CATHY WILLIAMS - Too Scared To Love

She had hoped that she might be able to leave the room, but he was clearly not in the slightest bit tired. In fact, he looked as though he could have kept going for another few hours at least. If this was his norm, then lord only knew how much sleep he needed. Maybe none. She glanced across at him and decided that he was the type who considered sleep an unnecessary waste of valuable time.

‘Briefly,’ Roberta replied. ‘I’m afraid I was a little late getting here, and she was in bed when I arrived, although she did pop into see me.’

‘I can imagine,’ he said blandly, ‘and what did you think of her?’

‘She seems very outspoken,’ Roberta said carefully.

‘I would say that that’s an example of very British understatement. She lacks discipline.’

‘Lots of teenagers are a bit unruly, Mr Adams.’

‘Grant. And Emily goes way beyond the boundaries of unruly. Have you been told that she’s been expelled three times?’

‘No,’ Roberta admitted, not surprised at that.

‘Have you been told that she should be at school now, but she was expelled from her last one a month ago?’

‘No.’

‘That hardly surprises me. My mother probably thought that such vital statistics would put off any prospective candidates for the job. Not many people are ready or willing to take on a fourteen-year-old with no sense of responsibility.’

Roberta was shocked by the inflexible hardness in his voice. No wonder your daughter’s a bit off the rails, she wanted to say.

‘A sense of responsibility is something that’s gleaned from the example of those around,’ she said bluntly.

‘Meaning?’

There wasn’t a great deal of amusement in his eyes now. She suspected that he was not accustomed to being criticised, however implicitly, and he didn’t like it.

‘How much time do you spend with her?’ she asked, and his frown deepened.

‘Excuse me,’ he said coldly, ‘but who’s employing whom? I don’t like your tone of voice, and I certainly don’t like what I think you’re saying.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Roberta murmured, not feeling sorry in the slightest. ‘I don’t mean to tread on your toes, but from what I gathered you don’t spend a great deal of time with your daughter. If you did, perhaps she might be more inclined to live up to your expectations of her.’

‘In case it hasn’t occurred to you,’ he said in a hard voice, ‘I do have a living to make.’

‘But at the expense of your daughter?’

‘What?’ he roared, running his fingers through his hair and glaring at her. ‘Have you forgotten that you’re paid to look after my daughter and not to analyse my behaviour?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Roberta said calmly.

‘You don’t sound it!’ He stood up and paced the room to the window, staring outside, his back to her.

No, she thought, he really was not accustomed to being criticised. No doubt that was something he held the monopoly on. And got away with, judging from what she had seen.

But his air of restless aggression didn’t intimidate her. When it came to her job she was coolly professional and daunted by very little. It was only in her personal life that she had bumped into things she couldn’t handle.

‘I was wrong about you,’ he bit out, turning to face her. ‘You may have a passing resemblance to Vivian, but that’s about all.’ He walked across the room and leant over her, his hands gripping either side of the chair. ‘But something must ruffle that cool exterior of yours. What is it? What goes on behind that controlled face of yours? You’ve made your opinions of me loud and clear; now it’s time for me to ask a few questions. After all, I’m entrusting my daughter to you.’

ROBERTA regarded him with a trace of alarm. As far as she was concerned, being au pair to Grant Adams’s daughter in no way gave him an invisible right to quiz her on her personal life, but the look of intent on his face, inches away from hers, disturbed her.

She lowered her eyes and wished that he would remove himself to another part of the room. His daunting masculinity so close to her made her feel slightly giddy and out of control and she didn’t like it.

‘I don’t think,’ she said carefully, ‘that what goes on under this cool exterior of mine, as you put it, has anything to do with my job here. I’m being paid to look after your daughter for four weeks, and that’s precisely what I shall do. I happen to be very good at my job.’

‘I never said you weren’t.’

She could feel his breath warm on her face, and it seemed to go to her head like incense. That, coupled with the relentless, demanding glint in his eyes, made her hackles rise even further and she had to control herself against another unaccustomed surge of anger.

‘Then I don’t see that there’s anything further to discuss,’ she said evenly, raising her eyes to his.

‘You really would have made a great schoolteacher.’

‘And I resent your constant insults!’ she snapped.

‘Me? Insults? I thought that you were the one doing that.’

‘What do you mean?’ She eyed him levelly, inwardly cringing from that intangible sense of unquestioned power that radiated from him.

‘What I mean, my dear Roberta Greene, is that you feel free to make sweeping generalisations on my relationship with my daughter, but the minute I suggest that I try and discover what makes you tick, you instantly clam up. Surely you can see it from my point of view. I know nothing about you.’

‘I come with references,’ Roberta interrupted him, realising that her choice of words made her sound like some kind of prize dog proclaiming its pedigree. ‘Your mother will have copies of them all—’

‘But what do they say about you?’

‘That I’m experienced in this,’ she said evenly. ‘I’ve been an au pair now for two years. There’s not much else I can tell you, except that you must trust me with Emily.’

He stood up and walked back to the armchair by the desk, and Roberta breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t realised how much she had been affected by his proximity until she felt a swift release of tension that made her body sag.

Poor Emily, she thought sympathetically. She was probably scared stiff of her father. He certainly didn’t seem the sort who had a great deal of patience, and that was the one virtue that most adolescents needed in abundant supply.

‘I don’t suppose I have much choice, do I?’

It was a rhetorical question, but Roberta answered it nevertheless.

‘You could always ask me to return to England,’ she pointed out. ‘After all, you didn’t hesitate to do that when you thought—’

‘When I thought that you had conned your way over here on your physical similarity to my wife,’ he finished for her, and she nodded. He shrugged. ‘I know how to handle gold-diggers,’ he said abruptly. ‘It pays to be ruthless.’ The hard inflexion in his voice made her shudder.

‘I’ll bear that in mind when I’m dealing with your daughter,’ Roberta said mildly.

Her eyes met his, and for the first time he smiled, a genuine smile that lent his face such extraordinary charm that she was almost knocked for six.

‘I really would love to know what makes you tick,’ he commented lazily, and she stood up, in no way prepared to let his idle musings force her into a position of defensive anger again.

She didn’t need anyone prying into her life. Right now, it was all too sensitive a subject for that. Not that she would have been inclined to have told him anything, anyway. She was not given to sharing confidences, least of all with a man who gave off warning signals that even a deaf person would have been able to hear.

‘And I really would love to get some sleep,’ she said politely, with a cool little smile on her lips.