He ticked her a lopsided grin. ‘He’s the boy scout type—he’d make sure you knew what was coming. I bet, to Ransom, every woman’s a lady…’
‘Whereas to you…?’
‘Every lady is a tramp,’ he said with typical provocative-ness.
‘And you have the nerve to wonder that your daughter sets out to shock!’ she scoffed, beginning to gather up the books again. ‘I hope you weren’t including your mother in that crude remark.’
Her pointed barb missed its mark. ‘My mother would have laughed if I’d called her a lady,’ he told her. ‘She was a barmaid—frank and full of beans, always seeing the bright side of life and the best of people. We lived in a pretty tough part of west Auckland and she worked long hours at the pub, but she always managed to find something to laugh about. She brought us up rough but right.’
So that was where his strong sense of justice came from, and his preference for defending the underdog, for taking on cases that other lawyers considered to be lost causes.
‘Speaking of rough, are you going to tell me what you were smiling about, or do we get to have another torrid tussle on the grass?’ he said, scattering her empathetic thoughts.
Anya sighed, hugging the books defensively to her breast. ‘It’s fake.’
He looked bewildered. ‘What is?’
‘Petra’s nosering. It’s a clip-on.’
‘What? Are you sure?’
She took advantage of his stunned reaction to rise to her feet, flexing her cramped legs. ‘Trust me. I worked at a school where unauthorised body piercings were an expelling offence, whereas jewellery-wearing only merited confiscation. I had a drawerful of the things.’
‘The little devil!’ He stood up beside her, eyes gleaming with wry admiration. ‘She knew I was biting my tongue not to criticise it—or her mother for letting her have it done.’
‘She’s testing you.’
He bent to pick up her water bottle and fell into step beside her as she walked towards the house, intending to collect her handbag which was being looked after by the taciturn Mrs Lee.
‘I suppose I lose points for things like sending her to her room when she’s rude to Sean and making her take extra lessons.’
‘Actually, I think it makes her feel safe with you. She’s obviously used to discipline at home, because she has very good manners when she cares to display them, so when you demand a certain standard from her you’re indicating that you care about her future. She’s also secretly impressed that you’re making the effort to work from home so you can be with her.’ She slipped a sideways glance up at him and was startled and amused to see him blushing to the tips of his ears.
‘Yes, well…I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up,’ he gruffed in an attempt to hide his pleasure. ‘I can’t continue pushing cases off onto my partners, but I don’t want her to think that now the novelty of her arrival’s worn off I’m abandoning her.’
‘I don’t think there’s any danger of that. She’ll be starting school in a few days, and if she’s bussing with Sean and Samantha she won’t be home herself until half-past four.’
‘And then she’ll have a couple of hours under your supervision…’ he murmured, busily constructing himself a mental timetable. He saw her step falter and gave her a frowning look. ‘You agreed to the bargain. Even if everything works out for you as smoothly as I planned, I still expect you to continue with the tutoring. You’ve seen for yourself how much Petra benefits from individual guidance and you’ve already established a close rapport. She needs you.’
Petra wasn’t the only one. Over the next several days Scott continued to invite himself to join them, and although Anya took care not to be left alone with him again, she soon realised that she was being utilised by both father and daughter as a kind of emotional buffer, a neutral third party through whom they could filter their curiosity about each other without directly confronting their feelings.
On Saturday evening Mark rang Anya just as she was putting the finishing touches to her essay on the cultural impact of taste and consumerism, to tell her that the head of the Information Technology department had tracked down the hacker who had posted the party invitation on the bulletin board. It had turned out to be a student who was already on probation for serious misuse of the school’s computer system. A suspension had been handed down and the trouble-making parent’s threatening rumbles had been considerably dampened by her son’s identification as the purchaser of several bottles of hard liquor for his under-age friends.
Once back at college Anya found that she had to fend off intrusive remarks and irritating jokes from staff and suffer back-chat from more than the usual number of smart-mouthed kids, but by clinging to her usual good-humoured tolerance she rode out the initial flurry of interest and thereafter the fresh scandal of the hockey coach who was having a not-so-discreet affair with the wife of the caretaker took precedence in the collective imagination.
She and Petra adjusted their schedules and for two hours in the early evening, while Sean sweated on his uncle’s fitness machine in the pool-room to compensate for his lost rugby training and Samantha breezed through her own homework between phone calls, Anya went over any problems with that day’s lessons and helped Petra with her homework. The only thing that stumped Anya was the maths, but fortunately Samantha had an aptitude for the subject and proved willing to revisit some of her previous years’ work with her younger cousin. Just before the two hours were up there would be the throaty purr of the Jag in the driveway and Anya would shortly find herself sitting in the living room sipping dry sherry or a frosty lime-and-tonic while Scott nursed a vodka and Petra plied him for the lurid details of his latest case in between swigs of Coke.
Late Friday afternoon, as she was leaving school, Anya received an unexpected dinner invitation from Mark. Caught off guard, she instinctively demurred but he was flatteringly persistent and, remembering that Petra had said that her father was going out for the evening, Anya suddenly decided to set aside her recent disenchantment with Mark and defiantly enjoy their delayed date.
Deciding to get the day’s tutoring over early, so she had plenty of time to get ready, she called in at The Pines on the way home from school instead of popping home first, as she usually did.
Sean answered the door, no longer flinching at the sight of her, and saw her glance at the line of suitcases against the wall. She had forgotten that he and Samantha were due to return home today.
‘Mum and Dad flew back from LA last night,’ he confirmed. ‘Mum’s on her way over now, to pick us up.’ He wasn’t looking overly enthusiastic, probably anticipating his parents’ reaction to the reason for his not yet being back at rugby training.
She murmured an appropriate response and he jerked his head in the direction of the closed door along the hall in response to her enquiry about Petra.
‘She’s in there…banging away at the piano or listening to CDs, I guess. She spends ages shut in there by herself. Screams blue murder if you try to sneak in and listen to her playing,’ he groused.