Mission: Make-Over

She managed to keep her face straight as Jake gave her a look that should have turned her to cinders.

‘Very funny,’ he told her savagely, reaching into the car to pick up his car phone, but Lucianna shook her head and told him gently,

‘It won’t work, Jake, not whilst the alarm’s ringing; there’s an automatic bar that means you can’t…’

‘Where’s the handbook?’ Jake growled, reaching towards the glove compartment, but once again Lucianna shook her head sorrowfully.

‘That won’t open, Jake, not—’

‘Not whilst the alarm’s ringing…I know,’ he cut in tightly. Then he asked her grimly, ‘What about the engine? I suppose that won’t start either…?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Lucianna agreed gently.

‘All right. You stay here; there’s a public call box round the corner. I’ll go and ring the garage.’

‘All right, but you’d better leave me with the keys,’ she told him dutifully, and explained, ‘If you don’t someone might think that I’ve tried to break in…’

Silently Jake handed her the keys.

Lucianna waited until he was out of sight and then went into action. Just as well she had ignored his veto on her touching his precious car…

Humming to herself, she set to work. Ignoring the alarm and overriding the system to open the glove box and remove the owner’s manual, whilst deftly unlocking the bonnet, within three minutes she had silenced the alarm and within another two located the fault, which, as far as she could see, was simply a matter of replacing a fuse. The alarms would have to be reset, of course, because she had overridden them, but she still felt very pleased with herself as she stood back and enjoyed the consequent silence of her handiwork, patting the car and telling her that she was a very clever girl.

‘What the…?’

She smiled as she turned round in response to Jake’s ominous voice, telling him calmly, ‘It’s stopped…’

Out of the corner of her eye she could see a car bearing the insignia of the garage which had supplied Jake with his car. As it came to a halt alongside them Lucia

nna stepped forward and told the mechanic when he climbed out, ‘I’ve overridden the central nervous system and removed the electronic data coil, but I think the main problem lies with one of the fuses…’

‘More than likely,’ the mechanic agreed, giving her an initial appraising and then approving look as he lifted the bonnet and checked what she had done.

‘It’s a problem we’re having with these cars, and something that wasn’t discovered in the re-testing stage. We suspect it could be caused by changes in the air temperature, but we haven’t enough evidence to make a firm decision on that yet…’

That was all the encouragement Lucianna needed; within seconds the pair of them were deep in conversation and it took Jake’s grim, ‘When the pair of you have finished…’ to bring the young mechanic’s enthusiastic praise of the manufacturer’s latest electronic system to a faltering halt as he turned his attention back to Jake’s car.

Ten minutes later, after the mechanic had gone and they were driving out of the car park, Jake turned to Lucianna and demanded coldly, ‘All right, Lucianna, you’ve had your fun. When…?’

Lucianna didn’t pretend not to understand what he meant.

‘Er…the weekend you had to fly to Brussels. You asked David to drive you to the airport and then collect you when you got back because you didn’t want to leave the car parked there because so many had been stolen; so whilst it was at the farm…’

‘You ignored what I’d said and decided to start playing around with it…You do realise that it could have been your interfering that caused the fault in the first place.’

She watched his mouth harden as he swung the car out into the road. It felt good to know that there was one area at least where her knowledge was superior to Jake’s, and even better to know that he knew it as well—knew it and didn’t very much like it, if his thunderous silence was anything to go by.

Lucianna paused in the act of watering the plants she had lovingly rescued, freeing their poor constricted roots from the prison of the over-packed pots in which they had been planted, repotting them in a much more generously proportioned home.

They had repaid her love and care by flourishing despite all the taunting comments of her brother. Her father had been one of the old school of farmers, disdainful and impatient of anything grown for mere ornament and pleasure, and as a girl Lucianna had tended her small garden in secret, guiltily aware that her father would not have approved.

Now things were different, though, and even her brother had been impressed the previous summer when her planters and hanging baskets had not only attracted admiring comments from her customers and visitors, but had also won first prize at the local country fair.

On the other side of the yard her brother and sister-in-law were deep in conversation. Against all her own expectations Lucianna had quickly discovered that the books Jake had persuaded her to buy were giving her a fascinating new insight into other people’s reactions and feelings, and now, a week after their purchase, she was discovering that she was becoming something of a people-watcher.

The way her brother was leaning over his wife, the way their bodies were touching, the way she was smiling up at him were all indicative of their love and intimacy, and as she watched them Lucianna felt a painful welling of loneliness and envy.

Why was it that the ability to be attractive to and appeal to a man seemed to come so easily to others but not to her? Surely it wasn’t just a matter of looking docile and demure, of deliberately appealing to a man’s vanity, to his need to boost his own ego, because if it was she had too much respect for herself ever to adopt that kind of artifice. But no, it couldn’t be. She only had to think of how strong Janey could be and how determinedly she held her own against David whenever she felt the need.