Susan Stephens - The Man From her Wayward Past

Lucia smiled as she read the messy list, with all its scribbles and crossings-out. It was hard to believe she had ever been so naïve. Most of her ideas had been based on articles she’d read in teen magazines, which of course were essential reading for fourteen-year-olds with everything to learn. She would have to completely re-jig the list. Get a wax after she’d got a man? Well, that was wrong to start with. And, the way she felt right now, getting a wax could be number two-hundred and thirty-six on next year’s list. Yes, Luke was gorgeous, but …

No. She couldn’t.

She just couldn’t, that’s all.

But just out of curiosity, and because trips down memory lane seemed to be in vogue right now, she straightened out the much-thumbed pages and began to read.

1. Get a job!—preferably promoting a bar, which is a great way to meet new people, according to ROCK! magazine

2. Get a flat!—something gorgeous and stylish in the best part of town. N.B. V. close to the bar!

3. Get a wax!

She remembered that last entry being based more on dreading what her rapidly changing body might do next rather than any horrific hirsute happenings. And how many times had that entry been deferred? And why did she still shift position nervously when she read it?

She pulled a face as she got up to check her top lip in the mirror. Flopping back down again, she remembered her mother’s pale face when a visit to the beautician loomed. Perhaps that was the answer to her waxing phobia. She could still hear her young self asking, ‘Are you all right, Mama?’ And her mother’s response: ‘You’ll understand one day what it means to be a woman, Lucia, and what we have to go through for our men …’ Hefty sigh at that point.

All sorts of images had flashed into Lucia’s young brain—nostril-hair-plucking, blackhead-excising, even earwax-removal with one of those long, pointy things—but never had she imagined that her mother was referring to that most delicate of regions, let alone that some stranger was going to view her private bits close up prior to coating them in molten wax like some medieval torturer. And it didn’t finish there—as Lucia had discovered in that invaluable teenage self-help tome known to one and all as ROCK! Magazine . Then this female Torquemada was going to rip away at those nether regions without so much as a by-your-leave.

Youch!

No way, José!

Back to the list. The next entry after wax, was

4. Get a tan

Lucia remembered a columnist in ROCK! insisting that this must be subtle—a mere sun-kissed whisper that would fool any man into thinking it was natural.

5. Get a cool new wardrobe!

One that did not include a bobbly polyester uniform in a shade that might once have been white, presumably.

6. Get a hairdo

This prompted another visit to the mirror, where she lifted up her haystack hair. Most people complained that their hair was too thin or too straight. She was currently experiencing the opposite problem, known as The Inexplicable Explosion of Frizz. Without her styling products and gadgets, and without money to get it done in a salon, she was on her own.

7. Get a gym membership

First off, gym memberships cost money. And there was a more important consideration: without the hairdo, the tan, the wax and the cool new wardrobe, she was never going to make it through the door of a decent gym.

8. Get a good dance teacher—for the Samba, preferably. Someone like the old gaucho Ignacio, on Nero Caracas’s ranch. Judging by the way Ignacio vaulted the fence when I decided to ride Nero’s fire-breathing monster stallion bareback, Ignacio has still got some moves in him!

9. Get a gag for her polo-playing brothers—so they can’t share any embarrassing secrets with any men I might attract once I’ve completed all of the above.

10. Get a (non-polo-playing) man

And there the list ended. Lucia smiled as she remembered Ignacio teaching her to dance the Samba, and quite a few other dances as well, bringing his ancient ghetto blaster, as Ignacio had called his battered radio, to the hay barn, where she’d been able to blunder about undisturbed. Okay. Looking on the bright side. She was still podgy and in need of a suntan with a frizz ball on her head, but this babe could dance.

‘Cheers, Margaret,’ Lucia murmured, wrapping her frozen hands around the warm flask of chocolate. This small, kind act of someone who had so little made Lucia more determined than ever to help her elderly friend.

‘And hello, Luke,’ she added, addressing Luke’s smouldering poster just inches from her bed.

Hopping out again, she took a closer look. Wow hardly covered it. Lucia’s brothers frequently featured on billboards, but always in full polo rig and usually mounted on a horse. They were certainly never caught half-naked, sluicing themselves down, in a shot Lucia couldn’t imagine strait-laced Luke agreeing to in a million years.

‘You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?’ she murmured, taking full inventory of Luke’s previously hidden assets.

And then there was the pose. Brandishing a whip as he glared into the camera, Luke was naked to his washboard waist, his hard tanned torso accessorised by nothing more than sharp black stubble and a steel watch that could probably tell his position in relation to the moon. A pair of obscenely revealing riding breeches and knee-high leather boots completed an image guaranteed to make any girl’s day.

Posters were a safe way to appreciate the finer points of one of the world’s fittest men. She liked that. As she jumped about and blew on her hands to keep warm before hypothermia set in, Lucia guessed the only way Luke would have been caught out in a shot like that was through the involvement of her school friend and ruthless sister-in-law Holly. Holly was a journalist at ROCK! magazine, and had tamed—sorry—was married to Lucia’s brother Ruiz. Capturing Luke in such a provocative pose would have been an incredible scoop for her.

Three cheers for Holly the reporter! Lucia concluded, chalking one up for the girls. She took another look at Luke’s centrefold.

Goodness, Luke was big …

No wonder she was having erotic dreams. Trying hard not to fixate on Luke’s clinging breeches and the improbable-sized bulge within, Lucia shook her head. She could admire all she liked, but it certainly would never happen now. It couldn’t. She couldn’t. One thing was sure: after this unveiling he could stick his disapproval the next time they met.

The next time they met?

There was nothing on her to-do list that ruled against meetings with an approved family friend, she reasoned, climbing into bed.

I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats o’er vales and hill …

I’m the only twenty-four-year-old I know who doesn’t need to take her pill .

Anon .

Are all poets destined to end up on the (remainder) shelf?

Pull yourself together, Lucia!

RESTING her cheek against the cold wet glass the next morning, Lucia stopped scribbling in her journal and stared out of the caravan window at the windswept shore. If she had wanted distance from her brothers she had certainly got it here. She missed them, but no way was she going to ask them for the money to help Margaret. If she did she’d be right back to square one. Yes, she loved her brothers, but Nacho especially made no distinction between caring and smothering, which had left her gasping for freedom in the shadow of four powerful men and their saintly friend Luke.

Luke …

Did her body have to respond with such unbridled delight to the idea of so much stern, glowering disapproval locked inside one hot man?