‘OH, HELL, are you all right?’
Anya stirred, realising that the smothering blackness which had enveloped her wasn’t unconsciousness, but the black-clad chest of the girl who had landed squarely on top of her and smashed her backwards onto the unyielding ground. Anya spat out a mouthful of acrylic cardigan as the girl scrambled off her in a flurry of curses and knelt anxiously at her heaving sides. ‘God, I’m sorry—are you badly hurt?’ she asked, her voice thin with fear.
The overhead sun dazzled Anya’s eyes, white spots dancing mockingly in her vision as she tried to suck in the breath to answer, but there seemed to be no power in her deflated lungs and she took great, dry, whistling gulps to try and equalise the pressure in her burning chest. Her neck was cricked sideways under the overhanging corner of a low step, the back of her ringing head resting on the damp grass beside the path. As she lay there staring up at the jutting brick she was lucid enough to be thankful that her head had not cracked down on that sharp edge as she fell. It would have been lights out permanently!
‘Oh, no—do you think you’ve broken something?’ The girl sprang to her feet, shaken but clearly unhurt, her bright, kohl-lined blue eyes looking huge in her ashen face, and Anya finally managed to pump some air into her abused lungs.
‘No—I—don’t—think—so,’ she managed to croak, mentally blessing the fact that the lawn hadn’t been recently mown and the grass beneath her head was thick and springy. She started to squirm away from that threatening overhang. ‘I just—ouch!’
As she moved her arm she felt a fierce jab from her funny bone and the hot sting of scraped skin on her forearm. She flexed cautiously, finding no screaming pain from any of her other limbs, no sickening grate of broken bone, although the ringing in her head made it difficult to concentrate on the messages coming in from the rest of her body. ‘I think—I’m OK…just—bit stunned…’ she advised threadily.
The girl bent over, her hands on her hips in a pugnacious pose that Anya recognised from their previous encounter. ‘That was such a dumb thing to do—I could have killed you!’
Anya gaped up at the scowling face framed in its distinctive dye-job, the spikes of gold-tipped black hair standing up in defiance of gravity, the ring in her nose matched by two smaller ones in each ear. The words were spoken in relief rather than anger, she thought, and with a strong Australian twang.
‘Stopped—you—hurting yourself,’ she panted out in between whistling breaths, in defence of the scolding. At any other time she might have been amused at the role-reversal.
‘Yeah, and it’s probably going to cost me, big time,’ was the disgruntled reply. Anya decided to try and sit up, but the girl dropped onto her skinny haunches and planted a surprisingly strong hand on Anya’s collarbone, holding her flat against the uneven bricks. ‘No! Don’t try and move yet. I’ll go and get some help—’
Anya suddenly remembered where she was. ‘No, really, I’m OK—’ she protested weakly. ‘I can feel everything…’ She wiggled her toes to prove it.
‘Just wait!’ The young voice, formerly shrill, had now sunk back to its natural husky register and carried an amazing amount of authority for one so young. ‘Jeez, lady, don’t be in such a hurry. Please—don’t try and get up until I get someone to help. I don’t want you dying on me. I’m too young to have that on my conscience. I’d be traumatised for life!’
Anya doubted it. Not with that resilient sense of humour. ‘You…didn’t mean to…do it,’ she huffed, gracious to a fault.
‘No, well…’ The blue eyes sparked with a devilish light that plucked a familiar chord in Anya’s mind. ‘Be a real mate and hold that thought for me, will you?’
‘What—?’ But she was already gone, sprinting like a black gazelle towards the back of the house, leaping and hopping from leg to leg as she whipped off her running shoes along the way, dangling them by their laces as she ran. Did she think she was faster in bare feet?
Anya remained spread-eagled on the ground, not because she was following instructions but because she felt slightly giddy when she lifted her head, and her breathing was still catching unpleasantly in her chest. She would get up in slow stages, she decided, carefully straightening in her limbs in preparation to rolling over and pushing up on her knees.
She thought she was starting to hallucinate when she suddenly saw the girl’s head and shoulders poke out of the selfsame dormer window high up under the gabled roof. The weirdly skewed sense of déjà vu was shattered as the girl gave her an encouraging wave and launched into a series of ear-piercing screams. Her head abruptly disappeared back inside the room and Anya was left staring blankly upwards, thinking perhaps she was unconscious after all.
To her confused mind it only seemed bare seconds later when the girl came dashing back up to her prone body, this time from the direction of the front of the house and closely trailed by a babble of voices wanting to know what was going on. One of them, deep and resonant, made Anya utter a fatalistic cry of pained frustration.
‘What the—?’ Scott Tyler’s exclamation was cut short as he dropped to his knees beside her, his large hand going to her forehead to brushed away a few crumpled leaves. In his dark trousers and casual open shirt he looked younger and less ruthlessly constrained than he did in his elegant suits.
‘What on earth have you done to yourself?’ he muttered, running his eyes rapidly over her body, looking for clues. Over his shoulder Anya was dismayed to see the curious faces of Sean and Samantha, his niece and nephew, falling into startled expressions as they realised who it was lying on the path.
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ he continued, ‘I didn’t see your car parked out front.’
‘I—I walked over,’ she said, watching Sean turn around and hurriedly slope off while his sister craned forward.
‘Did you trip and hit your head on the bricks?’ he said, sliding his fingers around the back of her skull and feeling for any telltale sponginess.
‘No, I—’ Anya tried to pull her head away from his touch and saw the young girl looking down at her with pleading eyes, her hands steepled under her chin. ‘—I fell,’ she finished lamely. The girl silently folded her hands to her heart in a mime of swooning gratitude.
‘Not watching where you were going?’ murmured Scott Tyler, his dark brows drawn together as he bent over her and placed his flattened palms on either side of her neck, making her pulse jerk. Dark hair flopped across his forehead and she could see the pulse jumping at the base of his own throat through his open shirt-collar.
‘The bricks on this path are very uneven, and the steps do tend to sort of blend in,’ chipped in the cause of the accident with inventive flair.
‘I was looking up at the house,’ Anya said truthfully, gasping as his big hands smoothed over her shoulders and arms, and down her sides, his fingers trailing over the front of her ribs. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She squirmed as his hands kept going south, moving over her hips and down her legs.
‘Stop writhing about,’ he growled.
‘You’re tickling,’ she complained, and blushed when his dark lashes flicked up so that he looked directly into her eyes. Could he tell she was lying?
‘Well, at least you don’t appear to be suffering from any loss of feeling,’ he said drily. ‘And your colour seems to be coming back.’
‘I had the wind knocked out of me, that’s all,’ she said, putting a hand to her scooped neckline, drawing his attention to her yellow knitted top.
‘You look like a wilted buttercup,’ he murmured, ‘mown down by a summer breeze.’
Anya was flustered by the unexpected whimsicality of his words. Was that a poetical way of saying that she was a weakling? How would he fare on being struck by a human cannonball?
‘If you move out of the way I’ll get up,’ she said gruffly.
She began to hoist herself up on her hands but he remained where he was, tilting his head to frown at the scrape on her arm below her bunched sleeve. ‘I think it was a little more than a winding, but lying there on the damp ground certainly isn’t doing you any good.’
To her shock he slid an arm behind her shoulder blades and one under her knees and stood up in one fluid movement, tipping her high against his chest to readjust his grip under her thighs before he turned and began to retrace his steps, Samantha and the other girl trailing behind him, whispering to each other.
She pushed at his shoulder with a gritty hand, leaving a smudge on the front of his pale blue shirt. ‘Put me down…you can’t carry me—’
‘Why? Don’t you think I’m strong enough to handle a fairy-weight like you?’
She could feel the play of muscles across his chest and abdomen and the tensile pull of sinews and tendons in his arms as he moved effortlessly over the ground. He wasn’t even breathing hard as he mounted the steps to the open front door. There was no doubting his strength; it was the handling part that Anya was worried about…
‘I’m perfectly able to walk—’
‘But evidently not without falling over.’
He stepped into the hall and there was a muffled giggle behind him. ‘You just carried her over the threshold, Uncle Scott,’ Samantha Monroe informed him, her bubbly voice pregnant with meaning.
‘I doubt Miss Adams is feeling in the least bit bride-like at the moment,’ he answered repressively. ‘Go and get a bowl of hot water with disinfectant, and some cotton wool swabs would you, Sam?’ He raised his voice above the sound of her chunky sandals clattering off across the polished hardwood floor. ‘And while you’re in the kitchen getting the bowl, ask Mrs Lee to make some tea.’
‘That girl has marriage on the brain.’ He sounded sorely harassed. ‘Her sole aim in life seems to be how to snag herself a boy.’
‘Actually, from what I’ve seen at school, it’s the boys who want to snag her,’ Anya told him. ‘Samantha’s interest in marriage is probably partly self-defensive. Even fifteen-year-old boys realise that pretty girls who are misty-eyed about marriage are going to be the type to want commitment, and not likely to put out for whoever happens to be that night’s date.’
‘And people call me a cynical manipulator,’ he murmured, glancing down at the woman in his arms as if surprised by the rawness of her perception.
She tilted her chin. ‘No, do they really?’ she marvelled, widening eyes the colour of the sky on a rainy day.
‘Cat!’ he said, carrying her down the wide hall towards the living rooms. The interior walls and high, moulded plaster ceilings were the colour of whipped cream, and in daylight the impression of lightness and space was markedly different from the effect of the dark-stained panelling and densely-patterned wallpaper that Anya remembered from her childhood, or the garish coloured lights from Saturday night. The rooms off the hallway were carpeted in wheat-coloured wool which from the pristine look of it had been professionally cleaned since the party. She hoped Scott Tyler was making his nephew work off the cost.
‘I thought I was a buttercup,’ she countered.
‘A buttercup doesn’t have claws. I trust that this simple act of human kindness isn’t making you feel bridal?’ he enquired mockingly.
‘Homicidal, more like,’ she said, remembering the purpose of her visit. She kicked with her legs to signal her displeasure. ‘You can put me down now.’
‘All in good time.’
As they passed the former dining room she saw it was fitted out as an office and next door she caught a glimpse of something that genuinely widened her eyes. ‘You have a piano!’ she blurted.
His mockery turned sour. ‘Why so surprised? Did you think me too great a Philistine to own such an icon of highbrow culture?’ He turning into the living room opposite, reading the answer in her all-too-revealing flush. ‘Ah, I see…you’ve been listening to your loose-lipped cousin. Well, of course, it’s only there for pretentious show—or thumping out pub songs—whichever you think is the most offensive to good taste.’
Anya stiffened at the implication that she was a cultural snob. ‘As a matter of fact, Kate’s hardly mentioned you to me at all,’ she snapped. And then only in answer to direct questions.
His eyes gleamed as if he read her mind. ‘How frustrating for you,’ he said with a silky smile, lowering her onto a deep couch upholstered in cream-coloured linen.
She sank back into the plush cushions as he picked up her ankles one by one and calmly unzipped her boots, his hand cupping the backs of her calves as he slid them off her stockinged feet, ignoring her protest that there was no need for her to lie down.
‘Humour me,’ he said, allowing her to wriggle up so that her back was propped against the arm of the couch. ‘I don’t want to leave you any excuses to sue.’ He turned to accept the steaming bowl that Samantha had carefully carried into the room, along with a plastic box adorned with a red cross.
There was a high-pitched burble and Samantha snatched up the cordless telephone from the coffee table before it could ring a second time, her flawless complexion pinkening as she responded to the voice at the other end, twirling at one lock of golden-blonde hair around a manicured finger as she answered.
‘Oh, hi, Bevan…Yes, it’s me…Oh, nothing much, just hanging around here…Well, I don’t know—Angie and Sara want to go to the beach later…’ She wandered out of the room, the little domestic drama eclipsed in her mind by the pressing demands of a teenage social life.
Anya suffered a closer inspection of her minor bumps and grazes and clenched her teeth as they were meticulously bathed clean and the stinging patch on her arm was treated and a small dressing taped into place over the raw skin. She never would have thought that Scott Tyler could be so gentle, she thought, keeping her eyes fixed on his fingers so she didn’t have to look at the face so uncomfortably close to her own. Strangely, his deft gentleness made her feel more, rather than less vulnerable to his aggressive personality.
‘I’m using hypoallergenic sticking-plaster because I’m guessing that you have very sensitive skin,’ he said, pressing down the final piece of tape and running his thumb down the tender, velvety-smooth inside of her arm to linger over the blue veins in her fine-boned wrist.
‘Mr Tyler—’
‘Miss Adams?’ The prim way he said her name made her feel foolish for her attempt to reassert a formal distance between them. ‘You’d better call me Scott. A woman should be on first-name terms with the man who carries her over the threshold.’
The threshold of what? she thought darkly and was chagrined when she realised that she had muttered it out loud.
His eyes picked up the blue of his shirt, making their colour more intense than ever. ‘I guess that’s the lady’s choice.’ He looked down at her where he touched her. ‘I’ll bet you bruise very easily—Anya.’ He broadened the initial ‘A’, the way it was meant to be pronounced but seldom ever was by anyone outside her family, making it sound seductively foreign.
‘Yes, but I heal very quickly, too.’ He was stroking tiny circles at the flex-point of her wrist, proving his theory about her sensitivity. Anya could feel the hairs all up her arm rising as if swept by a fine electrical current.
‘Then you’re a lot more resilient than you look.’
‘I thought we were agreed that appearances could be deceptive—Scott,’ she said, and his fingers tightened briefly on her wrist and then released it to brush the specks of brick dust on her hand.
‘I’m surprised you don’t have any defensive grazes on your palms. Most people instinctively fling out their hands to try and break a fall…’
Anya’s hands had been raised to catch the girl who was now hovering at the other end of the couch, her gaze darting between them, a thoughtful wrinkle forming above the bridge of her strong nose.
‘And oddly enough it looks as if you’re going to have a bruise here.’ He lightly touched the reddened skin over her breast-bone just above the neckline of her top, his eyes puzzled as he traced what he didn’t realise to be the outline of a bony knee.
Fortunately the owner of the knee interrupted him before he noticed Anya’s spontaneous reaction to his feather-light stroking.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me to do something to help, too?’ she said, with a rather challenging look at the man now rising to his feet. ‘Or am I surplus to requirements?’
To Anya’s surprise he didn’t react to the sarcasm with his usual swift retort. He seemed momentarily at a loss, and the pair of them stared at each other across the couch, two sets of blue eyes exchanging a silent message that neither seemed able to interpret. In fact, had Anya been given the choice, she would have picked the youngster as the marginally more confident of the two.
Finally Anya couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Perhaps you’d like to see if the tea’s ready?’ she suggested brightly, swivelling her legs off the couch. ‘I could really do with something to drink.’
Scott ran a hand through his hair, suddenly released from his tension. ‘Good idea. Could you go and ask Mrs Lee for the tray, and bring it through here? And you may as well take this away,’ he added, giving her the bowl of water floating with used swabs. ‘Oh, and Miss Adams’s boots, too, please, Petra,’ he said, picking them up and handing them over. ‘Put them out on the shoe stand by the front door.’
‘Oh, right! So now I have to do everything,’ the girl griped, with a roll of her expressive eyes.
This time Scott grinned, relaxing even further. ‘Well, you did ask. And I doubt if you were doing it just to be polite, because politeness doesn’t seem to be one of your strong points.’
‘I can be polite,’ came the pert reply.
‘Then how about demonstrating your manners now? In spite of the dramatic manner of your meeting, you two haven’t yet been introduced.’ A furtive glance between the two females was smoothed into polite expectancy on both sides. ‘Miss Adams, this is my fourteen-year-old daughter, Petra Conroy—temporarily attending Hunua College from the start of the new term. Miss Adams teaches history, Petra.’
‘Yeah, so Sam told me. Hi, Miss Adams!’
Petra patently enjoyed the shock in Anya’s murmured greeting, giving her a huge grin before strolling out the door. As she stepped into the hallway, Anya realised the reason for her dance to take off her shoes. Her bare feet made no sound on the wooden floor. She would have been silently fleet up the wooden staircase and deliberately rowdy thundering back down. A girl with a great deal of natural wit and cunning, she thought. I wonder where she inherited that from?—probably the same person who had given her those forget-me-not eyes.
‘You have a daughter?’ she couldn’t help saying. ‘I didn’t know you’d ever been m—’ she stopped, biting her lip, but he was quick to embarrass her over her near faux pas.
‘Married? I haven’t. I hope you don’t make that conventional assumption about the parents of your pupils at the college; a lot of them come from painfully fragmented backgrounds.’
‘I know that.’ Anya repudiated the criticism. ‘I meant that I hadn’t heard that you had children—’
‘A child, and I don’t “have” her. She’s lived with her mother in Australia since before she was born,’ he said, dropping into the armchair opposite the couch, his outstretched arms dropping over the padded arms, the casual sprawl of his legs a direct counterpoint to her neat, straight-backed, knees-together, ankles-crossed pose.
‘Oh,’ she said, searching for the proper response to such a statement. ‘You must have been quite young yourself when she was born—’
‘Eighteen.’ He saved her the maths. ‘She was conceived while I was still at school.’ His daughter wasn’t the only one with a propensity to shock. Anya tried to control her expression but some of her involuntary disapproval must have leaked out because his mouth drooped sardonically. ‘And no, I didn’t carelessly get my teenage girlfriend pregnant. Lorna was thirty, and she was the one making all the decisions about our relationship, including the one to have and raise a child on her own.’
Anya’s mouth fell open and the corner of his mouth ticked up in satisfaction.
‘What’s the matter? Aren’t I conforming to the stereotype image you’ve created of me?’
She was so stunned she instinctively spoke the truth. ‘I…you—I just have difficulty thinking of you as a…a junior partner in any relationship,’ she stammered.
‘Everyone has to get their experience from somewhere,’ he told her, and for one horrible moment she thought he was going to demand to know where she had got hers. She tried not to think about Alistair Grant any more, except in his capacity as her parents’ agent. Anyway, she was sure that her limited experience was of no interest to Scott Tyler.
‘Are you saying you were a—’ Suddenly she realised what she had been going to ask and her whole body suffused with heat. It was no business of hers. How could she even think of asking such an intimate question of a man she barely knew, a man she had come here to angrily confront?
‘A virgin?’ he said with explicit clarity, relishing the sight of her fiery blush and the embarrassed flutter of her guilty grey eyes. ‘Perhaps not physically but emotionally it was certainly a first for me.’
‘You were in love with her?’
‘I was flattered by the attentions of a very attractive, intelligent, older woman,’ he replied with exquisite evasiveness. He might want to slap her in the face with the raw facts of life, but he evidently wasn’t prepared to reveal the secrets of his heart.
Anya moistened her dry lips. ‘H-have you been able to see your daughter very often?’ She ventured onto what she thought was more conventional conversational ground.
‘Not since she was a baby. Lorna wanted it that way. She didn’t want any financial support and in exchange I agreed not to involve myself in her child’s life.’ He shrugged at her indrawn breath. ‘I was eighteen…what did I know? As Lorna pointed out, I had no money and at least four years of law school ahead of me. I wasn’t ready for parenthood—she was…’
There was more to it than that, Anya was sure of it; his whole attitude was simply too nonchalant. ‘So what’s Petra doing here now? Has something happened to her mother?’
‘No. Petra decided that it was time she tracked down her biological father. After an argument with Lorna about it she ran away from home, hopped a plane—booked with her mother’s credit card—and turned up on my doorstep last week.’
‘Good lord…!’ Climbing out of a second-floor window was probably a breeze compared with what she had already risked.
‘After some discussion Lorna and I agreed that since Petra felt so strongly about it she should stay here for a few weeks and get to know her paternal relations—as long as she doesn’t miss her schooling. History is one of her subjects and since you may find her in one of your classes I thought it might help you to know a bit about her background.’
‘Talking about me, Dad?’ Petra waltzed in with a laden tray which she set down on the coffee table with a cheerful rattle.
‘Who else? You are the current hot topic around here,’ said her father drily. He looked down at the tray and raised his eyebrows. ‘Three cups? Nice try, Petra. If you go back to your room right now we’ll only add—’ he checked his steel watch ‘—another half an hour onto your sentence to make up the difference.’
‘But Dad—I was rescuing someone. I should get time off for good behaviour!’ Petra had the grace to flush when she looked over and saw Anya’s lowered brows. ‘OK, OK,’ she amended hastily. ‘But this sucks. All I did was tell Sean what I thought of his brain-dead friends.’
‘In language I’m more used to hearing in police holding cells than at my own breakfast table. And throwing food is completely unacceptable.’ Anya looked at him through her lashes as he was laying down the law, hiding her amusement. He might know nothing about parenthood but he was obviously a fast learner. ‘None of us are used to living with each other, but if we act civilised and respect each other’s boundaries we can all get along. My house, my rules, Petra—and I don’t think a couple of hours of time out is unreasonable punishment. You spend more time than that plugged into the stereo in your room every day. In fact, why don’t you take up that book about New Zealand I was going to lend you? In a couple of hours you could learn some of the things you may need to know in school next week. Why don’t you pour Miss Adams’s tea while I get it?’
There was a small silence after he left the room until Petra rushed into speech.
‘Hey, thanks for not dobbing me in!’ She picked up the china teapot and poured out two cups, pushing one across the coffee table to Anya and carefully sugaring and stirring the other before positioning it within easy reach from the vacant chair.
Anya watched this small, telling act with a softening heart but she wasn’t going to be bamboozled by her emotions.
‘I fell for a good con job,’ she chided in her cool, clear voice. ‘But it won’t happen a second time. What you did today wasn’t reckless, it was just plain stupid, and really dangerous. The fright your father got when he saw me lying there was nothing to the anguish he would have felt if it had been you. You might not have died, but you could have had to live the rest of your life unable to function as an individual, with your father blaming himself for not taking better care of you. If nothing else, at least have consideration for the feelings of others before you give in to your selfish impulses.’
She found herself being regarded with unexpected awe. ‘Wow!’
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘Nothing.’ The girl shook her head, but then blurted: ‘You wouldn’t think to look at you but you’re real good at making a person feel bad.’ Her husky voice dropped into quiet sincerity. ‘I was just sneaking out to prove that I could—I won’t do it again, I promise.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘I knew as soon as I got out there that it was a dumb thing to do but I couldn’t get back in, so I figured it was better to go down as quick as I could so there was less far to fall. I thought it was too dorky to yell for help. I really am sorry.’
‘You had to yell for help anyway,’ Anya pointed out.
‘Yeah, but it’s cool to do it for another person,’ the girl pointed out with unarguable truth.
When her father came back with the promised book she was quick to beat a retreat.
‘She probably won’t even open it,’ he grunted, sitting down and reaching for his tea.
‘Uh, Petra’s already done that for you,’ said Anya when he ladled in a another teaspoonful of sugar.
He paused in his stirring. ‘Then why didn’t you stop me?’ he said, irritated.
‘I’m sorry my reactions weren’t fast enough for you,’ she replied astringently. ‘I didn’t know I was supposed to police the sugar bowl. For all I know you could need all that extra sweetening,’ she added in a dulcet tone, taking a sip of her own, unadulterated tea.
He shoved the over-sweetened drink back onto the tray and poured himself another in the spare cup, adding a sparse teaspoon of sugar, then sat back in his chair and regarded her with a threatening attentiveness.
‘So, to what do I owe the honour of this visit? Or were you simply strolling by and decided to “trip” in for a neighbourly chat?’ His ironic inflexion stressed the fact that she had never made any such neighbourly gesture before.
‘I walked across the fields because my car battery is flat,’ she told him, to disabuse him of any notion that she was in the habit of skulking around his property. ‘And you must know why I’ve come!’
‘Must I?’ His eyes were steady over the rim of his cup.
‘Don’t play word games with me!’ Her fingers tightened on the edges of the delicate bone-china saucer as she forced herself to calm down. ‘I’m talking about your phone call last night to Mark Ransom. You made absolutely no effort to contact me to get my side of the story about Saturday night, so I quite naturally assumed that you had got the full truth out of Sean. Now I find out that without even bothering to give me the chance to explain you’ve complained to the college—’
‘Actually, I did try to contact you last night to warn you what I was doing, but I was unable to get through,’ he interrupted, taking a fraction of the wind out of her sails. ‘And this morning I’ve been tied up in conference calls…’
Anya had been careless hanging up after Kate’s phone call the previous night and hadn’t discovered the receiver was still dislodged from the cradle until early this morning. That still didn’t excuse what he’d done. She set her tea down on the coffee table with an angry rattle.
‘You wanted to warn me that you were going to stab me in the back with unsubstantiated lies? Mark is coming to see me and I don’t even know what kind of slanderous allegations he’s going to throw at me!’ She had the satisfaction of seeing him frown. ‘What exactly did you say to him? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’
‘Calm down…’
‘Calm down?’ She was outraged. ‘This is my career we’re talking about!’
He waved a dismissive hand. ‘I know exactly what I’ve done. And I haven’t made any allegations or complaints about you or your conduct. I merely informed Ransom—as a friendly courtesy—that there was an unauthorised party here on Saturday night and a lot of kids from the school were here with illicit alcohol and that you also were here at one point, collecting some partygoers—’
‘—and prancing around in my underwear,’ she finished his sentence bitterly.
He kept his gravelly voice even. ‘I didn’t mention your state of dress—or lack of it. I was purposefully vague. Ransom knows you, you’re friends—he’s not going to automatically assume the worst.’ As he had! ‘I told him that Sean was being appropriately punished—fortunately his memory of the evening is pretty much a total blur—’
‘Fortunately for Sean, you mean!’
His mouth thinned but he held onto his patience. ‘For both of you. The only things Sean recalls of the latter part of the night is you chewing him out for what was going on, and him throwing up. After that everything’s a blank. He doesn’t even remember me arriving on the scene, let alone what he said to me, or what you were or weren’t wearing at the time…’
Anya felt a brief pang of dizzy relief. ‘Then why on earth did you have to go telling tales to Mark?’
‘Because word has a way of getting round, and it’s easier to attack with the facts than defend against rumours,’ he told her, his blue eyes persuasively intent on her stormy face. ‘Sean says that the party was supposed to be just for his rugby mates and their girlfriends, but it became an open secret around school and more and more people kept turning up on the night.’
He picked up her cup and handed it back to her, still holding her captive with his compelling gaze, and she automatically began drinking, the hot liquid easing the angry tightness in her throat. ‘I had a few calls from concerned parents yesterday about the state their children had arrived home in after what they had been told was an evening of watching videos. The phones have been running hot amongst the kids and before I warned him to keep his mouth shut Sean had already told a few of his mates that you had caught him with “some rich chick”, and no doubt they told a few of their mates, probably embellishing as people tend to do when they’re telling a good story. There are probably others, too, who’ll remember seeing you when you arrived at the party and start wondering why…’
‘Oh, no…’ Anya sighed, beginning to perceive the enormity of the problem in which she was entangled.
‘Oh, yes. Trust me on this, Anya, it’s my own field of expertise: it’s always safer to be the source rather than the victim of information. If rumours are flying around, we definitely don’t want it to look as if we’ve tried to cover anything up, because that implies that there’s something worth covering up in all this. As it is, only you and I know what happened in that bedroom, and as long as we corroborate each other’s story there won’t be problems about it. I’m sorry I couldn’t wait for your prior approval, but it was imperative to make a pre-emptive statement before any whispering campaign got started that could affect you in the classroom, or some parent formally approached the school.’
Trust him? Anya swallowed another mouthful of tea. She supposed she didn’t have much choice, and everything he had said did seem to make solid sense.
‘Well…’ Suddenly she realised the most important point she had almost overlooked. She straightened. ‘So you now admit I was telling the truth about what happened? That you were wrong about me.’
‘You can’t blame me for—’ He halted as she gave him the haughty-eyebrow routine. He inclined his head. ‘On this occasion, yes…I was wrong,’ he conceded, with an obvious difficulty that made the admission all the sweeter as far as Anya was concerned. He picked up the decorative plate of home baking which had remained ignored on the tray, and offered it as a blatant distraction.
‘Biscuit? Mrs Lee has a very light hand with brownies.’
‘Thank you.’ She took her time selecting one and then continued to press her advantage in the same, insistent tone. ‘And, of course, you take back all those terribly insulting things you said to me…’
His eyes narrowed and he put down the plate with a thump, giving her a sharkish smile. ‘I’m afraid I’m not prepared to give you a wholesale retraction. Why don’t you be a little more specific? You tell me what each insult was, and I’ll either agree or disagree to withdraw it.’
And in the process make her repeat every embarrassing one. Anya bit down on her biscuit with unnecessary force and nearly choked on the crumbs that exploded onto her tongue.
He watched her splutter for a moment, her eyes watering as she washed down the crumbs with the dregs of her tea, and leaned forward, his smile shifting into shocking suavity and his voice deepening to a sexy throb. ‘I am, of course, deeply sorry to have caused you any degree of discomfort whatsoever and hope that you’ll accept my most humble apologies for having the temerity to doubt a lady’s word…’
‘Oh, very prettily done,’ she said, outwardly unimpressed while inside her bones were resonating to the rich vibrancy of his tone. ‘A for effort and acting, but you get a definite F in sincerity.’
His suavity was discarded as he burst out laughing. ‘You’re a hard woman.’
‘I’m glad you finally realise it.’
‘Then I needn’t worry about putting you through this next ordeal, though I think we both understand that it has to be done…’
The ‘ordeal’ turned out to be an apology from a very subdued Sean Monroe who, with his uncle standing with folded arms behind him, trotted out a few stilted words that didn’t quite conceal a lingering hint of truculence.
‘I don’t remember whatever it was I’m supposed to have done, but Uncle Scott said I acted like an obnoxious little kid so I guess I’m sorry for that, and whatever…and thanks for helping me when I was sick…’
Anya didn’t prolong his agony, accepting the olive branch with a casualness that she hoped wouldn’t leave any lasting feelings of resentment. She could see no hint of a smirk in his brown eyes which would indicate that the blank spots in his memory were anything but genuine.
‘Very clever to make him feel he made a fool of himself behaving like a silly little boy instead of a bad, macho stud,’ she commented to Scott when his nephew had slouched out. ‘Maybe he won’t be so keen to let himself get out of control in future.’
‘Maybe. He wants to be a professional rugby player and he has talent, but whether he has the long-term application and the temperament, I don’t know. His problem is that he enjoys being the sports superstar too much and expects it to earn him special treatment off the rugby field as well.’
He had accompanied her to the door, where she slipped on her boots. ‘At the moment he’s bitter because I’ve grounded him for the next three weeks, which means he’ll miss the first two weeks of rugby training when he gets back to school. I suppose you think I’m being too lenient.’
‘Actually I think you’re wise not to go overboard,’ she said mildly, perceiving in his acid comment an underlying doubt that appealed for her professional reassurance. ‘Except possibly—’ she hesitated, then forced herself to confront the worrying issue ‘—except where drugs are concerned…’
His face took on an expressive grimness. ‘Don’t worry, he and I have dealt with that as an entirely separate issue. I’m inclined to accept his claim that it was a one-off, because he’s obsessive about smoking or anything that might affect his fitness, but it’s still something that his parents are going to have to look into when they get back.’
Their new and tentative peace accord was almost breached when Scott refused to let Anya walk back home alone in spite of her insistence that she was perfectly recovered from her small accident. Under the threat that otherwise he would walk her home himself, step-by-step, she found herself bullied into his prowling silver Jaguar, which ate up the distance in no time flat.
Being enclosed in a small space with him heightened her unwilling physical awareness until she was responding to every drawn breath and slight shift of his body, and she began to quietly fret at the thought that he might choose to linger when they arrived at their destination. She couldn’t very well refuse to invite him in if he asked, but she knew that once he had been in her home his pervasive image would be even more deeply imprinted on her consciousness.
To her mingled relief and disappointment he merely dropped her at her front gate as she requested, with a glance at his watch and a brief instruction to answer Mark’s questions without going into unnecessary detail, and to try to sound casual and amused rather than angry or shocked.