Page 1 of Indecent Temptations

Chapter one

Stop flirting with dads

"Youknow,ifI’dhad a teacher as pretty as you, I don’t think I would have had any trouble with my studies."

I smiled at the man who had just delivered what he, no doubt, thought was the smoothest line in the book. Damien was a few years younger than me, always made a point to chat me up, and might have been the sort of guy I’d have let buy me a drink, if I was already a couple deep. And, as he lingered outside the school waiting to pick up his daughter, I supposed now was as good a time as any to practice my flirting skills.

"Maybe you could tell some of my students that," I joked back lightly.

I knew that I should have been a little more stringent about shutting down the attentions of the sweet, flirty dads who stopped by the school to pick up their kids, but I was allowed to indulge in a little flirtation every now and then, wasn’t I? I had been doing this for long enough to know where the line was, and I never took it too far – just far enough to give both our egos a little boost, and to make sure that they wouldnevermiss a teacher’s night meeting with me.

"I’m not sure they’d take it from an old fart like me," he replied, and I cocked my head at him.

"I must have a few years on you," I protested. "What does that make me, if you’re old?"

"Mature," he replied, and he let his gaze slip down over the outfit I was wearing – but before he could say anything else, a car door slammed behind him and a woman emerged to lean next to him on the peeling green paint of the old gate that cut the school off from the rest of the world.

She had a baby strapped to her chest, a pencil stabbed through a bun in her hair, and she put her hand on his shoulder at once, staking her claim on him. I didn’t need telling twice. I could read woman-code forplease don’t make me feel bad about myself by flirting with my husband right in front of me,and I figured it was the least I could do to respect it.

"Anyway, I should get in and make sure we haven’t got any stragglers left," I remarked, smiling at Damien and nodding to his wife. And with that, I headed back inside the building before I got plastered with the title of homewrecker, over a guy who I had only really been flirting with out of politeness, anyway.

In a small community in northeast Scotland like this one, rumors spread fast and stuck faster. I taught at the small school of Crainlioch, a blended high school and primary that served the inhabitants of the sparse and spackled local community. Most of them came down from the old crofter’s houses in the hills, but others were closer to the Loch, living in little clusters of homes that filled out the frigid banks with life.

I lived in the coastal city of Inverness. I couldn't cope with life out here in the middle of nowhere, though sometimes Inverness felt like it might as well have been that. It purported to be a city, but I wasn’t sure I believed it, not when it still had the same feel as these tiny little rural clusters. I had moved out there from Drumnadrochit, home to the famed Loch Ness Monster, in the hopes that I would find a little more life, but it hadn’t served me as well as I had hoped.

I stepped back into the old stone school building that I spent most of my days inside – it was strange, from the outside, it looked like it could have been in a period drama, but within the walls it was as modern and average as any other school, all scuffed parquet floors and coat-hooks with little animals next to them so that the younger kids would remember where to leave their belongings.

My classroom would probably have looked tiny next to one in Edinburgh or Glasgow – I taught the whole of the second-year high school student class here, and there were only a couple of dozen of them to speak of. Still, I liked the smallness of it. I liked having the chance to get to know everyone I taught. I felt like I had a solid connection with them, and that was such a big reason as to why I had chosen to teach here instead of one of the schools in the city. That, and my loose, slightly hippy-ish style fit in better here than it did in places of a more urban nature.

It was quiet when I closed the door behind me, and I took a moment to close my eyes and take in the peace. I had seen off the class for the weekend, and I’d been on gate duty to count the lot of them out. Now that I was all done, I felt like I could relax. Not that I had ever actually been much good at that.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Damien. Not that I actually wanted anything to do with him – no, he was too young for me, and he was married, and a little awkward, and had a scar where he’d been hit with a shinty stick as a kid that made his eyes look a little squint. But I was thinking about his wife. And the fact that she had actually managed to find someone, while I was still out here wandering around like the old spinster of the hills, wondering if I was ever going to catch someone who made me feel like I could spend a lifetime with them.

I supposed this had been on my mind a lot since Eilidh had gotten married.

Eilidh, my younger sister. She had always been the pretty one out of the two of us – I think even she would have agreed with me on that one – and when she had gone off to Edinburgh to study Gaelic translation, she had been inundated with men who wanted to make her their one and only. She had eventually settled down with Lukas, a Polish transplant who worked for the government, and the two of them had finally tied the knot just a few months before.

It didn’t seem fair that my younger sister should be getting married before me. That wasn’t the way it was meant to work, was it? I was meant to be all settled down, offering sage advice on the business of being a wife to anyone who needed it, and yet here I was, still unwed, still wondering if there was anyone I hadn’t already gone out on a flunked date with at some point in the surrounding area.

"You’ll find someone, you will," Eilidh had told me when I had gotten a little tipsy at her bachelorette party. "You’re a catch."

"Then why has nobody popped the question yet?" I asked, trying to keep my tone jovial, but finding that it sounded more whiny when I said it out loud.

"I honestly have no idea," Eilidh admitted. "I thought you and Lewis were meant to be, but..."

She must have seen me wince because she dropped that line of questioning before it went any further. She knew that bringing up Lewis to me was just asking for trouble. The memory of him still stung, no matter how much I would have liked to pretend that I was totally and cheerfully over everything about him.

Ugh. Even thinking about him now made my heart sink. I had thought the same as her – I had assumed that it was just a matter of time before he asked me to marry him. Maybe he would have, if it hadn’t been for…

No, I couldn’t let myself think about that. Now wasn’t the time. It was too heavy for me to let it cross my mind on a Friday night, when I was meant to be having fun. If I was going to go out and meet someone, then I would need to go to the pub with a smile on my face, not heaving the baggage of my past out with me.

And God only knew how much I wanted to meet someone.

I knew it was hardly the most feminist outlook on life, but I wanted a man – I wanted a husband, a family. I was thirty-eight years old, and I felt like time was running out for me to meet someone who really worked for me; I felt like, soon enough, I was just going to have to take what I could get, and hope that any man I came across would be alright dealing with the fact that I...

"Well, T-G-I-Friday!” Mallory exclaimed as she wandered into my classroom. I instantly pushed the thoughts that had been plaguing me to the back of my mind – I knew that Mallory would never let me think about myself in that way. She had been my biggest cheerleader since we had started working together three years before. Even though she had only just turned thirty, we had a lot in common, and I was always glad to see her burst into my room with no warning.

"Agreed," I replied, and I put a smile on my face. She kept little mini-bottles of wine in the drawer at her desk that we sometimes indulged in if it had been a particularly tough week. I could have used one of those tonight – might make me feel a little less sorry for myself.

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