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Anne had just finished strenuously working on her rugby player, whose thigh had been over-stressed by some typically macho posturing on the weight machines at the gym. It had been hot, and she had stripped to a singlettop and shorts, her skin damp with perspiration. Jerry, who had been wearing even less, had rolled over on the floor and started pulling on his faded tracksuit bottoms as she’d answered the door.
Handing her letters over, Hunter’s eyes had flicked briefly past her to the man scrambling into his clothing and the rumpled sheet spread out over an exercise pad on the hard floor.
‘Been having fun, Anne?’ he murmured silkily.
‘Actually no, it’s very hard work,’ she replied evenly, determined that this time she would not let the situation degenerate into farce. She would explain clearly and succinctly what was going on and Hunter would stop looking at her as if she had just crawled out from under a stone.
‘Not for me.’ Jerry had got to his feet and now sauntered up behind her, his cropped gym shirt still in his hand, acknowledging the man at the door with a non- chalant disrespect that revealed his engineering school origins. Cocooned by the sciences, he had never had to worry about facing Professor Lewis’s legendary temper on a personal basis. ‘All I have to do is lie back and let myself be mauled by this little tiger,’ he grinned, and suddenly his overgrown-puppy personality was less endearing than usual.
‘No one can make me feel as good as Annie can. She’s got a magic touch,’ he burbled on, slinging a broad, naked arm around her neck and hugging her back against him. Jerry had already made the obligatory pass—on his first appointment—and had taken his rejection with cheerful unconcern, so Anne knew that his action was merely friendly. But with Hunter’s hawkish gaze on them she felt awkward and tried to squirm discreetly out of the casual embrace. Unfortunately Jerry didn’t know the meaning of discretion and thought himself excruciatingly witty.
‘Hey, quit wriggling around like that, Annie,’ he said in an oily, mock-leering voice. ‘You might give the professor the wrong idea about us…’
As if he didn’t have it already! She was tempted to slap his face for what she read in the narrowed black eyes. Did Hunter really think she had so little self-respect? And so much stamina! She studied all day, looked after Ivan, supposedly wrote all night—where she was supposed to get the energy for all this frantic sex he seemed so keen to think that she constantly indulged in?
‘Jerry’s studying engineering…He plays rugby for the university,’ she began tightly. ‘I was just—’
‘Running through some plays with him?’ Hunter interjected smoothly.
To her annoyance Jerry pre-empted her cutting response with a laugh and a friendly slap on the flank. ‘She just can’t keep her hands off me, can you, Annie? But I must admit she’s getting me in great shape for the touch season.’
‘How apt,’ Hunter said with cool sarcasm as he looked at the beefy hand where it had come to rest against the pale, rounded thigh revealed by Anne’s frayed denim shorts.
‘Well, don’t let me interrupt any further,’ he drawled, turning on his heel with a thin smile. ‘By all means go back to your…tactile exertions…’
‘He was talking about summer touch rugby,’ yelled Anne at Hunter’s retreating back, but he ignored her, the back of his head and set of his wide shoulders as expressive of contempt as his coldly insolent smile had been. If it weren’t for Jerry looking interestedly on she would have marched after him and insisted that he give her a proper hearing. Dammit, one day she was going to demand that he stand his ground and back up these ridiculous notions he had about her!
What really fretted her was that he might have knocked on her door for a reason other than just to deliver her letters. After all, it would have been more in keeping with his current policy of isolationism to have left them in her letterbox, or on her front doormat. Instead he had chosen to make personal contact.
But if the gesture had been a small olive-branch then he had certainly snatched it back with unflattering alacrity! It was almost as if he had welcomed a further excuse to despise her.
Anne sighed heavily again, her pen tracing absently over the Cyrillic script in front of her. She persevered valiantly for a few more minutes, but finally she threw the ball-point down in disgust and sat up.
‘This is ridiculous!’
Since she obviously wasn’t going to be able to get any serious work done until she had confronted Hunter, she had no choice. She’d just have to bite the bullet and beg for the opportunity to watch him grovel.
She was almost out of the door when she remembered her typing tape still chattering away and rushed back to switch it off. The sudden cessation of noise woke Ivan and as she picked him up it occurred to Anne that Hunter might need some softening up. To talk properly with him she would first have to get invited in,
and perhaps Ivan could do that for her. She could say that she needed to look up an all-night chemist in his phone book so that she could get some more gel for his gums or something…
Ivan looked suspiciously calm and drowsy for a supposedly fractious baby but Anne decided to chance it. The worst that Hunter could do was to shut the door in her face.
If he opened it in the first place, of course!
Standing outside in the narrow hallway, knocking on his door for the fourth time, Anne found herself getting annoyed. For a grown man Hunter was acting very immaturely, hiding in his room like a sulky child. He should come out and take his punishment like a man!
‘This is the last straw!’ Anne told Ivan grimly as she marched back down to the cupboard where the fuse boxes were and felt in among the rusty nuts and bolts in a small cardboard box. The key was there, where Hunter had advised her to leave a spare of hers when she had locked herself out of her flat one day.
‘I suppose this is an unforgivable invasion of privacy,’ she murmured to Ivan as she quietly inserted the key into Hunter’s front door, and was delighted to feel it smoothly unsnick the lock. ‘If not actually illegal…’
Ivan’s head loyally bobbed back and forth as he gabbled his views on the individual’s right to privacy. Anne shushed him and he shushed moistly back, making satisfying bubbles. She couldn’t resist popping one with her finger, which made him blink in astonishment then go squinty-eyed with glee.
‘Hunter?’ She pushed open the door and then was impatient with her own tentativeness. ‘Hunter!’
She held Ivan protectively in front of her, half expecting Hunter to rush out of the darkness at full throttle.
Darkness?
