A Passionate Proposition

by Susan Napier

  ‘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.’

  Now he was going too far! Anya’s quiet temper bubbled to the surface. His entire attitude was in need of serious readjustment!

  ‘You have a real chip on your shoulder, don’t you?’ she burst out. ‘Let me guess: your parents couldn’t afford to send you to a private school, so you resent anyone who was given the educational and social advantages that you weren’t. Well, most young kids don’t have any more choice about where they go to school than you did—I certainly didn’t!

  ‘And, contrary to your obvious prejudice, Mr Tyler, private school pupils aren’t all elitist snobs who take their privileges for granted and look down their noses at the rest of the world. A lot of them are the children of ordinary, e
galitarian, hardworking New Zealanders who believe in the kind of discipline, or moral and religious values that aren’t offered at a state school.’

  She unthinkingly punctuated her lecture with a teacher’s wagging finger, and Scott Tyler reacted with the insulting slyness of a naughty schoolboy.

  ‘Careful, Miss Adams, your slip is showing,’ he mocked, his gaze dipping down to where her emerald bra-strap peeked from under the sliding collar of his shirt.

  She hitched it impatiently back into place with a baleful look, refusing to be diverted. ‘My qualifications are rock-solid—it’s because of your own reverse snobbery that you didn’t want me getting the teaching position at the college. You did everything you could to cast me into a bad light at my interview, and it sticks in your craw that they gave me the job anyway!’

  The glow of smug triumph on her delicate face was like a red rag to a bull.

  ‘I didn’t want you in the job because I didn’t think you were physically or mentally tough enough to cope with the pressures and problems of teaching in a big unisex school which draws a large number of its students from a lower socio-economic group,’ he grated, planting his hands on his hips, his open jacket revealing the flatness of his tailored waistcoat against his hard stomach. ‘And I still don’t!’

  Anya bristled. ‘There are plenty of other female teachers on the staff—’ she said pugnaciously.

  ‘—who’ve got previous experience in a variety of large unisex schools, whereas you’ve been insulated in your cushy little Academy for Young Ladies ever since you graduated from training college.’

  She lifted her silky-fine eyebrows, echoing his taunting mockery from a few moments ago. ‘Careful, Mr Tyler, your inferiority complex is showing.’

  He bared even white teeth in the opposite of a smile. ‘So the butterfly can bite? Insulting me won’t change the facts.’

  He saw her as a butterfly? She pictured herself as a small but determined terrier.

  ‘The facts being that so far I’ve been managing my classes just fine!’ Apart from a few natural hiccups she’d rather not mention.

  ‘It won’t last,’ he predicted bluntly.

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘Do I have to? If tonight is an example of how you “manage” your students I think the major threat is your own behaviour.’

  She compressed her lips, controlling the surge of indignant words that welled hotly in her throat. After his disparaging comments about her former school her explanation wasn’t going to go down too well, so she delivered it in edited highlights.

  ‘Look, this really doesn’t have to go any further,’ she said, adopting her most reasonable tone. ‘I’m helping supervise a holiday camp out at the regional reserve, and a couple of the girls came to the party without permission, so I drove over to pick them up. I tracked them down but then Sean was sick all over my clothes. I was cleaning up in the bathroom when I heard him knock something over and ran back in to check…’

  She looked over at the culprit, meeting his bloodshot brown eyes behind his uncle’s back. She had half expected him to try and bluster his way out of trouble, but perhaps he was too intoxicated to put together a coherent sentence. Or maybe he was just hoping that by keeping silent he could avoid incriminating himself

  ‘Is that what happened, Sean?’ Scott Tyler rapped out, inclining his head but not taking his sceptical gaze off Anya.

  The boy shrugged, but he wasn’t too strung out to miss that the cynical edge in the gravelly voice wasn’t directed his way.

  ‘How should I know why she invited herself?’ he mumbled quickly, his sluggish tongue tangling in the consonants. ‘It was a party, man…chicks have been coming and going all night.’

  A cold trickle of dismay ran down Anya’s spine when she saw him leaning back out of his uncle’s peripheral sight, smirking maliciously at her.

  ‘All I know is, she followed me into my room and wouldn’t leave me alone. Who’da known she was so hot? Ever made it with a history teacher, Unc’l Scott?’

  The grubby insinuation with its macho, man-to-man overtones had Anya’s eyes snapping back to Scott Tyler’s face, which was suddenly rigidly impassive, wiped clean of all emotion. She guessed it was the expressionless mask he wore into the courtroom, when he didn’t want anyone to know what he was thinking.

  ‘Whatever he’s implying didn’t happen,’ she said tartly. ‘You know very well he’s just telling you what he thinks you want to hear…’

  One thick, dark eyebrow shot up. ‘Is he?’

  He was just playing devil’s advocate, she told herself.

  ‘You know he is. Look out the window if you don’t believe me. The girls I came here to find are down there waiting for me in my car—’

  He sent a fleeting, almost uninterested, glance down towards the turning circle. ‘There’s no smoke without fire,’ he murmured with infuriating blandness.

  ‘What are you—a fireman now?’ she flung at him witheringly, her slender body vibrating with fury. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a hot-shot lawyer. Why don’t you act like one and make Sean tell you the real truth!’

  ‘His version, or yours? When there’s two witnesses, the truth is often a matter of perspective.’

  It was on the tip of Anya’s tongue to tell him that she had another witness, but she didn’t want to involve Cheryl, and thus Eastbrook, unless she could help it.

  ‘Are you saying that you actually believe him!’

  ‘You must admit I’ve ample reason to be suspicious. Don’t tell me you aren’t aware that there’s something inherently erotic about a woman wearing a man’s shirt,’ he said, his eyes sliding down over her silk-wrapped body in a speculative way that made her blood boil, and not entirely with fury. ‘And the little white socks add just the right provocative touch of pseudo-innocence.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t be ridiculous!’ A piercing thrill of guilty pleasure made Anya lash out, trying to douse the treacherous feelings aroused by his words with a drenching of pure scorn. ‘I suppose you’re going to accuse me of trying to seduce you next!’

  There was a short, electric silence as they stared at each other, and Anya noticed all the things about him she had always tried very hard not to notice: the smooth grain of his olive skin as it stretched over the strong bones of his face; the almost feminine lushness of the thick dark lashes which framed his compelling blue eyes, and the strikingly masculine contrast of that thin, yet sensual mouth, and harshly chiselled jaw.

  The stubbly regrowth of his beard and faint purplish tinge under his sunken eyes—signs of his ‘hellish’ day—made him look rakish rather than merely weary.

  When he spoke again his voice was deeper, softer, and more dangerous than she had ever heard it. Too soft for the boy behind him to hear. And he allowed a flare of male hunger to show in the deep blue gaze.

  ‘You’re welcome to try, but I should point out that I’m a great deal more discerning—and considerably more demanding—than your average randy teenager…’

  The sheer wickedness of the barbed challenge sucked the breath out of her lungs, and Anya opened and closed her mouth several times before she summoned the words to prove that she was wasn’t totally vanquished.

  ‘Oh, you’re impossible! It’s easy to see you’re related—you’re both as bad as each other. Believe what you damned well like; I don’t care!’

  And on that resounding lie Anya swung on her heel and stormed into the bathroom, slamming the door violently enough to cause the mirror to shiver on the wall above the basin and several toiletries to fall over on the vanity top.

  Muttering to herself to bolster her sense of outrage, she ripped off the silk shirt and pulled on her wrinkled clothes, the damp patches practically sizzling as they hit her burning skin. She finished zipping up her ankle boots with a vicious tug that jammed a piece of her sock in the meshing teeth and swore through tight lips as she tried to work it free.

  She had always thought of cotton ankle socks
as utilitarian rather than sexy, but now that serene unawareness was gone for ever. She would never be able to put on a pair of white socks again without thinking of him.

  He had viewed them as provocative, for God’s sake! A pair of simple, inexpensive white socks! The man was plainly in need of therapy, she thought as she checked herself out in the mirror, looking in vain for the cool, capable, down-to-earth Miss Adams she was used to recognising in her reflection.

  With her glittering, storm-darkened eyes, flushed cheeks, and the baby-fine wisps of hair escaping from the pins at her nape and drifting forward to curve around her smooth oval jaw, she looked disturbingly young and flustered. Not in control.

  And she had no make-up to repair the damage to her self-image. She did what she could, smoothing back the strands of hair from her glowing forehead and tucking them firmly into place with tremulous fingers. Had her small mouth always looked that rosy and full? She pressed her lips together in a stern line and willed her colour to fade back to normal. She could do nothing about the way her clothes clung where they were wet, but at least they were clingy in fairly non-strategic areas.

  She could hear a low murmur coming from the bedroom and she hesitated for a moment before she squared her shoulders, gathered up her ragged dignity, and reached for the door.

  She was going to walk back out there with her head held high, and if fault should be admitted she was prepared to be graciously forgiving, as befitted her normally kind and compassionate nature.

  But the sight that met her eyes wasn’t promising. Scott Tyler stood beside his seated nephew, his hand resting on Sean’s brawny bare shoulder, whether for reassurance or restraint, she wasn’t sure.

  ‘Well, has he told you what happened?’ she challenged.

  Scott Tyler’s unreadable mask was firmly back in place

  ‘That could take some time in his present condition,’ he said uninformatively, acknowledging the condition of her clothes with barely a flicker of his eyes. His voice flattened into resolute finality. ‘As I said before, it’s late, and if there are issues to be settled they can wait until a more civilised hour…’