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‘I think you should be proud of her. You have an extremely gifted child.’ His blue eyes were glittering as he struggled against an upsurge of emotion, moved not only by the music but by an overflowing sense of paternal pride. ‘And I think you and your daughter should talk about what she intends to do with her gift. Alone.’
He and his daughter looked at each other and Anya held her breath. She wasn’t sure who moved first, but suddenly Scott and his daughter were hugging each other, and he was pressing a kiss on the top of her ruffled head, his eyes squeezed closed as his arms contracted around her skinny frame, burying her snuffling nose in his jacket. Anya swallowed a lump in her throat as she backed out of the door. This was no time for anything as mundane as schoolwork. It was the first time she had seen the pair of them spontaneously touch each other and knew that another important barrier had been breached—in the politically correct world it had become practically taboo for an older man to show physical affection towards an unrelated female child, and that was how they had both been acting. But now Scott and Petra were truly father and daughter, bonded in trust as well as in blood.
She was wiping the moisture away from the corner of her eyes as she reached the front door and almost cannoned into a big, chestnut-haired woman coming up the front steps.
She knew Joanna Monroe by sight from her volunteer work in the school’s tuck shop, but had got the impression she was a little stand-offish for all her air of bustling congeniality so she was taken aback when the woman lifted the sunglasses from her nose to reveal pale blue eyes and beamed her a wide, friendly smile.
‘Hello, Miss Adams. Or I suppose I should call you Anya now. Scott told me when I rang last week that you were helping him sort out his daughter’s problems. I must say, I was as mad as a wet hen when Gary insisted I go and play corporate wife on his conference trip just when Scott needed me! Of course, I knew he had a daughter, but none of us ever expected her to drop in unannounced like this, least of all Scott! I hope he’s not too shell-shocked, poor lamb, what with my two to look after as well. Not that they’re likely to give him much problem, and he does have Mrs Lee here six days a week—’ She had said it all with barely a pause for breath and as she hesitated to draw her second wind she noticed Anya’s repressed smile.
‘What? What did I say? Am I running on like an idiot?—sorry—I tend to do that. I’m sorry I never said hello to you before but I didn’t realise you and Scott were on such friendly terms.’ She gave Anya a disconcerting wink. ‘He did try and act close-mouthed on me but I can always winkle these things out of him, even though he got rather tangled up in his own tongue when he talked about you. He said you were infuriating but you made him laugh and I thought Oh, good, at last because it’s ages since
he’s had any real fun in his life. In his job everything is so depressing and serious, and Scott has such a highly developed sense of humour—well, you’d know that, wouldn’t you? It’s just a pity you’re related to that wretched woman—sorry, she’s your cousin and I know I shouldn’t say that—’
‘You mean Kate Carlyle?’ interrupted Anya, in fear that Joanna Monroe was never going to run down.
‘Yes, and I know I shouldn’t say any more because Scott will kill me but—well, one minute she’s cuddling up to him all lovey-dovey, and rabbiting on about giving up her career for him and the next—bang! She’s gone without a single word. Not even a Dear John letter to tell him why she went, just a note from her agent about a concert booking. She dumped poor Scott two weeks later by e-mail—e-mail, can you believe it!’
Anya could, and she couldn’t.
There was a pain in her chest so intense she could hardly breathe. Scott and Kate had had an affair?
‘Are you saying that Scott was in love with Kate?’
‘Well, I don’t know about in love. Scott always plays his cards pretty close to his chest. But he must have been fairly deeply involved to be so devastated by her leaving. He virtually stopped dating for a whole year afterwards, and since then he’s never even come close to finding a suitable woman to marry. Sometimes I think he never will…’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘WHAT a coincidence, look who’s sitting over by the window—it’s Tyler with Heather Morgan. They must have arrived while I was ordering drinks. Why don’t I go over and say hello and see if they’d like to come and join us…?’
Anya almost dropped the menu she had been studying, her body stiffening with horror, her eyes rigidly fixed on the man across the table. ‘No, Mark, please, I’d rather it was just us—I hardly know Miss Morgan—’
But Mark was already getting to his feet, smiling and nodding in the direction she refused to look. ‘It’s too late now, they’ve seen me. Besides, you should see it as a chance to get to know her better. It’s good politics to be friendly with people like the Morgans…’
‘They’re on a date; they’d probably much rather be left alone,’ said Anya desperately, but she was talking to thin air as Mark strolled across the busy restaurant to the table where the other couple were being fussed over by the head waiter.
Coincidence? Anya would rather call it horrific bad luck. The old-fashioned pub restaurant was popular with people from Riverview because it was halfway between the town and the motorway which was the main commuter corridor between the city of Auckland and all points south, but she wouldn’t have thought it stylish enough for Heather Morgan’s tastes. She was certainly among the most smartly dressed, in a glittery red cocktail dress, while her companion—leaning back in his chair to speak to Mark—was more subdued but no less elegant in a dark suit, where most of the other men in the restaurant were in sports jackets or shirtsleeves. His eyes flicked past Mark to capture Anya’s unsmiling gaze, and she felt a rush of panic, jerking her eyes back to her menu, her heart thumping uncomfortably in her chest.
She bent her head, staring unseeingly at the ornately printed words, silently cursing herself for her foolish reaction. She should have smiled and coolly inclined her head instead of acting like a frightened ostrich. What she had done had amounted to an outright snub. She didn’t dare look up again and almost melted in relief when Mark reappeared, alone.
Relief turned to dismay as he moved around to grasp the back of her chair. ‘Come on—Scott’s invited us to be his guests for the evening. I tried to protest but he insisted—he said their corner table is much better suited to conversation.’
That was what Anya was afraid of! ‘But we’ve already ordered our drinks—’ she protested feebly.
‘The waiter’s sorting that out. He’s happy because we’re freeing up a table for more customers.’
Anya tried not to resent Mark’s guiding hand on her back as she walked towards the flames of hell. He wasn’t to know that she was still shell-shocked by Joanna Monroe’s devastating revelation. For some reason Joanna had seemed to think that Anya was now part of Scott’s intimate inner circle, and naturally assumed that she had known about the turbulent affair.
She stretched a smile across her face as they reached the table, conscious that her unadorned black slip dress with its filmy, beaded overtop was no match for the other woman’s dramatic flair, and wished she had worn her hair in a more sophisticated style than the simple French braid that hung down her back. She had always believed that the inner person mattered more than the outer one but it would be nice, just once, to be able to out-dazzle the opposition.
Scott had risen to his feet and she was forced to briefly look him in the eye during the exchange of greetings, pretending not to notice the threatening determination she glimpsed in his studied politeness. His tigerish smile told her he was highly satisfied with the turn of events, while Heather’s tight, brief effort suggested that she held the opposite view of the disruption to her evening.
Etiquette demanded that Mark sit next to Heather while Anya sat beside Scott, which at least saved her the nerve-racking prospect of having to converse with him face-to-face, but the table’s banquette seats made the brushing of arms and legs inevitable when sharing with a man as tall and broad as Scott, and Anya’s nerves soon began to hum at the suspicious frequency with which he was casually rearranging his limbs.
‘Having trouble with your contact lenses, or do you need those to read the menu?’ drawled Heather, and Kate put a hand up to her face and realised that she was still wearing her driving glasses.
‘I use them for long-distance—like when I’m driving.’ Annoyed with Mark for not mentioning them before, she quickly whisked them off with fumbling fingers that bounced them onto Scott’s bread and butter plate.
‘And in the classroom—to keep your eye on the delinquents and troublemakers who always try to hide themselves in the back row,’ Mark jokingly reminded her.
