Moth to the Flame (5 page)

‘Oh. Yes, of course we need a killer,' Alicia said, blushing furiously. What an idiot he must think her! ‘And a victim. And a motive. And between four or five suspects, a few red herrings and . . .' She trailed off. In her mind's eye she could see Neville's sneering face. He would regard a classic murder mystery as being a light-as-air irrelevance.

‘Perhaps,' she said slowly, ‘we could make it meaningful, in some way?'

Emily began to shoot forward, sensing danger signs, but Jared shot her a ‘back off' look. Such was Emily's instinctive confidence in him that she found herself—most unusually—obeying him. ‘OK. We are doing this for the St Bede's Easter Play after all, so it wouldn't hurt us to put in a bit of relevant social content.'

Jared, oh Jared, I could kiss you, Emily thought. If you weren't so smitten with Alicia, that is!

‘We could centre the play around a family home,' Alicia said. ‘Perhaps in a run-down area?'

Jared leaned forward, propping his chin up
on
his clenched fist. It brought him to within inches of her. Alicia felt her breath catch. She could actually see the tiny pores in his skin. The shadow of a beard on his jaw. If she ran her finger across his chin, she would feel their tiny prickles scratch her . . .

You want to go down the domestic violence route?' he hazarded, looking into her eyes. She blushed, and quickly looked away. And once again, a strange, odd, thoughtful, but glowingly tender look crossed his face.

‘Yes, but not a husband-wife murder. That's too pat. Why not give it a twist?' she murmured thoughtfully, her eyes glowing now as she got the bit between her teeth. ‘Why not make it a case of a parent being battered by a child? The mother could be the victim, and she could have a son—a teenage son. Big for his age.'

‘A fifteen-year-old perhaps?' Emily put in her penny's worth. ‘They can be big and brutal at that age.'

‘Right! He could be angry with his mother for some reason—confused. She's having an affair, and he's found out.'

‘So the husband would be one of our suspects, right?' Jared prompted, getting into the swing of it too.

‘Of course!' Alicia said, reaching for the paper and beginning to jot down notes. Over her bent head, Emily and Jared once more passed a silent message to each other.

‘But
I'm not going to write the play itself, remember?' Alicia said, her notes finished, her burst of happiness and confidence diminishing.

‘No, of course not,' Emily murmured, her eyes twinkling.

‘Right,' Jared said, his eyes dropping once more to the lovely profile of the woman next to him. Her skin was as creamy white as a camellia. Her long black hair was so close, he itched to stroke it, to run his fingers through the silken length. She was tapping a pen thoughtfully against her lips; lips that were coated in a slightly plum-coloured gloss of no doubt very expensive lipstick. Her mother, he thought, would have taught her how to dress and don make-up before she hit her teens. He wanted to kiss that expensive lipstick from her mouth . . .

‘And the son will be the obvious suspect,' Alicia was saying happily. ‘We'll have to plant a really incriminating piece of evidence on him. But what we need is an outsider.'

Emily caught sight of her watch, and yelped. ‘Hell! It's nearly six! Come on, let's get to Hall, or we'll be stuck in the queue for ages. I hear we've got some big-wig dining with us tonight, a woman poet. I heard a couple of third-year Lit. students going on about her. Apparently there's to be a big announcement at dinner.'

And suddenly Alicia remembered catching sight of Davina Granger on the train. Her family would expect her to cultivate the poet's
friendship,
of course. She looked up, into dark eyes that were watching her with such a strange, gentle intensity, and her breath caught again.

If she was to help him with this play he'd agreed to put on, she was going to be seeing a lot more of Jared Cowan.

Jared smiled, stood up, and offered his elbow. ‘Would you care to join me for dinner?'

The shirt had a hole in it, and she could see the point of his elbow peeking through.

Feeling a right idiot, but also a warm glow of pleasure bathing her from head to toe, she rose. Regally, she inclined her head. ‘Thank you, yes I would.'

And together, much to Emily's amusement, they left, arm in arm, to walk across the dark, rain-sodden lawns to Hall.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Hall was already crowded and extremely noisy when the Principal and his party arrived. As Sin-Jun very gallantly escorted Davina to the High Table, where scouts delivered meals for them, there was a just a slight drop in the noise level. The female students, according to their natures, were either intrigued and approving of her shorn locks and fashionable dress, or were scornful and envious.

Davina,
not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed at the seating arrangement, found that Dr Gareth Lacey had been seated directly on her left.

‘I hope you won't find the food too homely for you, m'dear,' Sin-Jun said. ‘Chef isn't always able to be as creative as he would like, and also manage to stick to his budget.'

Davina smiled, shrugged and took her pick of the two options on the day's menu.

‘So, where do you think you'll start?' Sin-Jun said, and Davina nearly jumped out of her skin. For one blank-minded second she thought he was asking where she was going to start in her campaign to destroy his English Literary don. The hand holding her fork, which bore the St Bede's crest of arms on the handle, shook alarmingly.

‘Sorry?' she squeaked, then cleared her voice. ‘Sorry? Start where?'

‘With the anthology?' Gareth said quietly, sensing her confusion. His stormy grey eyes watched her with a slightly puzzled, gentle look. She was obviously nervous. He wouldn't have thought a poet of her reputation would be overawed by Oxford, but she obviously was. He realised, of course, that with no formal education to speak of, some people felt at a very great disadvantage when they were surrounded by so many academically successful people, but he hadn't expected this woman to be prone to such feelings. She
looked
too confident, too self-sufficient. Obviously he was wrong.

Davina sighed in sudden relief. The Anthology! Oh that. She took a deep breath. ‘Well, my publishers want me to pick a hundred or so of my favourite modern verses, including at least twenty different poets and from as many different countries as I can manage. Then there's the foreword. I think the foreword will have to be the last project—I can hardly write an introduction, explaining the choice of poems, before I've decided which ones I'm going to choose.'

Sin-Jun nodded, but already his mind was wandering. What he knew about poetry could be written on the back of a postage stamp. What he was really interested in was boosting the science departments within the college. Young Jared Cowan now, whom he could see seated at the first table down, was where the future of St Bede's lay.

‘So do you have any idea where you want to start?' Gareth, recognising the look in his Principal's eye which meant that Sin-Jun was off on one of his mental rambles, was more than happy to take over the job of looking after their guest.

‘I thought I'd start with the Irish poets first,' Davina said, turning to look Gareth full in the face. She'd been avoiding doing so ever since that rust meeting in the SCR.

To think, now, that she'd thought Rex
Jimson-Clarke
was her quarry!

If only he was, a taunting, panicking voice piped up in the back of her mind. It would be so much easier. For she was already falling prey to those damned grey eyes again. They were so fathomless. So full of intriguing, interesting, darts of expression.

Gareth smiled. It transformed a face already way too handsome for its own good, into a breathtaking one. Or rather,
for my own good
, she thought wryly. ‘That's always a good place to start,' he agreed. ‘I have the latest Sean Healey, if you'd like to borrow it.'

Davina nodded and murmured her thanks.

She knew herself well enough to recognise all the signs of attraction, even though she'd only felt it a few times in her past. But never before had the feeling been so strong. So instant. So physical. So primordial.

‘And after the Irish?' Gareth probed delicately.

‘The Americans.'

‘You should check out the Caribbean too.'

Davina nodded, but didn't elaborate. Let him think she needed guidance. The more he thought it, the more he'd offer it. The more she'd take it. The closer she could get to him.

You should be thinking of running, not getting closer.

The thought was so loud it almost sounded like an extra voice in her head. It made her jump. Grimly she ignored the warning. So she
was
attracted to him. So what? She'd been attracted to men before, and said ‘no'. Just because her body wanted him didn't mean she had to allow her mind or her heart to follow suit. She was thirty years old, for pity's sake. She was in control. Of course she was!

‘What kind of poetry are you going to be looking for? And are you going to include any of your own?' Gareth found himself leaning towards her, straining and eager for any words that might fall from those full lips.

When he'd first set eyes on her in the SCR, nothing had prepared him for the vision in lilac and silver, walking towards him. The touch of those huge, cat-green eyes on his face. The perfection of the shape of her head, that the short spiky haircut only seemed to reinforce. The sheer power of the woman—even the way she moved had recalled to his mind visions of a stalking tigress. His body, even now, was quivering in tension at her nearness. A tingling anticipating of his nerve endings. He hadn't felt anything like it since . . . well, since he'd met Martine, his late wife.

Then he'd been eighteen, and it had been love at first sight. Now . . . now he was a mature man of thirty-eight, not a hormone-ridden teenager. He shouldn't be feeling this level of sexual awareness. It was . . . well, it should have been embarrassing, but, Gareth realised, with a start of nervous surprise, he didn't feel the least embarrassed. Excited, yes.
Bewildered,
OK. But she was also looking at him with those interested, cat-green eyes, and he knew that, if she was feeling even anything remotely the same, he was going to have another woman seriously in his life for the first time in nearly sixteen years.

Another love. It was a staggering thought.

When he'd got up that morning, he'd had no inkling that his life was never going to be the same again. And that was terrifying.

‘Yes, I thought that I'd write a new poem, expressly for the anthology,' she said, exciting his brain now.

‘Oh? What topic?'

‘I'm not sure. When I first got here a little plaque told me I was in St Agatha's Quad. I couldn't remember who she was, but I thought, in honour of St Bede's, I might write a modern-day version of her story.'

Gareth felt his mind racing. What an idea! With her vivid, sometimes shattering gift of prose, a modern rendition of St Agatha would be . . .

‘Do you know her life story?' Davina asked, seeing those grey eyes glow. He really was passionate about poetry, she realised with a strange, tender yet savage lurch to her heart. That wasn't fair. In her mind's eye, she'd always pictured Dr Gareth Lacey as a burnt-out don, a man who'd tried and failed to write poetry, and had been warped and embittered by his failure. A man going through the
motions,
tutoring pupils out of a desire to hold on to his cushy job, rather than out of any real desire to impart knowledge, or endow a love of poetry.

But that was so obviously not the case with this man that she felt, once again, that sudden shifting inside her. The mental equivalent of stepping out, expecting to find a rung of the stairs beneath you, only to encounter heart-lurching thin air instead. Damn him, why couldn't he just fit in with her image of him? It was bad enough to discover that at the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, he was as gorgeous as an eagle in flight.

‘I don't think much of her life history has ever been recorded,' he said thoughtfully, dragging her back to their conversation. ‘I know that St Agatha, the one our quad is named after at least, was also better known as St Agnes. I think one of Rex's fellow theologians might be able to tell you all that's known about her. The only thing I can remember about her is that she was one of those child martyrs. I seem to recall that she died in approximately AD 304, and was beheaded for refusing to marry.'

Davina, who'd been about to take a sip of the excellent Veuve Cliquot that Sin-Jun had ordered from the College Cellars for the occasion, found herself pausing. A rather dreamy smile crossed her face. She slowly nodded her head. ‘Now there's a poem in the
making.'

Gareth nodded. ‘In the style of “Leaf-Churning, Eye balling”?' He named one of her earlier, extremely controversial poems. It was a good choice. She, too had been thinking of that irreverent, shocking style of prose herself, as he'd been telling her about St Agnes. Or St Agatha. And, once again, she felt her heart lurch.

He's reading my mind!

His sensitivity, the very synchronicity of their thoughts, made her feel as panic-stricken as she'd ever been in her life. No! They just couldn't be on the same wavelength like this. It was not fair! He was her enemy, not her soul mate! Dammit. Think of something else. Quick! Anything. ‘Isn't there a day of the year called St Agnes' Eve?' she asked, her voice as weak as the feeling in her knees.

‘Hum. January the twentieth. According to legend, a woman will dream of her future husband on that night.'

Davina managed a rather bitter laugh. ‘That doesn't seem very appropriate, considering poor St Agnes' fate.'

Gareth smiled. ‘No. Perhaps not.'