by Susan Napier
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 st
roking.
‘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.
