AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Oh, please, don’t suffer on my account,’ she snapped.
‘I won’t,’ he assured her smoothly, and there was a small silence.
She sighed. It would appear that she was going to have to grovel after all, since her bribery had patently failed to charm. She caught her plait over her shoulder and began fiddling with the end as the silence lengthened.
‘By the way, while you’re here…’
‘Yes?’ She brightened, her eyes shifting from gloomy hazel to hopeful blue at his apparent tentativeness. Perhaps he wanted to ask a small favour of her, thereby enabling her casually to suggest a trade!
‘Perhaps you’d like to use my telephone?’
‘Telephone?’ she echoed blankly, hoping her shock would be mistaken for polite surprise.
‘That is why you’re here, isn’t it?’ His voice was a strange mixture of gravel and silk.
‘Whatever makes you say that?’ she said bravely.
‘The way you keep sneaking glances at it. The phone box down the street has been vandalised, I noticed yesterday. And now here you are, oozing charm to a surly brute—’
‘I never called you a brute!’ she protested weakly. ‘A brute is unreasoning and unintelligent—’
‘You must think me both if you expected to fool me so easily, after making such a point of avoiding me like the plague since you moved in—’
‘Since you’ve so kindly and unexpectedly offered, I may as well take advantage of your good temper,’ interrupted Anne loftily. She marched over to the wall and lifted up the receiver. ‘You know, you’re a very mistrustful man,’ she said as she dialled the number. ‘If you remember it was your not so subtle suggestion that we avoid each other.’
‘I didn’t expect you to take me quite so literally.’
‘No, you expected me to fling myself at you—’
‘Or to start knocking at my door every five minutes, sweetly offering me home-cooked meals and asking to use the phone,’ he interposed pointedly.
She glared at him and turned her back as the telephone was answered.
‘Rachel?’ Conscious of her audience, she hurried to make her call as short as possible. ‘My morning tutorial has been cancelled for tomorrow so I’m not going to be coming in. Do you want to drop by here after your lecture so we can go over that Russian test, or do you want to leave it until the weekend?’
She turned again as Hunter brushed past her to move about the kitchen. As she listened to Rachel run through her crammed weekend social schedule she watched him out of the corner of her eye, noting how thoroughly comfortable he was in his surroundings. She saw him take a pot from a drawer beneath the ceramic cook-top and empty the contents of her square plastic container into it. Instead of scraping it with a spoon as she would have done, he hooked a bottle of red wine out of the rack built into the wall above her head and deftly opened it, rinsing the remains of the sauce out of the corners of the container with a hefty slug.
She forced her attention back to the voice in her ear. ‘Uh…no, thanks…really, I just have too much work to do…I’ve got a few assignments going already…and a lot of writing to do,’ she added hurriedly for the benefit of the man untangling what looked like freshly made fettucine on the marble bench-top. ‘Oh, sure, maybe another time…’ Much as she liked Rachel, the night-clubbing social life that her friend enjoyed was not for her. Unlike Rachel, Anne couldn’t afford to fail any of her papers so most of her spare time had to be dedicated to studying, or earning some extra income. ‘OK. I’ll see you Sunday evening, then. Bye!’
She hung up. ‘Thanks.’
He didn’t turn around, concentrating on coiling up the ribbons of pasta. ‘I know I should say, Any time, but we both know that would be a polite lie.’
‘This was sort of an emergency,’ she explained.
‘So I heard. I get the feeling that there are going to be a lot of sort-of-an-emergencies in your life, so perhaps we’d better define a set time convenient to both of us that you can use the telephone.’
Anne opened her mouth to refuse haughtily, and realised that pride was getting in the way of good sense. ‘Well…’
He made it easy for her. ‘How about not before six or after seven?’
She was usually up well before six at home but her metabolism was already adjusting to lazy city ways. ‘Uh, I think that might be a bit early…’
He turned his head, his look wry. ‘I meant in the evenings, Anne. I like a lie-in in the mornings myself.’
She could imagine it. That big, bronze body sprawled across white sheets. Since he didn’t have any bodily imperfections to hide he probably slept in the raw…and within touching distance of Anne if there hadn’t been a wall between them. She knew his bed was hard up against the same wall as hers because sometimes, when she woke up at night, she could hear the protest of his bedsprings as he turned over.
‘Anne?’
