The Sister Swap

Before she realised what he had meant he was up the stairs and heading towards her half-open door. His boast about moving fast hadn’t been idle. Frantically trying to remember whether she had tidied everything away after putting Ivan to bed, Anne flew up after him, and nipped in front just in time to bar his entry with one slender arm across the doorway.

‘The lights are on so obviously everything’s OK,’ she said breathlessly, trying to act casually as his mo- mentum brought his chest up against her restraining arm. He froze and she smiled brilliantly at him. ‘Thank you ever so much for your help,’ she gushed. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

He was looking at her oddly, through thoughtfully narrowed eyes, and she instantly realised that she was overdoing the gratitude. After the scathing comments she had just flung at him he was bound to be suspicious of such a sudden volte face. ‘You can go back to—er—whatever you were doing now,’ she urged more calmly. ‘I don’t want to put you to any more trouble…’

To her dismay he shrugged. ‘No trouble.’ He leaned forward as he spoke and she felt the straining pressure of that deep chest against her upper arm.

‘No, really, there’s no need!’ she squeaked desperately as he lifted a big hand and effortlessly brushed her re- straining limb aside.

Three steps into the room he stopped, crossing his hands over his chest as he slowly surveyed the territory. Coming up beside him, Anne was relieved to see that there was nothing untoward in the scene. Relief brought back her courage. ‘Satisfied?’ she demanded defiantly.

‘At the very least, from your state of guilty panic, I expected to find an orgy going on in here,’ he mur- mured, confirming her opinion of his acumen. Worse than a nosy neighbour was a suspicious one who could read your mind like a book!

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’

‘Oh, you haven’t disappointed me, Miss Tremaine. My expectations of you aren’t high enough for that to be possible. I expect the worst, and if you don’t oblige then I can only be pleasantly surprised.’

‘What a ghastly philosophy of life!’ Anne stared at him disapprovingly. ‘No wonder you’re so bad-tempered. So would I be if I went around in a constant state of gloomy pessimism.’

‘Yes, I can see that you’re one of life’s noisy optimists,’ he said drily. ‘Relentlessly determined to enjoy yourself at all costs.’

‘Only a pessimist could make optimism sound depressing,’ was Anne’s tart reply. ‘And one person’s noise is music to another person’s ears.’

‘I’m a realist, not a pessimist, but we won’t get into an argument about it.’

‘Why not? Afraid you’d lose?’

‘I have better things to do with my time than argue semantics with starry-eyed Lolitas—’

‘Lolita! I’ll have you know I’m twenty—’ She stopped herself just in time and added haughtily, ‘I’m older than I look and I was never starry-eyed. Now that you’ve assured yourself you’re not missing out on an orgy, perhaps you’ll finally go back to where you belong.’

He gave her a small, ironic inclination of his head. ‘Ah, would that I knew where that was…’

She almost softened, intrigued by that weary, cryptic murmur, except that she saw the deep, hooded gleam in his eyes and suddenly knew that he was playing on her compassion deliberately, slyly proving his point about her unsophisticated gullibility.

‘Try hell,’ she said sweetly. ‘I’m sure people often direct you that way.’

A startled stillness gripped his expression, then he threw back his head and laughed, the warm sound rising richly to the high, sloping rafters. His eyes slitted and all the brooding lines of his face seemed to lift with the upward curve of his mouth. She had certainly been right about his handsomeness when he wasn’t scowling. Suddenly his cynical suspicion of a strange woman invading his personal space didn’t seem quite so untenable.

‘I don’t know what you’re laughing at—it wasn’t a compliment,’ she pointed out. ‘You know, for someone so inordinately keen to be left alone you’re singularly difficult to get rid of!’

His laughter ended as abruptly as it had begun and he gave her a slow, measuring look as he began to saunter towards the door in his own sweet time. ‘Such big, pompous words for such a little country girl.’

‘Size and geographical origin has nothing whatever to do with intelligence,’ she said icily. ‘And I’m a woman, not a girl.’

‘That remains to be seen.’

‘But not by you!’

This time she got to shut the door smartly in his face, although her satisfaction was somewhat dimmed by the memory of that last, grimly taunting smile.

It seemed to say that Hunter Lewis would see whatever he wanted to see, whenever he damned well wanted to see it.

She would just have to keep well out of his way and make sure he never got the opportunity.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_5909ac6f-c767-52dc-a09e-1f2ec51c694b)

‘I THINK they should call it disorientation week!’ Anne groaned as she collapsed with her small backpack on to a seat in the university quad.

‘Decided to give up and go home to the farm?’ grinned the plump blonde already sitting there as she carefully added a dollop of cream from her doughnut to a paper cup of coffee.

‘Are you kidding? I’m having a great time!’ Anne rallied. ‘It’s just taking me longer than I thought to find my way around this maze.’

She stretched out her legs in their age-softened jeans, enjoying the cool breeze playing about the loose neckline of the white shirt that Mike had grown out of six months ago. It had been part of the dress uniform at her brother’s school but her mother had added a jaunty feminine touch with embroidery along the pocket and collar. With sleeves rolled up and shirt-tails hanging out Anne had felt confident of blending in with her fellow students, despite the fact that she was older than most of the other first-years.

‘Don’t worry, even second-year students like me still get lost sometimes,’ Rachel Blake told her sympathetically. She had cheerfully admitted to being a student dilettante whose wealthy parents could afford for her to dabble at university for as long as it took her to get a degree—any degree.

To Anne, who loved to study but had to watch every cent of expenditure, it sounded like an existence to be envied, and yet she didn’t. Such aimlessness was a waste of time and effort and Anne didn’t want to waste a single moment of her time at university. Her aim was to gain her degree in the shortest possible time without overloading herself to the point where she didn’t have enough free time to earn the extra money essential to the continuation of her studies. After that, the world was her oyster!

‘At least you have the stamina for all the trekking about we have to do,’ Rachel added, with a mocking glance down at her own full figure. ‘You country girls probably have the strength of marathon runners from chasing all those sheep up and down the alps.’

Anne grinned. ‘Our farm’s nowhere near the Southern Alps and the dogs did all the running. I just leaned on the gates and whistled.’

Her new friend’s use of the phrase ‘country girl’ sent a small frisson up her spine. In the past two weeks she had seen very little of her surly neighbour, mainly be- cause she had adopted a policy of active avoidance. Apart from the occasional thunderous knocking on the wall whenever she forgot herself and played her tapes a little too loud, or to cover one of Ivan’s rare bouts of crying, he was just as scrupulous at avoiding contact.

Whatever it was that Hunter Lewis did for a living, his hours seemed to be erratic, so that it was no easy task to work out a schedule by which she could be sure of missing him whenever she ventured out. However, an ear to her bedroom wall was usually enough to ascertain if he was at home and therefore unlikely to be encoun- tered on the stairs. Coming back in she just had to keep a sharp look-out and take her chances. Every time she went up or down the stairs it was an adventure, and her heart pounded in her throat with nervous apprehension.

‘So…how’s the rest of your lecture schedule shaping up? I can’t believe you’re taking Japanese and Russian. One language at a time is enough for most of us!’

Anne shrugged. ‘I’ve already done basic correspondence courses in them so it won’t be too much of a shock. I used to love making up and solving codes and cryptograms when I was a kid. I even used to invent languages with proper alphabets and rules of grammar…put the whole works down in little notebooks. It’s just something that I’m good at.’

‘Inventing grammar’? Now I know you’re weird.’ Rachel rolled her eyes. ‘Most of us spend our childhood trying to avoid having to write any grammar! Your teachers must have loved you. So…what do you think of your lecturers so far?’

‘They seem OK.’ It was an understatement. Just to be at university was wonderful and Anne knew she was seeing everything through rose-coloured spectacles.

‘Lucky you. I’ve got some killers from last year. Him for example.’ She screwed up her face and inclined her head at one of the figures crossing the quad. ‘Gorgeous bod, personality of Dracula. You know, there are poor souls who actually take political studies because they think it’s going to be an easy option. Big mistake. The drop-out rate in his class is fierce. He has a fiendish temper and he just piles on the assignments!’

‘So how come you’re still taking it, then? Can’t resist the gorgeous bod?’ teased Anne with a smile as she casually scanned the quad.

‘I discovered I’m actually quite good at it,’ admitted Rachel sheepishly, making Anne laugh. ‘I know, I know…it shocked me even more than it did Professor Lewis. He thought I was just another blonde bimbo looking to plug a hole in my schedule—practically shredded me to pieces that first semester. The Pit Bull, I call him…let him scent a weakness and those big jaws just go chomp!’

Anne wasn’t listening. She had spotted him at the exact moment that Rachel had mentioned his name. He was walking towards them at an oblique angle but there was no mistaking that tight, impatient stride or the saturnine expression. He was wearing a sports jacket over dark trousers and pale shirt and tie, and was carrying a bulging leather briefcase.

‘Professor Lewis? Professor Hunter Lewis?’ she said hollowly, hoping against hope that it was merely a ghastly coincidence.

‘Yeah. You know him?’

‘He’s a lecturer here?’