Mission: Make-Over. PENNY JORDAN
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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.
But stubbornly she omitted to mention anything of this as she responded to Jake’s instruction by simply saying, ‘I see a man, a woman and two children.’
‘You’re beginning to try my patience, Lucianna,’ Jake warned her. ‘Look again. Look at the way the man is behaving towards the three of them—protectively, lovingly—and the way the woman is responding to him, the way she obviously feels that he’s done something special; and the two children—look at their excitement.
‘At a guess I would say that they are a young couple who are just planning their first continental holiday with their children and that they have just been to obtain their family passport photographs. This holiday is probably something they’ve planned for and saved for for a very long time, something they’ve had to make sacrifices to afford, especially the man who’s probably had to work extra hours to pay for it…’
‘That’s sexist,’ Lucianna objected. ‘It might be the woman who’s had to do the extra work.’
‘It’s