern he had for her, how little respect for her reputation. To have kissed her like that where anyone could have seen them, to have verbally implied that they were lovers.

These might be the 1990s, couples might live together openly and easily without feeling it necessary to marry, believing that their emotional commitment to one another was the only bond they needed. But this was a very small market town where, while mothers and grandmothers might say bravely to their friends that of course they would never dream of pressuring their child to marry simply for the sake of convention and that children were far better off being brought up by two adults who loved them rather than by a married couple who stayed together out of duty, they still admitted privately to their closest friends that, oldfas.h.i.+oned though it made them, they would dearly love to have seen their son or daughter married, preferably before they presented them with their much-loved grandchildren. Rosie knew that, while her parents would never question the way she chose to live her life, they would still, deep in their hearts, be hurt by any gossip linking her name with Jake's in a way that suggested they were lovers with a physically intimate relations.h.i.+p that they had no plans to make permanent.

And then of course there were her clients. Many of them were her own age and some even younger, and she knew they would not be in the least concerned about what she did in her private life. But when she had taken over from her father she had taken on his clients, many of whom had expressed doubts as to her ability to fill her father's shoes, and their att.i.tude, she suspected, would be confirmed once any gossip reached their ears. In their eyes a woman involved in a s.e.xual relation s.h.i.+p with a man outside marriage was not his equal, involved in a mutual partners.h.i.+p, but something very different. She would lose status and respect in their eyes... And their business as well?

Wearily she closed her eyes, a feeling of helpless despair and resentment was.h.i.+ng over her.

Glancing across at her, Jake frowned. Even now, in the intimacy of his car, she still had this ability to withdraw from him, to distance herself from him.

Pain twisted unsparingly inside him. Fifteen--sixteen years and nothing had changed. She still had the ability to get under his skin, to touch emotions and needs that no one else had ever come even close to touching.

She hated him, of course. He had always known that. He had seen it in her eyes the night he found her in bed with Ritchie and he had seen it in them on every occasion they had met since.

Until this afternoon.

This afternoon she hadn't looked at him with hatred.

She hadn't looked at him with love, either, he reminded himself.

He had been twenty-three, almost twenty-four, when he'd first realised he loved her, and he had been revolted by that knowledge. She had been just sixteen, still a schoolgirl, a child, and with none of the precocious s.e.xuality of some other girls of her age.

She had been innocent, unknowing... uncaring of the effect she was having on him.

He had fought against what he felt with all the power of his intellect and intelligence. He was a man, she was a child; his feelings were a malicious joke played on him by capricious fate, a form of sickness, madness... a danger both to him and to her.

They would pa.s.s. They had to pa.s.s. He could not really be in love with a sixteen-year- old child who barely knew he existed, who was closer to his irresponsible cousin in age than himself. All he had to do was to ignore them, to ignore her, and eventually they would go away without harming either of them.

And then he had found her in bed with Ritchie. It had been a neighbour of his aunt and uncle's who had alerted him by telephone to Ritchie's illicit party.

He had arrived there to find the living-room full of drunken teenagers, rock music blaring out so loud he suspected that, sober, their ear drums could not have withstood it.