Anna watched under the shield of her lashes as he sketched a quick smile; he was hard not to watch. His voice too was memorable, deep and velvety with a hint of gravel but no sign of a Highland lilt despite all this Urquart of Killaran stuff. Did that make him a laird or something? It would explain his warm reception, though such a thing as a laird, especially one who looked more like her private image of a pirate, seemed wildly anachronistic to Anna.
What would he look like in a kilt? She managed to swallow the inappropriate giggle produced by the equally inappropriate thought and lowered her lashes.
Always assuming her instincts were right and she had the job, did that mean she’d be working closely with him?
The thought made her heart beat even faster. With luck he kept his involvement to cheque book.
She struggled not to flinch as his attention swivelled back to her. The recognition she had thought she’d glimpsed initially was gone, replaced by a flat look that she could not read. Even so, she felt her anxiety levels climb—as it turned out with good reason!
‘So tell me how long have you been teaching?’
‘Five, no four...’
His intense gaze brought a rush of colour to her cheeks, one of the curses of her red-haired complexion. She managed to retain a semblance of what she hoped came across as headmistress-style gravity as she tipped her head. ‘Five and a half years.’
Cesare Urquart, his elbows on the table, leaned forward across the table towards her. The undercurrent swirling behind his smooth smile made Anna feel a lot like Little Red Riding Hood. The man made your average wolf seem benevolent.
‘Let me give you a hypothetical situation, Miss Henderson.’
Anna smiled back and nodded. Bring it on.
CHAPTER TWO
PRIDE ALONE KEPT Anna’s shoulders straight and her head high as she left the room, pausing to nod and murmur a thank you to the panel members. Pride, and a grim teeth-clenching determination not to give Cesare Urquart the pleasure of seeing her crumble.
He didn’t avoid her eyes or attempt to hide the smug smile with the hint of chilling cruelty that pulled the corners of his sensually sculpted mouth upwards. His complacent expression said job well done. The other panel members remained silent, none met her eyes, which was probably just as well as a word of kindness and she would have fallen apart.
‘I’ll call you a taxi.’
This offer definitely wasn’t a kindness so Anna was able to hold it together as she met the stare of her tormentor. Hold it together but not conceal the bewildered hurt in her blue eyes.
He was the first to lower his gaze, his dark, preposterously long spiky lashes casting a shadow along the razor-sharp edge of his chiselled cheekbones as he picked up his pen, twirling it between long brown fingers before he scribbled something on the sheet of paper that lay on the table, drawing a line figuratively and literally through her name, she speculated bitterly.
Why had he done it?
Just because he could?
Why had she let him?
In the corridor her courage deserted her and Anna slumped like a puppet whose strings had been cut, clutching her head. She had the beginning of a first-class migraine. She leaned heavily against the wall feeling the cold of the ugly green tiles through her thin jacket.
Her coat lay folded across the chair in the room she had just left, but pneumonia was an infinitely more attractive option than going back for it.
The loud tick of the clock on the wall opposite brought her dazed glance to the large clock. Her eyes widened. It had only been five minutes since she had stood there on the brink of being offered her dream job. It had taken Cesare Urquart less than five minutes to make her appear an incompetent idiot.
Five minutes to reduce her to a stuttering level of incompetence, and she had let him! With a grimace of self-disgust, she straightened up and began to walk down the corridor, her heels beating out an angry tattoo.
The taxi was waiting for her outside. As she slid inside she could think of any number of responses to his seemingly innocent questions. He’d led her to the edge of a hole but she’d jumped in. And he’d enjoyed it!
A person who stubbornly clung to the belief that people were basically good, Anna didn’t want to believe that he’d taken pleasure from her distress. But it was true, and probably the worst part of it was the knowledge that behind the bland and beautiful mask he had enjoyed watching her stutter and stumble. It had been clinical and cruel.
She looked at her hands. They were shaking. She made a decision. They’d arrived at her hotel.