Unexpected Pleasures Read Online Free PDF

message indeed.
    On her way down in the lift, Rosie studied her reflection again. This time it was very different. Her face was flushed, especially along her cheekbones, her eyes huge and dark with emotion, the pupils enormously dilated. Even her mouth looked different somehow, softer, fuller...as though...as though she had been kissed.
    Shuddering with distaste, she turned away, and when she stepped out into the street she acknowledged that she felt so emotionally raw and on edge that she was on the verge of tears.
    It was just disappointment because Ian Davies had not responded more enthusiastically to her approach, she told herself as she walked back to her car. It wasn’t anything to do with seeing Jake Lucas. That had upset her of course, but she wasn’t going to let the fact that he despised her, that he was contemptuous of her, reduce her to tears.
    It wasn’t, after all, his judgment of her that hurt so much; it was the fact that seeing him always reminded him so unbearably of what she had done, of the way she had demeaned herself.
    It was bad enough that she knew of her shame and degradation, without him having to know of it too.
    But he did know, and nothing she could do could ever erase that knowledge. When he looked at her, she knew as surely as though he were saying the actual words that he was seeing her not as she was now, but as she had been then, half-naked, stupid with drink and shock, lying across his aunt and uncle’s bed, while her partner, the boy who had deliberately given her that spiked drink and who had then equally deliberately semi-coaxed and semi-dragged her upstairs to his parents’ bedroom, had left her, after telling her triumphantly that he had won his bet to seduce her and bring her down off her high horse.
    He had not said that to his cousin, though. No, it was a very different story he had told Jake Lucas. According to him, she had been more than willing to accompany him upstairs—she had been the one to suggest it, in fact, and Rosie, too shocked and distressed to defend herself, too humiliated physically and emotionally, had done nothing to defend herself.
    Thank God that Ritchie Lucas and his family had emigrated to Australia so quickly afterwards.
    And thank God also that Ritchie had apparently got so drunk that evening that it had appeared that he had no recollection of what had taken place and so had been unable to boast to anyone else about it.
    No, only two people had remembered what had happened—herself and Jake Lucas—and Jake Lucas did not know the real truth.
    He had assumed that she was a member of the rather wild crowd that Ritchie went around with, that she was one of those girls who was foolishly experimenting with sex and drink in the mistaken belief that she was showing everyone how grown-up she was and, beneath his anger at his cousin for taking advantage of his parents’ absence to throw an unauthorised party, and his obvious disgust that Ritchie had brought her upstairs to his parents’ room, Rosie had been sharply conscious of the contempt he had for her.
    And yet his judgement of her couldn’t have been further off the mark. She had never even kissed a boy properly before that night, never mind done anything else, and, if it hadn’t been that for the previous few months a small group of girls in her class at school had been making her life a misery by taunting her about her ‘primness’ and her ‘goody-goodyness’ to the extent that she was slowly becoming alienated from all the other girls and treated as someone who was ‘different’...an outcast, she doubted that she would ever have allowed herself to be persuaded to even go to the party in the first place.
    To discover later that she had been the subject of a cruel trick deliberately planned to hurt and humiliate her had been hard to bear, but not as hard as Jake Lucas’s contempt, and certainly not as hard as discovering that she was pregnant.
    At least no one but her knew about that. She bit