"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 gla.s.s 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 mebecause I didn't..." She ducked her head un comfortably."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 her.

"I felt so ashamed... so... so guilty and afraid..."

"The guilt was Ritchie's." He paused as he looked at her, and then

added in a low voice, "And the shame mine."

"It's all a long time ago... and none of it matters now," Rosie told him jerkily. What on earth was she saying? Of course it mattered. She had never forgotten what had happened... his disgust... his contempt... Only he had just said that they had never been directed at her, but at himself.

"This afternoon... were you leaving the party because you'd seen Ritchie?"

His abrupt switch from the past to the present caught her off guard.

"Yes," she admitted.

"I saw you both..." She bit her lip when she realised what she had admitted and realised from the bleak look he gave her that he had recognised all that she had not said.

"I suppose I deserved that," he told her.

"I'm sorry if Ritchie upset or frightened you."

"Well, at least he didn't remember... about the party. He was very

drunk that night."

"But not too drunk to rape you."

The harshness of his voice startled her, making her body go tense.

"I can understand why you want to protect Naomi," she told him.

"But I'm no threat to Ritchie's marriage." She gave him a small,

bitter smile.

"Far from it. Your Draconian measures this afternoon to keep me away

from him really weren't necessary. He's the last man I'd want in my life, even if he wasn't married..."

She drank her wine quickly.

"I wish you hadn't said what you did in front of him, implying that you

and I... If it gets round and people start to gossip... I know it isn't supposed to matter these days, that a woman is as ent.i.tled as a man to enjoy her s.e.xuality She knew her face was burning, but she was determined to say what she felt must be said.

"But you don't want anyone thinking that you're enjoying yours with me, is that what you're trying to say?" he interrupted.

He sounded angry now, more like the Jake she knew, his voice harsh and tense.

"This is a small town," she told him uncomfortably, 'where peoplesometimes still make old-fas.h.i.+oned judgements. If it weren't for thebusiness... I "You'd what?" he demanded.

"Be quite happy for people to think that you and I are lovers?"

He moved towards her and automatically she jerked back from him, her skin burning red beneath the cynicism in his eyes.

"It isn't that," she protested automatically.

"It isn't you..."

Helplessly she saw the way he tensed, pouncing on her words.

"Not me," he repeated softly. She saw him breathe in, awarenessglinting in his eyes as he asked her quietly, "Tell me something,Rosie. How many men... how many lovers have there been since my cousinraped you?"

To her horror, Rosie felt her whole body start to tremble.

She could feel the emotion welling up inside her, the tears clogging her throat, the pain, the panic, the grief, all burning through her in a relentless, unstoppable tide.

"None... None... I didn't... I couldn't... There wasn't--' "Rosie...

Rosie..."

Almost before she could even blink Jake had covered the distance between them, taking her gently in his arms, removing the now empty gla.s.s from her hand, holding her as tenderly and carefully as though she were merely a child ... a baby... A baby... The sound of anguish she made was smothered against his s.h.i.+rt, the tears she hadn't realised she was crying soaking through the cloth.

She tried to stop, to pull away, to regain control of herself and her emotions, but Jake wouldn't let her. Instead he was talking to her, crooning almost, soft, rea.s.suring words telling her that it was all right for her to cry, that it was all right for her to show him her pain, to share her anguish and bitterness.

Distantly she heard the small warning voice that urged her to think, to stop, to cease this act of idiotic self-betrayal with a man whom she had always thought of as her enemy.

And yet who better to share what she was feeling with? Who could

understand more... know more?

"Let it all go, Rosie," she heard him telling her gently.

"There's no need to hide it any more. You have every right to feel pain and anger."

She realised that he was stroking her hair, the slow movement of his hand not just rea.s.suring her but giving her as well a physical contact with him that some part of her needed.

It was as though by touching her, holding her, talking to her he had almost become a part of her as well as a part of her past.

Words, phrases, emotions, all of them jumbled and turbulent, tumbled from her lips as her control broke.

Somehow she was sixteen again and saying all the things she had not been able to say then, expressing all the agony, the guilt, the anger he had caused her to feel.

Once she actually bunched up her fist and pummelled it fiercely against his chest as she relived physically the emotions he had caused her to suffer then, which she had never been able to express.

It didn't occur to her to question why the focus of all those emotions should be Jake and not Ritchie. She was not capable of such logical thought, but Jake was.

As he held her and let her emotions pour from her like poison from a lanced wound, he ached with sorrow and guilt for all that she had suffered.

Why had it never occurred to him that she might not have gone willingly with Ritchie? Had it been any other girl but Rosie, he must surely have done, but, in the seething torment of love and jealousy which had seized him, in the blinding belief that she felt for his cousin the desire she would never feel for him, he had not stopped to question her willingness to be there.

Now he realised that the dazed, transfixed stillness of her body had not been caused, as he had so jealously believed, by sensual satisfaction and was not the aftermath of s.e.xual completion, but on the contrary had been caused by terror and shock and had been her mind's way of escaping from the horror of what had happened to her.

Ritchie hadn't been violent with her, just rough, she had told him when he gently probed her memories. He had used force to overpower her, but the s.e.xual act itself had been over quickly.

Her memory of it was not one of pain but one of shock and shame that she had not somehow guessed what he had intended and been able to stop him.

As he held her and listened to her, he knew that there were no words to express what he was feeling, no relief from the burden of his own guilt.

He couldn't bear to think of what it must have done to her to have kept such a traumatic event to herself, to have felt that there was no one she could confide in, no one who could support and help her, and he could bear it even less knowing that he should have been that someone and knowing that, far from being that someone, as he ought to have been, he had actually caused her trauma to increase.

All these years she had kept all that locked away inside her. No one knew better than he how hard it was to lock away any kind of emotional pain, and he considered himself to be an expert on the subject, but somehow she had done so, stoically bearing the burden of self- contempt and guilt he had unknowingly given her.

He knew without her having to tell him why there had been no other men in her life, no other man who might have shown her that she had every right to enjoy her s.e.xuality, to take pleasure and joy in it.

He was to blame for that as well.

She was still leaning against him, her body a sweet, warm weight against his own. She was trembling slightly, physically exhausted by the intensity of her emotional turmoil and by reliving the past.