Sins by Penny Jordan

share his deep commitment to the land and his inheritance, and she had known, young as she had been, that someone in John’s position would never want to marry a girl like her. The Fittons were, after all, a very old and proud Cheshire family.
    But that hadn’t prevented her from having her daydreams.
    Later on, when she had been at college and she had seen the way that men looked at her, knowing that she loved John had made her feel safe. Because if she loved John then there was no need for her to worry about falling in love with anyone else–with someone who might pretend to love her but who would really only want to treat her as her father had treated her mother.
    No other man could hurt her or reject her whilst she loved John. And she always would. Always. Even though she knew that nothing could ever come of it. Instead she hid her private love for him in her heart and concentrated on her work and on making sure that she repaid her aunt Amber’s faith in her.
    ‘When I said head-and-shoulder portraits of girls, that was exactly what I meant,’ she told Josh severely now, as she focused firmly on the present, ‘not poses more suitable for a certain type of magazine.’
    Josh burst out laughing. ‘Ollie would be mortified if he heard you say that. He photographs models for
Vogue
, not
Men Only
.’
    Rose could feel her face starting to burn. Quickly she turned round and headed to the top of the stairs wherethe first door in front of her had an unsteady ‘WC’ painted on it.
    ‘You’ll have to make sure that there are proper cloakroom facilities,’ she announced. ‘At least you will if you want to attract girls.’
    She hadn’t realised that there was a
double entendre
to her words until she heard Josh laugh again.
    ‘So that’s where I’ve been going wrong when I’ve taken girls back to my place,’ he joked. ‘And there I’ve been, changing my toothpaste, thinking I might have bad breath. You reckon I’d be better getting one of those fancy crocheted covers for the toilet roll, do you?’
    Rose laughed in spite of herself. She wasn’t fooled for a minute; she doubted that any girl who agreed to go home with this man cared two hoots about his bathroom. She wasn’t going to boost his ego by telling him so, though, not when she was pretty sure that he already knew it himself.
    Instead she said loftily, ‘Of course I don’t know what kind of clientele you want to attract.’
    ‘But posh girls like you wouldn’t come and get their hair done in a salon run by a working-class Jewish hairdresser whose salon that hasn’t got the right kind of “cloakroom,” is that it?’
    He sounded more curt than amused now. His obvious contempt made Rose flinch, but she stood her ground.
    ‘That wasn’t what I meant at all. It isn’t a matter of being “posh”. In fact, some of the grandest houses in the country have the most antiquated bathrooms you can imagine. It’s just a matter of making your clientele feelthat you appreciate and value them, especially when that clientele is going to be female. Making them feel comfortable, but at the same time making them feel that they deserve something that’s special, and…and the best. That is after all why you want them to come to you, isn’t it?’ she challenged him. ‘Not just so that you can do their hair but because you think you can do their hair better than anyone else?’
    Josh was taken aback and impressed by her astuteness. He looked at her as though he hadn’t really seen her before and in one sense he realised he hadn’t. Previously he’d seen her as a stunning-looking girl whose Eurasian beauty would make her an excellent model for the avant-garde hairstyles he and Vidal talked about so passionately into the early hours. They were both in their different ways determined to do away with the old-established hairdressing model of rigidly arranged and lacquered ‘set’ styles, and to replace them with precision cutting that focused on the natural