LITMIR.BIZ

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she was every bit as much a woman as the Felicitys of this world, every bit as worthy of being loved and wanted—and she was going to prove it!

      CHAPTER THREE

      ‘YOU’RE up early this morning…Not had a change of heart, have you, and planning to do a disappearing act?’

      Lucianna shook her head as she listened to her brother’s teasing comments.

      ‘Certainly not,’ she told him firmly, but he was closer to the truth than he knew. She had woken up this morning with a very heavy heart indeed and a deep and gloomy sense of foreboding and dismay at what she had let herself in for.

      ‘Pull the other one,’ her brother advised her, showing that he knew her rather better than she liked and informing Janey as she walked into the kitchen, ‘I told you she wouldn’t go through with it; she’s—’

      ‘I am going through with it,’ Lucianna interrupted him indignantly. ‘I just got up earlier than normal because I want to finish a job off before…before I drive over to…’

      To prove a point she gulped down her coffee and started to hurry towards the back door before David could make any further teasing remarks. With her back to him she didn’t see the look of compassionate sympathy he gave her before exchanging a rueful glance with his wife.

      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.

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