She just raised her eyebrows, leaving him to work it out for himself. He was right. He’d been nineteen when she was born, which meant that his daughter wouldn’t be seventeen until next May. It would be six months before she could even apply for a licence.
‘You stole a car, drove it without a licence, without insurance?’ He somehow managed to keep his voice neutral. ‘That’s your idea of “nothing much”?’
He didn’t bother asking who’d taught her to drive. That would be the same person who’d given him an old banger and let him loose in the field out back as soon as his feet touched the pedals. Driving was in the Saxon blood, according to his father, and engine oil ran through their veins.
But, since she’d hot-wired Mrs Warburton’s car, clearly driving wasn’t all her grandfather had taught her.
‘What were you doing under the Bentley?’ he demanded as a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature ran through him.
‘Just checking it out. It needs new brake linings…’ The phone began to ring. With the slightest of shrugs, she leaned around him, unhooked it from the wall and said, ‘George Saxon and Granddaughter…’
What?
‘Where are you?’ she asked, reaching for a pen. ‘Are you on your own…? Okay, stay with the car—’
George Saxon and Granddaughter…
Shock slowed him down and as he moved to wrest the phone from her she leaned back out of his reach.
‘—we’ll be with you in ten minutes.’ She replaced the receiver. ‘A lone woman broken down on the Longbourne Road,’ she said. ‘I told her we’ll pick her up.’
‘I heard what you said. Just how do you propose to do that?’ he demanded furiously.
‘Get in the tow-truck,’ she suggested, ‘drive down the road…’
‘There’s no one here to deal with a breakdown.’
‘You’re here. I’m here. Granddad says I’m as good as you were with an engine.’
If she thought that would make him feel better, she would have to think again.
‘Call her back,’ he said, pulling down the local directory. ‘Tell her we’ll find someone else to help her.’
‘I didn’t take her number.’
‘It doesn’t matter. She won’t care who turns up so long as someone does,’ he said, punching in the number of another garage. It had rung just twice when he heard the clunk as a truck door was slammed shut. On the third ring he heard it start.
He turned around as a voice in his ear said, ‘Longbourne Motors. How can I…’
The personnel door was wide open and, as he watched, the headlights of the pick-up truck pierced the dark.
‘Sorry,’ he said, dropping the phone and racing after his daughter, wrenching open the cab door as it began to move. ‘Turn it off!’
She began to move as he reached for the keys.
‘Alexandra! Don’t you dare!’ He hung onto the door, walking quickly alongside the truck as she moved across the forecourt.
‘It’s Granddad’s business,’ she said, speeding up a little, forcing him to run or let go. He ran. ‘I’m not going to let you shut it down.’ Then, having made her point, she eased off the accelerator until the truck rolled to a halt before turning to challenge him. ‘I love cars, engines. I’m going to run this place, be a rally driver—’
‘What?’
‘Granddad’s going to sponsor me.’
‘You’re sixteen,’ he said, not sure whether he was more horrified that she wanted to race cars or fix them. ‘You don’t know what you want.’
Even as he said the words, he heard his father’s voice. ‘You’re thirteen, boy. Your head is full of nonsense. You don’t know what you want…’
He’d gone on saying it to him even when he was filling in forms, applying for university places, knowing that he’d get no financial backing, that he’d have to support himself every step of the way.
Even when his ‘nonsense’ was being installed in every new engine manufactured throughout the world, his father had still been telling him he was wrong…
‘Move over,’ he said.
Xandra clung stubbornly to the steering wheel. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Since you’ve already kept a lone woman waiting in a dark country lane for five minutes longer than necessary, I haven’t got much choice. I’m going to let you pick her up.’
‘Me?’
‘You. But you’ve already committed enough motoring offences for one week, so I’ll drive the truck.’
CHAPTER TWO
ANNIE saw the tow-truck, yellow light flashing on the roof of the cab, looming out of the dark, and sighed with relief as it pulled up just ahead of her broken-down car.
After a lorry, driving much too fast along the narrow country lane, had missed the front of the car by inches, she’d scrambled out and was standing with her back pressed against the gate, shivering with the cold.
The driver jumped down and swung a powerful torch over and around the car, and she threw up an arm to shield her eyes from the light as he found her.
‘George Saxon,’ her knight errant said, lowering the torch a little. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘Y-y-yes,’ she managed through chattering teeth. She couldn’t see his face behind the light but his voice had a touch of impatience that wasn’t exactly what she’d hoped for. ‘No thanks to a lorry driver who nearly took the front off the car.’
‘You should have switched on the hazard warning lights,’ he said unsympathetically. ‘Those sidelights are useless.’
‘If he’d been driving within the speed limit, he’d have seen me,’ she replied, less than pleased at the suggestion that it was her own fault that she’d nearly been killed.
‘There is no speed limit on this road other than the national limit. That’s seventy miles an hour,’ he added, in case she didn’t know.
‘I saw the signs. Foolishly, perhaps, I assumed that it was the upper limit, not an instruction,’ she snapped right back.
‘True,’ he agreed, ‘but just because other people behave stupidly it doesn’t mean you have to join in.’
First the car park attendant and now the garage mechanic. Irritable men talking to her as if she had dimwit tattooed across her forehead was getting tiresome.
Although, considering she could be relaxing in the warmth and comfort of Bab el Sama instead of freezing her socks off in an English country lane in December, they might just have a point.
‘So,’ he asked, gesturing at the car with the torch, ‘what’s the problem?’
‘I thought it was your job to tell me that,’ she replied, deciding she’d taken enough male insolence for one day.
‘Okaaay…’
Back-lit by the bright yellow hazard light swinging around on top of the tow-truck, she couldn’t make out more than the bulk of him but she had a strong sense of a man hanging onto his temper by a thread.
‘Let’s start with the basics,’ he said, making an effort. ‘Have you run out of petrol?’
‘What kind of fool do you take