The baby herself was fast asleep in Gemma’s arms. Neil had gone upstairs to discover what had caused the argument they could hear taking place between their two sons. The phone in the hall rang, causing the baby to stir and cry.
‘Here, hold her for me will you please, Rosie, while I go and answer the phone?’ Gemma asked her, thrusting the baby towards Rosie so that she had no option other than to take her from her.
She felt warm and solid, with that undefinable but instantly recognisable baby smell.
Tensely Rosie held her, her body rigid, her stomach churning, tremors convulsing her.
Unused to being held at such a distance, and missing the warmth of her mother, the baby’s cries increased.
She was still young enough to have that piercing, womb-aching cry of a new baby, and as she heard it Rosie reacted instinctively to it, cradling her against her shoulder, as she supported her small, soft head and soothed her rigid, tense body.
The baby turned her head, nuzzling into Rosie’s skin—an automatic reflex action that meant nothing, Rosie knew—and her own body’s reaction to it was so immediate and devastating that she could feel herself starting to shake.
Abby had stopped crying now, apparently content with her new surroundings, snuggling sleepily against Rosie’s shoulder, but for Rosie to overcome her emotions was not so easy.
She always deliberately avoided this kind of situation, making sure that she had as little physical contact with small babies as she could.
Once they were older it was different, the pain less devastating and primitive, the sense of loss, of deprivation, of agonising guilt, easier to deal with.
She heard Gemma coming back into the kitchen and immediately handed Abby back to her.
‘I must go,’ she told her quickly. ‘I’ve got an early start in the morning. I’ll do some work on some comparison tables for you and drop them around later in the week.’
It was only later, when she was on her way home, that she remembered that in her desperate anxiety to get away she had forgotten all about her hat.
Before going to collect her car she had meticulously gone over and over the proposals she planned to put before Ian Davies.
She was confident that they were at least as competitive as anything anyone could offer him; where she believed she had the advantage over much larger concerns was the personal touch.
It was almost eleven o’clock when she went upstairs to prepare for bed. She was just about to get undressed when the phone rang.
It was Chrissie, wanting to know how she was.
Firmly she assured her sister that she was feeling fine but, ten minutes later, when she had removed her make-up and was studying her face in her bathroom mirror, she had to admit that her appearance belied her words.
She had always been pale-skinned, and for that reason had always had to protect her sensitive skin from the sun, but tonight her pallor was sharpened by tension and pain.
Shakily she turned away from the mirror, not wanting to see…to remember.
Jake Lucas. He had remembered. She had seen it in his eyes when he looked at her across the Hopkinses’ crowded sun-dappled garden, had seen the coldness and the contempt, the distaste and dislike. It didn’t matter how hard she worked at burying the past, at shutting herself off from it, at trying to forget it—Jake Lucas would never forget; she could not wipe his memory clean, could not erase his knowledge of her.
But at least there was one thing he did not know, one secret that was hers alone.
Rosie winced as she bit down too hard on her bottom lip and broke the skin.
Now she would have a swollen bruise there in the morning. She grimaced crossly in the mirror. She would have to remember to wear a concealing matt lipstick tomorrow. Her mouth was on the over-full side as it was and she had no wish to arrive at Ian Davies’s office looking like some pouting little doll.
Before getting in to bed, she checked that she had everything ready for the morning. Her suit was hanging up outside the wardrobe, and so was the silk shirt she intended to wear with it.
Underwear, tights, plus a spare pair in case of accidents, were laid out ready in the bathroom.
Her shoes were downstairs, cleaned and polished, her neat leather handbag-cum-attache´ case filled with all the papers she would need.
Rosie did not believe in going for a high-powered female executive image. She felt it both theatrical and off-putting for some of her smaller clients. She preferred to dress neatly and unobtrusively, so that people paid attention to what she had to say, not the way she looked.
She flinched a little, remembering how Chrissie had commented not unkindly, some time ago, that men would never be oblivious to the way she looked.
‘They can’t help it,’ had been her half-indulgent remark. ‘It’s in their nature, poor dears, and let’s face it, Rosie, you are very attractive.’
She had eyed her younger sister judicially before adding, ‘In fact, you could be very sexy, if you wanted to be.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ had been Rosie’s fierce response.
And it was true. After all, what was the point in looking sexually attractive when she knew how impossible it was for her to follow through the promise of such looks, without at some stage having to reveal the truth.
‘Don’t think about it,’ she warned herself. ‘Just accept that that’s the way things are. You aren’t unhappy. You don’t lack for anything.’
Apart from a lover…someone to share her life on an intimate, one-to-one basis. A lover…And a child.
IT WAS THE crying that woke her up, bringing her bolt upright in her single, almost monastic little bed, her arms crossing protectively around her body as she tried to clear her brain.
There was the familiar oblong of light cast by the moon through her bedroom window, the familiar pale colours of her simply decorated bedroom with its white bed-linen, its plain, light-coloured walls and carpet, slightly stark against the darkness of the room’s oak beams.
She was not, after all, as she had been dreaming, there in that hospital ward, all around her the cries of the new-born babies, to remind her agonisingly of the child she had just lost…The child she had been so terrified she might have conceived, the child she had rejected with panic and shock, terrified of what its conception was going to mean of the way it would alter her life.
But now there was no child, and she was safe. She knew she ought to be glad…relieved. Only somehow she wasn’t, and the pain inside her wasn’t just caused by the physical shock of the haemorrhage which had preceded her miscarriage. And those piercing new-born cries scraped at her raw nerves like physical torture. No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape from him…or from what had happened.
She was shaking, Rosie recognised, her body icy-cold. Even though it was a softly mild night, and despite her shivers her body was drenched in sweat as she fought not to remember.
It was over fifteen years ago now, almost half her own lifetime. She had been sixteen, that was all—still a child in so many ways, and yet still woman enough to grieve tormentedly for the life that was lost, for the child she would never now hold, for the ache within her that came from the emptiness of what she had lost.
Sixteen…Sixteen, and a virgin. Innocent of any knowledge of male sexuality. And yet she should have known…should have recognised.
It had been all her own fault, as Jake Lucas had so contemptuously pointed out to her.
You didn’t go upstairs with someone, allow him to kiss and fondle you, without knowing where it was going to lead.
Her head had still been thick then with the cider she had had to drink. Only half a glass and