Wife For Hire
CATHY WILLIAMS
Nicholas Knight was a formidably powerful and attractive man, and he had a very tempting proposal for Rebecca Ryan: he wanted to move her into his luxury home, to share his life… and his bed?Rebecca had known and fantasized about Nicholas as a teenager– so did he recognize her, or was he playing games? All Rebecca knew was that she'd never forget the hot passion he'd once aroused in her. Now she just had to find out if it was really her Nicholas wanted, or just a convenient wife!
“I’d just like to say that you’ve changed.”
Rebecca’s mouth fell open.
“I know you recognize me. It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it, Rebecca? Did you think I didn’t remember you?” His voice was as soft and smooth as melted chocolate. It made her dizzy, a response she immediately put down to confusion.
Nicholas gave Rebecca a slow smile that made her pulse race. “You haven’t the sort of face that’s easily forgotten. But I don’t expect you to back out of our arrangement because of our past little liaison.”
His dark eyes held hers unwaveringly and she finally realized what she’d let herself in for….
CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and came to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three small daughters.
Wife for Hire
Cathy Williams
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ONE
FROM the very moment that Rebecca Ryan opened her eyes that morning, she knew that the next few hours were going to be the worst of her teaching career.
She was not, by nature, prone to dramatic flights of imagination, but for a few brief seconds she heartily wished that she could shut her eyes and make the day go away; then she climbed out of bed and headed for the bathroom. Normally, this was her most relaxing time of the day. That long, leisurely soak in the bath before she opened the door of her small but comfortable school quarters, and braced herself for the challenges confronting anyone courageous enough to teach in an all-girls boarding-school. Or, as Mrs Williams, the principal, once put it, to exercise skilful manipulation of the homesick, the prepubescent, the adolescent, the hormonal and the premenstrual, whilst trying to educate to the highest possible standard.
Rebecca loved every minute of it.
Except, she thought, settling into the bath water, for today. Today she wished that she had mulled over her career options a bit more thoroughly at the age of twenty-one, and decided in favour of something slightly less stress-inducing, such as copy typist.
She sighed deeply and allowed her mind to scuttle over the past thirty-six hours.
There should be a tablet you could take to get rid of unpleasant situations, she thought. There would be a huge market for it. Just swallow two special, new, improved paracetamol capsules and let your problems fade conveniently away.
In the absence of any such panacea, she mentally worked out how she would deal with the problem staring her in the face. Part of it had already been handled, and she had emerged shocked, bruised but, generally speaking, still in good working order.
Part two of the problem, which she estimated was probably a mere one hour’s drive away from the school, would have to be dealt with as pragmatically as possible. Parents, she knew from experience, were not particularly reasonable when it came to dealing with their children’s misdemeanours. They were prone, initially, to disbelief, then to self-recrimination, and finally, in a few instances, to complete denial of all blame by placing it squarely on whomever happened to be handy, usually the teacher.
Rebecca, whose height waged a constant battle with the dimensions of most baths, stuck her feet out at the bottom, wriggled her toes and decided that, if Mrs Williams refused to allow her the luxury of sitting through the uncomfortable interview in relative silence, she would be firm, practical, sympathetic and as implacable as a rock.
She would be very careful not to let her wayward tongue get the better of her. She would keep all personal opinion to herself. She would smile a lot, with more than a hint of compassion, and she would not presume to preach to someone she didn’t know from Adam on his methods of fathering. She would close her mind to every word Emily Parr had uttered to her on the subject of her father, because teenagers could be quite unreliable when it came to descriptions of their home lives, and she would do as little as possible to upset any apple carts.
That resolved, she contemplated what she should wear for the meeting. Normally, as a teacher, she invariably opted for the most comfortable clothing she could find. Loose skirts and tops, flat shoes, muted colours. From as far back as she could remember, she had always tried to wear things that diminished her size. Five feet ten inches was tall enough, but add to that a generous bustline and curves that never seemed appropriate for the role of teacher, and what remained was something, she considered, fairly Amazonian.
Today, she decided, she would take advantage of her height to ward off any attacks Emily’s father might have in store for her. She knew that she frequently intimidated men. There was nothing about her at all that begged for their protective instincts. If anything, with some of the men she had dated in the past, she had ended up feeling protective. She had long ago assumed that the only men she attracted were the ones who were turned on by a dominant female. Or at least by a woman they considered would fit the role of the dominant female. It was useless telling them that the last thing she wanted was to take command or, God forbid, mother them.
She slipped on a dark grey suit, which was as prepossessing on her as a cold sore but succeeded in making her look rather intimidating, and stuck on a pair of two-inch high-heel court shoes which she had to dust down from lack of use. Then she stood in front of the mirror and surveyed the net result with a critical eye.
Definitely the outfit for a potentially difficult situation, she decided. And, from what she had heard about Emily’s father from Mrs Williams, she would need all the superficial help she could get her hands on.
He was, she had worked out, not one of life’s easygoing characters. For a start, he had made only one appearance in the two years his daughter had been at the school, and that had been to complain about her grades. Mrs Williams, recalling the incident, had blanched at the memory of it, and it took a great deal for Mrs Williams to lose her legendary calm.
So how he was going to react to this major body blow he would be dealt in a little under an hour was enough to make anyone shudder with apprehension.
Rebecca gazed thoughtfully at her reflection and was, for once, grateful for what confronted her. A woman of imposing height and stature, face attractive but well played down so that the firm jawline and widely spaced blue eyes looked strongly determined, and with her shoulder-length auburn hair tortured into something she hoped resembled a bun at the back, she looked every inch the sort of person that other people should consider very carefully before antagonising.
And her curves were well concealed under the boxy grey jacket. Curves and grim-lipped severity did not make the best of companions.
Fifteen minutes later she was striding confidently towards the principal’s office, glancing in at the classes in progress and mentally hoping that her own class was being well behaved for Mr Emscote, the English teacher, who had a tendency to wilt when confronted with too many high-spirited teenage girls.
Mrs Williams was waiting for her in the office, standing by the window, and looking fairly agitated.
‘He should be here in a short while. Please sit, Rebecca.’ She sighed wearily and took her place in the chair behind the large mahogany desk. ‘I’ve told Sylvia to make sure that we’re not interrupted. Has Emily been to see you again?’
‘No.’ Rebecca shook her head. ‘I think she decided that I needed a bit of a breather after the shock. How did she react to your talk with her?’
Another weary sigh, this time more pronounced. ‘She didn’t. React, that is. Barely said a word and looked utterly pleased with herself in that insufferably insolent manner she has.’
Rebecca knew precisely the insufferably insolent manner to which Mrs Williams was referring. It involved a bored expression, stifled yawns and eyes that drifted around the room as though searching for something slightly more exciting to materialise from the woodwork. She was the perfect rebel and, because of it, had a league of adoring supporters who, thankfully, while admiring her antics, were not quite foolhardy enough to imitate them.
‘Did you mention anything to her father about…why he was asked to come here?’
‘I thought it best to do that on a face-to-face basis.’
Shame, Rebecca thought. He might have simmered down if he had had a day to mull over the facts.
‘I’ve gathered all the relevant school reports on Emily, so that he can read through them, and I’ve also collated the numerous incident reports as well. Quite a number, considering that the child hasn’t been with us very long.’ She sat back in the chair, a small, thin bespectacled woman in her forties with the tenacity and perseverance of a bulldog, and shook her head. ‘Such a shame. Such a clever child. It certainly makes one wonder what the point of brilliance is when motivation doesn’t play a part. With a different attitude, she could have achieved a great deal.’
‘She’s had a…challenging home life, Mrs Williams. I personally feel, as I said to you before, that Emily’s rebelliousness is all an act. A ploy to hide her own insecurities.’
‘Yes, well, I suggest you keep your opinions to yourself, Rebecca,’ the principal said in a warning voice. ‘There’s no point in muddying the waters with a post-mortem on why this whole unfortunate business happened in the first place. Aside from which, she’s not the first girl to have endured her parents’ divorce and all the fallout from it. And other girls do not react by…’ she looked down at one of the sheets of paper ‘…smoking through the window of a dorm, falsifying sick notes to the infirmary so that she can go into town, climbing up a tree and remaining there for a day just to watch us all run around like headless chickens looking for her… The list goes on…’
‘Yes, I know, but…’ Rebecca could feel herself getting hot under the collar of her crisply starched white blouse, which she had unearthed from the furthermost reaches of her wardrobe and now felt so uncomfortable that she was seriously regretting having put it on in the first place.
‘No buts, Rebecca. This is an immovable situation and it will do no good to try and analyse it into making sense. The facts are as they stand and Emily’s father will have to accept them whether he cares to or not.’
‘And Emily?’ Rebecca asked with concern. ‘What happens to her now?’
‘That will be something that must be sorted out between herself and her father.’
‘She doesn’t have a relationship with her father.’
‘I would advise you to be a bit sceptical about what she says on that front,’ Mrs Williams told her sharply. ‘We both know that Emily can be very creative with the truth.’
‘But the facts speak for themselves…’ Rebecca found herself leaning forward, about to disobey her first rule of command, which was to be as immovable as a rock and launch into a fiery defence of her pupil, when there was a knock on the door, and Sylvia poked her head round.
‘Mr Knight is here, Mrs Williams,’ she said with her usual gusto.
Mr Knight? Rebecca frowned. Why was his surname different from that of his daughter? References to him had always been as Emily’s father, and it hadn’t occurred to her that he might not be Mr Parr.
‘That’s fine, Sylvia. Would you show him in, please? And no interruptions, please. I shall deal with anything that crops up after Mr Knight has left.’
‘Of course.’ Sylvia’s expression changed theatrically from beaming good humour to grave understanding, but as soon as she had vacated the doorway they could both hear her trill to Emily’s father that he could go in now, and could he please inform her how he would like his coffee.
Rebecca wondered whether he would be disconcerted by the personal assistant’s eccentric mannerisms—most people who didn’t know her were—but his deep voice, wafting through the door, was controlled and chillingly assured.
Stupidly, because her role in the room was simply to impart information, she felt her stomach muscles clench as he walked through the door, then a wave of colour flooded her cheeks.
Mrs Williams had risen to her feet and was perfunctorily shaking his hand, and it was only when they both turned to her that Rebecca sprang up and held out her hand in polite greeting.
Emily’s father was strikingly tall, strikingly forbidding and strikingly good-looking. Even wearing heels, she was forced to look up at him. She didn’t know what she had expected of him. Someone older, for a start, and with the military bearing of the typical household dictator who had no time for family but a great deal for work.
This man was raven-haired, dark-eyed and the angular features of his face all seemed to blend together to give an impression of power, self-assurance and cool disregard for the rest of the human race.
And the worst of it was that she recognised him. Seventeen years on, she recognised him. At sixteen she had been as knocked sideways by the man he had been then as she was now by the man he had become.
Knight. Not the most run-of-the-mill name in the world, but even in those fleeting seconds when the principal had referred to him by name it had not occurred to her that the man she was about to meet was the same Nicholas Knight whom she had briefly known.
She could feel her hand tremble as he gripped it in his, then she pulled away quickly and sat back down, watching to see whether there were any signs of recognition on his face.
None. Of course. As she might have expected. She lowered her eyes and heard him ask, as he sat down facing them both, if they could kindly explain what was of sufficient urgency to bring him here.
‘I was due to leave for New York this morning,’ he said, crossing his legs. ‘This is all highly inconvenient. I don’t know what Emily’s done this time, but I’m sure it could have been dealt with in the usual way.’
He had a deep, lazy voice and watchful manner which seemed to convey the message that, however much you knew, he knew infinitely more. Rebecca suspected that her dress code would not be having the desired effect. Seventeen years ago, he would have been amused at the thought of female intimidation. Now, from what she could see, it would barely register.
She sneaked a glance at him from under her lashes and felt the same illicit thrill she had felt when she had first set eyes on him at the local charity function all those years ago. Even then he had had the sort of commanding presence that made heads swing around for a second look.
‘I’m afraid not, Mr Knight.’ The principal removed her spectacles and leant forward, resting both elbows on the desk. ‘Emily has quite surpassed herself this time, which is why we felt it wise to summon you immediately.’
‘Even though we realise what a very busy man you are,’ Rebecca said sweetly—a remark which was greeted by the merest thinning of his lips. She felt his dark eyes course over her and calmly refused to look away.
It was beginning to sting a little that he obviously did not remember her. True, their acquaintance had been short-lived—barely a fortnight from beginning to end—but she wasn’t that forgettable, was she?
Of course, she knew, deep down, why he didn’t recall her. Unimportant blips were hardly the foundations of solid, long-lasting memories, and her presence in his life had been an unimportant blip, even though he had remained in her head for many months afterwards. To him, she had been little more than the girl from the wrong side of the tracks with whom he had planned on having a bit of harmless fun before she pre-empted him by walking away.
‘What’s the problem this time?’ he asked in a world-weary voice. ‘What has she broken?’ He reached inside his jacket pocket to extract his cheque-book, and Rebecca gave an automatic grimace of distaste, which he caught and held.
‘Do you have a problem?’ he enquired politely, looking at her. ‘I take it from the affronted expression on your face that you disapprove of something?’
Rebecca decided that she would abandon her vow of silence on the grounds that keeping too much in was fine in theory, but in practice would probably give her irreversible high blood pressure.
‘Not everything can be sorted out with a cheque-book, Mr Knight.’ People like him thought otherwise. She was fully aware of that. He had spent his entire life cushioned by wealth and he would automatically assume that there was nothing that could not be rectified if enough cash was flung at it.
So his daughter misbehaved, or wrecked a few things, or stepped out of line—well, let’s just sort it out by adding a new wing to the school library, shall we?
He very slowly closed the cheque-book and slipped it back into his jacket pocket, not taking his eyes off her face.
‘Ah. I see where we’re heading. Before my daughter’s slip-up, whatever that might be, is to be discussed, I’m first to be subjected to a ham-fisted analysis of why she did what she did. Time is money, Miss Ryan, so if you’re bursting to get your prepared speech out, then I suggest you make it fast so that I can sort this business out and be on my way.’
‘We’re not in the business of lecturing to our parents, Mr Knight,’ Mrs Williams said firmly, before Rebecca could be tempted into taking him at his word and delivering a thorough, no-stone-unturned lecture on precisely what she thought of him.
‘In which case, you might pass the message on to your assistant. She looks as though she’s about to explode at any moment now.’
‘Miss Ryan,’ she said, throwing her a gimlet-eyed look, ‘is an experienced and immensely good teacher. There is absolutely no way that she would allow herself to voice her private opinions.’
Rebecca nearly grinned at that. They both knew that voicing opinions was something she was remarkably good at.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she agreed demurely, and he raised his eyebrows sceptically at her tone of voice.
That particular tendency was still there, she noticed. The first time she had seen him, he had been lounging at the makeshift bar in the village hall. The dance floor had been packed to the seams with youngsters, and she had been standing to one side with a drink in her hand, miserably watching everyone have fun and thinking that she should have dispensed with her frock and her high heels which made her feel stuffy and over-large, rather like a sofa deposited at random in a china shop. All her friends were so petite, so feminine and so utterly unlike her.
Then she had caught his eye and he had raised his eyebrows very much as he had done just then, as though he could cut straight through to what she had been thinking, as though they had momentarily shared some private joke together.
‘Good.’ He reverted his attention to Mrs Williams now. ‘Now that I am to be spared an unnecessary lecture, perhaps we could stop beating around the bush and you could just tell me why I’ve been summoned here at such short notice. What has my daughter done this time?’
‘Perhaps you could explain, Miss Ryan?’
Thanks very much, Rebecca thought wryly to herself.
‘Two nights ago Emily came to see me, Mr Knight.’
‘She came to see you?’ He frowned, perplexed. ‘She left the building at night to pay you a visit? Is this normal procedure? For a child of sixteen to be allowed out on her own into the town so that she can visit a teacher? Aren’t there certain rules and regulations in operation around here?’
Call me a fool, Rebecca thought to herself, but I smell a very difficult situation ahead. She wished she were a million miles away, lying on a beach somewhere, recovering from the stress of the copy-typing job she should have gone for.
‘If you could let me finish, Mr Knight, without butting in?’ She made sure not to look at the principal when she said this, but even with her eyes strenuously averted she could easily imagine the look of warning that would have crossed Mrs Williams’s face.
‘I happen to live on the premises.’
‘We have what are called house mothers here,’ the principal explained. ‘Each dormitory section is manned by one. They basically live here and supervise the children out of school hours, make sure that everything is running smoothly. It’s not uncommon for them to have visits during the night, especially by the younger ones who are new and perhaps a little homesick.’
‘You’re a young woman. Why on earth would you choose to live in a boarding-school?’
‘As I was saying, Mr Knight,’ Rebecca carried on, overriding his question with the single-minded intent of a bulldozer, ‘Emily came to see me to talk about a rather…unfortunate situation.’ She glanced at Mrs Williams for support and the other woman nodded encouragingly.
Emily’s father, on the other hand, looked slightly less encouraging. His face was grim, unreadable and frankly terrifyingly forbidding.
‘I’m waiting,’ he said at last, when an uncomfortable silence had begun to thicken around them as Rebecca searched for the most tactful way of saying what she had to say. ‘Is she on drugs?’
‘No.’ She inhaled deeply, adopted her sternest expression and clasped her hands on her knees. ‘I’m sure you’ve been made aware, Mr Knight, over the past couple of years, that your daughter has been…’
‘Bloody difficult. Why don’t you just come right out with what you have to say, Miss Ryan? The facts don’t go away, however much you try and sugar-coat them. Yes. I have been all too aware of what she has managed to get up to. It hasn’t made pretty reading and I needn’t tell you that I’ve been losing patience fast.’
Charming attitude to adopt, Rebecca thought, directing a meaningless smile at him and suppressing the urge to clout him over the head.
‘To be honest, I was a little stunned when she knocked on my door at two in the morning. Emily isn’t one for confiding in her teachers. She enjoys being a law unto herself, doesn’t like anyone to glimpse her vulnerabilities, and before you object to what I’m saying I can assure you that all girls of sixteen are vulnerable, whatever air of bravado they might choose to wear.’
‘I’ll take you at your word, Miss Ryan. I have no experience of teenage girls.’
‘Including your own,’ Rebecca countered before she could censor her thoughts, and he shot her a hard, cold look.
‘Just carry on with the facts, Miss Ryan, and keep your thoughts to yourself.’
‘I think that what Miss Ryan is trying to say,’ Miss Williams took up hastily, ‘is that we are quite accustomed to dealing with unruly girls and we tend towards leniency in most cases. A stern talking-to usually does the trick. Boarding-school can seem restricting to some of our girls, at least initially. They are disoriented, and they react, occasionally, without thinking. These problems are by no means frequent, but they do occur, and we all recognise how to deal with them.’
‘Fine.’ He had not glanced in the direction of the principal. His eyes had remained focused on Rebecca the whole time. She began to feel hot and uneasy. She could also feel her ridiculous bun beginning to slip out of place, and she wondered whether she could halt its progress downwards by keeping her head very, very still.
She decided, as he continued to stare at her with the off-putting concentration of someone trying to move an immovable object by exerting will-power, that time had honed that natural self-assurance that had first attracted her into obnoxious arrogance. There was no other word for it. The man was a pig.
Was he totally incapable of taking any responsibility for his daughter’s behaviour? Did he imagine that young girls of sixteen operated in emotional vacuums?
‘She was in quite a state,’ Rebecca confessed. ‘I made her sit down, and she told me… I’m afraid to tell you, Mr Knight, that your daughter informs us that…that she’s pregnant.’
The word fell into the silence like a stone. Seconds passed. Minutes. He said nothing.
‘Perhaps you can understand now why we felt we had to get you up here, Mr Knight,’ the principal said gently. ‘I realise that this must come as a shock to you…’
‘How the hell was this allowed to happen?’ His words were soft and sharp, but they still managed to reverberate around the room like a thunderclap. He turned to look at Rebecca. ‘You say that you live on the premises so that you can make sure that everything is running smoothly. Well, you haven’t managed to do a very good job, have you? What were you doing while my teenage daughter was slinking along the corridors at night and heading into town to meet some man? And do we know the identity of this bastard?’
Under the controlled voice, she could sense a man who wanted to kill and, however much she disliked what she had seen of him so far, she could sympathise with him. He must feel as though a bomb had been dropped on him from a very great height.
‘First of all Emily isn’t on my floor…’
‘Then why would she come to you with her problems?’
‘Because…’
‘Perhaps,’ Mrs Williams said in a conciliatory tone of voice, ‘because Miss Ryan is one of our younger members of staff. Many of the girls turn to her for advice. She’s popular…’
‘Yes, well, a glowing appraisal of Miss Ryan’s character isn’t what I’m after right now. What I want—’ he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and the slight shift in position made Rebecca instinctively cringe back into the chair, causing further damage to her already precarious hairdo ‘—is a bloody explanation!’
‘Emily hasn’t gone into details, Mr Knight,’ Rebecca answered. Her hands were shaking and she steadied them on her lap, linking her fingers together. ‘She won’t say who the boy in question is and she won’t tell us how it happened. It’s highly unlikely that she slipped out at night. The doors would have been very securely locked to prevent the girls from doing just that sort of thing and there is a night watchman on the premises. It’s far more likely that she met him during the day, probably on a weekend when the girls are allowed a certain amount of freedom once they get to a certain age. They are not kept padlocked here. We hope that they have the right moral codes instilled that will guide—’
‘Oh, why don’t we just cut through all this claptrap? What you’re telling me here is that you accept no responsibility for what’s happened! It’s unfortunate that a child’s life has been ruined, but as far as you’re concerned you intend to wash your hands of it and put it all down to experience. Am I right?’
Why on earth doesn’t he direct this tirade at the principal? Rebecca thought distractedly. Why does he keep staring at me as though I’ve single-handedly engineered all of this? She squirmed uncomfortably, aware that he had struck close to a chord. Of course, it was an awful thing to have happened, but at the end of the day Emily would be expelled and, in time, forgotten.
‘Of course that’s not what we’re saying!’ she snapped angrily. ‘It’s distressing, not least for your daughter! But it’s happened, and she’s going to have to live with the consequences! Berating us, and berating her, isn’t going to make the situation change, Mr Knight. It’s just going to make it all the harder for her to cope with it!’
‘So what happens now?’ he threw at her. He glanced from her to the principal, his eyes cold with rage. ‘Would either of you ladies care to tell me? No, allow me to have a stab at guessing. She’s to pack her bags and leave the premises immediately. Her education will seize up and, wherever she ends up, may it all be a salutary lesson for one and all! Am I on target here?’
‘What choice do we have, Mr Knight?’ Mrs Williams said wearily. She looked exhausted, Rebecca thought. It had not been a wonderful thirty-six hours for her. This was the sort of incident that could wreak havoc amongst the school. Parents would be alarmed. The fallout was not worth thinking about, and it would be no use to suggest to concerned mothers and fathers that Emily had been in a category of her own. A time bomb waiting to explode.
‘We have no option but to ask you to remove Emily from the school. Naturally she will be given until the weekend to get her things in order.’
‘Naturally…’ His mouth twisted harshly, then he sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘So have neither of you any ideas on how this problem might be dealt with?’ He shot an accusing eye in the principal’s direction. ‘Even if you sit stiff-backed in your chair and accept no responsibility for what’s happened, this can’t be the first time…’
‘Absolutely the first time, Mr Knight. There are no precedents we can follow here.’
‘She’ll need your support,’ Rebecca interjected, and he turned to her with a cynical glint.
‘I must say that’s going to be a trifle difficult to muster up. It’s been impossible enough dealing with her since she came to me two years ago, but this is positively the last damned straw!’
That, Rebecca thought, was not quite the story that Emily had told her. In between her tears, she had bitterly informed her that her father had had zero time for her ever since she had been landed on him thanks to her mother’s death in a skiing accident. She had had little contact with him as it was as a child. With her parents divorced when she was two, her mother had not encouraged father/daughter bonding. In fact, she had expressly forbidden it and had moved to the opposite side of the world in an attempt to avoid any such thing. He hadn’t pursued her then, and ever since she had been returned to him he had chosen to ignore her because she was no more than a stranger who did not fit in with his lifestyle.
‘So what do you intend to do?’ Rebecca asked coolly. ‘I don’t believe homes for fallen women still exist.’
‘That’s a particularly constructive remark, isn’t it, Miss Ryan?’ he told her acidly. ‘Any more where that came from?’
Rebecca blushed, furious with herself for voicing thoughts that were better kept to herself, and ashamed that in the midst of this painful and difficult situation she could find herself distracted by Nicholas Knight. He was someone who was buried so deeply in her past that it surprised her to discover just how easily she could recover the image and the wounded feelings inflicted on her over a decade ago.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said sincerely. ‘There was absolutely no call for that, and you’re right, it wasn’t constructive. What you might find constructive is if I tell you Emily is not the first teenager to find herself in this situation, and she can come out of it. She might leave this school, but there’s no reason why her education has to come to an abrupt end because of it. She can be tutored at home. She’s an incredibly clever child and—who knows?—this might just be the thing that helps her find her way.’
‘How pregnant…is she?’ The distaste in his voice was audible and Rebecca shivered. Poor Emily, however downright stupid she had been, was not going to find her father easily forgiving.
‘Only just.’
‘Meaning?’
‘A week…overdue, apparently. But the pregnancy test, she informed me tearfully, was definitely positive. In fact, she said that she did two, just in case the first was wrong.’
‘Home tutoring,’ he said to himself. He stroked his chin with one finger, frowning, and Rebecca caught herself staring. She pulled herself up short and allowed her eyes to wander away from him. ‘I suppose that’s the only solution, isn’t it?’ he said to them. He looked at Mrs Williams for a while. ‘Could you excuse us for a minute? There’s something I’d like to discuss in private with Miss Ryan.’
‘Well…’ The principal hesitated, taken aback by the request.
‘I’m sure anything that needs to be discussed can be discussed in front of—’
‘We’ll be twenty minutes.’ He gave them both a bland, impenetrable look and Rebecca watched in frustrated silence as Mrs Williams left the room, shutting the door behind her.
CHAPTER TWO
‘HOME tutoring.’ He sat back in his chair, crossed his legs and looked at her. ‘Carry on.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You were giving a little pep talk on all the opportunities still available to a teenager who has been stupid enough to get herself pregnant. You mentioned home tutoring as an option.’
‘Yes.’ He had removed his jacket before entering the room, and now he slowly began to roll the sleeves of his shirt up, exposing strong forearms, black-haired, and lightly bronzed. Although he was English by birth, she remembered him telling her years ago that there was Greek blood in him. Lust had apparently got the better of common sense, and his maternal grandmother had shocked everyone by throwing caution, and her very British fiancé, to the winds and marrying the son of a Greek tycoon. The tale had amused him, had appealed to that element in him that rebelled against convention.
She dragged her eyes away from his wretched arms and fastened them on his face. ‘Home tutoring. I didn’t mention that because I felt any kind of obligation to point out a bright side to this whole sorry business. I mentioned it because it’s a perfectly viable option, and actually I think Emily would do very well on it. She’s incredibly bright. She picks things up very easily. It would more be a matter of steering her towards her exams, making sure that certain levels of work were maintained.
‘I’m not saying that it would be a piece of cake for her, or for her tutor for that matter. She’ll still have to deal with all the ups and downs of the pregnancy, still have to come to terms with it, and she can be difficult.’ Rebecca laughed a little. ‘Possibly one of the bigger understatements of my lifetime. But she should be all right, at least academically, provided you find the right tutor. Someone patient, I think.’
‘You didn’t explain why my daughter chose you for her confidante.’
‘Well…’ Rebecca blushed ‘…as Mrs Williams said, I am one of the younger members of the staff here, and, well, I do pride myself on having a certain rapport with the girls. I do a fair amount of stuff with them after school hours. I run the amateur dramatic society, for example. Actually, that was about the only class that your daughter really seemed to enjoy. I think she liked being able to slip in and out of characters. Perhaps she found it relaxing.’
‘Yes, that would make sense.’ His mouth twisted cynically. ‘Her mother was fond of amateur dramatics herself.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Probably runs in the genes.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that,’ Rebecca said vaguely.
‘No. I don’t suppose you would. You just know Emily as a child who joined your school approximately two years ago and has proved troublesome from day one. Do you ever take an interest in their backgrounds?’
He was looking at her curiously now, and there was something ever so slightly critical about his appraisal.
‘To some extent,’ she said stiffly. ‘But if you imagine that I spend half my leisure time going through their personal records, reading up on what their parents do for a living, then no. I don’t.’
‘So you are unaware of the circumstances surrounding my daughter…’
‘I know that her mother died two years ago…’ Actually, she did have some idea of Emily’s background from what the child had told her, but she had no intention of admitting that. Trust was something that teenagers held very dear, and she was not about to break Emily’s.
‘So you’re not aware that she and I were divorced when Emily was only a toddler.’
‘I don’t see how this is relevant…to what we were discussing earlier, Mr Knight. Namely, home tutoring for your daughter.’
‘Oh, but you were so quick to judge me earlier on, Miss Ryan,’ he said smoothly, and a little caustically. ‘I thought you would be eager to slot together the little mental puzzle you had formed of my relationship with Emily. I mean, there’s no point in jumping to lots of amateur deductions if you only know the surface gloss, is there?’
‘It’s none of my business,’ Rebecca said, blushing furiously. She pressed her head against the back of the chair in an attempt to stop her hair from unravelling totally. Why she had bothered with these ridiculously uncomfortable clothes, she had no idea. Nicholas Knight was about as intimidated by her as an elephant by a flea. And she felt as though she was suffocating in her jacket, which she had not had the foresight to remove from the beginning. ‘Anyway, Mrs. Williams will be returning shortly…’
‘But I’m sure she’ll leave again if we’re not quite finished.’
‘Not quite finished with what? I don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you on the subject of home tutoring. If you like, I’m sure Mrs Williams can recommend a few people…’ A few brave, intrepid people, she thought to herself. Emily would need brave and intrepid. She would need the sort of private tutor who did bungee jumping for fun in his spare time. Such creatures were thin on the ground.
‘I shouldn’t like to leave you with any deluded impressions of me, Miss Ryan. I know your conscience couldn’t bear it if you thought that you were dispatching my daughter off to face a life of despair and misery at the hands of an unsympathetic, absentee father.’
‘Why would I think that?’
‘Because if Emily ran to you with tales of what had happened, then it’s more than likely that she confided all about her unhappy family life.’ He gave her a shrewd, knowing look. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.’
‘Well, she just mentioned one or two things. In passing,’ Rebecca answered feebly.
‘Care to fill me in?’
‘I did happen to know that you and your wife split up when she was two, and she was taken to Australia to live.’
‘Did she also tell you that I did my damnedest to keep in touch, and that it was only years later that I was informed by her mother that every letter and present I had sent over the years had been shredded and destroyed? By which time she had been inculcated in the belief that I was the big bad wolf who had driven her innocent, victimised mother into a divorce she never wanted, and then, not content with that, had forced her to flee to the opposite ends of the earth?’
Not precisely, Rebecca thought. She couldn’t quite understand why Nicholas Knight felt obliged to fill her in on any of this, but, as a teacher, she knew that she had a duty to listen. Underneath his cool, self-contained acknowledgement of the situation, he no doubt was feeling pangs of guilt and this was his way of releasing some of it. That being the case, she tilted her head obligingly to one side, prepared to listen. He wasn’t to know that everything he said she would take with a hefty pinch of salt. Emily might have done a fair bit of exaggerating, but the truth doubtless lay somewhere between the two accounts.
‘When Veronica died, I found myself with a teenager I didn’t know and who seemed quite incapable of accepting the generous efforts made by us to smooth the path.’
‘Us?’ Rebecca’s ears pricked up. This introduced a complete new line into the story. Had Nicholas Knight remarried? Emily had made no mention of a stepmother. In fact, she had made no mention of a woman on the scene at all, but now, thinking about it, and delving back into her memories of him, he was not the sort of man who cultivated celibacy as a chosen lifestyle.
‘So she didn’t mention Fiona to you?’ The black eyes narrowed. He uncrossed his legs and stretched them out in front of him.
‘Fiona being…your wife?’
‘Fiona being my girlfriend. My dearest ex-wife rather tarnished my belief in the institution of marriage, I’m afraid.’
‘No, Emily didn’t mention a Fiona.’
‘I’m surprised. Fiona did her utmost to get to know her.’
Rebecca thought that that manoeuvre was probably the one thing guaranteed to put off someone like Emily. She would have seen it as the threat of a mother substitute in the offing and would have instinctively reacted against it.
‘Well, I’m sure that you and your girlfriend will be able to sort everything out suitably,’ she said vaguely.
There was a knock on the door and Mrs Williams poked her head around it, her eyes flitting between the two of them questioningly. Rebecca smiled, relieved, but her relief lasted approximately three seconds, until he said, without the slightest hint of apology in his voice, ‘We’re not quite finished here. Perhaps you could give us another…’ he glanced at his watch ‘…half an hour?’ It was just lip-service to politeness. The three of them knew that the principal would give him just as long as he wanted, and she nodded and retreated back, shutting the door behind her.
‘Where were we…?’ he asked, settling back to look at Rebecca.
‘You were just agreeing that once you get Emily back everything will be fine. I’m sure your girlfriend will rise to the occasion and give you both all the support you need.’
‘Well, now, I’m not at all sure I want to throw poor little Fiona into any such situation…’ he ruminated, and Rebecca ground her teeth together in sheer frustration. She had no idea where all this was going, but she had a suspicion that it was going somewhere.
‘If she loves you,’ Rebecca said firmly, ‘then she’d want to help you deal with it. And she’d also want to help Emily deal with it.’
‘Oh, I’m sure she’d like nothing better than to busily try and make herself indispensable, but, you see, I don’t want any such thing.’
‘Oh, right. Well, that’ll be up to the two of you to sort out between yourselves.’
‘But then I’m back with my little problem, aren’t I? One wayward, pregnant daughter who needs home tutoring. Even if I find the time to interview a series of prospective candidates, I’m abroad a hell of a lot, and I won’t be available to supervise how things are going. And you have to admit, knowing Emily as you seem to do, that supervision is going to be essential.’
‘Not if you find someone you feel confident in.’
‘I’m glad you said that.’ He smiled at her. The smile of a rampaging barracuda that had successfully managed to trap its prey through sheer cunning. Rebecca stared back at him blankly.
‘Because you are going to be Emily’s home tutor.’ He sat back and watched her, and she could feel her face transparently revealing every single thing that was going through her head. Stunned surprise, followed swiftly by incredulity, followed even more swiftly by a complete rejection of the idea.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised, ‘but there’s no way that I can…’
‘Why not? This is an appalling business and you yourself stated that the only way out of it for Emily, without ruining her chances in life for ever, is to employ a home tutor.’ He tapped his finger. ‘She trusts you, first of all.’ He tapped another finger. ‘You’re a good teacher from all accounts, well able to get her through her exams.’ He tapped a third finger. ‘I won’t need to supervise the situation if I know that whoever is with Emily can be trusted. So where’s the problem?’
‘Where’s the problem? Where’s the problem? How can you ask that?’ Her voice had risen and she had leant forward, so that her bun now did the dirty on her and collapsed. With one hand she yanked her hair free and it fell around her face, straight, shiny and ludicrously image-altering. ‘The problem is that I already have a job! Just in case it’s passed you by! I can’t just up sticks and take on a temporary private job because it suits you!’
‘I’m not the one at stake,’ he pointed out calmly. ‘Emily is. If her education fails her now, then I needn’t paint you a picture of what life holds in store for her.’ Having said that he needn’t paint a picture, he then proceeded to paint a complete and graphic picture of his daughter’s supposed state of affairs, should home tutoring prove impossible for one reason or another. He, too, leant forward, resting his elbows on his thighs, and skewered her with his eyes so that she felt as though she was personally under attack.
‘Suppose I do manage to find her someone to tutor her at home,’ he began, making it sound as if the task would be along the lines of finding a needle, possibly even a broken one, in an enormous haystack, ‘you know my daughter probably as well as I do. In fact, probably much better. She would eat the poor person alive. Or else she would do her best to ensure that the minimum of work was done, so that the duration of each tutor would be approximately a fortnight. Which,’ he emphasised, ‘would mean that any educational benefits would be eradicated.
‘She would see this situation through and emerge from it well behind her peer group. With that immediate disadvantage dogging her, where would she find the impetus to suddenly pick things up and get going again? With a baby in tow? Far easier to simply let the whole damned thing slide, and in a couple of years’ time, when she became utterly bored of being at home, supported by me, she would find herself some nondescript, badly paid, lowly job totally unworthy of her wasted talents.’
Rebecca felt physically besieged by his onslaught.
‘Well,’ she began, ‘that all seems a bit on the extreme side, Mr Knight. I’m sure—’
‘What you’re sure of, at the end of the day, is that you don’t want to become involved. You’ve uttered your little words of wisdom, but beyond that…well…’ He sat back and gave an infuriatingly Gallic shrug of his shoulders.
‘That’s not what I’m saying at all!’ she responded heatedly. How dared he imply that she didn’t care? Of course she cared! And who was he to speak, anyway? Wherever the truth lay as far as his relationship with his daughter was concerned, she would bet her last pay cheque that it didn’t fall on the side of Nicholas Knight, devoted father, mysteriously slandered by his only daughter. Oh, no, sir!
‘Then please clarify. I’m all ears.’ He cocked his head to one side and she could have hit him.
‘I’m merely pointing out that I am currently employed…’
‘And that’s your only objection?’ he asked, interested.
‘It’s a pretty big one from where I’m sitting,’ Rebecca countered cuttingly. ‘We minor members of the workforce do like to have a bit of job security, you know.’
There was another knock on the door.
Again Mrs Williams poked her head around and was about to speak, when he told her that they were wrapped up.
‘I’ve just made a little proposition to your star teacher,’ he opened by saying, and when the principal raised her eyebrows in polite enquiry he then proceeded to fill her in on all the details of his preposterous plan. Rebecca watched him as he spoke. He was paying no attention to her now. Every scrap of his considerable concentration was focused on the principal, who was visibly wilting from the sheer impossibility of getting a word in edgeways. He politely sidestepped every objection that began forming on her lips with the dexterity of a trapeze artist.
Finally, he informed her, as a point of passing interest, that he would compensate her hugely for releasing Rebecca immediately.
‘No!’ Rebecca protested hotly. ‘I mean,’ she carried on in a less frantic voice, ‘it was just an idea that Mr Knight had. I’m sure you would be able to recommend some private tutors for Emily in the London area. Gosh, there must be thousands!’
‘Yes, I’m sure—’
‘No,’ he cut in before the principal could finish her sentence. ‘I think perhaps you both misunderstood me…’ He shot Rebecca a look from under his lashes which implied that any misunderstanding was purely on the part of the principal because he had made his thoughts crystal-clear to Rebecca. ‘As I explained to Miss Ryan, Emily will be an uphill task for any private tutor, apart from one who knows how to handle her, as she clearly does. I realise that it will be difficult to release her today, but the end of the term is…when? In a fortnight’s time? That will give you all of the Christmas vacation to work on finding a replacement, and, as I said, I will pay generously for putting you out.’
The principal appeared to be dithering.
Rebecca could almost feel the net hanging overhead, but she wasn’t going to allow herself to be trapped. She didn’t like Nicholas Knight, and she especially did not want to spend months under his roof, with the past rising up inside her every time he walked into a room.
‘I have a responsibility to the girls I teach,’ she said carefully.
‘Who, at this moment, do not require quite the same level of compassion as my daughter does. It will be a matter of a few months. Surely you can find it in yourself to spare the time?’ He gave her a winning smile, and the overhead net seemed to drop a few inches closer.
‘It’s entirely up to you, Miss Ryan,’ Mrs Williams said. ‘I should be able to call upon a support teacher to cover for you until you return.’
‘Yes, but…’
Two pairs of eyes focused on her, as they both waited in silence for her to complete the objection.
‘It seems highly unorthodox,’ she finished lamely. ‘And anyway, have you considered that Emily might well disagree with the plan? She may not want to be pursued by her teacher and forced into line…’
‘My daughter will just have to accept it,’ he said bluntly, his mouth hardening. ‘As I will make it perfectly clear when I see her. I can’t unravel this situation, but I have no intention whatsoever of letting her get away with any further stupidity. She made a mistake of horrendous proportions and I shall deal with it whether she likes it or not. She’s sixteen years old and she’ll do as I say.’
Rebecca had visions of racks and thumbscrews and a diet of bread and water for lack of obedience. She shuddered. The man obviously knew nothing at all about teenagers, least of all teenagers like Emily. His idea of taking control of the situation had all the makings of the sort of heavy-handed attitude that could end up driving his daughter to run away.
And, however clever and cunning and unruly Emily was, she was still, underneath it all, a mixed-up child who wouldn’t survive for a day on the streets of London.
The net settled over her and she sighed in defeat.
She would take the job. He was right; it would only be for a matter of months, and she would make sure that he was never reminded of any past they might have shared. She would also make sure to avoid him at all costs. She could still remember how he had made her feel all those years ago. True, she had been young and naïve then, but the man had a certain predatory charm. She might dislike him intensely, but charm had a nasty habit of getting under your skin, and that was something she would simply not allow.
‘All right,’ she conceded, and she saw him breathe a sigh of satisfied relief. Had he actually contemplated the possibility of refusal? If he had, then he could be an Oscar-winning actor, because not at any point had he appeared to doubt the persuasiveness of his arguments.
‘But I shall have to discuss this with you in a great deal more depth before I commit myself.’
‘I thought you already agreed,’ he pointed out. ‘You either agree or you don’t agree.’
‘I will work for you provided you meet my terms and conditions.’
‘Don’t worry, money is no object.’
‘I wasn’t talking about money!’ she snapped, suddenly flustered at the situation she had let herself be talked into.
‘Order, please!’ Mrs Williams smiled at her sudden surge of humour. ‘I think it’s only wise that this is discussed in some depth. I’m sure you understand that Miss Ryan may have some misgivings, Mr Knight. But for the moment I need use of my office. I’m seeing the governor of the board in five minutes. Why don’t you two continue this discussion in the staffroom?’
‘Why don’t we continue this discussion,’ he said smoothly, rising to his feet, ‘in your quarters? It’ll be much more private. The open forum can be a hotbed for gossip.’ He looked at her with the smugness of a cat that had successfully managed to catch a wily little mouse. ‘We’re going to be talking about salary, despite your apparent aversion to money, and you wouldn’t want all your fellow teachers knowing what sort of pay packet you’ll be on, do you? They might all be lining up for jobs as private tutors in London!’
‘Splendid idea!’ Mrs Williams said on Rebecca’s behalf, obviously imagining a mass exodus of her teaching staff. She walked them to the door and shook his hand, pleased with the way things had turned out. She had anticipated the worst and was relieved that a solution of sorts had been found.
‘But…’ Rebecca began. She didn’t think that she had opened so many of her sentences with ‘But’ in all her life.
‘But nothing,’ he said, steering her out of the door and smiling at the principal. ‘You heard Mrs Williams.’
As soon as they were out of earshot, she turned to him and said stiffly, ‘I take it you’re accustomed to exploiting other people?’
‘Exploiting other people?’ He gave her an innocent look that didn’t quite sit with his dark, raffish good looks. Rebecca thought he looked about as innocent as Lucifer on a bad day. ‘I take advantage of opportunities, Miss Ryan. Perhaps I should call you Rebecca. I’m a great believer in employers being on first-name terms with their employees. Puts them at their ease.’
Rebecca, vastly ill at ease, not least because of the sidelong, giggling looks she was getting from the assortment of girls drifting from one class to the other, didn’t say anything.
‘And I’m Nick.’ He grinned to himself, as though at some private joke.
‘Why does Emily not carry your surname?’ Rebecca asked, leading him along corridors, past classrooms and finally into the secluded quarters of the dormitories. With no one around, she was unnervingly aware of his presence.
‘Because by the time Emily was born Veronica and I were so disillusioned with one another that she did precisely what she knew would stick in my throat.’
They had reached her quarters, and she opened the door to the small but comfortable sitting room. There was just enough room for a small flowered sofa, two chairs and a couple of tables, and on either side of the fireplace bookshelves had been mounted which she had crammed with her books. He strolled over to them and began perusing the titles, while she stood and watched him, arms folded.
Did he think that this was some kind of social visit? she wondered.
‘Why did you choose to live in the school?’ he asked. ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier for a young woman like yourself to live in the town and travel in?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? Mind if I sit?’ He sat down.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ She had a very small and very basic kitchen. Generally, she ate the school meals, although on her free nights she always went into the town to see her friends. It was one of the good things about working in the place she had grown up in. She had kept in touch with all her own schoolfriends and they met regularly to catch up on gossip. ‘I’m fine.’ His dark eyes raked over her. ‘Why don’t you sit down? You look very awkward towering over there.’
Thanks for the flattering description, she thought sourly. Yes, I do tend to tower, but there’s no need to bring it to my notice.
She removed her jacket and primly sat on the chair facing him. At least she wasn’t hot and stuffy now, but the blouse was still a ridiculous fit. She could feel her breasts pushing against the white material. She was also acutely aware of his eyes on her, and it seemed to her that out of the principal’s office there was something rather more assessing to his gaze.
‘There are a few things I want to make perfectly clear before I take up the position with you,’ she began before he could launch into any more personal asides. ‘Firstly, I want you to know from the start that if I am to tutor your daughter I must be given free rein to do so however I see fit. These are unusual circumstances, and sitting Emily down for formal classes as she would do in a school environment just isn’t going to work.’
‘And what are you suggesting here?’
‘I’m suggesting that she has to feel comfortable with me if I’m to succeed in teaching her anything at all. She will have an awful lot on her mind and she will need fairly gentle handling.’ He looked at her as though he disagreed with every word she had just spoken, but after a while he nodded.
‘Naturally, you will want to be informed of her progress, so I suggest we arrange a time at the beginning of each week, when we can get together for a short meeting, so that I can tell you how Emily is getting along.’
‘And in between these arranged…meetings…? Should we conscientiously ignore one another? Speak, but keep it to the minimum? Pretend that we’re total strangers?’
‘This isn’t a joke, Mr Knight!’
‘Nick.’
Rebecca ignored that. ‘I’m sure Emily will keep you up to date with what we’re doing.’
‘Oh, I doubt that very much. She’s managed to make herself very scarce on the occasion when she’s been forced to be under the same roof as me.’ His voice was bland, but she could sense emotion underlying it, and she felt a pang of sympathy. As a father, it must be difficult to realise that your only offspring would rather ignore you than include you.
‘That must be very difficult for you,’ Rebecca said sympathetically. ‘Being denied contact with your daughter, and then, when she’s a teenager, finding yourself confronted with a young woman you have never really known.’
‘Thanks for the vote of sympathy.’ He gave her a long, cool look and she immediately understood that private utterances along those lines were not welcome. She wondered whether his girlfriend had more access to his emotions, whether he showed her the sides of himself that he kept carefully concealed from the public gaze.
‘Fine,’ she said crisply. ‘Now, shall we discuss the more technical aspects of this…arrangement?’
They became immersed in all the details involved, the nitty-gritty that would make up the contract of employment, which he assured her would be put in writing and sent to her for signature within the next couple of days by his secretary.
When she stood up to indicate that their meeting was now at an end, she was surprised and taken aback to find that he had remained where he was, and was staring at her in a vaguely unsettling manner. Not sexual, but somehow watchful.
‘If that’s all?’ she prompted.
‘I thought that I was the one doing the interviewing,’ he said mildly. ‘There might be one or two things I’d like to say to you.’
‘Are there?’
‘As a matter of fact, yes.’ He linked his hands behind his head and continued to stare at her until, disconcerted, she plonked herself reluctantly back down on the chair.
‘Well, fire away.’
‘Firstly, I shall expect you to have meals with me—expect you both to have meals with me—when I’m around. I don’t intend to slink through my own house like an intruder just to satisfy your bizarre preference for solitude. Admittedly, my work takes me abroad quite a bit, and my social life can be a bit disruptive as well, but there will be times when I’m around, and your presence might pave the way for a slightly smoother relationship with my daughter.’
She caught that slight edge of defensiveness in his voice again and bit down the feeling of sympathy. Emily must be the one crack in his suit of armour which he could not hide. His feelings snaked into his voice, almost of their own accord, and he seemed unaware of it. Probably he was so accustomed to controlling people, situations, events, that he was quite wrong-footed by the one situation, the one person, over whom he had no control.
Rebecca nodded but did not commit herself to agreeing with any such plan.
‘And—’ he stood up, finally, taking his time and slipping on his jacket ‘—just one more thing…’ He gave her a slow smile that made her pulses race. ‘I’d just like to say that you’ve changed.’
Rebecca’s mouth fell open.
‘I know you recognise me.’ He moved over to her and it was all she could do to hold her ground and not scuttle away to the side of the room in alarm. ‘I could see it the minute you set eyes on me. It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it, Rebecca?’
Rebecca could think of nothing to say.
‘Did you think that I didn’t remember you? You did. I can see the answer in your eyes.’ His voice was as soft and smooth as melted chocolate. It made her dizzy, a response which she immediately put down to confusion. ‘You haven’t got the sort of face that’s easily forgotten. You look more or less the same. In fact, you seem to have aged very little over the years, but your manner’s changed. If I remember correctly you were so full of life, so eager to please.’
His voice had sunk to a husky whisper, and she could feel her cheeks aflame with colour as she raised her eyes to his. Did he imagine that his syrupy charm was going to have her wilting obligingly? Or was that syrupy charm all part and parcel of his persona, something that manifested itself in every word he spoke?
‘Our paths crossed years ago for a matter of a couple of weeks.’
‘Why didn’t you acknowledge me?’
‘Why didn’t you?’
He shrugged carelessly. ‘I figured you had your reasons. Anyway, it was incidental to what was being discussed. After a while, I became intrigued to see whether you’d slip up, which you didn’t. You still haven’t lost that urge to say exactly what’s on your mind, though, have you? I could see you bursting to condemn me before I’d even sat down!’
So he had known all along. She felt a complete idiot.
‘Why did you run out on me all those years ago?’ he asked. ‘You never bothered to explain. The last I saw of you at that party was with your back turned, laughing, with a glass of champagne in your hand, and then no more contact after that. Every call I made politely declined.’
‘I can’t think that that’s preyed on your mind all this time,’ Rebecca told him, plucking every ounce of self-control at her disposal and immeasurably grateful for the fact that teaching had given her an invaluable discipline as far as her emotions went.
‘Whoever said that it had?’ His eyes narrowed, and not altogether pleasantly, on her. ‘Although…’
‘Although what?’
‘I saw you there, in that room, and the past crossed my mind; it’s as simple as that. And with the past came a bucketful of questions that you never answered when you decided to do your vanishing act.’
‘And they won’t be answered now!’ she flared back at him. ‘And that’s another condition! I do my job, I do what I shall be paid handsomely to do, but there’s to be nothing personal between us.’
He gave her a leisurely, dangerous smile. ‘I suggest you tell yourself that every morning when you wake up,’ he said silkily, ‘because I can feel the heat radiating from you like a furnace. If I laid a finger on you right now, I bet you’d just go up in flames. Poof! Just like that. You’re even trembling, and don’t bother to deny it. But still, nothing personal. At any rate, I’m involved, in case you’d forgotten.’
He stalked across to the door and stayed there for a few seconds, looking at her, his hand resting lightly on the doorknob. ‘See you in a few weeks’ time, Rebecca. And I don’t expect you to back out because of our past little liaison. I’m sure you’re grown up enough to realise that it would be a vast disfavour to my daughter if you did. For the wrong reasons.’
With that, he was gone.
CHAPTER THREE
THE station was packed. Rebecca rarely travelled down to London. Year after year, she promised herself a treat—told herself that she would vanish to London for a week or two during the summer holidays and catch up on all those exciting things a girl of her age should be enjoying: theatres, shopping, mingling with the teeming crowds, perhaps even a nightclub, if she could drag a friend down with her. Unfortunately, whenever she tallied up the prospective bill for any such jaunt, she would feel the familiar shudder of horror at the thought of spending huge sums of money to stay in a hotel for a fortnight, eat out and go to the theatre, not to mention shopping.
And the idea always evaporated. Spain for two weeks during the summer holidays was a cheaper, more reliably hotter option. And Cornwall to visit her cousin and her three boisterous children held even more appeal.
So now, with swarming crowds around her, she felt hopelessly lost, as though she had wandered accidentally into another country.
She’d managed to commandeer a trolley and she pushed it along the platform, at which point she was obliged to abandon it so that she could lug her two hefty suitcases up the escalator and out of the station.
By the time she was outside, with a freezing wind gusting around her, she felt thoroughly deflated.
This was all a horrendous mistake. She had been manoeuvred into doing something she basically didn’t want to do. She had had the whole of Christmas to think about it in Cornwall, and, however much she had lectured to her cousin on what a splendid and altruistic gesture it had been to commit herself for an indefinite period of months to a private tutoring job, she couldn’t erase the niggling unease that had settled at the back of her mind like a heavy stone.
‘Why are you looking so worried if you know you’re doing the right thing?’ Beth had asked her one evening. ‘I can’t really see what’s bothering you. You’re going to be paid more than I could ever hope to get in a month of Sundays, and the school is going to keep your job open for when you return.’ Which had shamed Rebecca because Beth worked like a carthorse, looked after her three children in the absence of a husband, and rarely complained.
‘I don’t much like her father,’ Rebecca had said, omitting to mention that they had once briefly known one another several centuries ago.
‘Why not?’
‘He’s a bit autocratic.’
Beth had shrugged. ‘Humour him. Keep a low profile. Do your job and save all the money you earn. You’ll come out smiling.’ She’d grinned. ‘Then you can fling it all in my direction and buy me another car. Mine’s had it.’
She looked around her now, feeling like anything but smiling. There was a row of black cabs moving slowly forward and a queue of people shuffling in line, waiting their turn. His secretary had informed her that she would be met at the station. She was on the verge of abandoning hope, when she heard Emily’s voice from behind her, and she swung around to see her advancing gaily, confidently and designer-clad in a black coat, black boots, with a glimpse of jade beneath the swirling lapels.
‘Sorry I’m a bit late,’ she said breathlessly, and Rebecca gave her a quick, assessing once-over. This was not the Emily she had expected. She had expected to cope with the teenager’s ongoing despondency. Emily looked as despondent as someone who had just been told that they’d won the lottery.
‘The car’s parked on double yellow lines. We’ll have to hurry before poor old Jason gets a ticket. The traffic wardens are terribly officious around here.’ She grabbed Rebecca’s arm and appeared oblivious to her attempts to move quickly with two suitcases in tow.
‘So,’ Rebecca finally said, catching her breath and sitting back in the plushly upholstered chauffeur-driven Jaguar, ‘how are you, Emily?’
‘Oh, you know.’
‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked,’ Rebecca said. Without the school uniform, Emily could have passed for a girl in her early twenties. She was tall, strikingly pretty, with long black hair and very blue eyes, and with the self-assurance of someone who had learned to grow up before her time.
‘Coping,’ Emily said with a careless shrug. ‘Glad you’re here, actually. Christmas was a nightmare.’ She made a face. She had been staring out of the window and she swung around to look at Rebecca. ‘Most of my friends were away doing wonderful things in hot places, and I was stuck at home with Dad and that dreadful, hideous, awful woman of his. I hate her. Yuk.’
She had stopped looking like a young woman in her early twenties and reverted to teenager with an axe to grind. ‘She spent the entire fortnight forcing everyone to be jolly. Thankfully, Dad was away most of the time so I only saw her now and again. When I was dragged out of my bedroom. Do you know what she gave me for a Christmas present?’ Emily didn’t pause to let Rebecca answer. ‘A giant stuffed toy! Can you believe it? A giant stuffed panda!’
‘Maybe she thought that it would come in useful for the baby.’
‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ She had turned away again and was looking out, her shoulders hunched in defiance.
‘You can’t hide from it, though, can you?’ Rebecca said gently.
‘It’s all my father talked about the whole time. My stupidity. I don’t know why I had to come and live with him. He’s worse than Mum. At least all she nagged me about was how much she hated him. He just nags me about everything: the clothes I wear, the way I look and my stupidity. That’s when he’s around. Most of the time he’s not. I think he finds it easier not being around me. I get on his nerves.’ There was such childish, bewildered self-pity in her voice that Rebecca felt her heart lurch. She had to remind herself that this was not about taking sides, it was about educating Emily. Her problems with her father would have to be resolved between the two of them, and possibly the panda-giving stepmother-to-be.
‘I don’t suppose you managed to get any work done?’ Rebecca asked, changing the subject, and Emily looked at her.
‘Course not. I told you, I spent most of the holiday hiding away in my room, listening to music and watching television. Anyway, I was waiting for you to arrive.’
‘We’ll do as much as you feel up to doing.’
‘So if I can’t be bothered, you won’t force me?’ Emily asked with adolescent optimism, and Rebecca shook her head and grinned.
‘Sure I’ll force you, but I’ll make sure to do it gently.’
‘And what if I refuse to do any at all?’
‘I’ll pack my bags and head back home.’ The car had cleared the slow-moving traffic and was picking up a bit more speed as they headed away from the city centre to the leafy suburbs of North London.
‘You can’t do that,’ Emily said quickly. ‘You can’t leave me alone with those two!’
‘One of whom happens to be your father, your own flesh and blood, whether you like it or not.’
‘You mean a complete stranger who doesn’t like me and would rather he’d never been saddled with my presence,’ Emily returned sulkily, and she then spent the remainder of the trip staring vacantly out of the window, leaving Rebecca to nurse her ongoing misgivings at what lay ahead.
On the plus side, she liked what she heard about Nick not being around a lot. At least she wouldn’t have to contend with him and her suspicions that he probably remembered her as the lust-crazed teenager who had made no secret of how she had felt.
On the minus side, Emily was going to be a handful. The fact that she wouldn’t discuss the pregnancy rang alarm bells in Rebecca’s head. It smelled of denial, which meant that she probably hadn’t dealt with the shock of the situation. Nor would she have mentally resolved the considerable consequences it entailed. She had shoved the pregnancy to the back of her mind. Did she think that by avoiding the topic it would simply go away?
She was frowning and thinking about this when Emily said, after her prolonged silence, ‘Nightmare Hall approaches.’
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