Читать книгу The Dare Collection February 2019 - Nicola Marsh, Avril Tremayne - Страница 19

I’M LISTENING TO Professor Winterbourne’s Wednesday morning lecture and definitely not concentrating. How can I when my mind is filled with thoughts of Connor?

I’m also making cannelloni and my hands are covered in ricotta and garlic cream when my doorbell rings. And I know who it is the instant I hear the sound. I smile to myself, wiping my hands on my apron, and go through the kitchen and the lounge.

A cursory inspection through the safety glass shows Connor. Or Casual Connor, as I have taken to thinking of him in this guise. Wearing jeans and a collared shirt with sleeves pushed up his forearms to reveal tanned, leanly muscled flesh that makes my mouth go dry.

I slide the chain lock into place and open the door an inch, a mock-stern expression on my face. ‘Yes, sir?’

His grin undoes me. I bite down on my lower lip.

‘More studying?’ he teases, catching the strains of the lecture. I nod, smiling.

‘No rest for the wicked.’

He wiggles his brows. ‘And what are we cooking today, Miss Amorelli?’

‘We?’ I prompt, my heart skidding against my ribs.

‘Well, you. But I’ll watch. And help you lick the bowl.’ His wink is slow and so full of heat.

Still, I pretend not to be affected. I tilt my head to the side, eyeing him thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’m having a perfectly nice evening with Professor Winterbourne...’

‘He’s no threat to me.’

I laugh at his arrogance, but push the door shut so I can unchain it and open it fully.

As soon as I do, he sweeps in and wraps me in his arms, his kiss taking over my senses, his mouth dominating me in a way that steals my breath.

He lifts away, his bright green eyes held fast to mine for a moment, and then he grins, walking towards the kitchen as though this is his place, not mine.

‘Ah. Cannelloni.’ He sits down on one of the stools at the kitchen bench; I love the sight of him there. I pause the lecture, knowing I’ll need to get back to it later. ‘My favourite.’

‘Oh, really?’ I arch my brows, my heart still thumping hard and fast from his kiss. I peel myself away from the wall with effort and attempt to look casual as I head back into the kitchen. ‘You don’t know cannelloni till you’ve tried my cannelloni.’

His nod is sage. ‘You talk a good game, Amorelli, but can you back it up?’

‘I intend to.’ I lift my piping bag and reach for another pasta tube, pressing the nozzle into its centre and squeezing. It is an act I have performed a thousand times, first with my nonna and then with my mother. Now, I could do it in my sleep. I fill at least four before he speaks again.

‘Your boyfriend—’ he says the words quietly, and I’m jolted out of my cooking meditation by the discordant phrase ‘—what happened?’

He’s back to Pietro. I don’t know if I’m annoyed or gratified. I suppose the latter, because there’s something about his interest that is significant in some way.

I can’t really explain it properly, it’s just how I feel. ‘We got together when I came back from travelling,’ I say after a beat. ‘I mean, I’d known him for ages, through my cousin, and I knew he had a thing for me. And I thought he was cute.’ I shrug, a little self-conscious. ‘Then I went away. And he was waiting when I got back.’

‘And you felt obliged,’ Connor surmises—correctly.

I wince. ‘It’s not a particularly good reason to go out with someone.’

‘No.’

‘I did like him. We just weren’t a good fit.’

He nods thoughtfully and then, ‘Where’d you go?’ He switches topics but I know him now. I know that he is liquid in his approach to all things. That he eases and thrusts, relaxes and aggresses, as part of his strategy to tease information and gain surrender.

‘All over.’ I smile at him, my tummy flipping.

‘Starting with?’ he prompts, reaching across to my wine and sipping it before standing up and lifting the glass to my lips. I am hopelessly lost, my eyes locked onto his as I take a drink.

A dribble of liquid runs down my chin. He catches it with his fingertip before sitting down, and I return my focus to the pasta.

‘Mmm...’ I pause in my cannelloni stuffing to give him my full attention. ‘The south of France. Spain. Italy—all along the western coastline. Greece. Croatia. Then we sailed to Morocco—which was amazing. We took a flight to South Africa for a few months and then Bali beckoned.’ I wink. ‘We spent another six months island-hopping through Asia. Hospitalised twice...’ I lift two fingers and roll my eyes ‘...for stomach bugs.’

He grins. ‘Bali belly?’

‘And then some.’ I return to the pasta. ‘Then a year and a half in Australia. It was incredible.’

‘Who’d you travel with?’

‘A friend of mine. Clara. We worked together at a café when we were teenagers.’

He’s quiet and I don’t want to stop talking—sharing. I can’t say where the urge comes from, only that I find myself opening up to him in a way I never thought I would.

‘I think it’s why I was so interested in the Donovan case.’ My eyes meet his for a fraction of a second and then flick away. ‘We were practically the same age. I mean, I was eighteen when I left for my trip, right out of school. I can imagine how she felt. The excitement, the nerves. Her life was taken from her, and that’s awful. But the pleasure and excitement she was on the brink of enjoying...what a crime to rob someone of that.’

I stare at him, waiting to see his reaction, but it’s expertly concealed from me. There is barely a flicker of response in his face and, though that might seem cold, on some instinctive level I know it’s not. I believe it’s that he feels so deeply he can’t show it. That he doesn’t want to show it.

‘Don’t you think?’ I push, needing to hear him admit what I know he’s thinking.

He’s quiet still.

‘I mean, she was so young,’ I say.

When he eventually looks up there is something in his gaze, as though he’s weighing his words carefully. I wait, breath held for some reason. ‘Where was your favourite part?’

I narrow my eyes. His ability to clam up on me is utterly infuriating. ‘I couldn’t say.’

‘Try.’

‘I loved Sydney,’ I say finally.

He nods and sips his wine.

‘You didn’t come to my office yesterday.’

I am jerked from our conversation into another river, the current moving in a wholly new direction and at an altered speed. ‘Was I meant to?’

‘Yes.’ His nod is slow, thoughtful. ‘To discuss the group assignment.’

It dawns on me then that he mentioned something about this on Thursday afternoon. ‘I presumed that was just a pretext to get up close and personal so you could slip me the hotel key?’

He shakes his head. ‘I really did want to talk to you.’

‘Oh. What about?’

His eyes meet mine and there is renewed speculation in them. ‘How many students were in your group?’

‘Five. You have the list, right?’

‘Yet you, and you alone, wrote the assignment.’

I blink at him, confused by his insight. He’s right, but he has no way of knowing that. ‘It’s a group assignment,’ I demur. ‘We all played our part.’

He expels a sigh. ‘You can’t let people take advantage of you like this. You’re starting your career. You’re very smart. If you’re not careful, you’ll crumble under the pressure of what becomes the norm for people to expect of you.’

‘No one took advantage of me.’

‘But you wrote the whole thing. Fifteen thousand words.’

I don’t answer at first. I reach for another cannelloni then realise I’ve stuffed them all. I lay the piping bag down without meeting his eyes. ‘It was a team effort.’

‘You have a certain style to your phrasing. A logic that is uniquely your own. This paper might as well have been a fifteen-thousand-word autograph, Miss Amorelli.’

I am flattered.

I should be more defensive, more outraged, more protective of my groupmates. But his intuitive familiarity with my writing sparks something in my chest. Pride, relief, gladness. They all tumble through me, making me smile.

‘It’s not funny. I’m annoyed at you.’

I laugh. ‘Why?’

‘Because you can’t let people walk all over you.’

‘I assure you, I didn’t.’ I bat my eyelids at him. ‘What did you grade the assignment?’

‘I’m giving you a high mark,’ he says. ‘But I’m severing you from your group. They’ll fail unless they can show me detailed research notes proving their involvement.’

All amusement drops from my face. ‘You’re kidding?’

‘No, Olivia. This is your final year. They can’t skate by on your hard work. I can’t let them.’

‘No one’s... Oh, God, Connor, please don’t do that.’ I move around to his side of the bench with urgency. ‘It was my idea for me to do the damned thing. Our schedules were so chaotic and we could barely get together. It was a topic I was comfortable with—so similar to a research piece I did last year. You can’t fail them. Please.’

I hover in front of him, my arms lifting around his neck of their own volition.

‘Are you actually standing between my legs, asking me to change grades for you?’

‘Not my grade,’ I mutter, knowing that I’ve moved into ethically questionable territory. ‘Theirs.’ My cheeks drain of colour. ‘Or fail me, too. Don’t sever me. Say you suspect it wasn’t a proper group effort and fail us all—let us resubmit in a month. Please.’

‘Jesus, Olivia, it doesn’t work like that. How many group assignments have you done at the LLS?’

‘I don’t know. Ten, maybe eleven.’

‘Enough to know that the approach is in the name. Nothing’s easy about group assignments. Everyone knows that. It’s preparation for the real world. Do you think I liked having to rely on other people? People who didn’t have my understanding of the law or motivation to work my arse off? It’s the worst. You suck it up. That’s as important as the content of the assignment.’

His lecture is striking every chord in my body and, absurdly, tears fill my eyes. Tears which catch us both off guard. ‘Let’s talk about it at school on Monday,’ he says gently.

‘No.’ My heart is twisting painfully. ‘I can’t... I can’t... This is not good.’ I move away from him, back into the kitchen. I sip my wine and then turn away from him, staring out of the window at the view I have of a brick wall, sprayed liberally with bright graffiti. It is a fascinating contrast—jagged and sharp, somehow beautiful, too.

There is loveliness in the defacement. Hope in the ruins.

* * *

Olivia’s shoulders shift gently. Her back is to me but I know she’s fighting tears and my organs squeeze up, tightening in my body, hard.

There is a reason these relationships are prohibited. There’s the inherent power mismatch that comes from sleeping with someone over whom you hold a position of strength. There’s a loss of perspective that makes it impossible to carry out your normal functioning.

And this is a perfect example of that.

Would I have even noticed that the group assignment was all Olivia’s handiwork if her words hadn’t drifted into my brain and filled it with her voice? If I hadn’t learned, intimately, how she views life and crime, and how she expresses those views?

And if I hadn’t learned how her beautiful brain works, I wouldn’t have picked this up. And even if I had somehow miraculously guessed that this assignment reflected only Olivia’s work, would I have cared if we weren’t sleeping together?

Would I have bothered to bring it up?

Or would I have laughed at the predicament she found herself in—so much brighter and more motivated than the classmates she’d been grouped with?

Relationships like this, teachers and students, are banned on so many levels. They are problematic in myriad ways. Could someone in my role offer better grades in exchange for sex? Teachers have done it in the past. There was a famous case at another prestigious law school about ten years ago where a professor did just that. She slept with around a dozen students—that went public—male and female. She upped their grades in the initial infatuation period and then burned them once they broke up.

There is an imbalance of power between us. I’m ten years older than she is and in terms of life experience it may as well be twenty. I have accumulated a fat fortune, garnered professional success, and I’m her teacher. And now I’m bringing grades into the equation.

Her shoulders move and I know now she is actually crying. I’m frozen to the spot, my gut twisting painfully.

Why do I even care about the damned group assignment? I’m only lecturing for the summer term. I’m not invested in the school; I’m not really a part of the faculty. Surely I can let this slide? Olivia deserves a distinction. Any other teacher would have awarded the group the mark without questioning it.

So aren’t I the one in the wrong? Because I’m applying knowledge I’ve gained only by virtue of the fact that we have a completely prohibited sexual relationship?

‘Don’t worry about it.’ I hear the words come from my mouth gruffly. ‘Let’s just...ignore it.’