Thankfully Miles got her off the hook. 'Where's Tim? School?'
'It's Saturday, Miles,' said Clare drily. Every day was a work day to her boss; the two were indivisible as far as he was concerned. 'Tim is out with the dogs.'
'Oh. Well, at least I'll get to spring my surprise twice! Look, Clare, you check Davey in and I'll get Shari to give my suite a quick once-over while I collect a few things.' Miles's needs were simple: he tended to live out of a suitcase even at home. 'You'll be on the staff side of the lodge, but only for a few days,' he explained to the dark man who was still watching Clare give a good imitation of being cool and collected, 'and you'll have all the private facilities that you'd have in a guest suite. I have a few things to get on with, so I'll see you later…'
Ignoring the impulse to follow him, Clare braced herself. 'Come into the office and I'll find the book.' Unfortunately the first book that sprang to sight was the glossy Deverenko biography on top of a filing cabinet. She bustled over and heaped a pile of spread sheets over it before she searched out the register. Deverenko didn't say a word, but when she looked up at him there was an amused gleam in his eye that told her he had seen the book and drawn his own egotistical conclusions.
She wished he wouldn't stare so. His eyes were like magnets, drawing her awareness, interfering with her concentration. She sat down at the desk and opened the register. In her hurry to get him out of the room, which suddenly seemed small and airless, she rapped out the necessary questions like a police interrogator.
'And how long do you wish to stay?' she asked, with pen poised over the book. All this was duplicated on the computer but, given the famous names that appeared on its pages, the register was in the nature of an institution, an autograph book crammed with parting comments, both witty and prosaic.
'How long can you put us up…or should that be, put up with us?' he countered, and for the first time Clare became aware of his companion. Deverenko's magnetic aura had been so strong that nothing else had registered.
'I… no more than three weeks,' she said, looking at the figure hovering in the doorway, an uncomfortable tightness easing in her throat as she rioted that it wasn't a woman but a lanky adolescent. She forced her fingers to relax around the pen. So what if he had come with a woman friend, a lover? It would have been nothing to her! 'But surely you won't want to stay that long, anyway?'
'Trying to get rid of me already, Clare?' Deverenko murmured chidingly. 'What would your…employer...say about that?' He was leaning on the desk, his shaggy head almost level with hers. In a soft grey sweater, shabby with age but definitely angora and therefore no doubt hideously expensive, and dark rubbed-corduroy jeans, he looked most unlike the elegant figure he had cut at his concert, and the party afterwards. He looked much more earthy, accessible… much more dangerous…
'My employer—' she laid the same emphasis he had on the word, denying him the answer to his subtle question about her relationship with Miles '—leaves the running of Moonlight to me.'
'So we're your guests, rather than his. We shall know who to look to for our comfort and well-being…'
'Just the two of you?' Clare asked hurriedly, transferring her gaze to the sulky-looking boy in the doorway again.
'Just the two of us,' Deverenko confirmed, turning and extending a hand. 'I should have introduced you. Clare, this is Tamara, my daughter. Tamara, this is Clare Malcolm, Tim's mother…'
Ah, that relegates me to my proper place—of secondary interest to my son, thought Clare wryly as she coped with the shock. Not a lanky boy, after all, but a gawky, adolescent girl, tall and thin with a punk-inspired crew-cut that didn't at all flatter her square face with its strong nose and jaw and blemished skin. Having seen pictures of Deverenko's wife, Nina, who had been killed in a plane crash four years earlier, Clare felt her heart go out to the girl. Nina Deverenko had been a great beauty—a small, delicate Frenchwoman of Russian extraction, and a fine musician in her own right, a pianist who often used to accompany her husband. Tamara, it seemed, favoured her father in looks, and Clare realised that she had already antagonised the girl with her surprise. Dark, sullen eyes stonily rejected her greeting, while thin shoulders bunched in dislike beneath a scruffy brown leather jacket. She wore jeans like her father, but with none of his panache.
After mumbling a few words which could have been anything, the girl turned her sullen face towards her father and asked him something in a language that Clare couldn't identify. Her voice was unmusical, oddly rasping, with a faint, whining undertone.
'In English, please, Tamara,' her father corrected her. 'I doubt that Clare understands Russian.'
He would have done better to chastise his daughter for her rudeness in their own language, thought Clare, as she watched the girl's olive complexion darken. Tamara must be at least twelve, but certainly no more than fourteen—not child enough to accept public correction easily, but a long way from being adult enough to accept it gracefully. She was obviously already excruciatingly aware of her own shortcomings, and the inevitable comparisons that her parentage invited.
'I said, what do we have to stay in this dump for?' Tamara repeated defiantly. 'I thought this was supposed to be my holiday! What are we supposed to do all day, stuck here in the middle of hicksville? According to that old guy, there isn't even a pool or TV.'
The 'old guy' being Miles, Clare presumed. 'There's the lake,' she pointed out as she sorted through her drawer to find the extra key to Miles's suite, although people rarely bothered with locked doors at Moonlight.
'And Rotorua's not far away. There's plenty to do and see there.'
'Boring! Smelly geysers and boiling mud. I've seen it all before and in better places than this.'
Clare recognised the blasé attitude. Few people brought their children to Moonlight—it was an adult retreat—but the ones who did come had a sophistication beyond their years, the natural arrogance of those born to wealth and privilege used to being pandered to in order to gain their parents' favour. Some of them were nice kids under all the gloss, others were already irredeemably spoilt. She wondered which Tamara would turn out to be.
'Why don't you take a wander around and see what there is on offer?' her father suggested.
'Why? What are you going to do?' Tamara demanded suspiciously.
'Sign in, and then go and have a lie down in our room,' he told her patiently. 'I still feel jet-lagged from our London flight. You can come and rest, too, if you like.'
'No, thanks.' Tamara revealed she had some manners after all, albeit grudging ones. 'I guess I'll just have a look around and see what there isn't,' With a last baleful look at Clare she slouched out. Clare got the impression that, if Deverenko hadn't issued the invitation to rest with him, his daughter would have insisted on sticking by his side.
'I'm sorry.' Deverenko sighed when the sound of the girl's footsteps faded. 'Tamara's going through a difficult stage. I had already planned to come down here when she… got some extra time off school, so I had no choice but to bring her…'
Suspended, thought Clare, reading between the lines of his unease and Tamara's defiance. 'You hadn't booked,' she pointed out. 'Surely you could have postponed your visit? I would have thought your first obligation was towards your daughter…' Her voice trailed off as the dark gaze narrowed on her face.
'So it is, but she has to learn that she can't manipulate me as easily as she seems to manipulate her teachers. I hadn't booked, Clare, because I wouldn't have put it past you to go off on holiday yourself if you foun
d out I was coming down. Virginia said that with the renovations going on she didn't think I'd have any trouble persuading Miles to invite me down.'