as she used a second towel to quickly clean up the mess on the tiled floor, annoyed at herself for the compulsive act of neatness.
Anya’s own gorge rose as she plucked at her soiled garments, her delicate nose wrinkling in fastidious horror. She couldn’t sit in a small car with this sickening stench clinging to her clothes—both she and her passengers would likely be ill themselves!
Glancing out to see that Sean was slumped back on the bed, Anya bolted the bathroom door and swiftly stripped off her outer clothes. She flushed the stains in cold water, rubbing some pine-scented soap into the affected patches for good measure. The soaking pieces of fabric would be uncomfortably clammy against her skin but it was better than the noxious alternative!
She was about to wring out the excess water when she heard a crash and muffled moans on the other side of the door. Afraid that Sean had been sick again and was choking as a result, she snatched the nearest dry covering—a man’s shirt that had been tossed on top of the laundry basket—and shrugged it on as she shot back into the bedroom.
She was disgusted to see Sean pawing at the rumpled covers of the bed, scrabbling for the smouldering joint which he had somehow knocked off the bedside table.
‘Ah-ha!’ he said, rolling over with his trophy held high, his glazed eyes barely focussing as Anya marched over, shirt flapping, and snatched the burning brand out of his clumsy fingers.
‘Here, I’ll take that,’ she said sternly, intending to flush it down the toilet.
‘Hey, no way, bitch!’ He reared up and tried to grab it back. Anya jerked her arm away—he lunged, she twisted—and for a few seconds they were locked in a bizarre kind of dance at the edge of the bed, brought to an abrupt end by a deep voice, taut with outrage.
‘Dammit, Sean, I thought we agreed no parties while I was—What in the hell is going on here?’
Anya spun around and the man who had appeared in the doorway stiffened incredulously, his cobalt-blue eyes widening in shock.
‘You!’
The stunned monosyllable dripped with nameless accusation and Anya froze, her whole life flashing before her eyes.
She clutched at the gaping shirt and stared at Sean Monroe’s supposed-to-be-away-for-the-weekend uncle.
Scott Tyler. Her personal demon. The man who had strongly opposed Anya’s application to join the staff at Hunua College.
The legal adviser to the school board who thought that she wasn’t competent to do the job she loved. The man who had admitted that he was just waiting for her to make a mistake that would prove him right!
CHAPTER TWO
IN A distant, still functioning corner of her brain Anya became aware that the music had stopped and there were sounds of high-pitched voices, car doors slamming and engines revving outside.
The party was definitely over and the reason was standing in front of them, storming mad.
She had heard via staffroom gossip that Scott Tyler had been unexpectedly landed with his sister’s children while she and her husband were overseas and guessed that a thirty-two-year-old workaholic bachelor would find living with two teenagers caused a severe disruption to his formerly smoothly-running life.
Fifteen-year-old Samantha, who was in Anya’s fifth-form class, was a good student but chocolate-box pretty and wildly popular with the boys, and as for Sean…well—if he had been expressly ordered not to do something then naturally he would have disobeyed, simply on principle!
Anya cleared her paralysed throat. She had no intention of being made a scapegoat for a bunch of irresponsible kids. Or shielding Sean, who had sunk back to the bed, gaping stupidly at his uncle’s thunderous face.
‘I can explain—’ she said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the hapless youth.
The piercing blue eyes shifted from Anya’s face to the sweeping movement of her hand and she was horrified to realise that it was the one in which she held the smoking cannabis joint. She hastily whipped it behind her back.
‘Don’t bother. I think I get the picture—unpleasantly graphic as it is,’ he said. ‘How unfortunate for you that I worked double-time to complete my business early and managed to get on the last flight back from Wellington. If I’d returned tomorrow as planned you might actually have got away with it.’
The tight drawl did nothing to conceal Scott Tyler’s controlled fury and Anya fought not to feel threatened by the daunting combination of his forceful personality and dominating physique.
He seemed impossibly tall from her perspective—big-boned and thick-muscled, his double-breasted grey suit accentuating his powerful build, his loosened tie hanging from the unbuttoned collar of his starched linen shirt. His sheer presence made the spacious cream-painted room feel suddenly claustrophobically small. His dark brown hair was thick and unruly, spiking over his wide forehead, his face an aggressive congregation of hard angles, with broad, high cheekbones surmounted by deep-set eyes and a handsome Roman nose that had been broken at some stage of his life. Not surprisingly, Anya thought. She had been tempted to take a punch at that arrogant nose a time or two herself…if she had been able to reach it!
He had intimidated her from their very first meeting at her personal interview with the Hunua College Board of Trustees six months ago, and in retrospect she could see that he had deliberately set out to undermine her composure. He had lounged in his seat at the end of the table, arms folded, staring at her with an unsettling intensity all through the initial part of the session, interrupting with a series of probing questions about her lack of co-educational experience just when she had begun to feel confident that she was making a good impression on the rest of the interviewing panel.
His obvious disapproval and sharply critical comments had caught her off guard and Anya had found herself floundering on the defensive. Then he had smiled—a cruelly self-satisfied curve of his hard mouth—and her innate stubbornness had kicked in. Her slender spine had stiffened as she revealed her grace under fire, retaliating with a calm, level-headed self-assurance combined with a dry sense of humour which had clawed back the lost ground. For a while, though, she had felt like a prisoner in the dock, and she hadn’t been surprised to later find out that Scott Tyler was one of South Auckland’s leading barristers, with a reputation for winning difficult cases on the strength of his ruthless cross-examinations.
From the brief research she had done after applying for the job, she knew that, although he wasn’t a voting member of the board, his role as legal consultant and a personal friendship with the Chairman gave him a considerable amount of influence.
Fortunately, the headmaster, Mark Ransom, had firmly thrown his support behind Anya as the best of the three other candidates already interviewed, and a majority of the board must have concurred, for several days later Anya had been overjoyed to receive the job offer that had precipitated her move to Riverview.
To her dismay, accepting defeat graciously was evidently not one of Scott Tyler’s famed accomplishments, and at each successive encounter, despite her strenuous efforts to be pleasant, they’d seemed to end up on opposite sides of an argument.
Which made it even more important that this silly incident not be blown out of proportion.
‘I know what it looks like, Mr Tyler, but you’re jumping to the wrong conclusions—’ she protested as he
