in.”
“You can’t do that!” She’d found her voice, and it sounded almost panic stricken.
“Why not?” His eyes narrowed. “What have you got to hide?”
“Nothing! But…there’s no place for you here!”
Deliberately he stared her down, not caring now if he was intimidating, even hoping that he might be. Although, he conceded reluctantly, she didn’t scare easily. Letting the silence speak, he looked past her, out the window, and then back at her defiant eyes, which held a hint of cornered rabbit in their astonished depths.
“Then you’d better make one,” he said. They both knew this place was way big enough to accommodate an extra person, the rooms reserved for tutors seldom fully occupied. There was always a spare space somewhere.
He pushed back his chair, ensuring this time he was the one to terminate the discussion. “I’ll let you know when I’ve settled things over in L.A. Meantime—” he leaned forward so that he was towering over her in her chair “—you won’t, of course, think of making any major decisions without me, will you?”
Straightening without hurry, he took a card from his breast pocket and flipped it onto the desk in front of her. “My e-mail address and phone number are on there.”
It was very satisfying turning his back on her and strolling to the door. He didn’t look at her again before closing it behind him.
Chapter Two
Triss found that her fingers had curled about a heavy diamond-cut glass paperweight on the desk.
It would have felt good to throw it at Steve’s dark, arrogant head, but that would have given him the pleasure of knowing he could make her lose control, and anyway it was too late. She’d only damage the door and chip the paperweight.
Releasing it, she flexed her fingers, seeing with mild surprise the red marks on her palm left by the sharp angles of the glass.
She had cleared the desk just the day before, leaving only the paperweight, a desk set and a handsome leather blotter holder, all gifts from past students to Magnus.
It was a task she’d have had to tackle some time, and there’d been no point in putting it off.
Besides, she’d had a half-formed hope that among the long-term clutter that had piled even higher in the last weeks of her husband’s illness might be something that would negate the unchanged will.
Before Steve arrived she hadn’t given particular thought to which room to use for their meeting, but perhaps by leading him in here she had subconsciously been hoping for some sense of Magnus’s presence to give her a much needed feeling of confidence.
Steve—real name Gunther Stevens, according to the formal language in Magnus’s will—had been her enemy from the moment they met. She had tried to get on with him for Magnus’s sake, but Steve had been determined not to help her bridge the gap. In the end the gulf had been so wide and so deep it was clear one of them would have to go. Even Magnus had to see that.
So why had he not seen that the will he had drawn up soon after his marriage could only lead to disaster?
“Magnus, Magnus…” Triss dropped her forehead into a supporting hand, leaning on the desk that had once been his. “My dear man, what were you thinking of?”
She was assailed by blinding panic—a sensation hauntingly familiar from the days after she had lost both her parents with brutal suddenness halfway through her teens. Magnus’s death had not been unexpected, but the sense of abandonment and fear, of being adrift in a hostile, or at best indifferent world, was almost as strong.
Salt stung her eyes, but at a tentative knock on the door she straightened, fiercely blinking the tears away. She had held up thus far, and too many people depended on her for her to give way now. She would have liked to crawl into some quiet corner and cry for hours. Instead, her voice strong and steady, she called, “Come in.”
A husky youth sauntered into the room, hands thrust into the pockets of baggy pants worn with a camouflage jacket.
“Yes, Piripi?”
“Me and the guys’re just wondrin’ if it’s okay to have a game.”
“A game?”
“Touch football.”
“You’re asking for permission?” Triss said, puzzled. “You know in free time you can play whatever you like.”
Piripi looked down at his shabby, thick-soled trainers. “Well, y’know, with Magnus, ah—” he swallowed “—you might think…” He looked up manfully. “It’s not like we don’t care, Triss…”
“I know you care,” Triss said gently. “Of course you do.”
Under their tough exteriors the boys had almost worshipped the man who had rescued them from various kinds of privation. And they treated Triss with a touching mixture of respect for her as Magnus’s wife and a sometimes bantering, sometimes confiding familiarity that they might have accorded to an older sister.
“Sitting around moping can’t help Magnus,” she told Piripi, “and he’d expect you all to get on with working hard and playing hard.”
That had been his philosophy for the school, although for himself the playing part had never come easily. “It’s been too quiet around here the last couple of days.”
Relieved, Piripi grinned, then wiped the grin away, evidently thinking it was unsuitable. He backed to the doorway and hesitated there. “You okay, Triss?”
His large brown eyes were concerned, so different from the barely concealed hostility in Steve’s inflexible gray stare. She only hoped he hadn’t known what an effort it had taken to give him back an unblinking stare of her own, concealing all sign of emotion—or weakness.
Tears threatened again at the boy’s delicacy and regard for her feelings, but she made herself smile reassuringly. “I’ll be fine, Piripi. Thank you for asking.”
The smile faded as he closed the door, but a small warming glow remained, easing a little the bleak sorrow that enveloped her. Not having any brothers or sisters of her own, at Kurakaha she’d found the closest thing to a family that she’d known since she was Piripi’s age, when her parents had been cruelly snatched from her. As she had been then, he and the others were bereft and bewildered, and probably scared. So was Triss, but she couldn’t let anyone know it.
Minutes later a whoop and a yell told her the boys were enjoying their game. It would do them good. They’d been unnaturally sober since she’d broken the news to them, and in the midst of her own sorrow her heart went out to them. Poised on the brink of manhood, in many ways they were still children.
Losing Magnus would leave a huge gap in their lives, but it was up to her to help them carry on as Magnus would have wished. Maybe his death would even strengthen their desire to live up to the standards he’d set.
As it should hers. Triss squared her shoulders and forced herself out of the chair. She didn’t have time for self-pity. There was still
