A Passionate Proposition

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