by Penny Jordan
‘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.’
Lucianna looked away from him, unable to meet his eyes and unable to refute his statement.
‘It’s your choice,’ he told her evenly, ‘your decision, but I must say you’ve surprised me…’
‘Surprised you!’
Lucianna gave him a wary look. In her experience surprising Jake took an awful lot of doing.
‘Mmm…’ he agreed, nodding. ‘I thought you had more courage, more guts…more self-respect than to give up without at least making some attempt to fight for what you want.’
‘I do have,’ Lucianna retorted indignantly, and then added truculently, ‘Oh, very well, then, but if you think I’m going to let you bully me into wasting money on some stupid, silly outfit that you think a woman should wear—’
‘Excuse me, but whilst I may have been guilty of many sins in my time, Lucianna, wanting to see a woman dressed in frills isn’t one of them. And besides, you’re a long, long way yet from being ready to change your outer image…It’s your inner image we’re going to be working on today and for many days to come.
‘Femininity, womanliness, is something that comes from within. It means being proud of yourself as a woman, being confident about your femaleness and your sexuality; it’s showing the world that you value yourself as a woman…When a person has that, how they choose to clothe their body is really immaterial apart from the fact that what they choose to wear acts like a shorthand message to those who see her.’
Whilst he’d been talking he had restarted the car, and this time Lucianna made no objection as he continued to drive towards the town.
Something about
the calm way he had delivered those few unexpected words had for some odd reason or other brought a huge uncomfortable lump of emotion to her throat, an indefinable sense of loss and sorrow, as though he had highlighted something within her which she had secretly felt had never been allowed to flourish and had even more secretly hidden away in shame even from herself.
Yet as she sat silently at his side her thoughts, unexpectedly, were not of herself or even of John but, surprisingly, of her mother.
Might not things have been different if she had not died when Lucianna was so young…? Might not she have been different?
‘But this is a book shop,’ Lucianna protested as Jake determinedly ushered her through the plate-glass doors.
They had arrived in the town five minutes earlier and, having parked the car, Jake had directed her towards the town’s main shopping street.
‘That’s right,’ Jake agreed, touching her lightly on the arm as he pointed to a labelled section of books on the far side of the shop. ‘I think we’ll find what we need over there,’ he told her.
Lucianna frowned; the shelves seemed to be filled with diet and self-improvement books so far as she could see. Warily she allowed Jake to propel her in their direction.
‘I don’t think these will be of much benefit to me,’ she told him as she studied the title of the diet book which was prominently displayed.
‘I doubt it,’ he agreed. ‘If anything you need to put weight on.’
‘To make me more feminine?’ Lucianna suggested, her hackles starting to rise at his implied criticism of her.
‘To make you more healthy,’ Jake corrected her. ‘You’re naturally fine-boned and delicate—anyone can see that,’ he added, startling her as he totally unexpectedly ran his index finger along the curve of her cheekbone, producing an aftershock of sensation on her skin in the wake of his touch something like the kind of feeling she associated with an unexpected rash of goosebumps but with an extra indefinable and unfamiliar something which made her feel peculiarly light-headed and breathless.
‘And it naturally follows that your body will be similarly delicately made, long-legged and high-breasted with a narrow waist,’ he told her, emphasising his point by reaching out and placing his hands at either side of her body.
Her indignant verbal objection was never uttered as she looked down at where his thumbs met and felt the hard, warm male pressure of his grip through the thickness of her clothes. A suffocating tightness had invaded her chest, far, far tighter and more constricting, more dangerous than Jake’s firm grip on her body.
‘I can’t breathe,’ she protested angrily and huskily, reaching out to take hold of his arms as she instinctively tried to force him to release her.
‘Can’t you?’
The most peculiar and disturbing sensation she had ever experienced in her life seized her as she heard the deeper note in Jake’s voice and felt her whole body trembling uncontrollably in response to it in some secret inner vibration. When she looked at him she discovered that his gaze seemed to be focused on her mouth. Probably because he was waiting for her angry objection to his behaviour, she told herself protectively as she fought to control a sudden compulsive need to wet her almost painfully dry lips with the tip of her tongue—and lost.
‘Stop it,’ she hissed breathlessly. ‘Stop it at once…’
‘Stop what?’ Jake responded mock innocently.
‘You know perfectly well what. Stop looking at my…at me like…like you were doing,’ she finished lamely, her colour high as she thankfully felt him respond to her agitation and lift his head to meet her eyes at the same time as he removed his hands from her waist.
‘You’re looking very hot and bothered; what’s wrong?’ he asked her, outwardly solicitously, but she could see the laughter gleaming in his eyes.
‘You know perfectly well what’s wrong,’ she told him forthrightly. ‘It’s you…the way you…the way you looked at me.’
‘You mean the way a man looks at a woman he wants,’ Jake told her calmly. ‘It’s called body language,’ he continued, before Lucianna could take issue with him on the first part of his statement. ‘The way a man looks at a woman he wants’—indeed! Well, she knew one thing and that was that he certainly didn’t want her—and she would never want him to want her, she added hastily. It was John she wanted to want her, to desire her, to love her.
‘Body language,’ Jake repeated instructively as he reached up and removed a couple of books from higher up the shelves and handed them to her. He explained, ‘It’s a fact that all of us both consciously and subconsciously send out messages to others with every movement we make, every expression we show, and the first step to getting others to be responsive is for you to show them that you are open to that responsiveness.
‘For example, just now when I looked at your mouth, you touched your lips with your tongue, which means—’
‘Which means that you were making me nervous and angry.’
‘Nervous?’ Jake queried with a small half-smile that made her look warily away from him.
‘Nervous and angry,’ she insisted, but she knew that her voice didn’t sound quite as convincing and determined as she would have liked.
‘Mmm…I see. So when John looks at your mouth like that what kind of response do you give him?’ he asked her placatingly, but Lucianna was too on edge to be placated.
‘John never looks at me like that,’ she answered quickly.
She only realised her mistake when Jake said softly, ‘Oh, dear. Well, I’m sure there’ll be some advice inside these—’ he tapped the books. ‘—to indicate how you can rectify that situation, and if there isn’t—well, I can always…’
But Lucianna wasn’t listening. Snatching the books from his hand, she headed determinedly towards the till, head held high as the salesgirl gave the titles a quick, curious glance before taking Lucianna’s money and putting them into a bag for her.
‘I know her—I serviced her mother’s car,’ Lucianna hissed angrily to Jake once they were outside the shop. ‘I suppose you think all this is very funny,’ she added crossly as she fished the books out of the carrier bag, and she read the titles to him in scornful disgust. ‘The Science of Body Language and How to Use it Effectively, and The Art of Flirtation.’
‘Funny?’ Jake repeated. ‘No, Lucianna,’ he told her curtly. ‘I don’t think any of this is remotely funny.’
He looked so grim and unapproachable that the demand to know just what he did think of it and her, which she had been about to voice, died unvoiced.
‘This way,’ he told her, touching her, indicating the pretty town square which lay ahead of them. Set out with trees and benches and with the sun shining warmly, it was obviously a popular spot with office workers for eating their sandwiches.
One couple were vacating one of the benches as they approached and Jake quickly appropriated the spare seats.
‘What now?’ Lucianna asked wearily as he indicated that he wanted to sit down.
‘Now we’re going to do a bit of people-watching,’ Jake told her. ‘Let’s see just how sharp and accurate your instincts actually are and at the same time let’s see how much visual experience of the art of body language you can actually recognise.’
‘It wasn’t called that. It was called The Art of Flirtation,’ Lucianna snapped back at him.
‘Same thing,’ Jake told her dryly. ‘Now,’ he commanded sternly once Lucianna had reluctantly seated herself beside him, ‘take a good look around and tell me what you can see.’
Lucianna took a deep breath and mentally counted to ten before telling him irritably, ‘I can see the town square and part of the high street and I can see—’
‘That wasn’t what I meant, Lucianna,’ Jake interrupted her crisply, the look in his eyes as he turned to study her the same one he had used to reinforce his older and male status during the years when she had been growing up.
Then it had quelled her and even sometimes made her feel warily apprehensive and,
as she now discovered to her chagrin, things hadn’t changed all that much. The only difference was that now she felt seriously tempted to ignore his visual warning and see what just might happen. After all, what could he really do if she simply got up and walked away?
As though he had read her mind he advised her sharply, ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. You agreed to this, remember. You’re the one who’s desperate to prove—’
‘I’m not desperate to prove anything,’ Lucianna argued hotly.
‘Do you know something, Lucianna?’ Jake said wryly. ‘Your determination to win John rather reminds me of the same blind stubbornness that a child exhibits in demanding a sweet or a toy simply because it’s out of reach and being denied them, and I can’t help wondering if it’s the fact that he seems out of reach that makes him seem so desirable. There certainly doesn’t seem—’
‘I’m not a child,’ Lucianna began, then realised how neatly and easily she had fallen into the trap Jake had dug for her as he told her sharply,
‘No? Well, then, I suggest you cease behaving like one. Now, look around again and tell me what you see, and this time study the people—carefully. Look at that group over there just coming out of the chemist’s, for instance, and tell me what you see.’
Heaving a deep sigh, Lucianna painstakingly and dutifully stared in the direction he had indicated.
A man and a woman and two small children were standing on the pavement just outside the chemist’s. The woman was leaning towards the man and smiling up at him. The two children were dancing up and down beside them, obviously excited, whilst the man started to remove some papers from his pocket.
At the same time the woman instinctively reached out to draw the children closer to her as a car drove past and the man put out a hand to steady her as another shopper looked as though she might barge into them.
They were obviously a family, Lucianna could see that, and a happy one, she acknowledged as she saw their smiles and heard their laughter as they all looked at the strips of photographs the man was holding, the two children barely able to contain their excitement.