A Passionate Proposition

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.’