A Passionate Proposition Read online

  ‘If it was five years ago then you must have bought it from a close relative of mine,’ Anya told Scott Tyler eagerly, delighted at the prospect of a common point of interest that might help individualise her in his eyes during the next hour of question-and-answer. ‘Kate Carlyle. She was over here from London to accept an offer on the house. I’m sure you’d remember if you had met her. She’s an extremely striking woman—rather famous in America and Europe as a concert pianist…’

  He had stiffened slightly. Did he suspect her of being a shameless name-dropper? Well, perhaps so on this occasion—but she was also genuinely proud of Kate’s brilliant achievements.

  ‘Oh, yes, I remember Kate Carlyle,’ he said, his deep, harsh voice banked with unidentifiable emotion. No doubt, then, that the meeting had been memorable. Even when she wasn’t trying, Kate always had a big impact on men. ‘Exactly how closely are you related?’

  ‘She’s my cousin on my mother’s side,’ she said happily, tilting her small face to meet his demanding gaze.

  His expression tightened in what she took to be suppressed scepticism. ‘And how much—or how little—do you have in common with your famous cousin?’

  Her rueful smile forgave him for having doubts. He was obviously too polite to wonder out loud how such a beautiful, glamorous and talented creature as Kate could be related to plain, unremarkable Anya Adams, who didn’t have an artistic bone in her body—much to her parents’ enduring disappointment!

  ‘Well, since we’re both living on opposite sides of the world we very rarely see each other any more,’ she admitted, ‘and Kate does a lot of travelling, but we’re still family so we naturally try to keep in touch.’ At least Anya did. She supposed the occasional rushed few lines of e-mail from Kate in belated response to a long, newsy, handwritten letter from herself could be considered an effort, however feeble, to keep in touch.

  ‘That doesn’t really answer my question, does it?’ he drawled, with a sardonic twist of his mouth. ‘Perhaps I should have phrased it differently…asked if you share similar character traits, and perhaps her personal philosophy of life…?’

  Anya was bewildered. She wasn’t sure quite where his question was supposed to be leading, and it was obvious from his mocking expression that he was ready to pounce on any response.

  What on earth did he want her to say? As far as she was aware Kate wasn’t of any particular philosophical bent—unless you counted her dictum of ‘music first’. Whatever else Kate might be, she was a consummate professional.

  ‘Well, considering our shared background I guess a certain similarity is inevitable,’ she ventured cautiously. ‘When Kate was orphaned she came to live with my parents and me. For a while we were brought up together, just like sisters.’ With Kate being the senior by four years, and very much the dominant one, already obsessed by music and not at all patient with the childish preoccupations of her eight-year-old cousin.

  ‘So, you’re sisters under the skin?’ he confirmed with a hint of contempt, paraphrasing her words in a way that gave them a whole different meaning.

  For some reason, the closer the kinship she claimed with Kate, the less Scott Tyler seemed to be impressed. Did he think she was exaggerating her own importance in order to curry favour? Did he perceive it as an indication of a sense of personal inadequacy on her part—one that might affect her authority of her students?

  Disconcerted by his rising antipathy, Anya let her nerves run away with her tongue.

  ‘I suppose you were told when you bought it that the original part of your house is over eighty years old…and that it was built by John Carlyle—Uncle Fred’s father.’ History being her professional forte and personal interest, it was a natural subject for Anya to fall back on in moments of uncertainty. ‘Did Kate mention that she inherited The Pines after her parents were killed when she was only twelve? Of course, it was a working farm back then and it was leased as a share-milking operation by the estate until Kate was old enough to decide what she wanted to do with it. She sold off most of the grazing land when she turned eighteen, but she held onto the house and the surrounding few hectares as a piece of family history, even though she was already planning to live and work permanently in Europe or the States…In fact the last time she was in New Zealand was when she had finally decided it was time to sell The Pines. What a coincidence that you should turn out to be the buyer, Mr Tyler!’

  Oh, God, she was babbling. She never babbled! She could see the glazed look of boredom on Heather Morgan’s face and her father’s impatient glance at his wristwatch. Meanwhile, the object of her gushing lecture stood like a towering totem pole…rigid, aloof and aggressively unyielding, his rough-hewn face carved into blunt lines of cynical rejection.

  It had been more or less from that point on that she had given up expecting any positive support from Scott Tyler. The best she had hoped for was that his professionalism would compel him to at least give her a fair hearing. The trouble was that she had found herself picking up his tension like a tuning fork. He only had to be in the same room and she could feel herself vibrate with awareness, and even when she wasn’t looking directly at him he loomed larger than life in her mind, confusing her and making her say or do foolish things. But that didn’t mean she was going to lie down and let him walk all over her. It only made her more determined to fight back.

  Anya slid down into the bath until the fragrant waves lapped the point of her chin, soaking the tendrils of hair that had steamed free of the knot on the top of her head.

  Scott Tyler was a menace. Now he had even followed her into the sanctuary of sanctuaries, her bath. Looking down through the misty water, she could see her small bobbing breasts and boyish hips, so different from the statuesque curves that Heather Morgan flaunted around society on the arm of her rugged consort. Of course, Tank Tyler would probably need a well-built, boldly aggressive man-eater to slake his vile lust upon, she brooded darkly, for he would squash any woman of a more delicate and petite construction.

  How had he put it last night?

  I’m…considerably more demanding than your average randy teenager.

  She could just imagine what kind of demands he had been talking about…

  A tiny shiver rippled across the surface of the water and she sank a little deeper, letting it creep as far as her lower lip.

  He was probably an arrogant, clumsy oaf in bed, she ordered herself to believe, with no appreciation of the finer nuances of making love. Quantity rather than quality. Dominating and selfish. Impatient.

  She closed her eyes, trying to mine her imagination for more scathing criticisms, but instead her treacherous mind presented her with a vivid picture of Scott Tyler in the process of proving his oafishness, his glossy olive skin glistening with a bloom of moisture, his hard muscles flexing and rippling as he moved over the woman pinned beneath his pistoning hips, his blue eyes burning down into hers with reckless desire. He had dark hair on his wrists and a heavy beard growth so her inspired imagination painted a thick pelt of soft hair on his sleek and shining chest, that teased at her breasts with each thrust of his—

  Aaaarghh! Anya sat up choking and spluttering, groping for the towel at the side of the bath, coughing up the water that had rushed up her nose as her boneless body had slipped beneath the sensuously rocking surface.

  Anya scrubbed at her blotchy face, horrified at the dangerous byway down which her thoughts had drifted. The last thing she wanted to do was start having hot and heavy fantasies about Scott Tyler. As if she wasn’t self-conscious enough around him already! She looked down in dismay at her peaked breasts, knowing that this time she didn’t have the excuse of a cold draught to explain her body’s aching arousal.

  Dammit!

  She snatched up her loofah and soap and began scrubbing mercilessly at her skin, trying to scour away her sins. So much for her nice, soothing, revitalising bath. She was revitalized, all right, but in a most unwelcome way.

  She ducked back under the water to rinse off the soap, d
eciding to follow up with a brisk, cool shower to wash her hair. As she resurfaced, the water in her ears hummed, and she groaned as she realised that it was the telephone ringing in the kitchen. She debated leaving it, but then considered that in view of the upheavals that had occurred it might be wise to answer it.

  Her damp body wrapped in the plush white towelling designer robe that had been a birthday present from her luxury-loving parents in New York, Anya padded into the kitchen, releasing her waist-length hair from its top-knot and blotting at the dripping mass with a towel, half hoping the electronic burr would stop before she got there, but the caller was persistent—rather ominously so, she feared.

  Taking a deep breath, she picked up the receiver in a tense grip.

  ‘Anya? For God’s sake, what took you so long to answer? How far away could you be in that tiny little shoebox you call a house? Why on earth don’t you get a cell-phone like mine, or at least a cordless that you can carry around with you?’

  Anya’s fingers relaxed at the sound of the irritated greeting. ‘Kate? Good heavens, I was just thinking about you,’ she said, sternly censoring the last few minutes of her bath.

  ‘Were you, sweetie? I hope that means that you’ve got some good news for me at long last.’

  She might have known that her cousin wouldn’t ring for just a chat. ‘Well, uh—’

  But Kate hadn’t finished. ‘You know, I wouldn’t have to phone if you would just use your computer more often—you know I’m constantly bouncing all over the place and sometimes don’t pick up my snail mail for weeks. Didn’t you read the e-mail I sent you last week?’

  Typical of Kate to expect a rapid reply when she herself was notorious for her time-lagged answers.

  ‘Actually, I’ve been away—’

  ‘Just a moment!’ Anya heard a hand cover the mouthpiece at the other end and quietly resumed mopping her hair, squeezing out the shaped layers which framed her face before rolling up the sodden length in the towel and securing it round her head. She could hear echoing noises and a muffled conversation in French being carried on at the other end, with a good peppering of Gallic expletives.

  ‘Sorry, Annie,’ Kate came back on, ‘but I’m at Charles de Gaulle on my way to New York and some petty tyrant is trying to tell me that one of my bags is overweight for the baggage handlers. If the hotel chauffeur could handle it why not them? Are they all wimps? Why do I fly business class if not to avoid stupid hassles like this?’

  Anya waited patiently, knowing it was pointless to offer either advice or sympathy, for it would undoubtedly be taken as criticism or unwelcome interference. Just as pointless to remind Kate how much she disliked being called ‘Annie’.

  She stretched the telephone cord to enable her to reach the fridge and take out the bottle of white wine lying on the bottom shelf. She had the feeling she might need a glass before the conversation was through.

  ‘So, have you managed to get yourself invited over to the old homestead, yet?’ Kate returned abruptly to the purpose of her call when she had vented enough of her spleen.

  ‘Well, no, not really—’ Anya didn’t think she could count last night’s gate-crashing episode.

  ‘Why not, for God’s sake? You’ve been in Riverview for four months; you must be part of the local scenery by now. Can’t you casually wander over and say you want to look around the place you used to visit as a kid…maybe spin a sob story about a pilgrimage to The Pines in memory of your dear, departed Aunty Mary and Uncle Fred?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ said Anya, irritated by the flippancy of the last remark. She couldn’t imagine any sufficiently casual way to go knocking on Scott Tyler’s door. Especially now!

  She extracted the cork from the bottle with a sharp tug. ‘It isn’t that simple. I told you—Mr Tyler and I don’t get on very well…’

  That had to be the most masterly understatement of all time.

  ‘I know you did.’ Kate had been oddly complacent about the fact, emboldened rather than discouraged. ‘He’s too rough around the edges for someone like you. He’d eat you up in a minute. But you’re doing this for me, not for him. It’s not as if I ask you for many favours, sweetie…’

  Nor I of you, thought Anya with a rare stab of bitterness, pouring a healthy slug of wine into her glass.

  Kate had been disparaging when a pained Martha and Charles Adams had passed on the news that their daughter had taken the backward career-step of moving to a ‘down-market’ school and had bought some kind of ‘tumbledown’ cottage in Riverview. But a month ago she had rung up out of the blue, telling Anya that since she was conveniently to hand, perhaps she wouldn’t mind acting for her on a matter of great personal delicacy.

  Anya’s extreme reluctance on learning what the favour entailed had been tantamount to an outright refusal, but Kate had never been one to let such trifles get in her way.

  Kate had been staying at The Pines while the sale was being finalised and when she had left for the last time—in a mad rush because of an unexpected offer of a series of concerts in eastern Europe, she’d said, to excuse her forgetfulness—she had overlooked the bundle of personal belongings and keepsakes which she had temporarily moved up to a corner of the attic, out of the way of the commercial cleaners who had been buffing up the house for its new owner. Now a New Zealand magazine writer had begun work on an in-depth cover article about Kate and was sniffing around for interesting revelations, and Kate wanted to retrieve the journals and papers she had left behind, preferably without alerting anyone to the fact that they existed.

  ‘Anyway, even if I did manage to get myself invited for a look around the house—I’d be unlikely to be allowed to poke around on my own, would I?’ Anya protested.

  ‘You’re a history freak—attics are history. There was loads of other boring old junk up there. You could ask to see it because you’re writing something about the early inhabitants of the area—appeal to his civic pride. Or, better still, do it when there are too many other people around for anyone to notice what you’re up to,’ advised Kate. ‘Doesn’t Scott Tyler ever throw parties?’

  Anya shuddered and took a hasty sip of wine. ‘Of course he does—but I’m not on his guest list. We don’t move in the same social circles, Kate—’

  ‘You make it sound like the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.’ Kate said scathingly. ‘He’s a lawyer, not the Prince of Wales. Stop being so defeatist. Try dating someone who is on his guest list. I’m not asking you to steal anything from him, you know. Just retrieve a few measly papers. Those journals and letters are mine—they’re in my handwriting, for goodness’ sake—’

  ‘So why don’t you simply call him yourself and explain you want your trunk back, instead of dragging me into it?’ snapped Anya.

  She had to wait while another bout of muffled French fisticuffs was exchanged.

  ‘Do we have to go through this all over again?’ Kate came back in an emphatically lowered voice. ‘You know why—because there’s some compromising stuff in there that I don’t want to entrust to a—to a stranger. Very, very personal information that I really, really don’t want anyone to see.’

  Anya had never heard her cousin sounding so near to desperate.

  ‘If I asked Tyler to send me the trunk he’s not just going to take my word for it that it’s mine, after all this time. He’s going to want to go through everything with a fine-tooth comb to make sure that he’s not sending me anything that he can legally assert ownership to as part of the goods and chattels of the house. He’ll assume I’m trying to rip him off. You should have seen the way he went over the contract the real estate agent drew up. Believe me, he’s the paranoid, suspicious type…’

  Didn’t Anya know it! Unfortunately she also knew exactly how desperate one could feel at the thought of Scott Tyler possessing compromising information about you in his hands.

  ‘What makes you think everything is still where you left it?’ she asked weakly.

  ‘Because if he’d already come across it I would have
heard about it, believe me,’ came the grim reply. ‘He would have taken great delight in letting me know…’

  That struck a sour note and Anya frowned. ‘Kate?’

  ‘Anya, stop arguing about it and have a go, will you? For me? If I hadn’t let slip to that wretched journalist that I didn’t have any photos of myself as a kid because I’d left Mum’s old collection of family photos and my school certificates and workbooks at The Pines, I might let sleeping dogs lie. But I just know he’s going to go there and ask Tyler about it, then the fat will really be in the fire!’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him not to, then?’

  ‘Because he’s a journalist, stupid—that would be like a red rag to a bull. He could make a mint on some of the things in my old diaries. I have met a lot of famous people, you know, through your parents and when I was at Juilliard, and on tours…’

  Anya had hair-raising visions of what Kate might have got up to with said famous people. She knew her cousin had been sexually active from a young age and saw nothing wrong with indulging her strong sensual appetites.

  ‘I can’t promise anything,’ Anya said stubbornly, pursuing a rising suspicion of her own. ‘And I’m not going to try until you tell me the real reason why you won’t approach Mr Tyler yourself.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Kate’s stentorian breathing crackled into the phone. ‘OK, OK. If you must know, he told me he didn’t like classical music and I called him an ignorant, uncultured barbarian…amongst a lot of other things. You know what I’m like when I’m in a temper. Fortunately, this was after we had both signed on the dotted line and I had his cash in the bank. Oh, and maybe after I’d gone he might have discovered that there were a few icky little drainage problems that I never got round to mentioning…’

  ‘Oh, Kate!’ She had ever been one to ignore life’s ‘icky’ problems in favour of her own comfort.

  ‘Caveat emptor, sweetie. I was dead keen on a quick sale and he knew he was buying an old house. So you see, the man would leap at the chance to do me a bad turn on his doorstep. That’s why I know he hasn’t found anything—yet. He’d love to see me strung up in the press. He’d consider it rough justice, the perfect revenge for my tromping all over his precious ego…’