Wife For Hire

‘I’m sure anything that needs to be discussed can be discussed in front of—’

‘We’ll be twenty minutes.’ He gave them both a bland, impenetrable look and Rebecca watched in frustrated silence as Mrs Williams left the room, shutting the door behind her.

CHAPTER TWO

‘HOME tutoring.’ He sat back in his chair, crossed his legs and looked at her. ‘Carry on.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You were giving a little pep talk on all the opportunities still available to a teenager who has been stupid enough to get herself pregnant. You mentioned home tutoring as an option.’

‘Yes.’ He had removed his jacket before entering the room, and now he slowly began to roll the sleeves of his shirt up, exposing strong forearms, black-haired, and lightly bronzed. Although he was English by birth, she remembered him telling her years ago that there was Greek blood in him. Lust had apparently got the better of common sense, and his maternal grandmother had shocked everyone by throwing caution, and her very British fiancé, to the winds and marrying the son of a Greek tycoon. The tale had amused him, had appealed to that element in him that rebelled against convention.

She dragged her eyes away from his wretched arms and fastened them on his face. ‘Home tutoring. I didn’t mention that because I felt any kind of obligation to point out a bright side to this whole sorry business. I mentioned it because it’s a perfectly viable option, and actually I think Emily would do very well on it. She’s incredibly bright. She picks things up very easily. It would more be a matter of steering her towards her exams, making sure that certain levels of work were maintained.

‘I’m not saying that it would be a piece of cake for her, or for her tutor for that matter. She’ll still have to deal with all the ups and downs of the pregnancy, still have to come to terms with it, and she can be difficult.’ Rebecca laughed a little. ‘Possibly one of the bigger understatements of my lifetime. But she should be all right, at least academically, provided you find the right tutor. Someone patient, I think.’

‘You didn’t explain why my daughter chose you for her confidante.’

‘Well…’ Rebecca blushed ‘…as Mrs Williams said, I am one of the younger members of the staff here, and, well, I do pride myself on having a certain rapport with the girls. I do a fair amount of stuff with them after school hours. I run the amateur dramatic society, for example. Actually, that was about the only class that your daughter really seemed to enjoy. I think she liked being able to slip in and out of characters. Perhaps she found it relaxing.’

‘Yes, that would make sense.’ His mouth twisted cynically. ‘Her mother was fond of amateur dramatics herself.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Probably runs in the genes.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that,’ Rebecca said vaguely.

‘No. I don’t suppose you would. You just know Emily as a child who joined your school approximately two years ago and has proved troublesome from day one. Do you ever take an interest in their backgrounds?’

He was looking at her curiously now, and there was something ever so slightly critical about his appraisal.

‘To some extent,’ she said stiffly. ‘But if you imagine that I spend half my leisure time going through their personal records, reading up on what their parents do for a living, then no. I don’t.’

‘So you are unaware of the circumstances surrounding my daughter…’

‘I know that her mother died two years ago…’ Actually, she did have some idea of Emily’s background from what the child had told her, but she had no intention of admitting that. Trust was something that teenagers held very dear, and she was not about to break Emily’s.

‘So you’re not aware that she and I were divorced when Emily was only a toddler.’

‘I don’t see how this is relevant…to what we were discussing earlier, Mr Knight. Namely, home tutoring for your daughter.’

‘Oh, but you were so quick to judge me earlier on, Miss Ryan,’ he said smoothly, and a little caustically. ‘I thought you would be eager to slot together the little mental puzzle you had formed of my relationship with Emily. I mean, there’s no point in jumping to lots of amateur deductions if you only know the surface gloss, is there?’

‘It’s none of my business,’ Rebecca said, blushing furiously. She pressed her head against the back of the chair in an attempt to stop her hair from unravelling totally. Why she had bothered with these ridiculously uncomfortable clothes, she had no idea. Nicholas Knight was about as intimidated by her as an elephant by a flea. And she felt as though she was suffocating in her jacket, which she had not had the foresight to remove from the beginning. ‘Anyway, Mrs. Williams will be returning shortly…’

‘But I’m sure she’ll leave again if we’re not quite finished.’

‘Not quite finished with what? I don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you on the subject of home tutoring. If you like, I’m sure Mrs Williams can recommend a few people…’ A few brave, intrepid people, she thought to herself. Emily would need brave and intrepid. She would need the sort of private tutor who did bungee jumping for fun in his spare time. Such creatures were thin on the ground.

‘I shouldn’t like to leave you with any deluded impressions of me, Miss Ryan. I know your conscience couldn’t bear it if you thought that you were dispatching my daughter off to face a life of despair and misery at the hands of an unsympathetic, absentee father.’

‘Why would I think that?’

‘Because if Emily ran to you with tales of what had happened, then it’s more than likely that she confided all about her unhappy family life.’ He gave her a shrewd, knowing look. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.’

‘Well, she just mentioned one or two things. In passing,’ Rebecca answered feebly.

‘Care to fill me in?’

‘I did happen to know that you and your wife split up when she was two, and she was taken to Australia to live.’

‘Did she also tell you that I did my damnedest to keep in touch, and that it was only years later that I was informed by her mother that every letter and present I had sent over the years had been shredded and destroyed? By which time she had been inculcated in the belief that I was the big bad wolf who had driven her innocent, victimised mother into a divorce she never wanted, and then, not content with that, had forced her to flee to the opposite ends of the earth?’

Not precisely, Rebecca thought. She couldn’t quite understand why Nicholas Knight felt obliged to fill her in on any of this, but, as a teacher, she knew that she had a duty to listen. Underneath his cool, self-contained acknowledgement of the situation, he no doubt was feeling pangs of guilt and this was his way of releasing some of it. That being the case, she tilted her head obligingly to one side, prepared to listen. He wasn’t to know that everything he said she would take with a hefty pinch of salt. Emily might have done a fair bit of exaggerating, but the truth doubtless lay somewhere between the two accounts.

‘When Veronica died, I found myself with a teenager I didn’t know and who seemed quite incapable of accepting the generous efforts made by us to smooth the path.’

‘Us?’ Rebecca’s ears pricked up. This introduced a complete new line into the story. Had Nicholas Knight remarried? Emily had made no mention of a stepmother. In fact, she had made no mention of a woman on the scene at all, but now, thinking about it, and delving back into her memories of him, he was not the sort of man who cultivated celibacy as a chosen lifestyle.

‘So she didn’t mention Fiona to you?’ The black eyes narrowed. He uncrossed his legs and stretched them out in front of him.

‘Fiona being…your wife?’

‘Fiona being my girlfriend. My dearest ex-wife rather tarnished my belief in the institution of marriage, I’m afraid.’

‘No, Emily didn’t mention a Fiona.’

‘I’m surprised. Fiona did her utmost to get to know her.’

Rebecca thought that that manoeuvre was probably the one thing guaranteed to put off someone like Emily. She would have seen it as the threat of a mother substitute in the offing and would have instinctively reacted against it.

‘Well, I’m sure that you and your girlfriend will be able to sort everything out suitably,’ she said vaguely.

There was a knock on the door and Mrs Williams poked her head around it, her eyes flitting between the two of them questioningly. Rebecca smiled, relieved, but her relief lasted approximately three seconds, until he said, without the slightest hint of apology in his voice, ‘We’re not quite finished here. Perhaps you could give us another…’ he glanced at his watch ‘…half an hour?’ It was just lip-service to politeness. The three of them knew that the principal would give him just as long as he wanted, and she nodded and retreated back, shutting the door behind her.

‘Where were we…?’ he asked, settling back to look at Rebecca.

‘You were just agreeing that once you get Emily back everything will be fine. I’m sure your girlfriend will rise to the occasion and give you both all the support you need.’

‘Well, now, I’m not at all sure I want to throw poor little Fiona into any such situation…’ he ruminated, and Rebecca ground her teeth together in sheer frustration. She had no idea where all this was going, but she had a suspicion that it was going somewhere.

‘If she loves you,’ Rebecca said firmly, ‘then she’d want to help you deal with it. And she’d also want to help Emily deal with it.’

‘Oh, I’m sure she’d like nothing better than to busily try and make herself indispensable, but, you see, I don’t want any such thing.’

‘Oh, right. Well, that’ll be up to the two of you to sort out between yourselves.’

‘But then I’m back with my little problem, aren’t I? One wayward, pregnant daughter who needs home tutoring. Even if I find the time to interview a series of prospective candidates, I’m abroad a hell of a lot, and I won’t be available to supervise how things are going. And you have to admit, knowing Emily as you seem to do, that supervision is going to be essential.’

‘Not if you find someone you feel confident in.’