Anya backed away. “I think it’s time I was in bed—”

“You’re right, of course,” Scott agreed smoothly, putting out a hand to cover hers as she grasped the first door handle. “Wrong room,” he purred in her ear, drawing her back against his naked chest.

“I—it’s very late,” she tried.

“Yes, it is…far too late for either of us to back out.” He nuzzled the side of her neck. “I’ve been thinking about this all night…and so have you.”

Her head fell back against his shoulder. “I don’t think I’m cut out for this kind of affair—”

“How do you know what kind of affair it’s going to be until you give it a chance?” he asked. “Give me a chance to make love to you and you might find out that our affair is exactly what you need.”

SUSAN NAPIER was born on St. Valentine’s Day, so it’s not surprising she has developed an enduring love of romantic stories. She started her writing career as a journalist in Auckland, New Zealand, trying her hand at romance fiction only after she had married her handsome boss! Numerous books later she still lives with her most enduring hero, two future heroes—her sons!—two cats and a computer. When she’s not writing she likes to read and cook, often simultaneously!

A Passionate Proposition
Susan Napier

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER ONE

TO THE nervous girl hovering in the darkened doorway, the woman sitting at the long, scuffed dining table looked discouragingly absorbed, her slender body propped over a lecture pad as her pen danced across the ruled page. An untidy array of loose-leaf pages and open books fanned across the table-top in front of her and a half-drunk cup of tea sat forgotten at her elbow. The standard lamp which she had dragged over from the corner of the room to supplement the feeble naked bulb dangling from the ceiling poured yellow light down onto her bent head, refining the neat knot of fine, straight hair at the nape of her neck from its usual dishwater-blonde to burnished gold. Even in a boxy white shirt and fawn cargo pants she still managed to look enviously feminine.

Miss Adams had always seemed kind and approachable; she’d never shouted, or played favourites or picked on kids for things about themselves that they couldn’t help, as some of the other teachers at Eastbrook did. Right now, however, her delicately etched features looked aloof in their intentness and the girl’s misgivings overwhelmed her dwindling store of courage.

After all, Miss Adams was no longer teaching at Eastbrook Academy for Girls. She had left at the end of the previous year and moved out to the sticks to teach history at Hunua College, the local state high school. The fact that she was helping out on this special fifth-formers’ camp during the holiday break between the first and second terms didn’t mean she was ever coming back to Eastbrook. She was only here because Old Bag Carmichael had got sick and none of the other teachers from school were available to come and take her place. Miss Marshall would have had to cancel the rest of the camp if she hadn’t remembered that her friend and former colleague lived in the nearby town of Riverview. Luckily Miss Adams had been free to donate a few days of her time, but she certainly wasn’t going to be around to help cope with any fallout from tonight’s escapade—and there was bound to be heaps of aggro back at school if the other girls found out who had tattled, no matter that it had been out of worry rather than malice.

Clutching her loose pyjamas against her hollow stomach, the girl began to edge backwards into the gloom of the hallway, but it was too late.

As Anya turned her head to look up another reference she caught sight of a pale flutter out of the corner of her eye and was wrenched from her absorption, her heart pumping in alarm at the prospect of an intruder.

She didn’t usually jump at shadows, but Anya was conscious that the regional park’s accommodation was sited in a relatively isolated part of the shoreline reserve, and that she was currently the sole protector of four teenage girls. Cathy Marshall, the camp’s supervising teacher, had taken the rest of the girls out with the park ranger to count and record the number of nocturnal bird-calls in the surrounding bush, part of an ongoing park survey on behalf of the Conservation Department.

Her pulse slowed in relief as she recognised the tall, gawky figure of one of her temporary charges.

‘Hello, Jessica, what are you doing up?’

Glancing at her slim gold watch, Anya saw that it was well past midnight. She had been taking advantage of the quiet to catch up on some of the research which she had planned to do during these holidays and the time had passed more swiftly than she had realised.

‘I…uh…’ Jessica swallowed audibly, shifting her weight from one pyjama-clad leg to the other.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ Anya asked, pitching her cool, clear voice low in deference to the night. ‘Is your stomach hurting again?’

Jessica and her bunkmate had suffered a mild case of the collywobbles after gorging themselves on guava berries which they had picked off a bush hanging over a roadside fence.

Jessica blinked rapidly. ‘No…uh…I just came down to…to…’ She trailed off, gnawing her lower lip as her dark eyes skated around the room, searching for inspiration, ‘…to get a drink of water,’ she finished lamely.

Anya decided to overlook the rather obvious invention.

‘I see. Well, what are you waiting for?’ She tilted her head towards the open kitchen door behind her. ‘Help yourself.’

Returning her attention to her books, she listened as the kitchen light clicked on, and after an extended pause there came the squeak of a cupboard door, a clink of china and a gush of water. There was another long silence before the light snapped off and Jessica trailed slowly back, to linger once more in the doorway.

Anya raised her eyebrows above abstracted grey eyes, set wide apart in her delicate face. ‘Was there something else?’ she murmured, her mind still half on the open page in front of her.

Her impatience caused an agonised pinkening of Jessica’s freckled complexion as she hurriedly shook her curly head, but her fingers continued to anxiously twist and tug at the hem of her pyjama jacket.

Anya suppressed an inward sigh and put her pen down.

‘Are you sure?’ she coaxed, her mouth curving in a sympathetic smile that banished the former impression of cool reserve. ‘If you can’t sleep, maybe you’d like to stay down here and chat for a while?’ she probed gently.

An expression of yearning flitted across Jessica’s uncertain face. ‘Well…’

‘Is there a problem with some of the other girls?’

‘No!’ Her guess had Jessica almost tripping over her tongue with an over-hasty denial. ‘I mean, n-no, thanks—it’s OK…really! I—I feel quite sleepy now…’ She punctuated her stammered words with an unconvincing yawn. ‘Uh—goodnight, Miss Adams…’ She turned tail and scampered up the stairs.

Anya took up her pen again and tried to return to her research, but the memory of Jessica’s anxious expression nagged at her conscience. She regretted the initial dismissive-ness which had cost her the girl’s confidence. Anya’s ability to gain and hold the trust of her students was mentioned in her reference as one of her major strengths as a teacher. It was largely thanks to that glowing reference from Eastbrook’s headmistress that she had gained her challenging new post and, after allowing herself to be persuaded to sacrifice a few days of her precious holiday to help run this camp, the least she owed her former school was to fulfil her responsibilities with good grace.

Anya had been a boarding pupil herself at Eastbrook, and was aware of the bitter feuds, petty cruelties and reckless dares that were carried out behind the house mistresses’ backs. Remembering some of those escapades, she felt her guilt deepen to active unease and she pushed back her chair, gathering her books and papers up into a neat pile which she stowed in her zipped backpack. It was past time she packed up anyway. Tomorrow was the final day of the camp and the schedule was crammed full of activities, right up until the time that the bus was due to ferry the girls back to school. Then Anya would be at liberty to return to the peace and quiet of her cosy cottage. After years of sharing various accommodations she was revelling in the freedom of total independence, and these past few days of communal living had reconfirmed her belief that she had done the right thing in finally striking out on her own.

Friends and family had thought her crazy for moving to rural South Auckland and taking on a hefty mortgage at the same time as a new job, but at twenty-six Anya had felt it was time for her to take control of her life. It had been a childhood dream to live here in the countryside, and as an adult she now had the power to turn her dream into a permanent reality.

She carried her bag up to the cramped cubicle in which she and Cathy were quartered before walking quietly down the gloomy corridor towards the twin rooms the girls were sharing. She paused outside the first door, eyeing the square of pasteboard slotted into the metal holder which announced the room assignment.

Cheryl and Emma.

Her intuition hummed.

Cheryl Marko and Emma Johnson were a tiresome duo of spoiled little madams who had made it starkly plain that they were only here because the conservation camp was a compulsory part of the syllabus for boarding pupils. They had been due to go out on tonight’s bird survey with the others, but Cathy had allowed them to stay behind when, coincidentally, both had complained at the last minute of severe period cramps.

Rather too coincidentally, Anya had thought, doling out mild analgesics to the pair as they had languished smugly in their sleeping bags while the rest of the girls clattered out on their mission.

She eased the door ajar and ducked her head inside the darkened room. A full moon pierced the gaps in the uneven curtains, casting pale bars of light over the narrow bunk beds, striping two motionless lumps in the bunched sleeping bags.

Reassured, Anya was about to withdraw when she hesitated, her grey eyes narrowing. For a couple of fashion-obsessed teenagers who constantly preened over their rake-thin bodies, they were displaying suspiciously voluptuous outlines!

Darting inside, she stripped back the hood of the first sleeping bag and stared in dismay at the untidy sausage of towels and designer-label clothes which had been used to pad out the empty interior. A quick check of the second bag yielded the same result.

Her stomach clenched in apprehension. Of course, it was quite possible that Cheryl and Emma were off on some innocent teenage escapade, but she had the sinking feeling that their sophisticated tastes wouldn’t be satisfied by a common-or-garden midnight feast or giggling dorm raid.

A quick search of the rest of the empty rooms revealed no sign of the missing pair and, clinging to the slim hope that her instincts were wrong, Anya opened one final door and flicked on the overhead light.

‘Girls?’

Jessica jerked bolt upright in her sleeping bag, her spectacles still perched on her nose, while in the next bed a chubby redhead rolled over onto her back, blinking blearily into the glare as she struggled into wakefulness.

‘Cheryl and Emma seem to have disappeared,’ said Anya crisply. ‘Do either of you know where they’ve gone?’

She fixed her eyes on the redhead’s sleep-creased face.

‘Kristin? You’re friends with both of them—did they say anything to you about what they were planning to do?’

‘I was feeling so rotten earlier, Miss Adams, that I didn’t really pay attention to what anyone was saying,’ she replied plaintively.

Anya wasn’t fooled by the self-pitying evasion, nor was she in any mood for a drawn-out question and answer session.

‘What a pity,’ she sighed. ‘I was hoping to handle this on my own, but I guess I don’t really have a choice. You girls should get dressed—the police will probably want a word with you—’

‘The police?’ Jessica gasped.

‘B-but—shouldn’t you wait a bit longer before you do anything?’ gulped Kristin. ‘That’s what Miss Marshall would do if she was here. I mean—they’ll probably turn up soon, anyway…’

‘I can’t take the risk—not with a beach and river nearby,’ Anya said firmly. ‘If I was still on staff it would be different, but I’m just an unofficial helper on this trip. I can’t simply do nothing—that decision isn’t mine to take. Fortunately we have their parents’ phone numbers—’

It was the master stroke.

‘Their parents?’ Kristin’s flush of horror almost matched her vivid hair. ‘You can’t call Cheryl’s Dad—he’d go ballistic! They only went to a party!’

‘A party?’ Anya’s heart sank even further. ‘What party? Where?’

The facts that reluctantly emerged were hardly reassuring. A group of local boys who had been tossing a rugby ball around on the sand that afternoon while the girls were playing a game of beach-volleyball had extended the invitation to a party at one of their homes. Cheryl and Emma, the only ones daring enough to accept, had arranged to be picked up outside the gates of the regional park at ten o’clock by one of the boys in his car. They had been promised a ride back any time they wanted to leave the party.

Anya hid her horror. ‘You mean they agreed to go off in a car with total strangers?’ She racked her brains to remember exactly who she had seen on the beach. She had noticed several familiar faces from her new school, and had been able to reassure Cathy that the boys weren’t a roaming gang of thugs.

‘No, of course not!’ Even Kristin knew the difference between reckless defiance and outright stupidity. ‘It’s OK, Miss Adams—because Emma knew a couple of them from one of the bands who played at our school ball!’

Anya rolled her eyes. Oh, great…raging hormones and delusions of rock star grandeur!

The last straw was finding out that one of the big attractions of the party was the lack of any supervising adults.

‘Emma said that this really cute guy—the one whose party it is—told her that it would be a real rave because he had the house to himself for the whole weekend,’ added Jessica.

When pressed, Kristin was vague on the exact location of the party. ‘The boys said it would only take about ten minutes to drive there. Some big, two-storeyed place on the other side of Riverview…’

‘A white house on a hill, with a bridge at the gate and a stand of Norfolk pine trees,’ added Jessica, whose memory was as sharp as her intellect.

Anya’s mouth went suddenly dry and prickles of alarm feathered the back of her skull.

‘The Pines?’ she asked, her voice sounding shrill to her own ears. ‘Was the house called The Pines?’

Kristin had turned sulky again. ‘Yeah, that’s it…’

‘And you’re sure about there being no adults there?’

Kristin nodded and was even more disgruntled ten minutes later as she clambered into the back seat of Anya’s small car.

‘I don’t see why we have to go,’ she grumbled. ‘We’re not the ones in trouble.’

‘Because no one’s answering the phone at The Pines and I’m not leaving you two here alone while I go and get Cheryl and Emma,’ said Anya as she fumbled in the glove-compartment for the wire-rimmed spectacles she used when driving and reversed the car out of the parking area. She’d left an explanatory note for Cathy, although she expected to be back well before the group returned from their survey.

Her hands tightened on the wheel as she turned from the bumpy track onto the narrow sealed road which was the main route from the coast to the suburbs of South Auckland and tried to soothe her taut nerves. She was probably overreacting. It wasn’t as if she herself hadn’t sneaked out to an illicit party or two during her school days—it was more or less de rigueur for senior boarders, and even an otherwise goody-two-shoes like Anya had been obliged to break a few rules in order to assure a peaceful life in the dorm.

The trouble was that in the four months since she had left Eastbrook she had got used to not concerning herself with after-hours student high jinks. One of the things she enjoyed about teaching at Hunua College was the separation between work and leisure. When she left school each afternoon she shrugged off her responsibilities at the gate. Oh, she took home lesson plans and piles of work to mark, but she wasn’t personally responsible for the welfare of the kids themselves until the start of the next school day.

‘What if they’ve already gone when we get there?’ Jessica asked suddenly. ‘What if they come back another way and we miss them?’

‘This is the only road from Riverview to the regional park,’ Anya told her, ‘and there’s very little traffic along it at this time of night, so we should notice if they pass us. Besides, Cheryl and Emma told Kristin they would be back around two, so they shouldn’t have left yet—’

‘Unless the party’s a bust and they’ve gone on somewhere else,’ came the sly comment from the back seat.

Anya gritted her teeth. As if she didn’t have enough worries to contend with! ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?’

She continued to drive in tense silence. Fortunately it was a beautifully clear night, with only the suicidal dance of nocturnal insects in the high beam of her headlights to distract her from the road. The fields on either side of the unwinding ribbon of tarseal were bathed in monochromatic moonbeams and every now and then a glow of warm yellow light pinpointed a farmhouse tucked amongst a wind belt of trees, or perched on the grassy slopes of the foothills which folded themselves up against the towering shelter of the Hunua Ranges.

Ten minutes had been a macho exaggeration on the boys’ part, for it was a full fifteen minutes at strictly legal speed before Anya reached the cluster of shops, houses and agribusinesses that made up the small township of Riverview.

She eased up on her speed, not even glancing in the direction of her darkened cottage, set back from the road in the large, overgrown garden which had become her personal challenge and private pleasure. Before she had gone away to school she had spent most of her childhood in a succession of inner-city hotels and apartments where the closest thing to a garden had been a potted palm.

They passed the community’s one and only petrol station at the far end of the shops, its neon sign switched off and forecourt pumps locked. As buildings gave way to wire fences and trimmed hedgerows again Anya planted her foot back down on the accelerator, eager to get the coming ordeal over. She hoped that Cheryl and Emma would have the good sense to be co-operative when she fetched them away. She wanted the rescue operation to go as smoothly as possible, preferably without any dramatic scenes that might stir up more trouble than she could handle.

She didn’t fancy having to deal with two recalcitrant, and quite possibly drunken, teenagers on her own, let alone a whole partyful. Although she was fit, and considered herself reasonably strong for her build, at little over five feet three inches in height she was often dwarfed by her senior students and relied on intelligence, compassion and humour to command their respect, rather than a dominating physical presence.

Her tension tightened another notch as they came over a curving rise in the road and a row of trees loomed up suddenly on the left, towering triangles of stiffly outflung branches etched darkly against the night sky in the classic Christmas tree shape. Even expecting the familiar sight, Anya felt an unwelcome leap of her pulse.

‘Is this it?’ Jessica’s excited query was redundant as Anya braked sharply and turned off the road, the little car vibrating as its tyres rumbled over the wooden planks which bridged the deep, open drainage ditch running along the grassy verge.

At the end of a long, steeply rising sealed driveway lined with overlacing trees, they could see the big, white weatherboard house, multi-coloured lights glowing dimly behind the drawn curtains of the downstairs windows. Even with the car windows closed they could hear the heavy, rhythmic throb of a bass-beat reverberating through the walls of the house.

‘No wonder they didn’t hear the phone ring,’ murmured Anya, pulling up behind the haphazard scatter of cars parked on the paved turning circle in front of the house.

After a brief hesitation she removed the keys from the ignition and stepped out of the car, bending down to speak through the open door. ‘You two stay where you are. Lock the doors and don’t open them for anyone else but me…or Cheryl and Emma. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Don’t get impatient if you have to wait a while, and don’t get out of the car!’

Having made her point as forcefully as she could, Anya slammed the door and locked it, dropping the key into the hip pocket of her cargo pants and slipping her folded glasses into the breast pocket of her shirt as she hurried towards the sheltering portico that framed the front door.

Pushing on the doorbell brought no response. Frustrated, she tried knocking, then twisted at the ornate brass doorknob and found that it opened easily. A tentative push allowed her to step inside, where the muffled pounding which had filtered through the exterior walls escalated into an ear-crashing assault that made Anya wince.

There was little doubt she had come to the right place. There was one hell of a party going on!

Lithe young bodies were everywhere—gyrating to the music, propped against walls, sprawled over the furniture and floors; some were entwined in eye-popping embraces, others conducted point-blank conversations at shriek-level in competition with the musical cacophony. Bottles, cans, glasses and the remains of snack packets and pizza crusts seemed to litter every available flat surface. The atmosphere was hazy with cigarette smoke and thick with an aromatic combination of perfume, warm beer and sweat.

Anya threaded her way from room to room, searching for Cheryl’s golden-blonde mane and the iridescent black tank-top that Kristin had said Emma was wearing, her task made more difficult by the red-and purple-coloured light-bulbs which had been screwed into the lamps, casting a murky glow over the seething figures, blending the youthful faces into an amorphous mass.

At last she spotted a familiar figure scrunched in the corner of a couch, being leered at by a lanky youth who looked unattractively worse for wear. She was grimly satisfied to note that Emma didn’t appear to be enjoying herself very much.

The girl looked up as Anya approached, her pale face registering shock, disbelief and fleeting panic, swiftly superseded by an unmistakable flicker of relief.

‘Come on,’ Anya mouthed against the music, taking hold of her unresisting wrist and tugging her off the couch, ignoring the boy’s slurred protest as she dragged his hapless companion off through the crowd.

‘Where’s Cheryl?’ asked Anya, when she had steered her to the front door, where the noise level was slightly less brain-crushing.

Emma bit her lip, her frightened gaze darting nervously over Anya’s shoulder. ‘She went upstairs—a-about ten minutes ago…She said we weren’t going to separate…but—but then she went up there with one of the boys who asked us to the party—Sean, he said his name was…’

A chill went down Anya’s spine and a cold weight coalesced in her stomach. ‘Jessica and Kristin are outside in my car. Go and get into it. Do it now!’

She paused only long enough to make sure the girl headed out of the door before she turned and raced up the staircase, which was clogged with people sitting on the narrow rises.

Once at the top she sped along the central hall rattling doors. Some of the rooms were locked, and in one that wasn’t she flushed out false game: a giggling pair whom she sent smartly on their way. When she tried the next door it was flung open by a lone young girl with brutally short black hair bleached at the tips and a prominent nosering. Padded headphones hung around her slender neck, the wire trailing down to her bare feet.

‘What!’ she barked, hands planted on the skinny hips encased in scruffy denim jeans, her black-glossed lips peeled back in a ferocious snarl.

Anya’s single-minded focus momentarily slipped at the startling image of bristling hostility.

‘Ah…I’m looking for Sean,’ she faltered, and was rewarded by a contemptuous narrowing of cobalt-blue eyes.

‘A bit old for him, aren’t you?’ was the insulting response, followed by an uninterested jerk of the head. ‘His bedroom’s down at the far end—but the idiot’s probably too trashed by now to do you any good!’

The door was slammed in her face just as suddenly as it had been whipped open, and Anya shook her head over the odd encounter as she raced down to the end of the hall.

Charging through the unlocked door, she pulled up short at the sight of the rumpled single bed where Cheryl knelt, her mouth betrayingly swollen, her clothing disarranged but thankfully still in place. Beside her on the edge of the bed sat a shirtless male in unsnapped jeans, listing heavily to one side as he drained the dregs of a small bottle of vodka and lemon mix.

Sean Monroe was one of the stars of Hunua College’s first XV rugby team and had the build to prove it. Even though he was still only seventeen, his broad shoulders and thick muscles were more suggestive of a man than a boy, but the sulky defiance that appeared on his handsome face when he saw Anya confirmed he still had a lot of maturing to do.

They knew each other by sight only, since history wasn’t one of his subjects, but Anya could have done without this kind of introduction. He would never forgive her for ruining his fun.

‘Cheryl, are you all right?’ For the second time that night Anya observed an unexpected spark of relief in the humiliated gaze of her quarry.

The girl nodded jerkily as she scrambled awkwardly off the bed, raking her tangled hair back from her face.

‘He tried to make me share his drink but I didn’t like the taste,’ she said in a rather wobbly voice. She gave her companion a nervous look as he flopped back on the bed with a groan. ‘I don’t think Sean’s feeling very well, Miss Adams.’

‘I wonder why?’ said Anya with crisp sarcasm, devoid of any shred of sympathy.

Her gaze shifted to a beer can which was doubling as an ashtray and she took a closer look at what she had assumed was a relatively innocent cigarette.

‘I suppose he tried to make you share that with him, too,’ she said, her voice tight with anger as she pointed at the smouldering joint.

‘I only had a couple of puffs,’ Cheryl defended herself. ‘It just made me feel dizzy and sick to my stomach.’

Much as she longed to rail at the trembling girl for her stupidity, Anya forced herself to swallow her blistering words. Her first priority was to get them all back to camp as quickly and quietly as possible.

She ordered Cheryl down to the car and watched cynically as the girl grabbed up her shoes and bag and scampered out, unable to believe her luck in getting away without an on-the-spot lecture. Just you wait, young lady, thought Anya grimly. Cathy was going to be furious when she was told. A lecture would be the least of Cheryl’s worries!

She turned to the young man lying on the bed, intending to vent her repressed anger with a pithy few words on the subject of loutish behaviour. ‘Do you realise what you were risking? That girl is under age—’ she began heatedly.

Sean swore thickly and catapulted suddenly to his feet, almost knocking Anya over as he dived for the adjoining door. Incensed by his rudeness, Anya dashed after him, realising too late that she had followed him into the bathroom.

When he fell on his knees and vomited noisily into the toilet bowl she felt the first pangs of compassion, and filled a glass of water at the hand-basin to hand to him when he finished. However, when he finally staggered to his feet and took a few sips from the proffered glass he was promptly sick again, and Anya wasn’t quite quick enough on her feet to prevent the front of her shirt and one leg of her trousers from being splashed.

Cursing under her breath, she grabbed a towel from the rack and scrubbed at the stains while Sean rinsed out his mouth and stumbled drunkenly back into the bedroom. Her mouth compressed as she used a second towel to quickly clean up the mess on the tiled floor, annoyed at herself for the compulsive act of neatness.

Anya’s own gorge rose as she plucked at her soiled garments, her delicate nose wrinkling in fastidious horror. She couldn’t sit in a small car with this sickening stench clinging to her clothes—both she and her passengers would likely be ill themselves!

Glancing out to see that Sean was slumped back on the bed, Anya bolted the bathroom door and swiftly stripped off her outer clothes. She flushed the stains in cold water, rubbing some pine-scented soap into the affected patches for good measure. The soaking pieces of fabric would be uncomfortably clammy against her skin but it was better than the noxious alternative!

She was about to wring out the excess water when she heard a crash and muffled moans on the other side of the door. Afraid that Sean had been sick again and was choking as a result, she snatched the nearest dry covering—a man’s shirt that had been tossed on top of the laundry basket—and shrugged it on as she shot back into the bedroom.

She was disgusted to see Sean pawing at the rumpled covers of the bed, scrabbling for the smouldering joint which he had somehow knocked off the bedside table.

‘Ah-ha!’ he said, rolling over with his trophy held high, his glazed eyes barely focussing as Anya marched over, shirt flapping, and snatched the burning brand out of his clumsy fingers.

‘Here, I’ll take that,’ she said sternly, intending to flush it down the toilet.

‘Hey, no way, bitch!’ He reared up and tried to grab it back. Anya jerked her arm away—he lunged, she twisted—and for a few seconds they were locked in a bizarre kind of dance at the edge of the bed, brought to an abrupt end by a deep voice, taut with outrage.

‘Dammit, Sean, I thought we agreed no parties while I was—What in the hell is going on here?’

Anya spun around and the man who had appeared in the doorway stiffened incredulously, his cobalt-blue eyes widening in shock.

‘You!’

The stunned monosyllable dripped with nameless accusation and Anya froze, her whole life flashing before her eyes.

She clutched at the gaping shirt and stared at Sean Monroe’s supposed-to-be-away-for-the-weekend uncle.

Scott Tyler. Her personal demon. The man who had strongly opposed Anya’s application to join the staff at Hunua College.

The legal adviser to the school board who thought that she wasn’t competent to do the job she loved. The man who had admitted that he was just waiting for her to make a mistake that would prove him right!

CHAPTER TWO

IN A distant, still functioning corner of her brain Anya became aware that the music had stopped and there were sounds of high-pitched voices, car doors slamming and engines revving outside.

The party was definitely over and the reason was standing in front of them, storming mad.

She had heard via staffroom gossip that Scott Tyler had been unexpectedly landed with his sister’s children while she and her husband were overseas and guessed that a thirty-two-year-old workaholic bachelor would find living with two teenagers caused a severe disruption to his formerly smoothly-running life.

Fifteen-year-old Samantha, who was in Anya’s fifth-form class, was a good student but chocolate-box pretty and wildly popular with the boys, and as for Sean…well—if he had been expressly ordered not to do something then naturally he would have disobeyed, simply on principle!

Anya cleared her paralysed throat. She had no intention of being made a scapegoat for a bunch of irresponsible kids. Or shielding Sean, who had sunk back to the bed, gaping stupidly at his uncle’s thunderous face.

‘I can explain—’ she said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the hapless youth.

The piercing blue eyes shifted from Anya’s face to the sweeping movement of her hand and she was horrified to realise that it was the one in which she held the smoking cannabis joint. She hastily whipped it behind her back.

‘Don’t bother. I think I get the picture—unpleasantly graphic as it is,’ he said. ‘How unfortunate for you that I worked double-time to complete my business early and managed to get on the last flight back from Wellington. If I’d returned tomorrow as planned you might actually have got away with it.’

The tight drawl did nothing to conceal Scott Tyler’s controlled fury and Anya fought not to feel threatened by the daunting combination of his forceful personality and dominating physique.

He seemed impossibly tall from her perspective—big-boned and thick-muscled, his double-breasted grey suit accentuating his powerful build, his loosened tie hanging from the unbuttoned collar of his starched linen shirt. His sheer presence made the spacious cream-painted room feel suddenly claustrophobically small. His dark brown hair was thick and unruly, spiking over his wide forehead, his face an aggressive congregation of hard angles, with broad, high cheekbones surmounted by deep-set eyes and a handsome Roman nose that had been broken at some stage of his life. Not surprisingly, Anya thought. She had been tempted to take a punch at that arrogant nose a time or two herself…if she had been able to reach it!

He had intimidated her from their very first meeting at her personal interview with the Hunua College Board of Trustees six months ago, and in retrospect she could see that he had deliberately set out to undermine her composure. He had lounged in his seat at the end of the table, arms folded, staring at her with an unsettling intensity all through the initial part of the session, interrupting with a series of probing questions about her lack of co-educational experience just when she had begun to feel confident that she was making a good impression on the rest of the interviewing panel.

His obvious disapproval and sharply critical comments had caught her off guard and Anya had found herself floundering on the defensive. Then he had smiled—a cruelly self-satisfied curve of his hard mouth—and her innate stubbornness had kicked in. Her slender spine had stiffened as she revealed her grace under fire, retaliating with a calm, level-headed self-assurance combined with a dry sense of humour which had clawed back the lost ground. For a while, though, she had felt like a prisoner in the dock, and she hadn’t been surprised to later find out that Scott Tyler was one of South Auckland’s leading barristers, with a reputation for winning difficult cases on the strength of his ruthless cross-examinations.

From the brief research she had done after applying for the job, she knew that, although he wasn’t a voting member of the board, his role as legal consultant and a personal friendship with the Chairman gave him a considerable amount of influence.

Fortunately, the headmaster, Mark Ransom, had firmly thrown his support behind Anya as the best of the three other candidates already interviewed, and a majority of the board must have concurred, for several days later Anya had been overjoyed to receive the job offer that had precipitated her move to Riverview.

To her dismay, accepting defeat graciously was evidently not one of Scott Tyler’s famed accomplishments, and at each successive encounter, despite her strenuous efforts to be pleasant, they’d seemed to end up on opposite sides of an argument.

Which made it even more important that this silly incident not be blown out of proportion.

‘I know what it looks like, Mr Tyler, but you’re jumping to the wrong conclusions—’ she protested as he turned his attention back to his slack-jawed nephew, grimly assessing the extent of his intoxication.

‘I’ve had a hellish twenty-four hours with some very stroppy clients and I’m not in the mood to handle any more nonsense right now. So I suggest you put your clothes back on and get out,’ he tossed harshly over his shoulder, using the same menacing tone which had cleared out the rowdy party-goers below in record time. ‘I want to talk to my nephew—alone. I’ll deal with you later!’

Anya would have been delighted to escape, but she wasn’t going to leave with that ominous threat hanging over her head.

‘Look, I understand that you’re pretty annoyed about Sean throwing a party without your permission—’

He jerked around, snarling like a wounded bear. ‘How perceptive of you!’

‘—but I only found out about it myself about half an hour ago,’ she finished stoutly, bracing herself as he prowled back to where she stood. She dug her toes into the carpet, determined not to give ground.

‘So you immediately rushed over to strip and join in the fun?’ he savaged with brutal sarcasm. ‘I had no idea that history teachers were so progressive…’

His raking look of contempt made her clear, honey-gold skin bloom with unwelcome fire. Her grey eyes darkened with reproach, which only seemed to feed his smouldering fury.

‘Is this one of the methods of “inspiring young minds” that you talked of bringing to the college?’ Up close she could see the small scar on the left corner of his narrow upper lip, the one that gave him such an impressive sneer. ‘How long have you been offering private lessons in practical sex education as a part of your curriculum?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she cried, struggling to remain reasonable in the face of his flagrant provocation. There was no point in both of them losing their tempers. She had noticed it was a popular tactic of his—playing devil’s advocate, needling people until they became too annoyed to think straight, let alone consider the wisdom of their words. Maintaining control was the key to surviving a verbal encounter with Scott Tyler.

‘This is just a set of unfortunate circumstances—’ she stated clearly, tilting her head up in the unconsciously haughty gesture that she had inherited from her flamboyant mother.

‘That’s what they all say.’ His cynical laugh was gritty with scorn. ‘The “unfortunate circumstances” usually involve getting caught red-handed at the scene of the crime. I’m a criminal lawyer, remember—I’ve heard every excuse in the book.’

‘And who better than a lawyer to know that appearances can be deceptive?’ she snapped back.

‘In your case I’d agree…very deceptive. Who’d have thought that the quiet and refined Miss Adams, with her modest hemlines and sensible shoes, would have a penchant for see-through underwear and seducing her students…’

‘I was not seducing anyone!’ spluttered Anya, unable to refute the underwear allegation. For the most part her clothes were classically simple and tasteful, as required of a role-model for impressionable teenagers, but since her slender figure required only the bare minimum of support she didn’t have to be practical when it came to buying lingerie. She was free to indulge her secret passion for gossamer-thin lace and frivolous frippery. As long as she was well covered up she considered it no one’s business but her own what she chose to wear under her clothes.

Only right now she was feeling very much undercovered and a trifle cool, despite the heat in her cheeks. Glancing down, she saw that the oversized white shirt she was trying to anchor one-handed across her scantily clad body was made of slippery, ultra-fine silk through which it was possible to see the sheer lace of her low-cut emerald bra and matching panties.

‘Really…so you just like to prance around half-naked at parties for your own entertainment? You obviously find it sexually arousing to be the focus of male attention,’ he taunted, his sardonic stare making her supremely conscious of the way her nipples had tingled to hardness against the twin layers of flimsy fabric. ‘That’s tantamount to seduction in my book.’

‘Then your book would be wrong!’ She might have known that he would draw attention to something any real gentleman would have politely ignored. How dared he imply that she found him attractive? ‘There’s a cool breeze coming through the window behind me, in case you haven’t noticed!’ she pointed out obliquely.

His blue eyes glinted with malice and she hurried on before he could make another devastating comment.

‘For goodness’ sake, you can’t think I took my clothes off because I wanted to—’

His face hardened, his whole body contracting with a dangerous tension. ‘Are you claiming that Sean tried to rape you?’ he ground out.

‘No, of course I’m not!’ she cried, frankly appalled at the direction of his thoughts. One side of the shirt slipped from her distracted fingers and she frantically brought up her other hand to try and overwrap the fabric into more concealing folds.

His hostile preparedness had eased at her shocked exclamation but now his hand shot out and enveloped her fragile wrist in a steely grip.

‘Watch what you’re doing, woman! For God’s sake, give that to me before you singe a hole in one of my best shirts.’ He extracted the stubby remains of the mangled joint and let her go, crushing out the still-burning tip with his bare fingers.

‘Your shirt?’ She rubbed her buzzing wrist, goose-pimples breaking out over every centimetre of bare skin being caressed by the borrowed silk. ‘I—it was in the bathroom—I assumed it was Sean’s…’ she stammered.

A vein pulsed in his temple and a possessive growl sounded at the back of his throat. ‘What—it’s not enough that you play lord of the manor to your friends when I’m away, you have to dress the part, too?’ He sent his nephew, who was just getting unsteadily to his feet, a wrathful look that had him plopping heavily back down on his backside. ‘When I said I was happy to look after you and Sam for a few weeks, I didn’t envisage it meant opening up my wardrobe to you, as well!’

He screwed up the final shreds of cannabis cigarette in his contemptuous fist and scattered the dusty debris out of the open window.

‘Is there any more where that came from?’ he demanded of Anya.

‘I have no idea,’ she said succinctly, still grappling with the knowledge that she was wearing his shirt. It made her feel strangely shivery, uncomfortably vulnerable to him in a way that it was difficult to define. ‘It wasn’t mine. I’ve never smoked marijuana in my life.’

A tug of his scar hitched his lip into a disbelieving curl. ‘You’re telling me you never ran across any illicit weed when you were a pupil at that exclusive upper-crust school of yours? Places like Eastbrook are a hotbed of experimentation—WASPy little rich girls doing the rebellion thing, or getting high as a way of punishing mummy and daddy for being too busy with their own lives to pay them enough attention; bored young things always on the lookout for kicks, with easy access to money and no one to really care how they spend it—’

‘There’s that kind of element in every school, no matter what social strata it serves,’ Anya said, stung by the sneering accuracy of his thumbnail sketch. ‘And I never said I hadn’t come across it, only that I hadn’t used it.’

‘Come to think of it, cannabis is probably a little low rent for the privileged elite,’ he jeered. ‘Maybe the junior jet-set prefer designer drugs to go with their designer clothes.’

Now he was going too far! Anya’s quiet temper bubbled to the surface. His entire attitude was in need of serious readjustment!

‘You have a real chip on your shoulder, don’t you?’ she burst out. ‘Let me guess: your parents couldn’t afford to send you to a private school, so you resent anyone who was given the educational and social advantages that you weren’t. Well, most young kids don’t have any more choice about where they go to school than you did—I certainly didn’t!

‘And, contrary to your obvious prejudice, Mr Tyler, private school pupils aren’t all elitist snobs who take their privileges for granted and look down their noses at the rest of the world. A lot of them are the children of ordinary, egalitarian, hardworking New Zealanders who believe in the kind of discipline, or moral and religious values that aren’t offered at a state school.’

She unthinkingly punctuated her lecture with a teacher’s wagging finger, and Scott Tyler reacted with the insulting slyness of a naughty schoolboy.

‘Careful, Miss Adams, your slip is showing,’ he mocked, his gaze dipping down to where her emerald bra-strap peeked from under the sliding collar of his shirt.

She hitched it impatiently back into place with a baleful look, refusing to be diverted. ‘My qualifications are rock-solid—it’s because of your own reverse snobbery that you didn’t want me getting the teaching position at the college. You did everything you could to cast me into a bad light at my interview, and it sticks in your craw that they gave me the job anyway!’

The glow of smug triumph on her delicate face was like a red rag to a bull.

‘I didn’t want you in the job because I didn’t think you were physically or mentally tough enough to cope with the pressures and problems of teaching in a big unisex school which draws a large number of its students from a lower socio-economic group,’ he grated, planting his hands on his hips, his open jacket revealing the flatness of his tailored waistcoat against his hard stomach. ‘And I still don’t!’

Anya bristled. ‘There are plenty of other female teachers on the staff—’ she said pugnaciously.

‘—who’ve got previous experience in a variety of large unisex schools, whereas you’ve been insulated in your cushy little Academy for Young Ladies ever since you graduated from training college.’

She lifted her silky-fine eyebrows, echoing his taunting mockery from a few moments ago. ‘Careful, Mr Tyler, your inferiority complex is showing.’

He bared even white teeth in the opposite of a smile. ‘So the butterfly can bite? Insulting me won’t change the facts.’

He saw her as a butterfly? She pictured herself as a small but determined terrier.

‘The facts being that so far I’ve been managing my classes just fine!’ Apart from a few natural hiccups she’d rather not mention.

‘It won’t last,’ he predicted bluntly.

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Do I have to? If tonight is an example of how you “manage” your students I think the major threat is your own behaviour.’

She compressed her lips, controlling the surge of indignant words that welled hotly in her throat. After his disparaging comments about her former school her explanation wasn’t going to go down too well, so she delivered it in edited highlights.

‘Look, this really doesn’t have to go any further,’ she said, adopting her most reasonable tone. ‘I’m helping supervise a holiday camp out at the regional reserve, and a couple of the girls came to the party without permission, so I drove over to pick them up. I tracked them down but then Sean was sick all over my clothes. I was cleaning up in the bathroom when I heard him knock something over and ran back in to check…’

She looked over at the culprit, meeting his bloodshot brown eyes behind his uncle’s back. She had half expected him to try and bluster his way out of trouble, but perhaps he was too intoxicated to put together a coherent sentence. Or maybe he was just hoping that by keeping silent he could avoid incriminating himself

‘Is that what happened, Sean?’ Scott Tyler rapped out, inclining his head but not taking his sceptical gaze off Anya.

The boy shrugged, but he wasn’t too strung out to miss that the cynical edge in the gravelly voice wasn’t directed his way.

‘How should I know why she invited herself?’ he mumbled quickly, his sluggish tongue tangling in the consonants. ‘It was a party, man…chicks have been coming and going all night.’

A cold trickle of dismay ran down Anya’s spine when she saw him leaning back out of his uncle’s peripheral sight, smirking maliciously at her.

‘All I know is, she followed me into my room and wouldn’t leave me alone. Who’da known she was so hot? Ever made it with a history teacher, Unc’l Scott?’

The grubby insinuation with its macho, man-to-man overtones had Anya’s eyes snapping back to Scott Tyler’s face, which was suddenly rigidly impassive, wiped clean of all emotion. She guessed it was the expressionless mask he wore into the courtroom, when he didn’t want anyone to know what he was thinking.

‘Whatever he’s implying didn’t happen,’ she said tartly. ‘You know very well he’s just telling you what he thinks you want to hear…’

One thick, dark eyebrow shot up. ‘Is he?’

He was just playing devil’s advocate, she told herself.

‘You know he is. Look out the window if you don’t believe me. The girls I came here to find are down there waiting for me in my car—’

He sent a fleeting, almost uninterested, glance down towards the turning circle. ‘There’s no smoke without fire,’ he murmured with infuriating blandness.

‘What are you—a fireman now?’ she flung at him witheringly, her slender body vibrating with fury. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a hot-shot lawyer. Why don’t you act like one and make Sean tell you the real truth!’

‘His version, or yours? When there’s two witnesses, the truth is often a matter of perspective.’

It was on the tip of Anya’s tongue to tell him that she had another witness, but she didn’t want to involve Cheryl, and thus Eastbrook, unless she could help it.

‘Are you saying that you actually believe him!’

‘You must admit I’ve ample reason to be suspicious. Don’t tell me you aren’t aware that there’s something inherently erotic about a woman wearing a man’s shirt,’ he said, his eyes sliding down over her silk-wrapped body in a speculative way that made her blood boil, and not entirely with fury. ‘And the little white socks add just the right provocative touch of pseudo-innocence.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t be ridiculous!’ A piercing thrill of guilty pleasure made Anya lash out, trying to douse the treacherous feelings aroused by his words with a drenching of pure scorn. ‘I suppose you’re going to accuse me of trying to seduce you next!’

There was a short, electric silence as they stared at each other, and Anya noticed all the things about him she had always tried very hard not to notice: the smooth grain of his olive skin as it stretched over the strong bones of his face; the almost feminine lushness of the thick dark lashes which framed his compelling blue eyes, and the strikingly masculine contrast of that thin, yet sensual mouth, and harshly chiselled jaw.

The stubbly regrowth of his beard and faint purplish tinge under his sunken eyes—signs of his ‘hellish’ day—made him look rakish rather than merely weary.

When he spoke again his voice was deeper, softer, and more dangerous than she had ever heard it. Too soft for the boy behind him to hear. And he allowed a flare of male hunger to show in the deep blue gaze.

‘You’re welcome to try, but I should point out that I’m a great deal more discerning—and considerably more demanding—than your average randy teenager…’

The sheer wickedness of the barbed challenge sucked the breath out of her lungs, and Anya opened and closed her mouth several times before she summoned the words to prove that she was wasn’t totally vanquished.

‘Oh, you’re impossible! It’s easy to see you’re related—you’re both as bad as each other. Believe what you damned well like; I don’t care!’

And on that resounding lie Anya swung on her heel and stormed into the bathroom, slamming the door violently enough to cause the mirror to shiver on the wall above the basin and several toiletries to fall over on the vanity top.

Muttering to herself to bolster her sense of outrage, she ripped off the silk shirt and pulled on her wrinkled clothes, the damp patches practically sizzling as they hit her burning skin. She finished zipping up her ankle boots with a vicious tug that jammed a piece of her sock in the meshing teeth and swore through tight lips as she tried to work it free.

She had always thought of cotton ankle socks as utilitarian rather than sexy, but now that serene unawareness was gone for ever. She would never be able to put on a pair of white socks again without thinking of him.

He had viewed them as provocative, for God’s sake! A pair of simple, inexpensive white socks! The man was plainly in need of therapy, she thought as she checked herself out in the mirror, looking in vain for the cool, capable, down-to-earth Miss Adams she was used to recognising in her reflection.

With her glittering, storm-darkened eyes, flushed cheeks, and the baby-fine wisps of hair escaping from the pins at her nape and drifting forward to curve around her smooth oval jaw, she looked disturbingly young and flustered. Not in control.

And she had no make-up to repair the damage to her self-image. She did what she could, smoothing back the strands of hair from her glowing forehead and tucking them firmly into place with tremulous fingers. Had her small mouth always looked that rosy and full? She pressed her lips together in a stern line and willed her colour to fade back to normal. She could do nothing about the way her clothes clung where they were wet, but at least they were clingy in fairly non-strategic areas.

She could hear a low murmur coming from the bedroom and she hesitated for a moment before she squared her shoulders, gathered up her ragged dignity, and reached for the door.

She was going to walk back out there with her head held high, and if fault should be admitted she was prepared to be graciously forgiving, as befitted her normally kind and compassionate nature.

But the sight that met her eyes wasn’t promising. Scott Tyler stood beside his seated nephew, his hand resting on Sean’s brawny bare shoulder, whether for reassurance or restraint, she wasn’t sure.

‘Well, has he told you what happened?’ she challenged.

Scott Tyler’s unreadable mask was firmly back in place

‘That could take some time in his present condition,’ he said uninformatively, acknowledging the condition of her clothes with barely a flicker of his eyes. His voice flattened into resolute finality. ‘As I said before, it’s late, and if there are issues to be settled they can wait until a more civilised hour…’

He dropped his hand and moved towards her, obscuring her vision of the boy, imposing himself squarely in the centre of her attention. He was definitely in full protective mode, she decided, and in the split second before his broad chest blocked out her view her heart sank to see that the smirk had returned to the teenager’s face. The obnoxious weasel wasn’t going to accept responsibility for his actions until he was sober enough to appreciate the true consequences of his lies.

‘Well, here’s one issue that can be settled right now,’ she announced, pulling at a clammy spot on her cotton shirt where it had moulded transparently to her skin. ‘As you can see for yourself, I’m going to have to get my clothes cleaned. I’ll be sure and send you the bill.’

His thick lashes veiled his expression as he studied the effect of her makeshift laundering.

‘By all means. But don’t expect me to pay it if there’s contributory negligence involved,’ he told her in that same flat, non-negotiable tone. ‘For all I know you could have dunked them just now in the bathroom, to give credence to your story.’

Anya forgot about being kind and compassionate.

‘I suppose being exposed to the seamy underbelly of society all the time has given you a very nasty and obsessively suspicious mind, and distorted your view of the way normal, innocent, people behave,’ she said, with a cutting disdain that was designed to make him cringe.

He didn’t cringe, but he did back off slightly, leaning a broad shoulder against the painted frame of the casement window in concession to his weariness. ‘I prefer to think of it as trusting to the wisdom of experience. As a history teacher you must believe in using the lessons of the past to avoid repeating future mistakes.’

Her mouth primmed in frustration, for she hated to admit he was right, and for the first time he showed a glimmer of untainted amusement, a faint kick of his mouth which delivered a corresponding kick to Anya’s pulse. His next words were also guaranteed to raise her blood pressure.

‘So be careful you’re not making a mistake, Miss Adams, by riling me when I’ve already told you I’m in a very bad mood. Your position at the moment is rather untenable. It could be construed as contributing to the delinquency of a minor, for example…’

She was quick to scorn his bluff. ‘Apart from the fact that the whole accusation is nonsense—he isn’t a minor.’

He was about to offer a caustic reply when something outside the window snagged his attention. ‘Are you sure you want to argue the point now? Because the natives down there seem to be getting restless…’

She frowned at him, suspecting a trick. ‘What?’

‘There are two girls getting out of a yellow hatchback I presume is yours,’ he said, looking out the window. ‘They seem to be debating whether to approach the house—’

Anya yelped and flew over to see that he was right. Oh, God, she had been so distracted by his presence that she had completely forgotten about the girls! Supposedly her prime consideration on this mission.

She clutched the windowsill, gazing down in dismay as Jessica and Kristin milled uncertainly around the side of the car. Hadn’t she told them not to get out?—but of course by now they must be starting to panic at her extended absence.

‘Perhaps you’d like me to invite them up to join us while we finish the discussion you seem so keen on prolonging…’ came a silky purr.

‘No!’ Anya was too busy castigating herself to notice his openly baiting tone. She could just imagine what four gossipy girls would make of the pernicious scene. She looked at her watch, her thoughts fixated on damage control. If she didn’t get back to camp before Cathy read her note, all hell was likely to break loose. Or, should she say, further hell?

She glared at the cause of her appalling lapse in judgement. ‘I have to go—’

‘Oh, what a pity,’ he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘Just when I was about to offer you a cup of tea.’

She scowled. Naturally he would see her strategic retreat as his victory. ‘When you get him sober enough to tell you that my presence here was entirely innocent—’ she said, nodding in Sean’s direction as she hurried towards the door ‘—I’ll expect to receive a sincere apology. From both of you! And we’ll consider that an end to the matter.’

She thought that she had succeeded in having the last word, but a surly remark referring to frigid temperatures and the devil’s abode floated downstairs in her wake, making her itch to turn around and hit back with an equally vulgar blow. She managed to cling to her decorum but only by locking up her jaw. For a non-violent person she was beginning to have some very disturbing thoughts. All to do with That Man.

‘Where were you, Miss Adams? We were getting worried,’ said Jessica, as Anya herded the girls back into the car and burnt rubber down the drive in her anxiety to escape the invisible laser-beam eyes she was sure she could feel drilling into her back.

‘We saw that big guy go in and break up the party but you didn’t come out with the others. He looked pretty mad when he drove up and saw all the cars. I bet he went totally psycho at his kid for having a party,’ said Kristin in suppressed excitement. ‘I bet there was a big fight. Is that what took you so long, Miss Adams?’

‘You don’t—want—to—know,’ Anya ground out through her still-clenched teeth, her usually gentle voice so awe-inspiringly crabby that there was dead silence all the rest of the way back to the camp, apart from the occasional frightened sniffle from Emma and Cheryl in the back seat as they contemplated their uneasy future.

CHAPTER THREE

ANYA had a mildly thumping head when she arrived back at the regional reserve, and by the time she drove home the next afternoon it had developed into a full-blown tension headache.

She was just grateful that the decision of what to do with the chastened pair of miscreants had not fallen on her own shoulders. The two girls had produced copious amounts of penitent tears for a livid Cathy Marshall, who had raked them severely over the coals and segregated them out to do all the most boring, arduous and least-liked of the clean-up jobs rostered for the last day.

Seeing Cheryl scraping out the burnt-on muck of ten days of inexpert cooking from the camp oven and Emma mopping floors and grimacing over the application of a toilet brush had given Anya hope that their too-ready expressions of remorse might actually turn into a genuinely felt regret for their misdeeds.

But executing summary punishment hadn’t solved Cathy’s basic dilemma of whether to consider the offence a trivial one satisfactorily dealt with on-the-spot, as was her first impulse, or to put the girls on report to the headmistress when they returned to school, in recognition of the potential danger they had posed to themselves and to the Academy’s reputation.

Anya couldn’t blame her friend for wanting to avoid any official black mark against the camp, but did point out that once their initial fright wore off the girls were unlikely to refrain from boasting about their adventure. If it became common knowledge at the school, it would inevitably reach Miss Brinkman’s ears and she would want to know why she hadn’t been kept fully informed.

When she got on the bus back to Eastbrook, Cathy was still worrying about what to gloss over and what to emphasise in her written report, having reluctantly come to the conclusion that she couldn’t entirely leave it out.

‘I could probably get away with just using my discretionary judgement if it wasn’t for the fact that you found Cheryl with the boy, and you think there might have been some marijuana around,’ she sighed. ‘But don’t worry, nothing I say is going to reflect badly on you, Anya,’ she hastened to add. ‘You did the school a huge favour by helping out these last few days. It was just bad luck that those wretched girls took off when you were there by yourself. I’m going to tell Miss Brinkman you did exactly what I would have done in the same circumstances…’

Not quite. For Anya hadn’t gone into the full, gory details of her humiliating encounter with Scott Tyler. She had merely said that he had arrived after she had sent the girls out to the car, and that he had been angry and rude. She hadn’t wanted to add to Cathy’s anxieties by telling her of the personal hostility that had flared out of control during the confrontation, especially when her friend had instantly recognised the name of her protagonist.

‘Scott Tyler—the lawyer? The one who got that body-in-the-bag murderer—sorry, alleged murderer—off?’ Cathy was impressed enough to be momentarily diverted from her troubles. ‘Wow, I’ve seen him on the TV news—he’s one tough-looking dude. According to the papers he made absolute mincemeat of a watertight case to get that verdict. You definitely wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of an argument with him!’

Tell me about it! Anya had thought. When they had finally got to bed she had tossed and turned sleeplessly for what had remained of the night, running and rerunning her mental videotape of the experience, thinking of how differently the scenario would have played if she hadn’t let herself be sidetracked by his angry assumptions, and inventing pithy replies to his insults that she wished she had been able to think of at the time.

In the cold light of day she could almost convince herself that it had been a simple case of overreaction on both sides. Once Scott Tyler’s temper had cooled and he was no longer hampered by fatigue he was bound to take a more reasonable view. Surely the cynical lawyer in him would soon conclude that Sean’s spiteful words had simply been a drunken attempt to save his own skin?

He might even be content to act as if the whole unfortunate incident had never occurred. Anya certainly would. In spite of her defiant departing words she would prefer not to have to raise the subject with him ever again.

It would be hard enough having to face him next time they met. Scott Tyler had seen her underwear, for God’s sake! The last time that had happened was on her twenty-first birthday, and the man involved had gone on to break her heart. Not a very happy precedent!

Her nervous brooding made the last few hours of the camp stretch and sag like tired elastic and she was glad to finally be able to wave the air-conditioned bus onto the road back to Auckland and hop into her little car.

The hot bands of iron tension compressing her temples began to ease as she pulled into her crushed gravel driveway and parked in the small garage attached to the side of the weatherboard cottage.

She had bought the two-bedroomed house a few weeks after she’d signed her employment contract with Hunua College, rationalising that even if the job didn’t work out as she expected there were plenty of other secondary schools scattered around South Auckland that were within reasonable commuting distance of Riverview. As it was, the college was only half an hour’s drive along the winding rural roads to the sprawling outskirts of suburban south Auckland.

The house had been an early Christmas present for herself, and although it had put her deeply in debt to the bank she relished the long-term commitment the monthly payments represented. People—her cosmopolitan parents included—had told her that buying property in a small rural town was a poor investment, but they didn’t seem to appreciate that to her this wasn’t an investment, it was her home, a place for her to put down roots and flourish, emotionally as well as physically. Even several months after she had moved in she still felt a sharp thrill of joy each time she came home, to know that she was the proud owner of her own little quarter-acre of paradise.

‘Hello, George. Have you come to welcome me home?’ She bent to stroke the lean ginger cat which appeared from nowhere to wind around her ankles as she unloaded her bags from the boot. The ginger tom was actually a stray who considered the whole neighbourhood his personal territory, granting his fickle attentions to whomever was likely to provide him with the choicest titbits at any given time.

Anya scratched his bent ear and smiled at his motoring purr, her face lighting up from within, the spontaneous warmth lending her quiet features a glowing enchantment.

Now that she was feeling thoroughly settled in she had been thinking she might get herself a cat of her own. Or even a dog. Thanks to her childhood asthma and her opera singer mother’s horror of anything that might compromise her respiratory tract and thus her peerless voice, she had never been allowed to have a pet. The frequent international travelling associated with her mother’s career had precluded even a goldfish, and only during her precious holiday visits to her aunt and uncle’s dairy farm at Riverview had Anya been able to indulge her interest in animals—with nary a sneeze or wheeze in sight!

‘Let’s see if I can’t find a nice can of tuna for us to share,’ said Anya, following George up the narrow brick path that she had laid herself, bordered by the flower beds already dug over in preparation for planting out. Although it was still unseasonably warm for mid-April, the clouds were gathering over the Hunua Ranges and she could scent a hint of rain in the sultry air.

Once inside she kicked off her shoes with a sigh of relief and went around opening the windows to air out the stuffy rooms. It was too early for her evening meal but she carefully divided up a tin of tuna and set down a saucerful on the kitchen floor for George while she tossed the rest with the salad ingredients she had picked up from a roadside stall on the way home and put it in the fridge for when she got out of the bath.

She intended to have a glorious, long, hot, mindless soak in lavender-scented water to steam out all the weary kinks in her body and the nagging worries in her brain. Then she would have her solitary salad with a glass of crisp white wine and relax amongst her books, with perhaps a delicate piece of Bach on the stereo. Oh, the bliss of being free of rules and regulations, and the obligation to be considerate of the rights of others. She didn’t even have to worry about how deep to fill the old-fashioned bath, for there was no one to moan if she selfishly used up all the hot water.

Leaving George licking his chops over the empty saucer and eyeing the rush mat by the back door where he invariably liked to curl up and digest her largesse, Anya ran her bath and sank into it with a groan of sybaritic pleasure.

But the bath wasn’t the total escape from reality she had expected it to be, for as the enervating heat sank into her tired bones and the fragrant steam wreathed her face in dew, Anya’s drifting thoughts circled relentlessly back to the annoying subject of Scott Tyler.

How was it he always managed to get her in tongue-tied knots?

When they had first been introduced she had had fond hopes of their establishing a friendly connection.

She had been welcomed to her afternoon interview in the college boardroom by the chairman of the board, a grizzled man in his sixties, and they had still been shaking hands when he’d suddenly beamed over her shoulder.

‘Oh, good, there you are, Scott! I wondered if you were going to make it back in time to sit in on this last one. Come and meet our final candidate—the lass from Eastbrook. We’ve already talked over her credentials…’ He performed a rather perfunctory introduction, distracted from his task by the throaty laugh from the tall, svelte brunette attached to Scott Tyler’s arm.

‘Sorry, Daddy,’ said the woman, giving him an unrepentant buss on the cheek. ‘I’d just finished a case in the district court so I buzzed Scott on his cell-phone and took him out to lunch. He and I got to talking shop and the time just slipped away from us.’

‘Heather works for a big law firm in the city,’ Hugh Morgan explained to Anya with fatherly pride, giving her the excuse to turn away from the jolting connection with a pair of unusual, electric-blue eyes. ‘Does heaps of Crown prosecutions. Very clever girl. Came top of her year at law school.’

‘Oh, Daddy, that was a little while ago now,’ Heather Morgan fluttered with a coy modesty that didn’t quite gel with her seriously elegant suit and ambitious air of self-importance. Anya estimated the ‘girl’ to be somewhere in her early thirties. That coy ‘little while’ was likely to be more than a decade ago, she thought with uncharacteristic bitchiness.

‘You know I don’t like to rest on my laurels,’ she continued, casting a teasing sideways glance out of her dark almond eyes at the imposing man at her side. ‘Especially with Scott around to keep me on my toes.’

She finally directed a condescending smile at Anya in belated acknowledgement of her reason for being there. ‘So you’re a schoolteacher?’ Her bored inflection made it sound like the most dreary and uninspiring job on earth.

Anya inclined her head politely, keeping her tongue behind her teeth as she was wished an insipid good luck. She was amused rather than offended by the woman’s arrogant assumption of superiority. The fact that she had graduated her history degree with first-class honours and won a scholarship to Cambridge which she had waived in order to train as a teacher, would doubtless cut no ice with Miss Morgan. Like Anya’s parents she would probably just consider it a pathetic waste of potential; because there was no serious money to be made in teaching, no important status to claim, no high-profile perks and rewards for a job well done. Just a quiet satisfaction at having helped guide and expand the minds of future generations of lawyers and teachers.

Anya stood quietly by as the other three continued to exchange personal pleasantries, trying not to let her nerves show, only stirring when she heard a passing reference to Scott Tyler’s home.

‘You live at a property called The Pines?’ she was startled into saying. ‘Not the house that’s on the road out to Riverview?’

‘Yes, that’s it.’ Scott Tyler looked down at her, the clipped wariness of his words emphasised by a hint of cool reserve in his eyes.

‘Have you driven past it? Charming, isn’t it? He bought it about…five years ago, didn’t you say it was, darling?’ Heather Morgan was more forthcoming, deftly making it clear that their relationship was not only professional. ‘Mind you, he says it was in a pretty run-down state at the time—the absentee landlord hadn’t bothered with anything but basic maintenance for years—so Scott’s had it completely redecorated inside and out since then.’

‘If it was five years ago then you must have bought it from a close relative of mine,’ Anya told Scott Tyler eagerly, delighted at the prospect of a common point of interest that might help individualise her in his eyes during the next hour of question-and-answer. ‘Kate Carlyle. She was over here from London to accept an offer on the house. I’m sure you’d remember if you had met her. She’s an extremely striking woman—rather famous in America and Europe as a concert pianist…’

He had stiffened slightly. Did he suspect her of being a shameless name-dropper? Well, perhaps so on this occasion—but she was also genuinely proud of Kate’s brilliant achievements.

‘Oh, yes, I remember Kate Carlyle,’ he said, his deep, harsh voice banked with unidentifiable emotion. No doubt, then, that the meeting had been memorable. Even when she wasn’t trying, Kate always had a big impact on men. ‘Exactly how closely are you related?’

‘She’s my cousin on my mother’s side,’ she said happily, tilting her small face to meet his demanding gaze.

His expression tightened in what she took to be suppressed scepticism. ‘And how much—or how little—do you have in common with your famous cousin?’

Her rueful smile forgave him for having doubts. He was obviously too polite to wonder out loud how such a beautiful, glamorous and talented creature as Kate could be related to plain, unremarkable Anya Adams, who didn’t have an artistic bone in her body—much to her parents’ enduring disappointment!

‘Well, since we’re both living on opposite sides of the world we very rarely see each other any more,’ she admitted, ‘and Kate does a lot of travelling, but we’re still family so we naturally try to keep in touch.’ At least Anya did. She supposed the occasional rushed few lines of e-mail from Kate in belated response to a long, newsy, handwritten letter from herself could be considered an effort, however feeble, to keep in touch.

‘That doesn’t really answer my question, does it?’ he drawled, with a sardonic twist of his mouth. ‘Perhaps I should have phrased it differently…asked if you share similar character traits, and perhaps her personal philosophy of life…?’

Anya was bewildered. She wasn’t sure quite where his question was supposed to be leading, and it was obvious from his mocking expression that he was ready to pounce on any response.

What on earth did he want her to say? As far as she was aware Kate wasn’t of any particular philosophical bent—unless you counted her dictum of ‘music first’. Whatever else Kate might be, she was a consummate professional.

‘Well, considering our shared background I guess a certain similarity is inevitable,’ she ventured cautiously. ‘When Kate was orphaned she came to live with my parents and me. For a while we were brought up together, just like sisters.’ With Kate being the senior by four years, and very much the dominant one, already obsessed by music and not at all patient with the childish preoccupations of her eight-year-old cousin.

‘So, you’re sisters under the skin?’ he confirmed with a hint of contempt, paraphrasing her words in a way that gave them a whole different meaning.

For some reason, the closer the kinship she claimed with Kate, the less Scott Tyler seemed to be impressed. Did he think she was exaggerating her own importance in order to curry favour? Did he perceive it as an indication of a sense of personal inadequacy on her part—one that might affect her authority of her students?

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