Читать книгу A Passionate Proposition - Susan Napier, Susan Napier - Страница 8

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?