A giggle escaped a wide-eyed Tamara. ‘Honestly?’
Fleur shook her head. ‘As first impressions go it takes some beating.’
The grave pronouncement sent the teenager into fits of laughter.
‘But Sandy loves him now.’ There’s a lot of it about.
‘He is very…’
‘Charismatic?’ Fleur suggested.
Tamara nodded with enthusiasm. She glanced at her watch. ‘He said he’d ring around six, you know,’ she said casually. ‘I might make my way back home.’ At the door she turned with an impish grin. ‘Shall I give him your love? Or would you prefer to give him that yourself?’ Laughing, she left a redfaced Fleur staring after her. Out of the mouths of babes!
The journey along the minor roads took ten minutes. It probably ought to have taken a little longer, but Antonio was in a hurry.
When he arrived he discovered that the college consisted of several buildings sprawled over quite a large area, all red brick and none very inspiring to look at. Not that Antonio, who parked his Mercedes in front of the main building, was thinking about architectural merits.
He only had himself to blame and he knew it. He had trusted her, first mistake. You trusted a woman and you deserved what you got. Expect the worst of people and occasionally you were pleasantly surprised. It was a philosophy that had got him this far…and look what happened when he abandoned it!
Give something of himself, Sophia had said. It just showed how much, or in this case now little, his sister knew!
Fleur added the last mark to the list of grades with a sigh of relief, satisfied she had used her free period to good effect. Now she would have all evening to make herself look gorgeous. She was sliding the stack of papers into her bag when the door banged open without warning to reveal a tall and very angry figure.
Actually, angry did not do justice to the raw fury that the unannounced intruder was vibrating with. Jaw clenched, nostrils flared, his patrician features tautened another notch as he stepped fully into the room. His expression had a windchill factor of minus thirty.
A combination of shock and confusion held Fleur immobile while she tried to figure why on earth he was here.
‘I thought our date was tonight?’
‘How dare you interfere in what does not concern you?’ Antonio’s low voice had the sort of carrying quality that any member of her classes would have been proud to reproduce. And such was his tall, commanding presence that he would only have to walk onto a stage to have the audience fall under his spell.
The normally faint foreign inflection in Antonio’s voice was very pronounced as he raised a sardonic brow and added. ‘I am waiting.’
Prodded into action, Fleur closed her jaw with an audible snap. ‘I have a class in five minutes.’
‘And I, Ms Stewart, have a problem, and that problem,’ he said, ‘is you!’
As she walked past him to close the door, acting as though he weren’t there, her slender back stiff, her chin lifted to a disdainful angle, Antonio’s control remained intact, but only just. He considered himself a pretty good judge of human character, but the problem was for the first time since he was a teenager he had allowed old-fashioned lust to cloud his judgement.
But could lust alone explain the bizarre fact that he seemed to rip his soul bare if he was in her company for more than two minutes at a stretch? It was the modern fashion, he knew, to dissect your emotions and analyse your motivation to the point where you could not blink without it being a product of a childhood trauma.
But that was not his way.
There was a handful of people outside his family Antonio trusted, trusted with his life, but it would never have occurred to him to unburden his worries on them. And they would not expect it; his friends were the sort of people who respected his reserved nature.
This woman respected nothing, certainly not him.
‘Do I get a clue?’ she wondered, leaning back against the closed door. Her breath coming in short, choppy bursts, Fleur fought to contain her anger. ‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I just want you to go. Just how dare you?’
‘How dare I?
His sneering tone sent a fresh wave of anger through her tense body. ‘Look, if you think I’m going to stand here and play whipping boy for you, you’re dead wrong. If you’ve got a problem with something I have done, you can tell it to my answering machine.’
He bared his teeth in a savage smile. ‘Oh, I have a problem.’ He had a problem with her mouth and the overpowering need he was experiencing to cover it with his own.
‘This is my place of work. How would you like it if I barged into your office and started yelling the odds?’
Had it even occurred to him that if anyone had seen or heard him she would be getting the fallout from this little stunt for the next six months? Of course it hadn’t, because he had never considered anyone else in his life!
‘I am not yelling. You are.’
Infuriatingly, he was right. Fleur compressed her lips and tried to regain control of her tumultuous breathing.
‘How did you know where I was?’
‘I asked someone.’
Fleur buried her face in her hands and groaned.
This got worse!
There was no chance at all that no one had recognised him. Antonio Rochas changed his hairstyle and it was national news!
Occasionally the private life of staff intruded into the workplace and it became the subject of speculation amongst her colleagues and the student population. The idea of being the subject of staff-room gossip made Fleur feel nauseous.
‘You knew that I did not want Tamara to know about Finch. You knew my wishes, but you decided to ignore them. Why would you do that? Other than this natural desire you appear to have to flaunt my authority?’
Fleur’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re saying this is about me answering Tamara’s questions.’ Actually she knew it wasn’t. It was clear to Fleur that this was about establishing some ground rules. This was about her stepping over some invisible line that women he wanted to sleep with were not allowed within fifty feet of.
She’d already been in one unequal relationship. A shiver ran down her spine when she thought about how close she’d come to walking into another.
‘Your authority!’ she choked. ‘You don’t have any—not over me, anyway. I’m quite capable of making my own judgements. You’re not my father!’
‘No, but I am Tamara’s.’
‘And she has my sympathy!’ Fleur flared.
He flinched.
‘I do not pretend to be a perfect father,’ he retorted grimly.
‘You don’t have to be perfect…but maybe you do? Perhaps that’s your problem. You want to be the best at everything?’
Antonio’s lips curled as he looked down into her wide-spaced golden eyes. ‘I am not interested in your psychobabble theories. I have no idea what your motivation was when you told Tamara about her father. But I can guess—’
‘You’re her father.’
The soft interruption made Antonio pause, but his tone had not softened when he broke the taut silence. ‘A fact you decided to ignore when you went against my express wishes,’ he reminded her.
‘I can see how