LITMIR.BIZ

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crumbs—she’d never make it back to London. It was doubtful she’d have enough juice to make it back to pick up Mr Clements!

      Yancie at that moment immediately recognised that she was about to drive past a service station. Lord knew when she might come across another one! There was no time to think, only to act. Quickly she spun the wheel and was already crossing into the next lane when a violently blasted car horn alerted her to the fact that she had very nearly rammed an Aston Martin.

      Oh, grief. She’d noticed it earlier but, since the driver—with all that power under the bonnet—hadn’t wanted to overtake, she’d stayed in the fast lane and had paid little more attention. But now she’d not time to apologize, only time to get out of trouble, and swiftly!

      Fortunately, the driver of the Aston Martin reacted quickly and moved out of harm’s way—and Yancie made it safely to the forecourt of the self-service petrol station.

      She would have liked to blame her inattentive driving not only on the sudden realisation that she was driving on empty, but also on the fact that thinking of her mother and her two aunts was invariably upsetting. But she knew she had only herself to blame—she and she alone was at fault.

      Yancie stepped out of the Mercedes, but had barely got the driver’s door closed when the Aston Martin pulled in behind her and, breathing fire from every pore—if his expression was anything to go by—a tall, dark-haired man began heading her way. By the look of it, she was going to have to apologise!

      And she might have done but—hold on a minute—her livelihood—not to mention this lovely job—was at stake here. She had no idea how these things worked, but if this immaculately suited man bearing down on her made a note of her registration number and reported her she could, ultimately, lose her job! In the wrong though she was, she just couldn’t afford to admit it—to apologise.

      ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ the man challenged aggressively the moment he was next to her, hard, unimpressed grey eyes flicking over her slender shape, taking in the brooch she wore—thank goodness she had covered up the firm’s logo—you never knew who might recognise it!

      But she wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. ‘Me!’ she retaliated. ‘Why, you grumpy old devil,’ she charged of the mid-thirties-looking man who still breathed fire and brimstone. ‘If you weren’t so keen to be the centre of attention in your Aston Martin, you’d have been in the correct motorway lane, and not riding on my bumper…’

      Oh, my word, he didn’t like being called a grumpy old devil, did he—or any of the rest of it! ‘I was in the correct lane!’ he snarled, his jaw jutting. ‘Not only did you not give the smallest indication of your intention to cross straight in front of me…’

      ‘I haven’t time to stand here all day bandying words with you!’ she cut in arrogantly—and saw his eyes narrow at her tone. Quite clearly, Mr-High-and-Mighty-Aston-Martin wasn’t used to being spoken to in such a way. She saw him take a sharp intake of controlling breath.

      Then, his jaw jutting no less furiously, he gritted, ‘I’ll attend to you later,’ and turned sharply away and went striding back to the rather superb-looking Aston Martin.

      There was nothing he could possibly do, Yancie told herself ten minutes later. His ‘I’ll attend to you later’ had no teeth. What could he do for goodness’ sake? It was a cold day, but, thanks to an efficient car heater, she had shed her uniform jacket. She’d removed that identifying tag when she’d left Mr Clements, and had pinned a rather attractive brooch over the Addison Kirk logo on her shirt, so sucks boo! The only way he might be able to trace her was if he’d thought to note her car registration number—but, even then, that near-ghastly accident was purely his word against hers—so he could take his ‘I’ll attend to you later’ and sling it. So why was she still trembling?

      Yancie proceeded on her way with the utmost care after that. The incident had shaken her more than she would have liked to admit. She was, however, correctly uniformed, with her identifying appendage neatly in place, when, with five minutes to spare, she arrived to wait for Mr Clements.

      Very occasionally, when she was working quite late, Yancie had permission—after first dropping off her passenger at his address—to take whichever motor she was driving on to her own home. She’d had to assure her immediate boss, Kevin Veasey, that she was able to garage the car, but even then this concession was only allowed on the understanding she would not avail herself of it for her personal use.

      She was late that night, so took the Mercedes home. As late as it was, her cousin Astra was still out working. ‘Astra works too hard,’ she remarked to her other lovely cousin, Fennia.

      ‘She loves it,’ Fennia answered. ‘Had a good day?’

      ‘Given I nearly wrote off an Aston Martin with a Mercedes, can’t complain,’ she smiled, and shared the experience with her cousin over a sumptuous casserole Fennia had made while waiting for her two cousins to come home.

      ‘Men!’ Fennia opined.

      ‘I was in the wrong,’ Yancie pointed out.

      ‘I know! But—men!’

      They laughed. They’d roomed together, the three cousins, at boarding-school. They’d shared each other’s secrets, mopped up—in the early days—each other’s tears when their mothers had hopped from relationship to relationship. Stable backgrounds—forget it! They’d had so many ‘uncles’, it had needed a young mind to keep up with it.

      They’d tried hard not to be judgmental, but it had been just a touch embarrassing not knowing which ‘uncle’ had been coming with their mothers to pick them up at each term-end.

      Aunt Delia was the rock they’d each leaned towards. Aunt Delia had been ten years old when her widowed mother had remarried, and in three years had produced three daughters. It was the younger girls’ dreadfully strict upbringing, Aunt Delia had explained, by a father who seemed to have few sensitivities, that was responsible for the way each of her half-sisters, in turn, had rebelled. Yancie’s mother apparently had been well ‘off the rails’ before Yancie’s father had been killed. Fennia’s mother was twice married—and on the lookout for husband number three. And Astra’s mother had twice divorced and was at present living with someone.

      With that kind of a background, the three cousins had been sixteen when, fearing they might have inherited some wayward gene from their mothers, they had vowed that they were going to guard with everything they had against turning out like their mothers. They wanted nothing of their mothers’ explosive and sometimes quite awful relationships which—in the main—brought nothing but disaster.

      To date, six years on, it hadn’t been a problem. In general the cousins had nothing against men. And so far, thank goodness, none of them had felt the smallest inclination to be wayward where men were concerned. Though it was true that if they ever went out on a date and did dip their toes in unchartered, experimental waters it was mainly with someone fairly safe whom they’d known for ages—usually the brother or relation of someone with whom they’d been at boarding-school.

      Yancie drove to work the following morning growing more and more comfortable with her lot. She was still in frequent telephone contact with her stepfather—who now employed a housekeeper—but she still had no wish to return to live in the same house as Estelle. Yancie enjoyed living again with her cousins. Fennia, despite her business training, thoroughly enjoyed the job she had found working with toddlers in a day nursery, and Astra, the most academic of the three of them, was working all hours as a financial adviser, and loving it.

      Yancie drove into the vast garages of the Addison Kirk Group and exchanged her uniform jacket and neat shoes for a pair of Wellingtons and an over-large overall.

      The men she worked with were getting more and more used to seeing her about the place. But even though—as she unreeled the water hose prior to tackling the wheel arches on yesterday’s Mercedes—she knew she must look a sketch in her present outfit it still didn’t prevent one courageous colleague from commenting, ‘You still look terrific even in that

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