She
didn’t even care that she had to sit close to Rafe on the couch to satisfy her mother’s expectation of marital bliss. No longer stiff and repressed, she flowered under the fierce cut and thrust of ideas, her animation flowing like wine through her veins, bringing a luminous warmth to her pale features and softening the square of her face as she ardently defended her point of view with wit and humour.
Although Jennifer loved Paula and Dot, and had planned to be utterly content with her future at Beech House, the strange double life she lived—of wild, passionate flights of daring imagination on the one hand and intensely practical, down-to-earth respectability on the other—had its drawbacks. She maintained a careful separation of the two starkly opposing sides of her personality, and at the moment they were revelling in their unexpected outing together!
Only when her mother mentioned that Jennifer had once taken some creative writing courses did the barriers slam back into place.
‘Sebastian was very intrigued—wasn’t he, Jenny?—that first time he stayed here.’ Paula laughed. ‘He found a scrap of something you’d written and you were horribly mortified when he said he’d read it and thought it was good. I remember how amused he was when you came over all shy, Jenny, and blushed like a tomato when he tried to talk to you about it. She hates people to read what she’s done,’ she confided, to Rafe’s intense interest. ‘I think that was why she was so keen on getting a computer for the bookings and accounts, so she can write to her heart’s content without leaving embarrassing scraps of paper floating about for all and sundry to see.’
‘Because it’s just private scribblings,’ said Jenny desperately, feeling her colour inexorably rising. It would be her mother who would die of mortification if she ever found out exactly what it was that her daughter was writing, and how sinfully successful she was at it!
She got up to take a jab at the cheerfully blazing logs on the fire with the cast-iron poker, hoping her blush would be put down to her proximity to the heat. The way Rafe was looking at her she felt as if the guilty truth was written in scarlet letters on her forehead:
‘What sort of things do your companies publish, Rafe?’ she heard Dot say as she pretended to be engrossed in the sparks that were flying off the blackened surface of the logs.
‘Oh, there’s a couple of high-class fashion magazines, and one or two aimed at, uh, the sophisticated male...’ Jennifer smiled maliciously to herself at his revealing euphemism. ‘Then I have one publishing house that specialises in children’s books and another that prints general and genre fiction. I also have a couple of niche publishers under the wing of a company I bought a majority interest in from my father a few years ago, after he’d rescued it from one of my stepbrothers, who’d driven it to the verge of bankruptcy with his incompetent management. One produces medical text and reference books and the other publishes series fiction for women.’
‘What kind of women’s fiction?’ Paula asked, having become an avid reader of wrenching emotional sagas during her convalescence. ‘Do you have any famous female authors?’
‘Not famous outside their narrow field, no. As I said, it’s a niche market. I guess you could say that Velvet Books are sort of educational—’
There was a sharp clang as Jennifer dropped the heavy poker on the hearth, nearly impaling her foot with its viciously barbed end.
She stared at Rafe in glassy-eyed horror.
Velvet?
Rafe owned the English company that was fast becoming the leading international publisher of female erotica? He was behind those elegantly sexy paperbacks which had tapped into the gap in the market between steamy sensual romances and crudely sexual romps?
The whole picture suddenly leapt into ghastly focus in her head—Sebastian’s vague publishing ‘contact’ all those years ago had been a member of his own family!
She felt a hot burst of maniacal laughter building up inside her.
Velvet novels were a lot of things: sinfully smouldering, intensely exciting, wildly romantic and exquisitely erotic.
But ‘sort of educational’?
Jennifer put a hand over her mouth to hold in her hysterical giggle.
Rafe had sprung up, misunderstanding her horror, sliding his cupped hands supportively under her elbows as she swayed in front of the fire.
‘Jennifer? Are you all right? Did you hurt yourself?’ he murmured into her owl-eyed confusion. When she didn’t immediately answer he knelt to run his hands over her feet, assuring himself that they were undamaged.
She blinked back to life, staring down at his blond head, conscious of how close she’d come to needlessly giving herself away. Thank God she’d never used her own name, not even in the earliest correspondence. She would never have even considered taking Sebastian’s advice if she hadn’t been able to wrap herself in complete anonymity. Only her lawyer and the tax department were aware that she was two people.
Certainly not the man kneeling at her feet.
Like a pleading supplicant, she thought, and felt another dangerous bubble of laughter form as she contemplated the awful irony of the situation.
‘I’m s-sorry. Uh—it was just the shock,’ she said with perfect truth, regretting it when he rose, regarding her with a glimmer of suspicion.
‘It slipped out of my hand,’ she added, laying it on. ‘I nearly spiked myself.’
He pushed her gently back towards the couch before bending to pick up the fallen poker, weighing it for a moment in his grip before dropping it back into its guard.
Bonzer, who was sprawled on the sheepskin hearth-rug, lifted his head for a throaty growl as Rafe moved past his line of vision.
‘Pipe down, Bonzer!’ said Dot, tossing him an after-dinner mint which he snapped up not at all lazily.