by Penny Jordan
‘A joke?’ Jake’s eyebrows rose. ‘Really? Well, I don’t find it particularly funny to be accused of being the kind of man who has a chain of interchangeable bimbos dragging through his life, and for your information I have never suggested nor would I ever insult anyone by doing so, that a woman is some kind of doll, a toy, to be dressed up or undressed at my or any other man’s whim. And furthermore I find it extremely unamusing, not to say offensive, that you should suggest I might,’ Jake informed her acerbically.
Despite the fact that his obvious anger had shocked her, Lucianna fought back valiantly, determined not to be left wrong-footed, as she pointed out, ‘Well, I’m sorry if I’ve got the wrong impression, but you’re the one who’s always changed his girlfriends more frequently than most men change their…their socks…’
‘Really?’ Jake challenged her. ‘Do go on…It seems to me that you know more about my private life than I do myself.
‘What a wonderfully insightful person you must be, Lucianna,’ he marvelled sarcastically. ‘And there I was thinking you never noticed anything that didn’t come with wheels and an engine, and yet here you are, completely au fait with the most personal details of my life…more au fait than I am myself, as it happens, since the last time I had anything even approaching a relationship was—’
He stopped speaking as Lucianna, unable to control herself any longer, interrupted him hotly to say, ‘I don’t know why you’re so angry, or pretending to be so…so…I heard the way David used to boast about the number of girls you and he took out,’ she reminded him. Both her eyes and her voice mirrored her feelings, revealing to him far more than she knew as she added defensively, ‘I thought it…you were…disgusting…boasting and bragging like that and—’
‘Not me,’ Jake interrupted her cuttingly. ‘I don’t recall ever having discussed such a subject in your hearing, and in fact…’
Forced by the sheer grim sternness of his voice to reconsider her own hotly, hastily spoken words, Lucianna was obliged to concede reluctantly, ‘All right…I might never have heard you say it, but you were part of it…part of what David was talking about. You and he—’
‘He and I might once have behaved with all the boorish stupidity that teenage boys are capable of displaying at times,’ Jake interrupted her to agree, ‘but the wholesale seduction and abandonment of a series of defenceless, vulnerable teenage girls in the style you were implying was totally and completely fictitious.
‘For one thing, you underrate the intelligence and sense of self-preservation of your own sex if you think otherwise, Lucianna…and, for another, teenage boys have a capacity for self-aggrandisement and exaggeration that knows no limits. It’s a fault that most of us grew out of very quickly indeed, and the kind of boastful comments teenage boys make shouldn’t be taken too seriously, you know…’
Lucianna shivered slightly as she turned away from him, her voice low and slightly shaky as she told him passionately, ‘I hated hearing the way you talked about…about girls…and…’
‘Sex?’ Jake supplied softly for her.
Lucianna could feel her face starting to burn. Why, oh, why had she ever brought up this subject? It was something she found it hard enough to think about herself even in the privacy of her own thoughts, never mind discuss with anyone else—and most especially with Jake.
‘Yes, I can understand how some of the things you overheard must have made you feel.’
Pensively Jake watched her. Suddenly an awful lot of things were beginning to fall into place.
‘No, you can’t,’ Lucianna contradicted him wildly, the panic starting to flood through her as she mentally relived the emotions and fears she had suffered through inadvertently listening in on her brothers’ macho conversations coupled with the well-intentioned but clumsy lectures they had given her on the wisdom of the way she should behave with boys and the pitfalls that lay in wait for her if she didn’t take heed of their advice.
‘You’re a man and you don’t…you can’t—’ Abruptly Lucianna stopped, conscious that she had been on the verge of saying too much.
Jake, though, was refusing to let the subject drop, prompting gently, ‘I can’t what?’
Tight-lipped, Lucianna shook her head and looked longingly towards the interior of the shop. What ten minutes ago had seemed an inhospitable, unfriendly, alien place now seemed like a welcome haven when placed alongside Jake’s unwanted probings into her most closely guarded thoughts and feelings.
‘I can’t what, Lucianna?’ Jake persisted. ‘I can understand how destructive, how emotionally and physically blighting it must be for a young girl on the brink of exploring her own sexuality and emotions to overhear a group of young men discussing such subjects without the guards they would normally put on their tongues in the presence of her sex.’
‘It didn’t do me any harm.’ Lucianna immediately defended her brothers. ‘In fact, it did me a favour. At least I knew what boys thought…’
‘You knew what boys thought, yes,’ Jake agreed quietly, ‘but what about men, Lucianna? Did you…do you know how they think and feel, or did the lessons you inadvertently learned from your brothers go so deep that they instilled in you a fear and dread of being talked about as your brothers talked about their first sexual experiences? Did their conversations inspire in you such a dread of having all your dreams violated by the crassness of some boy who might later boast about his sexual conquest of you to his friends that sex is still something you view with distaste and embarrassment?’
‘Of course not,’ Lucianna denied quickly. ‘In fact…’ she tilted her chin towards him bravely as she lied ‘…I don’t think anything of the kind…I—actually, I like sex; I like it a lot…’
‘I see. So if I were to suggest that instead of continuing with our shopping trip you and I go back to the Hall and spend the afternoon in bed mutually enjoying sex you’d be perfectly happy to agree?’
Lucianna was almost unable to believe her ears, her shock showing in her eyes, her voice quavering betrayingly as she responded, ‘No…No, I wouldn’t.’
‘But you just said you like sex,’ Jake pointed out reasonably, ‘and since I haven’t had a relationship with anyone for quite some considerable time, and of course being a man…’
‘I can’t go to bed with you,’ Lucianna protested squeakily.
‘Why not? I’m no different from any other man,’ Jake told her, adding silkily, with a deliberately sexual downward glance at her body, ‘I don’t intend to boast, but I think you’ll find I’m equally satisfactory as any of the other men you’ve had.’
‘Other men!’ Lucianna’s eyes rounded. ‘I don’t…there haven’t…I think you’re forgetting about John,’ she managed to say.
‘Ah, yes, John,’ Jake agreed, but then added swiftly, ‘But he isn’t here, is he, and you and I…?’
Lucianna had had enough. Now that she was over the initial shock of Jake’s astounding proposition, common sense was pointing out several salient facts to her. Tossing her head, she told Jake forthrightly, ‘You’re just trying to make fun of me. I know perfectly well you don’t want to go to bed with me, you don’t want to have sex with me…’
‘You’re right, I don’t,’ Jake agreed, but as he watched the emotions chase one another across her face he added mentally to himself, But I sure as hell want to make love to you, again and again and again, and if I had your precious brothers here with me now, friendship or not, I’d wring their wretched necks.
To Lucianna’s relief he started to walk towards the shop, but as she made to follow him he stopped and turned back to her, catching her totally off guard as he asked her almost absently, ‘Presumably there aren’t any problems with the sexual side of your relationship with John…?’
Immediately Lucianna bridled.
‘Of course there aren’t,’ she denied, thankful that Jake wasn’t standing close enough to hear the way her heart was hammering. The last thing she wanted was for Jake of all people to discover her most closely guarde
d and shameful secret…which was that she was still a virgin.
Technically she knew what sex was all about, of course. How could she not do so with her outspoken elder brothers? Elder brothers who had not been merely outspoken in their frank teenage discussions about their own sex lives, when they thought she wouldn’t understand or hear what they were saying, but who had been equally outspoken and frank in their fraternal advice to her about the way in which she should respond to any sexual approaches to herself.
‘Say no and make sure you keep on saying no,’ had been David’s stern advice. ‘That way they’ll know they can’t take advantage of you and they’ll respect you.’
‘Yes, and if they don’t they’ll have us to answer to,’ Lewis had added fiercely.
What they hadn’t told her, though, Lucianna recognised, was when and how a girl changed her no to a yes and, even more importantly, as she was discovering via her relationship with John, how she should let a man know that she was ready to be given the option to do so.
In the early days of their relationship John had certainly been keen enough to try and coax her into bed, and she, faithful to her brothers’ stern lectures, had very firmly said no, but in the weeks before his departure he had seemed quite happy with the tepid kisses and caresses they had exchanged and Lucianna had been at a loss to know how to generate a little more passion between them.
When she had tried tentatively to snuggle up a little closer to him he had simply asked her if she was cold; when she had tried to deepen the kisses they had shared he had seemed oblivious to the hints she was trying to give him.
Hopefully, though, the tips she had picked up via the books she had bought should help her to make things clear to him, but it was a subject she certainly wasn’t about to discuss with Jake. Jake, who, despite his surprising announcement earlier about the lack of any current relationship in his life, certainly had far more experience of her sex than she was ever likely to have of his.
Caught up in her thoughts, Lucianna suddenly realised that she had actually entered the shop and that the girl approaching her, far from being the haughty, disdainful type of person she had been dreading, was actually smiling at her with genuine warmth.
‘Would you like some help?’ she asked Lucianna. ‘Or would you prefer to be left alone to browse?’
‘We need—’
‘I prefer to browse.’
Lucianna overrode Jake firmly, and just as firmly ignored his sardonic comment, meant for her ears only. ‘This isn’t a jeans shop, you know,’ he said as the girl retreated, returning to the pile of jumpers she had been folding when they’d walked in, leaving Lucianna and Jake on their own.
‘I do know that,’ Lucianna returned with pointed emphasis, before turning on her heel and, ignoring Jake, walking over to study a selection of colour coordinated clothes which had caught her eye.
At first sight, the plain, caramelly-coloured coordinates for which she was heading might have seemed dull in comparison to the much brighter range of clothes the shop also carried, but Lucianna had remembered seeing similarly coloured clothes being modelled by a girl with her colouring in one of her fashion magazines.
She reached out and touched the fabric of a pair of trousers uncertainly. It felt cool and silky soft. She frowned as she studied the swing ticket. ‘Tencel’, it said, which left her none the wiser apart from her instinctive awareness that Tencel, whatever it was, made the fabric feel good and hang well.
There was a brochure on a coffee table beside her turned open at a page depicting the trousers she was currently examining. In the photograph they were teamed with a neatly fitting short jacket casually unbuttoned over what looked like a plain cream silk top.
‘This is our newest range,’ the salesgirl announced helpfully, suddenly materialising at Lucianna’s side. ‘It’s my favourite and I’ve really fallen for the shell,’ she added enthusiastically, whilst Lucianna looked blank and wondered frantically what on earth ‘the shell’ was until she saw that Jake had removed a hanger with the cream silk top on it and was holding it out to her.
He said quietly, ‘Yes, it would suit you, Luce.’
The top, of course; she remembered now seeing it described as a ‘shell’ in her magazine. For once she was too grateful for Jake’s intervention to object to his interference, but that still didn’t quite explain, as she told herself later, quite just how she came to be standing in front of him half an hour later, self-consciously wearing not just the shell but the trousers and the jacket that went with it as well, along with the toning scarf, whilst the salesgirl enthused about the practicality of adding the sleeveless dress that was also part of the collection to the trousers, since the same jacket could be worn over it.
‘I don’t want…’ Lucianna began, and then stopped, a fiery blush staining her skin as she saw the way Jake was looking at her.
‘What is it? What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?’ she hissed defensively at him whilst the salesgirl went to find the dress.
Jake shook his head.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he responded shortly, but he was frowning, Lucianna noticed, and suddenly the burning feeling of self-confidence and heady, unfamiliar pleasure in her own appearance that she had experienced when she had studied her reflection in the changing-room mirrors evaporated, bringing her abruptly back down to earth, making her feel awkward and uncomfortable and longing for the protection of her heavy denims to replace the silk trousers she was wearing.
As he turned his back on her Jake questioned with quiet inner savagery if he was totally sane. Knowing what he did about his feelings for her, it had surely been total madness to bring Lucianna somewhere where he was forced to watch her outer transformation from chrysalis to butterfly. He knew just what effect she was going to have on the rest of his sex when they saw her lovely lissom body dressed in that outfit, was aware that, whilst outwardly perfectly respectable, she seemed to hint with every movement she made at the delicate femininity of the body the suit was supposed to cover and shield.
‘You really do have the most wonderful figure,’ the salesgirl enthused, coming back with the dress over her arm and pausing to admire the effect of her coaxing and tweaking as Lucianna paused, reluctant to respond, to listen to her.
‘And that colour is definitely you as well,’ she added truthfully. ‘There’s something about clothes like these that makes you feel and look so feminine, isn’t there?’ she said warmly, and Lucianna, who, after witnessing Jake’s reaction, had been on the point of rejecting the outfit, hesitated and then frowned as she glanced into a mirror set at an angle to the shop floor several feet away.
In it she could just glimpse the back view of a woman wearing the same outfit as she was herself but on this woman it looked truly elegant, truly feminine. Lucianna lifted her hand to remove the scarf and then stood staring at the woman in the mirror, immobilised by the shock of realising that the reflection she could see was her own, that she was the woman who looked truly elegant, that the unfamiliar back view she had been admiring was, in actual fact, her own.
‘I’ll take it,’ she told the girl positively, before she could allow herself to change her mind. ‘All of it…and the dress as well,’ she added.
The girl’s smile widened.
Ten minutes later, as she paid for her purchases, Lucianna shot Jake a triumphant look.
He might not think she had what it took to be able to wear such feminine clothes but the salesgirl had thought differently and so had she, Lucianna decided firmly. She couldn’t wait to see John’s face when he saw her wearing her new things.
‘I hope you don’t mind my saying so,’ the salesgirl commented to Lucianna as she handed her a huge carrier bag containing her new clothes, ‘but I love the highlights you’ve had woven into your hair. Would you mind telling me where you had them done…?’
Highlights! Lucianna gave her a puzzled look, whilst Jake, who had overheard their conversation, duly explained for her, ‘I’m afraid they’re the
work of the sun.’
‘You mean they’re natural? Lucky you,’ the girl told her enviously. ‘I have to pay a fortune for mine and they don’t look anything like as good.’
Lucianna was still frowning as they left the shop. Highlights…Did the salesgirl mean those odd little goldy bits that had always lightened her hair in the summer?
‘Coffee?’ Jake suggested as he and Lucianna left the shop, but Lucianna shook her head and demanded instead,
‘You didn’t like it, did you? The outfit I just bought—you didn’t like it. I could see it in your face…’
‘On the contrary,’ Jake assured her truthfully, ‘I like it very much.’ Where did it come from, he wondered ruefully, this female ability to sense and home in on any unwary male reaction with all the deadly accuracy of a heat-seeking missile?
‘But you didn’t like it on me,’ Lucianna persisted. ‘I suppose you think I’m not feminine enough, not womanly enough to wear it…’
Jake was frowning again now, she observed, his mouth hardening in that dangerous way that always made her heart start to beat just a little bit too quickly. Not that she was afraid of Jake’s disapproval—no way…no way at all, she assured herself hastily.
‘Anyway, I don’t care what you think; it doesn’t matter,’ Lucianna informed him with a shake of her head before he could reply. ‘It’s what John thinks that matters…’
‘What he thinks or what he does?’ Jake demanded harshly, his own emotions overwhelming the need for caution and good sense. ‘What kind of reaction is it you’re expecting from him, Luce? What is it you want him to do? Take one look at you and want you so much that he can’t wait to start ripping the things off you? Do you expect him to take one look at you and immediately declare his undying love? Because if you do…’
‘Because if I do, what?’ Lucianna challenged him angrily, her fingers curling tightly over the handle of the carrier bag as her face flushed with mortification. ‘Just because you don’t think I’m…that John loves me. Well, he does love me,’ she told him proudly, ‘and when he comes back…’