Moth to the Flame by Maxine Barry Page A

tumbling into bed in exhaustion.
    But, such is the way of things, once she’d done so, she quickly discovered that sleep was suddenly a million miles away. Instead, she lay in the unfamiliar bed, looking at the ceiling, thinking of him. Gareth Lacey. She found herself cataloguing him, listing the ways in which he was so different from what she’d expected. He was young, not old. Good-looking, not ugly. Sensitive. Clever. Passionate about poetry. Lovely eyes. Lovely voice. And he understood her.
    She tossed violently on the bed, not liking that last thought at all. In her rehearsals for how things would go, she’d pictured herself as a Mata-Hari-type figure, wrapping a happy, smitten, panting Dr Lacey around her little finger.
    He might be feeling happy right now. Even a man with no sensitivity at all wouldn’t have been able to miss the strong sexual signals she’d been giving out. And he might be smitten. She was a big enough girl to know what a dark, deepening look in a man’s eyes meant. But she’d seen no sign of panting. And certainly no sign of a willingness to be wrapped around her little finger. She tossed again. Dammit, this was no good. Young or old, good looking or not, sexually attractive or not, he was still the enemy.
    OK. So, as things stood, it was beginning to look as if she wouldn’t be able to entice him into her orbit, make him want her, perhaps even love her, and then flit away again without getting her own wings singed a bit. All right.
    She could cope with that. She just had to concentrate on her two goals.
    Dr Gareth Lacey had betrayed the Student/Tutor trust, and for that he would know what it felt to be betrayed himself. He was going to fall in love with her, dammit, just so that she could throw that love right back in his face. Even if she had to cut out her own heart to do it.
    But Dr Gareth Lacey had also driven her brother to suicide, by labelling him a cheat, and having him sent down from his beloved Oxford. And for that, he, too, would be labelled a cheat. He too, would be ‘sent down’ from Oxford, kicked out by his college and ostracised by the university.
    Tonight, she’d begun step one.
    Tomorrow, she would figure out a way to accomplish step two.

CHAPTER FIVE
    By her third week in Oxford, Davina was becoming desperate. She’d talked to practically everyone in college who knew Gareth Lacey personally, right down to the scouts who cleaned his rooms, but nobody had a bad word to say about the man. She’d managed to pump both the other English dons for every little titbit concerning him, from the strictly professional to the downright personal. But nothing.
    The scouts came up with such facts as that he didn’t smoke, liked his coffee with cream and one sugar, always folded his clothes neatly, and shaved with a wet razor. Very helpful!
    The undergraduates were more easy to get gossiping about possible scandals, but even they were of little help, and Davina was getting heartily sick of all the adoration the man inspired. Why couldn’t they see through him?
    For some reason, she was never able to bring herself to steer the talk around to David. But if she had, she had no doubts everyone would roundly lecture her on how it was not poor Dr Lacey’s fault. And that, Davina simply could not have borne.
    Her shoulders were unconsciously slumped with dejection as she crossed Wallace Quad. She was going to the Bodleian Library, the world-famous institution which was given a copy of every book ever published in the world. But even that thought could not cheer her. Still, like it or not, it was time she did some work on the anthology. She’d been the one to bully her publishers into supporting the idea, knowing she needed an ‘in’ at Oxford. Now she was stuck with it.
    The last of February’s cruel wind teased her flapping blue coat as she trudged along. She had to find a way to get to the man. But how? He seemed to have