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‘Cover yourself!’ he rapped out curtly.
When Anne’s fingers fumbled with the elastic neckline of her blouse he uttered a brief imprecation and pulled it sharply up, taking care not to touch her silky skin, snapping the elastic firmly back into place at an overly modest height before moving quickly out of her reach again.
Anne almost smiled in sympathy. If Hunter was feeling anything like she was right now then she could understand the rawness of his temper. But, after all, it was entirely his fault that they were both feeling frustrated: she wasn’t the one who had cried halt.
She eyed him warily, noting the rigid posture, the fists clenched at his sides, the black scowl. His whole attitude was a picture of stubborn rejection as he avoided her gaze, dark colour streaking his rugged cheekbones. Was he embarrassed at his lack of control? Or was it self-disgust that robbed him of his usual blunt, head-on ap- proach to awkward situations? Or—ghastly thought-was it Anne he was disgusted with?
‘There’s no need to get so uptight, Hunter,’ she said, endeavouring to project a non-threatening breeziness that she didn’t feel. ‘We didn’t do anything wrong. We were just having a little fun—’
‘Fun!’ It was the wrong word to use. Hunter looked as if he was going to explode.
Pride made Anne refuse to back down. ‘Yes, fun. You know, Professor, when you do something purely for pleasure, amusement, diversion…’
His explosion was brief and to the point.
‘Well, I suggest that in future you look for your amusing little diversions somewhere else, because I’m not in the market for your cheap brand of fun!’
‘Cheap?’ Anne was bewildered by his fierceness. ‘We were just kissing, for heaven’s sake. You think I go around kissing every man I meet?’ she asked, torn between offence and laughter.
The urge to laugh was stifled at birth as he rapped out forcefully, ‘If you think what we were doing was “just kissing”, then that explains Ivan. No doubt you and his father were “justhugging” during his immaculate conception—’
Anne flushed deeply at the unfairness of it. ‘Don’t you dare bring Ivan into this!’
‘I dare because it’s evident that you haven’t learnt very much from your past experiences…’
‘There wasn’t much to learn…’ she said bitterly.
‘Oh, no, I forgot—you gave lessons to them.’ He flung her foolishly teasing words back in her face.
‘That was a joke. You can’t believe I meant it?’ she cried incredulously.
‘Can’t I? What other lies have you told me that I shouldn’t believe?’ She flinched and he smiled sardonically. ‘This time the joke’s on you, sweetheart; you can’t plead virtue with a mouth as skilled as yours. You were practically eating me alive.’
Anne was stricken. He made her eagerness sound so sordid, as if he had been merely a passive victim of her lust, instead of the prime instigator.
‘Oh, I see, I should have pretended not to notice when you grabbed me,’ she said furiously, placing the blame squarely back where it belonged. ‘Sorry I got it wrong. You should have told me that lack of enthusiasm is what you require from your women, and I would have dropped off to sleep instead of trying to liven you up!’
‘The last thing I need is livening up,’ he ground out. ‘And don’t flatter yourself that you’ll ever be my woman…There’s more to being a woman, thank God, than the ability to have sex and babies—something you’ve evidently yet to discover!’ He punctuated the scathing exit-line by violently slamming the door after him.
Looking back, it was obvious to Anne that her flippancy had been the trigger for that whole, bitter exchange. She sho
uld have been calm, serious, not tried to hide her insecurity behind joking words, but that had always been the way that she coped with life’s unexpected blows—by turning them inside out and rendering them harmless with her fine sense of the ridiculous. Besides, it was pretty difficult to act calmly when you were shaking like a leaf.
She propped herself up on her elbow again, brushing damp strands of hair off the page in front of her as she frowned down at the Russian phrases that mocked her comprehension.
On second thoughts, taking their brief encounter seriously would probably have achieved exactly the same result, only faster. University gossip had it that the dynamic professor had only rarely been sighted with the same woman twice, which only added fuel to the wild rumours: that he was secretly having an affair with another professor’s wife; that he was a misogynist; that he was a satyr who could never be satisfied by one woman; that he was a closet gay; that he was suffering from a bad case of unrequited love or still carrying a torch for his dead wife.
Of all the rumours, Anne was willing to give credence only to the last. Some judicious shaking of the grapevine had revealed that Hunter had been a widower for over five years, his wife having died while they were living in Australia, and yet his extreme reticence about his marriage seemed indicative of some deep, unresolved feelings. As he was hot-tempered, demanding, impatient and articulate, it had to be a very powerful emotion that was capable of inhibiting his natural expressiveness. If he still felt loyalty to the memory of his wife, that would explain his violent denial of any attraction towards Anne. He had certainly been avoiding any chance of a recurrence, by being singularly elusive.
Unfortunately, it seemed that every time Anne had seen Hunter since that night, she had been welcoming or farewelling a different male, and of course he hadn’t given her the chance to explain the entirely innocent circumstances. No, he had merely given her one of those hooded stares, oozing with suspicion, which seemed to have become his speciality…
On Rachel’s advice, Anne had put up a card on the university library bulletin-board advertising the massage skills that she had acquired while nursing her mother and, somewhat to her surprise, had found herself with a small but regular trickle of clients in the shape of brawny student sportsmen who couldn’t afford professional physiotherapy treatment for their minor injuries but who, if they couldn’t come up with the very modest fee she charged, were willing to swap services which to Anne were even more valuable than money.
Thus she had quickly acquired two terrific male baby-sitters—a catering student who cooked her gourmet meals and a rugby player who chauffeured her to the shops and back. Then there was the trainee soundtechnician who had made her the typing sound-effects tape, no questions asked!
Twisting sideways to flip impatiently through her Russian-English dictionary, Anne caught sight of her exercise mat rolled up in the corner of the room and was instantly revisited by last night’s infuriating débâcle.
All Hunter’s worst suspicions about the parade of impressive physical specimens to her door must have been confirmed the previous evening, when he had brought her some mail which had been left in his letterbox by mistake.
