Wife For Hire. Cathy Williams

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