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His eyes picked up the blue of his shirt, making their colour more intense than ever. ‘I guess that’s the lady’s choice.’ He looked down at her where he touched her. ‘I’ll bet you bruise very easily—Anya.’ He broadened the initial ‘A’, the way it was meant to be pronounced but seldom ever was by anyone outside her family, making it sound seductively foreign.
‘Yes, but I heal very quickly, too.’ He was stroking tiny circles at the flex-point of her wrist, proving his theory about her sensitivity. Anya could feel the hairs all up her arm rising as if swept by a fine electrical current.
‘Then you’re a lot more resilient than you look.’
‘I thought we were agreed that appearances could be deceptive—Scott,’ she said, and his fingers tightened briefly on her wrist and then released it to brush the specks of brick dust on her hand.
‘I’m surprised you don’t have any defensive grazes on your palms. Most people instinctively fling out their hands to try and break a fall…’
Anya’s hands had been raised to catch the girl who was now hovering at the other end of the couch, her gaze darting between them, a thoughtful wrinkle forming above the bridge of her strong nose.
‘And oddly enough it looks as if you’re going to have a bruise here.’ He lightly touched the reddened skin over her breast-bone just above the neckline of her top, his eyes puzzled as he traced what he didn’t realise to be the outline of a bony knee.
Fortunately the owner of the knee interrupted him before he noticed Anya’s spontaneous reaction to his feather-light st
roking.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me to do something to help, too?’ she said, with a rather challenging look at the man now rising to his feet. ‘Or am I surplus to requirements?’
To Anya’s surprise he didn’t react to the sarcasm with his usual swift retort. He seemed momentarily at a loss, and the pair of them stared at each other across the couch, two sets of blue eyes exchanging a silent message that neither seemed able to interpret. In fact, had Anya been given the choice, she would have picked the youngster as the marginally more confident of the two.
Finally Anya couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Perhaps you’d like to see if the tea’s ready?’ she suggested brightly, swivelling her legs off the couch. ‘I could really do with something to drink.’
Scott ran a hand through his hair, suddenly released from his tension. ‘Good idea. Could you go and ask Mrs Lee for the tray, and bring it through here? And you may as well take this away,’ he added, giving her the bowl of water floating with used swabs. ‘Oh, and Miss Adams’s boots, too, please, Petra,’ he said, picking them up and handing them over. ‘Put them out on the shoe stand by the front door.’
‘Oh, right! So now I have to do everything,’ the girl griped, with a roll of her expressive eyes.
This time Scott grinned, relaxing even further. ‘Well, you did ask. And I doubt if you were doing it just to be polite, because politeness doesn’t seem to be one of your strong points.’
‘I can be polite,’ came the pert reply.
‘Then how about demonstrating your manners now? In spite of the dramatic manner of your meeting, you two haven’t yet been introduced.’ A furtive glance between the two females was smoothed into polite expectancy on both sides. ‘Miss Adams, this is my fourteen-year-old daughter, Petra Conroy—temporarily attending Hunua College from the start of the new term. Miss Adams teaches history, Petra.’
‘Yeah, so Sam told me. Hi, Miss Adams!’
Petra patently enjoyed the shock in Anya’s murmured greeting, giving her a huge grin before strolling out the door. As she stepped into the hallway, Anya realised the reason for her dance to take off her shoes. Her bare feet made no sound on the wooden floor. She would have been silently fleet up the wooden staircase and deliberately rowdy thundering back down. A girl with a great deal of natural wit and cunning, she thought. I wonder where she inherited that from?—probably the same person who had given her those forget-me-not eyes.
‘You have a daughter?’ she couldn’t help saying. ‘I didn’t know you’d ever been m—’ she stopped, biting her lip, but he was quick to embarrass her over her near faux pas.
‘Married? I haven’t. I hope you don’t make that conventional assumption about the parents of your pupils at the college; a lot of them come from painfully fragmented backgrounds.’
‘I know that.’ Anya repudiated the criticism. ‘I meant that I hadn’t heard that you had children—’
‘A child, and I don’t “have” her. She’s lived with her mother in Australia since before she was born,’ he said, dropping into the armchair opposite the couch, his outstretched arms dropping over the padded arms, the casual sprawl of his legs a direct counterpoint to her neat, straight-backed, knees-together, ankles-crossed pose.
‘Oh,’ she said, searching for the proper response to such a statement. ‘You must have been quite young yourself when she was born—’
‘Eighteen.’ He saved her the maths. ‘She was conceived while I was still at school.’ His daughter wasn’t the only one with a propensity to shock. Anya tried to control her expression but some of her involuntary disapproval must have leaked out because his mouth drooped sardonically. ‘And no, I didn’t carelessly get my teenage girlfriend pregnant. Lorna was thirty, and she was the one making all the decisions about our relationship, including the one to have and raise a child on her own.’
Anya’s mouth fell open and the corner of his mouth ticked up in satisfaction.
‘What’s the matter? Aren’t I conforming to the stereotype image you’ve created of me?’
She was so stunned she instinctively spoke the truth. ‘I…you—I just have difficulty thinking of you as a…a junior partner in any relationship,’ she stammered.
‘Everyone has to get their experience from somewhere,’ he told her, and for one horrible moment she thought he was going to demand to know where she had got hers. She tried not to think about Alistair Grant any more, except in his capacity as her parents’ agent. Anyway, she was sure that her limited experience was of no interest to Scott Tyler.
‘Are you saying you were a—’ Suddenly she realised what she had been going to ask and her whole body suffused with heat. It was no business of hers. How could she even think of asking such an intimate question of a man she barely knew, a man she had come here to angrily confront?
