Captivated by Her Innocence

She struggled not to flinch as his attention swivelled back to her. The recognition she had thought she’d glimpsed initially was gone, replaced by a flat look that she could not read. Even so, she felt her anxiety levels climb—as it turned out with good reason!

‘So tell me how long have you been teaching?’

‘Five, no four...’

His intense gaze brought a rush of colour to her cheeks, one of the curses of her red-haired complexion. She managed to retain a semblance of what she hoped came across as headmistress-style gravity as she tipped her head. ‘Five and a half years.’

Cesare Urquart, his elbows on the table, leaned forward across the table towards her. The undercurrent swirling behind his smooth smile made Anna feel a lot like Little Red Riding Hood. The man made your average wolf seem benevolent.

‘Let me give you a hypothetical situation, Miss Henderson.’

Anna smiled back and nodded. Bring it on.

CHAPTER TWO

PRIDE ALONE KEPT Anna’s shoulders straight and her head high as she left the room, pausing to nod and murmur a thank you to the panel members. Pride, and a grim teeth-clenching determination not to give Cesare Urquart the pleasure of seeing her crumble.

He didn’t avoid her eyes or attempt to hide the smug smile with the hint of chilling cruelty that pulled the corners of his sensually sculpted mouth upwards. His complacent expression said job well done. The other panel members remained silent, none met her eyes, which was probably just as well as a word of kindness and she would have fallen apart.

‘I’ll call you a taxi.’

This offer definitely wasn’t a kindness so Anna was able to hold it together as she met the stare of her tormentor. Hold it together but not conceal the bewildered hurt in her blue eyes.

He was the first to lower his gaze, his dark, preposterously long spiky lashes casting a shadow along the razor-sharp edge of his chiselled cheekbones as he picked up his pen, twirling it between long brown fingers before he scribbled something on the sheet of paper that lay on the table, drawing a line figuratively and literally through her name, she speculated bitterly.

Why had he done it?

Just because he could?

Why had she let him?

In the corridor her courage deserted her and Anna slumped like a puppet whose strings had been cut, clutching her head. She had the beginning of a first-class migraine. She leaned heavily against the wall feeling the cold of the ugly green tiles through her thin jacket.

Her coat lay folded across the chair in the room she had just left, but pneumonia was an infinitely more attractive option than going back for it.

The loud tick of the clock on the wall opposite brought her dazed glance to the large clock. Her eyes widened. It had only been five minutes since she had stood there on the brink of being offered her dream job. It had taken Cesare Urquart less than five minutes to make her appear an incompetent idiot.

Five minutes to reduce her to a stuttering level of incompetence, and she had let him! With a grimace of self-disgust, she straightened up and began to walk down the corridor, her heels beating out an angry tattoo.

The taxi was waiting for her outside. As she slid inside she could think of any number of responses to his seemingly innocent questions. He’d led her to the edge of a hole but she’d jumped in. And he’d enjoyed it!

A person who stubbornly clung to the belief that people were basically good, Anna didn’t want to believe that he’d taken pleasure from her distress. But it was true, and probably the worst part of it was the knowledge that behind the bland and beautiful mask he had enjoyed watching her stutter and stumble. It had been clinical and cruel.

She looked at her hands. They were shaking. She made a decision. They’d arrived at her hotel.

‘Do you mind waiting?’ There was no way she was safe to drive her hire car the forty miles back to Inverness. She didn’t actually care what the taxi there cost her: it would be worth it not to stay another second.

Having reassured the car-hire firm she would be happy to pay the supplementary charge for them to pick up the car, Anna packed her bag in about thirty seconds. She was booked into the hotel overlooking the picturesque working harbour for two nights, but the view had lost its charm, as had the Highlands.

The thought of all things familiar and safe made her chest ache with longing. Everyone had been right. Moving up here had been a stupid idea, not because, as Rosie had suggested, there were no men—that was fine by Anna—but because there was one man. A man she could not even think about without wanting to break things. His head would be a good start.

She climbed back into the taxi. She fastened her seat belt and closed the door with a restrained bang. ‘Inverness station, please.’

Anna was actually in her seat on the train when all passengers were asked to disembark. No trains were running on the line between Inverness and Glasgow due to flooding and stormy weather further down the line.

‘Hail the size of golf balls, they say.’

Those passengers who requested details of bus times were told that bus drivers too were not risking the journey.

Anna normally maintained a philosophical frame of mind when events were out of her control, but if ever there was a day to respond with anger and frustration this was it.

Could this day get any worse?

Of course it could. This was the day that just kept giving and the man who just kept appearing. Twice was not a lot but it felt like more.

The gleaming car Cesare Urquart stood beside did not suggest he came under the category of traditional impoverished laird. It did not come as a surprise to Anna that having money would be the way he got away with being so totally obnoxious.

Human nature being what it was, people were prepared to put up with a lot from people who held the purse strings and the power. And what Cesare had done to her was a classic case of an abuse of power. It was inexplicable to Anna, who hated to see anyone unhappy, that a person could take such malicious pleasure out of causing someone pain, presumably just because he could.

Yet it had felt personal, very personal. That continued to bemuse her; if the man hadn’t been a total stranger she’d have felt the interview had been payback of some sort. Perhaps, she brooded bitterly, he took offence to redheads, who in her opinion got a bad press. Her temper was no fierier than anyone else’s. She pressed her fingers to her drumming temples. She actually considered herself to have quite a placid personality.

As was appropriate, Cesare had paused to congratulate the successful candidate after the interviews finished. The choice had not seemed difficult to him yet some of the panel had agonised over it and in the end the final decision had not been unanimous, even after a few probing questions where the redhead had become almost incoherent.

An image of those big, hurt, cobalt-blue eyes formed in his head and he firmly pushed it away. He was sure that the formula had been working all of her life. One look at those expressive eyes...a suggestion of tears bravely blinked away while she channelled inner integrity...had made his jaw tighten. The panel members, who had still stood by their original choice, would have been less disgruntled if they knew what he knew about Miss Henderson.

‘So you think it’s a good idea to build an office block on the lawn after we’ve bulldozed the—’

Cesare turned his attention to his sister. ‘Fine...fine...’

Her musical laughter drew several stares but then his model sister generally did draw stares.

‘What?’ he asked irritably.

‘You haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said.’

He flashed her an impatient glance and opened the passenger door. ‘Just get in, will you?’

Her delicate brows lifted. ‘You’re in a foul mood, I get that, but don’t take it out on me, big brother,’ she advised.

Cesare scowled at the suggestion and bit back. ‘I am not in a foul mood.’ His conscience was clear when the welfare of impressionable children was at stake. You didn’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt and there was no doubt.

This time his sister’s laughter was drowned out by another loudspeaker announcement explaining once more that, due to flooding on the line, the Edinburgh trains were cancelled. Not good news for the stranded passengers who had began to troop with varying degrees of resignation from the station.

‘Lucky I decided to catch the early train,’ Angel observed.

* * *

In her thin jacket Anna shivered, her throat tightened until she could hardly breathe. The booming noise in her head got louder and louder as she continued to stare at him, standing there as if he owned the place, not getting out of the way because he expected other people to...and they did. He was getting in the way and they were apologising for bumping into him.

And she’d done the same, though in her case it was not just walk around him—she’d let him walk all over her! She had just sat there and taken what he’d dished out during that interview. It was not her finest hour.

If she’d told him what she thought of him she knew she wouldn’t be feeling this awful, instead she felt...

‘Pathetic!’ she exclaimed to the world in general.

‘Are you all right, dear?’

Responding with a forced smile and an embarrassed laugh for the benefit of the concerned elderly couple who had approached her, Anna nodded and lied. ‘Yes, fine, I’m...’

Her voice trailed away and her smile vanished as a tall, hateful figure placed a hand on his beautiful companion’s elbow.

She inhaled and squeezed her eyes closed. Now was her chance to tell him what she really thought of him. She nodded to the couple, lifted her stuffed overnight bag and propelled herself through the crowds.

‘I expected you to bring Jas. Is she all right?’

As his sister looked around as though expecting her daughter to materialise, Cesare opened the passenger door. ‘She’s fine,’ he soothed. ‘I came straight from the school interviews for the new head.’

‘Many candidates?’ Angel glanced down at the file that lay open on the passenger seat and paused, glancing down at the name on the front page. ‘More than one, I hope.’

‘More than one,’ her brother agreed. Snatching the CV from her fingers, he flung it onto the back seat, consigning it and the person who had supplied it to a dark corner.

His sister made no attempt to get in the car. She was studying his face. ‘You look strange. Are you sure Jas is all right—nothing’s happened?’

‘A man could be excused for thinking you don’t think he’s capable of looking after a five-year-old.’ Despite his comment Cesare didn’t take her anxiety personally. He knew how hard it was for his sister to delegate any responsibility where her daughter was concerned, and he also knew he was a poor substitute for her absentee nanny who had broken her leg. Fortunately the injury would not put her out of action for as long as his niece had been with the painful hip complaint, Perthes, that had confined her to bed rest for weeks.

‘I know Jas is a full-time job and she can twist you around her little finger. How did the physio go this week? Did she play up? I hope you remembered—’

His sister’s voice faded as among the stream of frustrated travellers streaming out of the station, one caught his eye.

The amazing copper-coloured hair made her stand out like a flash of colour in a monochrome picture. Her blue eyes fixed on his face and she was heading his way like some sort of petite avenging angel. All the image lacked was a blazing sword, which was just as well because she looked as if she’d happily have skewered him if she’d had anything sharp to hand.

Conscious of a buzz of anticipation, he waited. He had not sought this encounter but he was not going to avoid it. As she got closer he felt the faint nagging guilt that he had been unwilling to acknowledge dissolve. The woman approaching was not the defeated, dejected figure who more resembled a mistreated kitten than a seasoned seductress. This was a sexy, smouldering redhead who moved with supple feline grace. The woman who would have caused havoc in the small community.

The muscles along his jaw tightened as she turned to heave the bag she was half dragging onto her shoulder, giving him an excellent, if fleeting, view of her taut, rounded behind. If he had needed proof of the walking danger she represented to men it was provided by the scorching flash of heat that sizzled through his own body to settle in his groin. If running true to form she would have worked her way through the married men in the area in a couple of months!

‘Someone you know?’ Angel murmured, looking curiously from her brother, who had frozen to the spot, to the slim, flame-haired figure approaching them as fast as the bag she was lugging would allow.

‘Stay out of this, Angel.’

Anna, close enough to hear this terse aside, didn’t know who she felt more scornful towards. Him, for speaking that way, or the woman for tolerating it.

Anna’s glance slid over Cesare Urquart’s predictably glamorous companion, a tall, utterly stunning brunette, made taller by the crazy spiky heels she was wearing, which she’d teamed with a retro-styled tea dress and a leather biker jacket. A challenging combination that she managed to carry off with style.

Pulling herself up to her full five feet three, Anna halted and, breathing hard, levelled an accusing finger at Cesare’s broad chest. She was struggling to articulate her fury, so she stuttered. ‘Y-you!’

His right eyebrow hitched a little higher as he tipped his head. ‘Miss Henderson?’

Previously his hostility had been masked, now it was overt. Her inarticulate fury gave way to bewilderment.

‘Look, you’re a bully, I get that, but what I would like to know is why?’

‘You are a bad loser, Miss Henderson.’

She lifted her chin and declared proudly, ‘But an excellent teacher.’

The furrow between his brows deepened as she wrapped her arms around herself, but carried on shivering.

‘Why have you not got a coat on?’ he demanded irritably.

The question briefly threw Anna off her stride. ‘I lost it,’ she snarled through gritted teeth.

‘Why?’ she repeated, her militant attitude giving way to genuine confusion. It was utterly impossible for soft-hearted Anna, who would not have deliberately set out to injure her worst enemy, let alone a total stranger, to understand how or why someone would do what he had.

‘It was my job to ensure that the school has the best possible head, and you were simply not up to the job.’ He curved his fingers around the beautiful brunette’s elbow. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’

The dismissal relit the smouldering flames of Anna’s fury. ‘No, I won’t!’ she cried, catching his arm.

He swung back, his metallic stare conveying astonishment before it moved with significance to the small white hand against his sleeve.

Anna’s hand fell self-consciously away, her nerve endings still retaining the impression of hard muscle even after she rubbed her hand against her thigh. ‘There is something else—I know there is.’

He arched a sardonic brow. ‘Beyond your incompetence?’

‘The others thought I was competent. I am competent,’ she qualified angrily as her fingers itched to slap the contemptuous smile off his hatefully perfect face. ‘Until you arrived, the panel thought I was the right person for the job.’

His lip curled. ‘On paper you looked an adequate candidate.’

The comment sent his sister’s interested glance to the file her brother had flung onto the back seat.

‘Adequate?’ Anna growled.

Cesare dragged his gaze up from the full pouting curve of her lush lips, where it kept sliding. ‘I am sure you are accustomed to smiling and getting your own way. Being born beautiful does not grant you special privileges in life, Miss Henderson.’

Anna blinked. Beautiful? She half expected to see sarcasm in his stare, but she saw only anger and something she struggled to put a name to. The indefinable dark something made her stomach muscles quiver.

She wasn’t beautiful.

‘For a moment I thought you were Rosie.’

Anna had lost count of the number of times she had heard that comment while she was growing up and she understood it: her older cousin, whom she admired and loved, was beautiful.

It was a subtle thing, beauty. She was Rosanna, though she much preferred to be called Anna. She had freckles, with a not quite straight nose and a mouth that was too wide. She was okay-looking whereas Rosemary was stunning. Her cousin could have had any man; instead she had fallen for the creep who had very nearly ruined her life.

‘If anyone here is privileged...’ She gave a scornful hoot of laughter. ‘You know what I think? I think you like to prove what a big man you are because you’re not—what you are is a bully, a pathetic bully.’ He looked so astonished she almost laughed. ‘What do you do as an encore? Kick puppies?’

‘I hardly think the analogy is apt, Miss Henderson.’ Not a puppy, but there was definitely something feline about this sexy red-headed witch.

She gave a cranky grunt and snarled through clenched teeth, ‘Will you stop calling me that?’

‘Would you prefer Rosie?’

She blinked. It was weird to hear this man call her by her cousin’s diminutive. ‘My name is Rosanna.’ It didn’t really matter what he called her because he’d always manage to make it sound like an insult. ‘My friends.’ She gulped, suddenly feeling very far away from those friends. ‘They call me A-Anna.’

Was this display of quivering bravery meant to make him feel guilty? ‘Have you ever heard the phrase what goes around comes around, Miss Henderson?’

‘If that were true something large would fall from the sky and hit you on your fat, self-important head!’

The snort of laughter drew Anna’s attention to the beautiful brunette, who rather unexpectedly grinned at her in an encouraging way and gave a thumbs-up sign.

Cesare flashed his sister a look without having any real expectation of it having any effect, then returned his attention to the slim redhead who, when she wasn’t abusing him, was playing for the sympathy vote.

‘Do you mind lowering your voice?’

She adopted a puzzled expression. ‘Why? It can’t be a secret you’re a cold-hearted bully.’

His silver-grey eyes narrowed to slits at the jibe. ‘We can trade insults if you wish.’ His smile suggested he thought he’d come off better in this exchange. ‘What do you call a woman who targets married men?’

Anna’s jaw dropped. ‘What?’

‘Paul Dane is a good friend of mine.’

The name caused the blood to drain out of Anna’s face, leaving her marble pale as the day’s events clicked into place. Suddenly it all made sickening sense. This man thought she was Rosie!

‘Suddenly you have less to say.’

Her eyes blinked wide open. Not, as he anticipated, filled with the shame of discovery, but angry. Sparkling like blue sapphires. His contemptuous smile faded as a furrow formed between his darkly defined brows.

Of course, this man and Paul Dane were friends. ‘A marriage made in heaven,’ she murmured.

‘Paul’s marriage is still strong, despite your efforts to end it.’

‘My efforts?’ She shook her head, her chest dramatically lifting as she struggled to control her feelings. ‘Sorry, did I get that right? You think your friend Paul is some sort of a victim?’ Anna began to laugh, her anger growing cold. It had taken her cousin a very long time to recover from the affair with the married man who had broken her heart. Rosie, whose only sin had been that she was too loving and trusting, that she followed her heart.

And she was brave too. A lesser person would have been destroyed by what had happened, but not Rosie. Anna’s admiration for her gutsy cousin was tinged with worry. Yes, Rosie had found her happy-ever-after scenario, but following her heart could just as easily have led to another heartbreak, another Paul Dane.

Rosie had taken the risk but even the thought of following her example was enough to send a ripple of horror through Anna. The nightmares of the night she had discovered her cousin semi-conscious beside a half-empty bottle of pills and a bottle of booze were less frequent now, but they still came. If one positive thing had come from that experience it was the knowledge that she would never allow her heart to rule her head.

Her expression sobered as she angled a scorn-filled look up at his dark lean face. So certain, so superior! She gave a snort of disgust. ‘Stupid question, of course you do.’

‘Paul was not without blame,’ he conceded, slinging her an impatient look.

‘Big of you to say so.’ She tilted her head back to direct a contemptuous look at his face. ‘This is how I know it to be. A man, a married man who seduces an inexperienced, starry-eyed girl ten years his junior, a man who tells her he loves her and is going to leave his wife for her.’

Too furious to consider her words, she gave a bitter laugh and added, ‘Yes, the girl knows she is doing wrong.’ An image of Rosie’s tear-stained face as she clutched that bottle of pills flashed into Anna’s head as she relived that awful moment.

‘But she does it anyway,’ Anna finished in a voice husky with emotion. ‘She lies to her family and when he dumps her and goes back to his wife she thinks her life is over. I’m not sure what I’d call a man like that but it sure as hell wouldn’t be victim!’

At least she had stopped short of revealing the whole story. Even so, Anna immediately felt guilty and disloyal. She had promised Rosie never to reveal what she knew to anyone, it was a promise that up to this point she had honoured.

The only comfort was that this man thought she was the person who had fallen victim to his friend and while she hated being thought of as this naïve victim, it was preferable to having this man sneer at Rosie, judge her.

Let him think what he liked about her. Anna was more than willing to take one for the team if it meant protecting Rosie from his sneers and accusations.

Her passion caused the permanent indentation between Cesare’s ebony brows to form into a V of doubt, which quickly smoothed. He resented the fact that this woman had made him even briefly doubt a man who had literally saved his life. He realised that she’d probably told this version of events so often that she believed it. A lot easier to believe a lie than admit you’d targeted a married man and relentlessly pursued him.

While Cesare didn’t consider himself intolerant of weakness—he had enough of his own—when it came to the subject of fidelity within marriage there were no grey areas. It was simple: you stayed faithful or you didn’t exchange vows you were not able to keep. This was the reason that he did not plan to take the marriage route. Loving the same woman for a lifetime or even a year? Impossible. Lying was a strong word even when the lie in question was directed to yourself. Did people, intelligent people, really believe it?

He gave a mental shrug. Maybe he was just wired differently? But for his money the existence of the Easter Bunny was easier to buy into than this soul-mate stuff. Sure, you grew comfortable over the years but who wanted to be comfortable when you could have passion and fire?

However, if you went down the marriage route, straying was not an option. It was true that Paul had not behaved well, but at least he’d come to his senses in time to save his marriage. Basically, Paul was one of life’s good guys, capable of selfless acts. If he hadn’t been Cesare knew he wouldn’t be standing here now—Paul’s selfless act had saved his skin.

‘Get in the car, Angel,’ he snapped at his companion before turning on his heel and presenting Anna with his broad-shouldered back.

Infuriated by the dismissal, Anna surged forward. The hasty action took her close to the edge of the pavement just as a bus drove by, depositing the contents of a deep puddle down the front of her suit.