Mission: Make-Over

She was his kid sister, damn it, and he loved her, and he could wring that idiot John’s neck for the misery he was causing her.

The job Lucianna had pretended was so urgent was simply a matter of changing an oil filter, and she was on her way back to the house when Jake drove into the farmyard.

‘What are you doing here?’ she challenged him aggressively as he got out of his car. Like her he was casually dressed in jeans, but unlike hers his were immaculately clean and they fitted him properly.

‘What do you think?’ he retorted calmly.

Lucianna gave him a stubborn look.

‘There’s no need for you to come and collect me as if I were a…a prisoner. I was going to drive myself over…’

‘But now I’ve saved you the trouble,’ Jake told her suavely, ‘and that’s one of the first lessons you have to learn.’

‘What?’ Lucianna asked.

‘How to accept a man’s naturally chivalrous instinct to look after and protect a woman—and,’ he added more dryly, ‘how not to dent his ego by pointing out that you don’t need or want his protection.’

‘How? By simpering stupidly and throwing myself at your feet in gratitude?’ Lucianna demanded acidly.

‘A simple “thank you” and a warm smile would be perfectly adequate. You want to thank the guy, not make him think you’re desperate,’ Jake told her.

Lucianna glowered at him whilst she felt her face grow hot with indignation.

‘I am not desperate—’ she began, but Jake was already shaking his head, telling her directly,

‘Don’t give me that, Luce…I know you, remember, and for you to go to such lengths…’

‘I love him,’ she told him, tilting her chin determinedly at him as though daring him to argue with her.

‘You might think you do but, believe me, you don’t even begin to know what love is yet.’

Her brother’s emergence into the yard prevented Lucianna from making the kind of retort she wanted to make but she was still seething with resentment and indignation ten minutes later as she sat next to Jake whilst he reversed his car back out of the yard.

‘Your timing’s out,’ she told him critically as she listened to the sound of the engine.

‘You’re going to have to know me a lot better before you can come out with a comment like that,’ he told her in an unfamiliar soft and meaningful voice that made her turn her head and look open-mouthed at him as her senses, more acute and finely tuned than her brain, recognised a message in the dulcet, husky sound of his voice that her brain could not quite pick up on.

‘My timing is never out,’ he added even more softly, and then reverted to his normal tone of voice, before she could say anything, to tell her briskly, ‘But yes, the car’s timing is slightly out, Lucianna…

‘Tell me something,’ he went on conversationally. ‘When you and John are alone what do you talk about?’

‘Talk about?’ Lucianna stared at him.

‘You do talk, I take it?’ Jake questioned dryly. ‘Or is your main form of communication on a, shall we say, more basic level?’

It took several seconds for what he meant to sink in, but once it had done Lucianna could feel her face beginning to burn with a mixture of fury and embarrassment.

‘Of course we talk,’ she snapped. ‘We talk about all kinds of things…’

‘Such as?’ Jake demanded, one dark eyebrow raised interrogatively, the profile he was angling slightly towards her uncomfortably reminiscent of the stern demeanour with which he had lectured her on some of her youthful follies.

‘Er…lots of things,’ Lucianna told him, desperately hunting through her memory for suitably impressive examples of the breadth and erudition of their shared conversations.

‘Really? So you’d agree with those who claim that verbal foreplay can be just as erotic and arousing as its physical equivalent, then, would you?’ Jake asked her.

‘Verbal foreplay!’ Lucianna’s colour deepened. ‘John and I have far better things to talk about than sex,’ she snapped bitingly.

‘And better things to do?’

The soft question slipped very subtly and, yes, sneakily beneath her guard, leaving her totally unable to come up with any safe response other than a taut, ‘I don’t discuss such personal things with anyone!’

But even that defence could not protect her, as she quickly discovered when Jake unkindly suggested, ‘Not even John? You might be able to strip down an engine very effectively and efficiently, Lucianna, but somehow or other I doubt that you have the same skill when it comes to stripping down a man—or for a man,’ he added with dangerous softness.

Struggling to overcome her mortification, Lucianna stared fixedly ahead through the car windscreen. Little did Jake know it but his scathing remark had echoed an unkind conversation she had recently overheard between two of John’s friends—girlfriends.

‘Can you imagine it?’ one had said to the other, unaware that Lucianna could hear them. ‘She’ll be saying to John, “Now this bit goes here and then this bit goes there and then you have to do this.” Poor John, I feel so sorry for him. I can’t understand what he sees in her, can you?’

Perhaps her sexual experience wasn’t all that extensive—at least not in the practical sense—and perhaps, yes, she did rather quail at the thought of having to take the sexual initiative with a man—certainly she had never or would never have attempted to undress one. But she could read, and if John had been rather slow to pick up on her hesitant signals that she was ready to take their relationship a few steps further than the kisses and caresses they had so far shared then she had at least, until recently, put it down to the fact that he valued and respected her and their relationship enough to let the sexual side of things develop slowly and naturally. After all, the last thing she wanted was to be wanted merely for sex.

She frowned, suddenly realising that whilst she had been deep in thought Jake had been driving them not towards his home but along the road that led into town instead.

‘Where are we going?’ she demanded sharply. ‘I thought—’

‘I’m taking you shopping,’ Jake informed her calmly.

‘Shopping?’ Lucianna tensed, warily remembering all the occasions on which her family had attempted to persuade her to change her style of dress. She knew they thought she was being stubborn and difficult in refusing to listen to what they had to say, but how could she tell them that her refusal to abandon her dungarees and jeans had its roots a long way back in her early teenage years?

Then, as a young schoolgirl, she had desperately wanted to look like her female peers and not like the tomboy she had heard others disparagingly call her.

The gift of some birthday money had given her the opportunity to turn her wishes into reality and she could still remember the excitement with which she had gone shopping with another girl from school, a girl who, in her then youthful and untutored eyes, had seemed to have all the feminine attributes she herself so longed for.

She still shuddered to recall what had followed when, dressed up in her new purchases—the uncomfortable suspender belt and stockings, the tight short skirt and the high heels that had made her wobble perilously as she’d walked nervously at her friend’s side—they had encountered a group of boys from school.

The crude remarks which had followed her transformation from tomboy into a girl who they had plainly believed was making herself sexually available had made her ears and her face burn for weeks and months afterwards, her embarrassment and sense of shame so great that she had actually refused to go to school the following week until her father had announced that he was sending for the doctor.

The incident, coupled with her own brothers’ derogatory comments about a certain type of girl, had so shocked and shamed her that she had never worn the clothes again, and in the years since, although in her wardrobe there were several rather more formal outfits than her preferred dress of dungarees and jeans, she had steadfastly refused to give in to her family’s exhortations to buy or wear ‘something feminine’. She had experienced already what happened when she did that, how the male sex reacted, knew that for some reason which was not really clear to herself there was something about her that made it impossible for her to wear the kind of clothes other women wore with such ease and confidence without cheapening herself and making herself an object of sexual contempt and ridicule.

‘I’m not going,’ Lucianna suddenly announced tersely. ‘Stop the car.’

Calmly Jake did so, but the atmosphere inside the car felt anything but calm as he turned to her and asked her critically, ‘What is it you’re so afraid of, Lucianna? And don’t try to deny that you are; I know you—remember? Are you frightened of failure—failing to be enough woman to—?’

‘No…’

‘No?’ One dark eyebrow rose in the interrogative and superior manner she was so familiar with and which so irritated her. ‘Then prove it,’ Jake suggested quietly.

‘I don’t need to prove anything to you,’ Lucianna told him angrily.

‘Not to me, no,’ Jake agreed, overriding her angry words, ‘but you certainly seem to have something to prove to John—and to yourself.’