Ravishing Rose Read Online Free PDF

hands. He stopped long enough to scrawl ‘Captain Cool was here’ where the big mirror had once hung over the fireplace. And then ‘Kilroy was here’ beside the old cartoon character with his nose over the wall. He moved on, slashing the date and the time onto the old-fashioned wallpaper. In the darkest corner he printed in slow deliberate letters ‘Jake ate chocolate’. All around him party guests added names and messages, obscenities and comments.
    Just inside the front door he drew a huge flower, labeled it ‘Rose’. Then for good measure he added long sharp thorns and the word ‘three’.
    “Who’s Rose?” a masked showgirl in fishnet tights and a pink sequined tube dress murmured behind him. The voice was so deeply familiar it left no room for doubt. Jake swung around and regarded his brother with shock.
    “Paul?”
    “Pauline, please...”
    “Does Hannah know you’re here?”
    Paul roared with laughter. “She’s the little Elizabethan boy over there with the optimistic cod-piece.”
    “Quite a relief—I think!”
    “Great party, bro.”
    “I’m glad you came,” Jake said. “Didn’t know if you would.”
    “Time to bury the hatchet,” Paul muttered.
    Jake nodded. It was way over time. He and his two brothers had never been close as children, and as teenagers they’d taken totally different paths. Paul and Tony had drifted into dead-end jobs, and sometimes no jobs at all. By contrast, Jake had made the most of his quick brain and unrelenting drive, and now owned a flourishing property development company.
    “Rose?” Paul asked again.
    “A fairy at the bottom of the garden.”  
    “For real?”
    “Who knows what’s real tonight?” He grimaced at his handiwork. Suddenly it seemed a tawdry jibe toward someone who’d given him such intense pleasure. He scraped at the seam of the wallpaper with a fingernail, hoping to rip away enough to disguise at least the taunting ‘three’. “Is Tony here?” he asked. He’d given tickets to both his brothers.
    “Out in the marquee I think,” Paul said, watching with amusement as his wife drew the ornately decorated and very blunt dagger from her belt and attempted to shred the curtains with it. He minced a few wobbly steps in her direction and grabbed the fabric in his meaty hands. The weave came apart like tissue paper.
    “Oh, fun!” a barely veiled belly-dancer exclaimed. “Help me Captain?” she begged, gathering up the end of another curtain and thrusting it out toward Jake. He held on while the belly dancer ripped and tore, and eventually sneezed to a halt as the dust of ages started to permeate the room. “Attention please, people,” the angel bellowed into the mayhem. “Supper next door in ten minutes.”

    Frankie wrapped her arms tightly across her breasts and crept across to the courtyard wall. She leaned back against its faint comforting warmth and gazed across the magic inlet. The band pounded out something of Justin Timberlake’s. She could picture him dancing to it in a video clip—snake-hipped, dark-eyed. Another man with the confidence to take what he wanted. Suddenly they were everywhere.
    She shivered. Not just from the cool air, but from bitter self-loathing. What had started as a foolhardy attempt to be someone else—someone brave and polished and sexy—had ended in desertion and despair.
    She hugged herself tighter, too cold to lurk alone in the darkness thinking such desperate thoughts. Sighing, she pushed away from the wall and retraced her steps under the helmet-grabbing trees, up the stone steps, and across the grass. Then less than elegantly up the change in level that the Captain had swung her over with such ease, only to demonstrate how aroused he was.
    The band fell silent as she staggered across the top lawn. The window smashers had given up for now, although she crunched over shards of glass near the back door.
    Where was everyone going? Guests poured out of the big old house as though there’d been a