Linda Miles - Heading For Trouble!

She forced herself not to look up. Gareth defeated a red knight, a green knight, a blue knight, a black knight and a giant, and still the lady despised him. From the corner of her eye Morgan saw a pair of white-trousered legs prop themselves against a table, the scrubbed cotton taut over the long, lean muscle of his thighs.

‘And then he returned to the court of King Arthur and jousted in disguise, and defeated every knight who came at him, even Sir Gawain,’ she said, her voice even huskier than usual from nervousness. She could just imagine what Kavanagh would make of this. ‘And then he went to the king and said, “I am the brother of Gawain, but I wished to be made a knight for my own efforts, and not because of my brother.” And he was knighted that very day, and Sir Gareth married the lady and lived happily ever after,’ she concluded hastily.

The silence at the end of this seemed to stretch out interminably. At last, in spite of herself, Morgan’s eyes were drawn slowly up to the face of the man watching her.

She had expected to see the spark of devilry which had been lurking in his eyes all evening, perhaps anger, certainly the promise of vengeance to come. But the hawkish face had an expression of almost brooding intensity; it was impossible to believe that its bitter cynicism had been prompted by anything so trivial as being unexpectedly landed with the washing-up.

His eyes held hers for an endless moment in which she was conscious only of the pounding of her heart, of the electric charge which seemed to strike her from those quicksilver, black-rimmed irises. And when he spoke his words took her completely by surprise.

‘That’s Malory, isn’t it?’ he asked, in a casual tone which made her wonder if she’d imagined that sombre look. ‘Tennyson misses the point—can’t see why anyone would want to get by on his own merits, so he makes the disguise a whim of the boy’s mother, isn’t that right?’

‘Yes,’ said Morgan. Her eyes fell to the pale green shirt, which had got splashed just above the belt and had grease-spots up the front, and some devil prompted her to add, ‘Do you have a fellow-feeling for Gareth, then, Mr Kavanagh?’

‘Oh, he had the right idea; I’m dead against people rising through their connections,’ he replied, and then added more cynically, ‘Though it was lucky for him that Arthur wasn’t one of the bad guys, wasn’t it? But perhaps I’m biased, speaking as one who got his start doing an exposé of the Round Table.’ With an abrupt change of gear, he went on, ‘Do call me Richard, though. Or is that your way of saying you’d rather I didn’t call you Morgan?’ And suddenly the gleaming spark of devilry was back.

‘You’ve called me worse things,’ said Morgan drily, with heroic self-restraint.

‘I know, damn it.’ He ran a hand absently through his hair. ‘I want to talk to you.’

Morgan bit her lip. ‘I’d love to,’ she said insincerely. ‘But it’s way past Ben’s bedtime. Perhaps some other time.’ She stood up abruptly, dislodging Ben briefly before gathering him up onto her hip.

At once her adversary rose to his feet as well, blocking off her path to the door. Looking up reluctantly, Morgan saw that one rebellious lock of hair had fallen forward onto his face, giving him an almost boyish look—but there was nothing boyish about the intent determination of the face bent towards her.

He had only just turned thirty, she remembered; if he had accomplished so much so young, it was because he was completely ruthless. Ruthless and not to be trusted. But even as she thought it his eyes lit with amusement, and his mouth curled in a smile that tempted her to respond.

‘Are you avoiding me because of this afternoon?’ he murmured, in an intimate voice pitched so low that she had to force herself not to move closer to hear him. ‘I wanted to make amends—honest.’ The grey eyes flashed her another gleaming glance. ‘But I thought I’d be discreet.’

Looking up into the cynical, charming face, so confident of an easy victory, Morgan realised bitterly that there was no justice in the world. If it hadn’t been for Elaine, how much she would have enjoyed this conversation!

She could just imagine what Richard Kavanagh would have done to a celebrity who had nearly knocked someone down, assumed she was after him, and abandoned the innocent victim at the scene of the accident— he wouldn’t have let someone off the hook just because he said he was sorry. How she would love to give him a taste of his own medicine! What exquisite revenge she could take for the mortification of their first meeting! And instead...

‘I’m not avoiding you,’ she said stolidly. ‘It’s just time to take Ben up to bed.’

His eyes began to dance. ‘Well, perhaps I could give you a hand?’

As Morgan searched desperately for an excuse she saw, furiously, that he was actually enjoying her predicament. Well, he wasn’t going to corner her so easily again. ‘Oh, no, Richard, I couldn’t let you do that,’ she said sweetly. ‘You’ve done far too much tonight already.’ She gazed up at him with an expression of wide-eyed, glowing gratitude. ‘I really don’t know how to thank you.’

For a moment she wondered whether she’d gone too far. There was a startled silence as he registered the fact that she was actually baiting him in return. And then, maddeningly, his eyes blazed up, not with anger, but with the delight of someone who had discovered that a game had surpassed all expectations. His eyelids drooped over the glinting eyes; one eyebrow shot up. ‘I can think of a few ways,’ he said. ‘You must let me tell you about them some time.’

Morgan blushed furiously. Where was Elaine? Why wasn’t she here showing off her knowledge of the exchange rate mechanism or some similarly incomprehensible subject, instead of throwing her sister to the wolf? In exasperation she pushed past him, trying not to flinch as she brushed against him.

He laughed softly. ‘You can’t run away from me for ever, Morgan,’ he told her. ‘I always get what I want, sooner or later.’

Morgan stalked out of the room.

By the time she had tucked Ben in it was still only nine-thirty. Morgan wasn’t about to go downstairs with the wolf still on the prowl; she would read in bed. She returned to Elaine’s room to take off her bright clothes, then slipped into the extra-large Child’s Place T-shirt which was her current nightgear.

She paused for a moment by the mirror, a frown creasing her brow. Her attention was caught, not by the wide-eyed houri who gazed at the glass, nor by the long, almost coltish legs which remained largely uncovered by the T-shirt, but by the new logo, the new name, and the new slogan—There’s no place like it’—each of which was rumoured to have cost several thousand pounds from a top agency.

Madness, she thought irritably, exasperated for the thousandth time by the charity’s prodigal expenditure on its image—and the marketing strategy was no better. You had only to look at the hundreds of designer T-shirts stacked in the storeroom to see why cash flow was a problem, why the director so often rejected even modest applications for classroom supplies. Or, for that matter, she thought cynically, to see why Ruth refused point-blank to let her look at the accounts!

Morgan had spent two years after she’d left university founding and making a success of a specialist cake firm. She’d decided that she would rather work with children than turn a small business into a large one, and had never regretted the change—but what she’d heard about the management of the charity made her itch to get her hands on it. The problem was that no one paid any attention to a teacher.

Morgan tugged absent-mindedly on the end of her plait. Even the underfunded classroom she ran was better than anything else available to the children. But it would be easy enough to hold the place up to ridicule; she could just imagine Richard Kavanagh standing in the overstocked storeroom making sarcastic comments while supporters deserted in droves.