MacAllister's Baby (3 page)

‘What do you mean, if you didn’t know better?’

Jo laughed. ‘Unlike you, I like to take a break from Shakespeare and read gossip magazines. Angus MacAllister is linked with a different woman every week. The man flirts as easily as he makes soufflé.’

Elisabeth remembered Angus’s eyes on her, assessing her as if she were a box of fresh, ripe tomatoes. A rush of heat went through her, and that feeling, unlike jealousy, she couldn’t suppress.

If she ended up working with Angus MacAllister, what other feelings was he going to arouse in her? Feelings she’d tried so hard, and so successfully, to stay away from for the past few years?

She cleared her throat. ‘So you want me to protect Jennifer and Danny from a superficial man who’s only interested in what he can get.’

Joanna blinked. ‘I didn’t say that. I said I wanted you to make sure the kids got everything out of this experience that they could. And that means helping Angus as well as helping Jennifer and Danny. The two of them aren’t easy to get on with. And I’m not sure they’ll get on with each other, either.’

She pulled the car up in front of Elisabeth’s block of flats, scraping the tyres on the kerb. Then she turned to Elisabeth.

‘You’re the best person for the job, Elisabeth. You have a good reputation with the kids. I sounded out Danny about teachers; he thinks most of us hate him, but he said you were fair to him when you’d dealt with him before.’

Elisabeth remembered a run-in she’d had with Danny on the school playground last year when a window had been broken. The boy had been almost surprised when she’d asked for his side of the story. In that case, he’d been innocent. Not that he usually was. But trouble kids usually expected to get the blame for everything that went wrong; it was one of the reasons they didn’t see the point of behaving properly.

‘And I know you’ve made some headway with Jennifer already,’ Jo continued. ‘She likes you.’

Jennifer had actually smiled in a lesson the week before, when Elisabeth had quietly praised her work. That one small smile had kept Elisabeth happy for days.

‘I like her,’ Elisabeth said.

‘I know it’s extra hours,’ Jo said. ‘And you’re not interested in cooking. But you
care.
You could really make the difference between this being a success or not.’

She
cared.

Elisabeth tightened her fingers on her skirt. Yes, she cared. Her students were just about the only thing she had left to care about.

She could only touch their lives at school. It was limited contact, limited caring. She only had so much influence. Sometimes she could help, and sometimes she had to stand there and watch as they made the wrong choices, fell victim to circumstances of their lives that she couldn’t change.

Being a teacher and caring was frustrating and heartbreaking and wonderful, and, for the past two years at least, those were the truest emotions she’d let herself feel. The only ones she
could
feel.

She cared enough about her students to face any demon of hell, let alone a chicken-chasing chef.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’

Angus leaned back in his wooden chair and prepared to savour the sweet, molten-hot, devil-strong espresso on the table before him.

He took a sip. Ah-h-h-h, paradise. His taste buds sent a welcome shock of coffee-induced pleasure to his brain, and his nerves started tingling back into life.

It had been ten long hours since his last coffee, made for himself on the gleaming espresso machine at his restaurant Magnum at six o’clock this morning. He’d drunk it alone in the empty dining room, going through his notes on some seasonal menu changes he’d wanted to discuss with his
sous chef
Henry before the prep for lunch.

But he hadn’t had the chance to talk with Henry, because the minute Henry had arrived he’d told Angus that the order of langoustines they’d based their lunchtime menu on had failed to arrive because there had been an accident on the M25 and traffic had been backed up practically all the way to Dover, and that two of their
commis chefs
were down with the flu, and the upshot of all this was that Angus had spent forty-five minutes on the phone and then ended up driving across London in rush-hour traffic, and then back to Magnum with his vintage Jaguar filled with boxes of ice and shellfish, and had then changed into whites and run the kitchen for a fully booked lunch service.

He’d just hung up his whites, washed his face, and sat down in his office with a bowl of the bouillabaisse from lunch when his phone had rung. He had answered it with a spoonful of soup halfway to his mouth. It had been Christine, his publicist.

‘I need to talk to you about the Kid Culinaire school thing,’ she said without preamble.

‘I’m fine, Christine, how are you?’ He eyed the langoustine floating in the saffron-scented soup. If his Jag was going to smell of langoustines for the foreseeable future, it only seemed fair that he should be able to eat one of them while it was hot. But Christine had that tone in her voice that meant she was about to tell him something for his own good. He lowered his spoon.

‘Fine. Listen. I’ve done more negotiations with the three schools you’ve visited. St Teresa’s is eager to work with us, they’re fine for TV cameras, but the school is right the other side of London. Gladstone School is also fine with the cameras. But the student has already had private cookery lessons. The Slater School has the kind of kids we’re looking for, kids who could use help. But the school is being cagey—they say it’s fine to use the school’s name and to film the competition, but they don’t want the students’ names to become public until then, and they want to wait and see how it goes before they have TV cameras in school. And they’ve made it a condition that you work with a teacher at all times and don’t have unsupervised contact with the children.’

‘They think I’ll be a bad influence on the nation’s impressionable youth, eh? Maybe you’re to blame for that, Christine, with the stories you’ve fed to the press about me and all those women.’

Christine was obviously ignoring his teasing today. ‘So the Slater School is the best choice for the kids, and it’s closest to you, but it’s not so great on the publicity front.’

Angus let out an exasperated breath. ‘Let’s cancel the whole thing. I never wanted to go into a school anyway. My school years were the most miserable of my life—why would I want to spend more time at one?’

‘To raise your profile. People love compassionate celebrities.’

He snorted. ‘I’m a chef. I do unspeakable things with knives and dead animals on a daily basis. I’m a nice guy, but I don’t have time for random compassion. I can barely manage to feed myself.’ He stirred his spoon through his cooling soup.

‘You do want to be famous, don’t you?’

‘Um.’

How to explain it? He wanted to be good at what he did, so good that people smiled when they heard his name. He wanted to walk into rooms and have people want to know him. To have their faces light up because he was there, because he was important to them, because he mattered.

None of that was being famous, precisely. But fame was the closest to it that he’d found. Fame, and work, made some progress into filling what was empty in him, what had been empty for as long as he remembered.

‘Do you really think this is a good idea?’ he asked, bypassing the difficult question.

‘Yes. The market is inundated with chefs. You’re the best-looking of the lot, but you need something else to make you stand out. Helping children and working for charity are hot right now.’

And cooking skills didn’t seem to come into it.

Oh, well. It wasn’t as if he didn’t use his appearance and his skills for promotional purposes anyway. More publicity would allow him to develop his restaurant, to further his career.

Why did it have to be in a school, though? The one place that was guaranteed to push his buttons?

He sighed.
Stop it, MacAllister. You’re not that pathetic kid any more.

‘All right,’ he said, going back to business mode. ‘It looks like we can eliminate the Slater School if they’re so shy about publicity and they’re imposing rules. Who’s the teacher they want me to work with, anyway?’

‘Her name’s Elisabeth Read. She doesn’t even teach cooking; she teaches English.’

Angus dropped his spoon and sat up straight in his chair.

Elisabeth Read. The English teacher with the North American accent, the person who’d sent MacNugget into a panic yesterday and then sized Angus up and ordered him around.

The bossy Miss Read. The prim Miss Read. The beautiful Miss Read, with her straight posture thrusting her breasts forward against her clinging top. Her glossy brown hair had been swept up at her nape, revealing an elegant neck. And best of all: her delicate chin was set, her brown eyes sparked, and her coral lips pushed forward in the semblance of a kiss.

The annoyed, and very sexy, Miss Read.

‘I’ll work with the Slater School,’ he said.

‘But the publicity opportunities aren’t—’

‘They’re good enough,’ he interrupted. ‘Set me up a meeting with Miss Read this afternoon at Luciano’s.’

So here he was at Luciano’s Italian Coffee Bar three hours later, after lukewarm bouillabaisse and then mediocre tea at a meeting with his investors, waiting for Miss Read.

Angus took another blissful sip of espresso and conjured up her perfume. Orange and cinnamon, exotic and warm. Her hair smelled of caramel. If he could capture the smell in flavours, he’d never stop eating. As it was, he wanted to sink more than his teeth into her.

Another thing he liked in a woman: competence and control. She hadn’t been rattled by his panicked chicken, or the students running around with wooden spoons. She’d responded to his teasing with polished-crystal dignity.

The only thing that had rattled her was his touch. She’d blushed as soon as he’d held out his hand, the only sign that she’d been feeling the same attraction that he had.

He knocked back the remainder of his espresso and signalled the waiter for another.

With caffeine and sugar in his bloodstream, he could think more clearly. What was he doing, agreeing to this publicity stunt he didn’t have time for, doing something he had no interest in?

He was no teacher. He did some training with chefs in his kitchen, but they were professionals who barked, ‘Yes, Chef!’ to his every order. His TV shows broke down recipes and showed viewers what to do, which was like teaching, he supposed, but TV viewers didn’t talk back and mess around. He knew from his time in the classroom yesterday that if you turned your back on kids for a second, they had the weapons out and were trapping some poor cowering animal in a corner.

Not so different from his own schooldays, actually. He could remember being that cowering animal. Alone, scared, vulnerable, with not even a safe cage to return to.

He shook his head. What was he getting himself into? Five seconds into this project and he was remembering things he’d thought he’d put behind him long ago. All because he had the hots for a woman.

He didn’t have time for women, either. Yes, he knew a lot of them, a lot of beautiful, intelligent, witty ones, and he went with them to restaurants and openings and parties, because you had to do these things and it was much more enjoyable with an interesting and aesthetically pleasing person beside you.

The tabloids implied that he was sleeping with all of them, and that usually made Angus laugh. Sometimes he felt like turning up at their offices and handing the tabloid editors a copy of his schedule: the eighteen-hour days he put in at Magnum and the studio, the hours he spent at home writing and planning, the nights he worked through to morning and shaved and put on fresh clothes and went back to his restaurant.

When was he supposed to fit in sex? He had time for a five-minute fumble in a closet, maybe.

For Angus, sex was more than a five-minute fumble. Sex was like food, fine wine, something to be enjoyed slowly, with every sense, worth all the effort and time. For sex you needed the right ingredients. The right setting, the right woman. And all the skill and attention you could lavish on it.

English teacher Miss Elisabeth Read was, for whatever reason, the right ingredient.

Angus leaned further back into the chair, stretching his legs out beneath the table and clasping his hands behind his neck. Who would’ve thought he would ever have the hots for a teacher? He laughed quietly and pictured it.

Miss Read leaned forward over her desk, breasts straining against a prissy blouse, undone to show her glorious cleavage. She frowned, and then ran her tongue over moist, glossy lips.

‘You’ve been naughty, MacAllister,’ she growled, lowering her eyelids seductively. ‘I need to see you after the lesson.
Do you need another coffee to wake you up?’

Angus, smiling broadly with his eyes closed, realised that the voice in his head had become real.

He opened his eyes to see Miss Strict Schoolteacher transformed into the actual Miss Elisabeth Read, looking considerably less welcoming than she had in his fantasy. She wore a chocolate-brown top, loose crème-caramel linen trousers, and dangly turquoise earrings. Her hair fell straight down over her shoulders. Her eyes, the same colour as her jumper, regarded him with wariness.

He stood and held out his hand. ‘Elisabeth, I’m glad to see you again.’

For the second before she shook his hand he anticipated the pleasure of touching her, and then his hand was wrapped around hers again. Her skin was smooth, soft, her grip strong. She wore a chunky silver moonstone ring. The tips of her fingers were cold, but her palm was warm. He wondered if she was like her hand: cold on the outside, warm and welcoming and passionate on the inside.

‘Mr MacAllister. Thank you for meeting me.’ She withdrew her hand, and though he searched for the awareness he’d seen in her eyes the last time they’d touched, she was hiding it better now.

‘Call me Angus.’ He reached round the tiny table and pulled her chair out for her. ‘What would you like to drink?’

‘Oh.’ Her smooth forehead creased slightly as she thought about it. ‘Just a filter coffee, please, with skim milk if they’ve got it.’ She sat down.