A Passionate Proposition. Susan Napier

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, egalitarian, 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?’