LITMIR.BIZ

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really ought to be leaving,’ Jake was saying now as he smiled across the table at her and thanked her for the meal. ‘I’m expecting a couple of faxes through and—’

      ‘Another multi-million-pound deal,’ David interrupted with a grin. ‘You’ll have to be careful, Jake,’ he warned him teasingly, ‘otherwise you’re going to be a multimillionaire by the time you’re forty and then you’ll have every fortune-hunter in the district after you…’

      ‘I’m never going to be a multimillionaire whilst I’ve got the estate to finance,’ Jake told him truthfully.

      ‘What would you have done if you’d inherited it without the back-up of the money you made during your days in the city trading in shares?’ David asked him.

      ‘I don’t know; I’d probably have had to sell it. Hopefully one day it will become self-sufficient—the woodlands we’ve planted will bring in some income when they’re mature and with the farming income and subsidies…’

      ‘It would have been a shame if you’d had to sell it,’ Janey told him. ‘After all, the estate has been in your family for almost two hundred years…’

      ‘Yes, I know…’

      ‘Well, it’s high time you were thinking about providing the next generation of little Carlisles if you intend to keep it in the family,’ David teased him. ‘You’re not getting any younger, you know; you’ll be—what…thirty-four this time…?’

      ‘Thirty-two,’ Jake told him dryly. ‘I’m a year older than you are…which reminds me, wasn’t it Lucianna’s birthday last week?’

      ‘Yes,’ Janey agreed, adding, ‘I rather think she was hoping for an engagement ring from John before he went away to Canada.’

      ‘How’s her business doing?’ Jake asked Janey, making no response to her comment about Lucianna’s disappointed hopes of a birthday proposal.

      ‘Well, she’s slowly building up a loyal clientele,’ Janey told him cautiously. ‘Female drivers in the main, who appreciate having their car serviced by another woman—’

      ‘She’s still heavily in debt to the bank,’ David broke in forthrightly. ‘No man worth his salt would let a woman service his car; we tried to tell her that, but would she listen? No way. It’s just as well she’s still living here and didn’t take on the extra financial burden of renting her own place as she originally wanted to do…’

      ‘You really are a dreadful chauvinist, David,’ Janey criticised mildly. ‘And whilst we’re on the subject Lucianna is, after all, very much what your father and the rest of you have made her. Poor girl, she’s never been given much of a chance to develop her femininity, has she?’

      CHAPTER TWO

      ‘JOHN got off safely, then?’ Janey asked Lucianna cautiously.

      They were both in the kitchen, Janey baking and Lucianna poring over her business accounts.

      ‘Only we didn’t hear you come in last night,’ Janey persisted, waiting until Lucianna had finished adding up the column of figures she was working on before speaking again.

      ‘No…I…I was later than I expected,’ Lucianna agreed quietly without looking up, not wanting to admit to her sister-in-law that after John’s flight had taken off she had felt so low that instead of driving straight home she had simply wandered aimlessly around the terminal. The brief, almost brotherly kiss John had placed on her forehead before leaving her and the speed with which he had responded eagerly to the very first call for his flight had contrasted painfully with the appreciative and lingering look she had seen him give the attractively dressed woman who had evidently been joining his flight, leaving her painfully aware that despite the fact that they had been dating for several months John seemed more interested in another woman than he was in her.

      ‘Perhaps when John comes home he’ll realise how much he’s missed you,’ Janey began comfortingly, but suddenly Lucianna had had enough. What was the point in pretending to anyone else when she couldn’t even pretend to herself any longer? Dolefully, she shook her head, refusing to be comforted.

      She and John had originally met six months earlier when John’s car had broken down, leaving him stranded a couple of miles from the farm where Lucianna had been brought up and where she now lived with her brother David and his wife Janey.

      She had happened to drive past and, recognising John’s plight, she had stopped and offered to help, quickly tracking down the problem and cheerfully assuring John that she could soon fix it.

      She had first developed her skill with engines as a young girl tinkering with the farm’s mechanical equipment—on a farm a piece of equipment that didn’t work cost money, and all of the Stewart family had a working knowledge of how to fix a broken-down tractor, but for some reason Lucianna had excelled at almost being able to sense what was wrong even before her older brothers.

      This skill had proved to be an asset in her teens when her second eldest brother Lewis had become interested in stock-car racing. Lucianna had happily allowed both Lewis and his friends to make use of her skills in helping them to repair and, in some cases, rebuild their cars.

      Because she was the youngest of the family, and had the added handicap of being a girl, she had grown up sensitively aware of the fact that she had to find some way of compensating for the fact that she wasn’t a boy and that because of that, in the eyes of her family, she was somehow less worthwhile as a human being.

      Unsure of what she wanted to do when she left school, she had continued with her farm chores and increasingly become responsible for not just the maintenance of the farm’s machinery but also for the maintenance of several of her brothers’ friends’ cars, and it had seemed a natural step to move from working with cars as a hobby to working with them as a means of earning a living.

      Initially her ambition had been to train and work with some of the top-of-the-range luxury models, but each distributor she had approached with a view to an apprenticeship had laughed at the very idea of a female mechanic and it had been her father who had ultimately suggested she could use one of the empty farm buildings and set up her own business from there.

      John had, at first, been shocked and then, she suspected, a little ashamed by the way she earned her living, considering it ‘unfeminine’.

      Femininity, as she had quickly discovered, was an asset both prized and praised by John and one she did not possess.

      Unhappily, she bit her lip. One date with John had led to another and then a regular weekly meeting, but not as yet to the declaration of love and long-term commitment she had been hoping for.

      ‘If he really cared, he’d have…’ she began, speaking her painful thoughts out loud before shaking her head, unable to continue. Then she asked Janey tiredly in a low voice. ‘What’s wrong with me, Janey? Why can’t I make John see how good we’d be together?’

      Lucianna was sitting with her back to the door, and whilst she had been speaking David and Jake had walked across the farmyard and entered the kitchen just in time to hear her low-voiced query.

      It was left to Jake to fill the awkward silence left by her subdued question as he announced, ‘Perhaps because he isn’t a combustion engine and human relationships need a bit more know-how to make them work than anything you’re likely to learn on a basic mechanics course.’

      The familiar razor-sharp voice had Lucianna spinning round, hot, angry colour mantling her cheeks, her green eyes flashing with temper, the off-the-face style in which she kept her long, naturally curly hair emphasising her high cheekbones and the stubborn firmness of her chin as she challenged bitterly, ‘Who asked you? This is a private conversation and if I’d wanted your opinion, Jake Carlisle…not that I ever would…I’d have asked for it.’

      She and Jake had never really got on. Even as a little girl she had disliked and resented his presence in their lives and the influence he seemed

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