Accidental Mistress, page 10
Knowing that she did, in the end, have little choice but to accede to his demands, she brushed past him and thrust her hands into the pockets of her jeans as she affected a cool saunter out the door. She pointedly stopped to take the key out of her pocket and turn it in the lock before following him down the side pathway to the shredded-bark paths that wound back and forth across the curving stone terraces, designed, so he told her, to resemble petals of a rose when seen from above.
‘I didn’t notice that, looking down at them from the verandah,’ she murmured reluctantly, intrigued in spite of herself, as much by the subject as the tacit offer of respite from tortured thoughts of her looming confession. Or maybe it was just his cunning way of softening her up so she would be more forthcoming.
‘I meant from directly above, from the air,’ he said, dropping back to walk beside her through the crowded ranks of bush and standard roses arranged in subtle graduations of colour, heading for the stone steps that would take them down to the lawn in front of the pool.
Emily had been refusing to look at him, but now she shot him a brief sideways glance, her breath shortening as she found his eyes lowered to the open collar of her blouse. He certainly didn’t look as if he was measuring her for a noose.
‘Why would Rose do that? I thought she was afraid of flying.’
Ethan showed no sign of embarrassment at being caught enjoying the advantage of his height, explaining that although it was Rose who had originally created the idea of stepped rose gardens, over the years her love of collecting porcelain had transcended her passion for gardening, especially after her illness had affected her stamina. Since it had been Ethan who had done hard physical labour in the garden at her direction from the time he was a teenager, it had seemed natural for him pick up where she had left off, going from merely digging holes and pruning on command, to propagation, planning and planting, and eventually redesigning the whole look of the garden. He found it a good way to relax, he said to her flabbergasted face.
‘You grow flowers?’
‘Does that make me seem less of an ogre?’ he said as they stepped down onto the emerald grass fronting the bottom terrace—a heart-stopping riot of red roses, from the tenderest bud to the most blowsy, overblown blooms trailing their petals in the breeze. ‘More like someone you can talk to?’
She glanced uncertainly at him, all her tension rushing back, and he indicated the bench seat in an open-sided arbour of climbing roses, but she shook her head, disconcerted when he sat and looked inquiringly up at her. She hovered at the entrance to the alcove, fingering the tiny serrations in the dark green roseleaves that mantled one of the trellised pillars.
‘I never thought you were difficult to talk to—’ she began.
‘Stop procrastinating. I asked Michael about you—Michael Webber,’ he added when she looked blank. ‘I rang him a few days after the party, before he ducked into rehab. He didn’t even remember you.’
‘Thank God,’ she said involuntarily, before she realised exactly what he had said. ‘W-why were you asking?’
‘My conscience, amongst other things,’ he said, not bothering to specify what those other things were. ‘I thought you might have been up to no good, and I was right, wasn’t I? Quest Restorations was doing an insurance job for Sean Webber at that time, so I understand—he told me there was some cock-up with its return but that it all turned out all right for him in the end because he eventually donated it to a museum and got a tax rebate.’
‘You spoke to Sean about me? Recently?’ she said, aghast.
‘Don’t worry, the sleeping bulldog settled smugly back down,’ he said drily. ‘I only poked him very delicately during a general chat about an investment I’m thinking of making in Shanghai, which is his area of expertise. He likes to boast. I mentioned your name in passing, and he bit, but not viciously—so I guessed that whatever you had done was done successfully without his knowledge, and not at the expense of his pride or his wallet, but for a motive as yet unexplained…’ The lilt in his voice made it a question, not a statement.
Emily swallowed, ripping at a leaf. ‘I was desperate…’
‘I get that bit.’ He sounded impatient.
She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know where to start—’
‘I presume it has something to do with your grandfather. What did he have? Alzheimer’s?’
When her eyes widened he growled: ‘For God’s sake, I may occasionally be a blind fool, but I’m not an idiot. You’ve been bloody protecting someone, and it obviously isn’t yourself or you wouldn’t be doing such a rotten job of it.’
She pushed back a curl that was tickling the top of her ear. ‘Not Alzheimer’s,’ she sighed, ‘but just as devastating as far as Grandpa was concerned. He developed a fine tremor in his right hand—an intention tremor, it’s called—a neurological condition. His hand would tremble whenever he started to do something—it didn’t happen when he was relaxed—and for quite a long while he managed to hide it from me, from everyone. But it’s incurable and in most cases progressive and eventually it was getting to the point where it would compromise his work, so he got very depressed…’ She looked down at the shredded leaf, folding it into little pieces. ‘While this was going on I—I’d met someone—a man, at a seminar in Wellington, Conrad Nichols—another restorer, someone I felt—I thought…’ She floundered, sensing Ethan lean forward, his elbows on his knees, his interest intensifying. ‘He seemed very genuine, personable—’
‘Handsome?’
She flushed at his cynicism. He clearly saw where this was leading. ‘Very,’ she said stiffly. ‘He was looking for a job, so I introduced him to Grandpa and they liked each other—so he came to work with us—’
‘And live with you?’
Her flush deepened. ‘No, he—Grandpa was old-fashioned. Conrad had his own apartment—’
‘You were in love with him.’ he said flatly.
‘I—he was so sunny and charming,’ she admitted obliquely.
‘He made it so easy to trust him. Too easy,’ she added with painful benefit of hindsight. ‘It was his idea that he could act as Grandpa’s aid, as his right hand, I suppose—in a literal sense—so that he could keep on working. I was relieved, because Grandpa was so proud—he refused to even consider any supervisory role in the business. He’d started to scale back, and let our other two employees go without telling me, because he couldn’t bear the thought of them seeing him dwindle, of losing their respect. He hated the idea of anyone pitying him. So while I was flat out trying to compensate for the dip in business by building my own client list I simply assumed that Grandpa was strictly supervising each and every thing that Conrad did, the way he had always done with me, but he was getting fatigued more easily and Conrad was taking responsibility for more of the work himself, only he simply wasn’t up to it—his knowledge and expertise was all superficial. He didn’t have the patience to be a top-notch restoration artist, but he would have been OK if he simply worked to order. Instead he was touting for jobs under the Quest name, padding out bills, and claiming Grandpa had worked on jobs that he never even saw.
‘It wasn’t until we had several commissions returned asking for them to be redone that I realised what was going on, but by then Conrad had skipped out with the cash he’d creamed off the top of the bills—’ she heard Ethan’s explosive curse but hurried on, wanting to get her mortifying confession over as soon as possible. ‘We had to pay refunds and do some free work to square things up but, thank God, James Quest’s name still carried enough weight to stop the whispers in their tracks.’
Unfortunately, Conrad had left one other time bomb ticking behind him, which she had discovered when she had been combing through the notes he had left in the studio. It was a repair he had done just before he disappeared, in which he had used the wrong fixing agent, a contact adhesive rather than the capillary one that was James Quest’s trademark for such delicate pieces. Even without seeing the repair itself she had known as soon as she had read of his technique that it was a botched job. Within a very short time that particular adhesive would start to change colour, and become obvious even to the inexperienced eye. To make things worse, he had already shipped the seventeenth-century Chinese flask back to its notoriously litigious owner, who would have grounds for accusing James Quest, whose signature was on a quote clearly stating the correct method of repair, of fraud or at the very least of criminal incompetence.
‘Sean Webber,’ guessed Ethan and Emily nodded.
‘I knew he would go ballistic. He broke it himself, you see, showing it to some friend, so he was already looking to offload some blame. And he was furious that his insurance company wouldn’t pay out the full value—they insisted on a restoration job and partial payout.
‘I tried to ring and explain that there had been a mix-up, but I found out the Webbers were overseas. Conrad had shipped it back to them without even checking they were going to be there!’ she recalled, still hot at this further evidence of his appalling lack of professionalism. ‘As it happened Michael signed for it, so I thought I’d have a chance to get it back and redo the repair before Sean even got wind of it, but unfortunately Michael wasn’t answering any of my messages and was always out when I called. When I did get hold of him on the phone, he wasn’t interested, he told me that anything I had to say could wait until his father came home. So I got myself invited to a party there and did a temporary swap.’ Remembered panic pitched her words high and breathless.
‘You stole it back,’ Ethan said, his voice a mixture of stark incredulity and grim admiration. ‘I can’t believe that your grandfather let you take a risk like that…’
‘He didn’t know,’ she said defensively. ‘He was shattered by what happened, I didn’t see the point of worrying him further. And then he had a bad fall, and went for tests with the neurologist that showed the tremor was getting worse—’
‘So you took the worry on yourself. What if someone had noticed you’d switched flasks? You took a hell of a risk!’ Ethan’s admiration turned to anger.
‘I know, but I had to do something—and it worked,’ she said, glossing over the agonies she had suffered over her brief foray into a life of crime. ‘It was a simple break and it was a new one, which always makes things a lot easier. All I had to do was remove the adhesive, dismantle the flask, clean it and put it back together. It only took a few days.’ A few days without sleep or solid food, in a constant state of sweating anxiety every time the phone rang…
‘When Sean Webber came home he found lots of messages from me trying to contact him on his answer machine, and when he did I explained that there had been a shipping mistake, and that he had got another collector’s flask—one that was fully intact, patterned differently from his, and worth more—so it was blatantly not an attempt at fraudulent substitution. He was rude and obnoxious about it when I went round to make the exchange, but not suspicious, thank God, and he was pleased that the repair on his flask was undetectable except under a magnifying glass. So it all turned out all right in the end,’ she announced with an airy gesture of finality.
But Ethan had no intention of letting her get away so easily. He got up, and plucked her hand away from its act of nervous destruction. ‘But how did you get a substitute flask of that quality at such short notice?’ he asked. ‘Surely they’re fairly rare.’
She looked away, licking her dry lips. She had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but she should have known he’d leave no rock unturned.
His curiosity instantly congealed into suspicion. God, he was quick.
‘Emily?’ His hand tightened on hers, warning her not to prevaricate.
‘Yes, all right, all right…it was from Rose’s collection,’ she confessed miserably, staring out at the glorious view to the distant hills of the south, sure she was confirming herself in his disgust.
‘I asked Peter and he let me borrow it for a few days. He knew it was to help my grandfather, but he didn’t even ask why. You probably think I took advantage of him, when Rose was so ill, and I did. I know I did. So many things could have gone horribly wrong…but when I told Peter about it afterwards he forgave me—he said he understood…’
She had little faith that Ethan would take such a compassionate view, so she was stunned when after a sizzling pause he murmured: ‘You really are a hardened little crook, aren’t you, Emily?’
She blinked up at his face, dappled by the shade from the canopy of twisting vines so that it was hard to read his expression in the shifting patterns. She moved back, tugging him out into the bright sunlight so that she could better interpret the strange nuance she had heard in his voice. ‘So you were right about me all along,’ she told him bravely.
‘Was I?’ he said, lowering their joined hands as he stepped closer, twining his fingers with hers. ‘You mean from the first moment I saw you at that party?’
‘Oh, God…’ Her fingers curled over his hard knuckles. ‘That awful party…it was like a bad dream—’
‘And I walked right into the middle of your nightmare—’
‘Looking like an avenging angel—’
‘Oh, believe me, I was feeling far from angelic at the time…’ He gently swung her arm across his body, brushing the back of her hand across the front of his trousers, and then back again, so there was no mistaking his deliberation—or the bold evidence of his arousal. ‘Any more than I am now…’
She gasped, her hand jerking, inadvertently pushing against the firm resilience and feeling it thicken and stir, prompting a low groan from Ethan as he turned her full against him, rolling his hips across hers in explicit invitation.
‘Shall we, Emily?’ he whispered huskily into her upturned face, pink with shocked excitement. ‘Shall we absolve each other of past sins, and replace the nightmare with a lovely, wild, wet dream…?
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t fantasised about it, about what would have happened if I’d taken you up on your invitation that night,’ he rasped with searing insight into the heart of her forbidden desires. ‘I have, and this is how it always starts…you and I—and this…’
CHAPTER SIX
ETHAN’S HANDS SLID into Emily’s hair, his mouth nibbling across her sun-warmed cheek to meet her lips, stroking them apart with his tongue, each kiss deeper and slower than the last until they were both swaying to a silent rhythm, drunk with the taste of each other. The rich, sensual perfume of the roses was suddenly more intense in the air around them, heady with notes of sweet musk, the lazy hum of the foraging bees blending with the sexy hum of Emily’s body to make her very bones seem to sing with pleasure.
Her arms wrapped around his lean waist as she gloried in the freedom to touch him the way she had imagined touching him in the secrecy of her lonely bed. The hands cupping her head drifted, stroking down the sides of her neck to the hollows of her throat, splaying sensuously across the soft triangle of skin bared by the open collar of her blouse, and toying suggestively with the top button.
She ached for him to go further, but the distant drone of a small plane suddenly made her aware of their exposed surroundings and she pulled back, glancing nervously up at the verandah of the house, the flat rail of which was just visible above the banked terraces, half expecting to see Mrs Cooper peering down at them in shocked disapproval.
‘Someone might see us…’ she murmured reluctantly, brushing his fingers from the button, disappointed when his hands obediently dropped to rest on her waist. His eyes gleamed at the sight of her sulky lower lip.
‘Not if we lie down,’ he said, tumbling her down onto her back on the thick, silky grass that curved around the base of the low stone wall of the terrace.
She lay startled, panting, her short curls splayed out on a carpet of fallen rose petals as he followed her down, dropping to his knees, uttering a husky growl when he saw the tantalising gap open up between her cropped blouse and the band of her jeans. Shunting backwards, he bent and buried his face against the narrow band of honey-coloured flesh between the two strips of fabric, rubbing his rough jaw against the satiny softness, his mouth opening over her neat belly button, his warm tongue darting in to stroke and suckle at the tiny hollow.
Shivers of delight prickled across Emily’s abdomen and she plunged her hands into his fire-flecked dark hair, half in protest, half encouragement.
‘Ethan!’ Her fear of discovery mingled with a thrill of reckless abandonment as his tongue painted a delicate line from hip to hip across her lower belly, before going back to play in the sensitive little dip. ‘We shouldn’t…’ she quavered. ‘What if somebody comes?’
She heard the deep burr of his laugh, felt it whisper damply across her quivering flesh and reverberate through his well-shaped skull.
‘I’m counting on it,’ he said wickedly, turning his head in the cradle of her hands and nipping at the fleshy part of her thumb. He prowled up her body on all fours, caging her with his long limbs, hovering above her and watching the fresh wave of fascinating colour sweep into her unadorned face as she realised his meaning, her up-tilted eyes the same mesmerising blue as the cloudless vault of heaven above them. At first glance she wasn’t much more than ordinarily pretty yet there was something innately sensual about her that had more to do with her guarded passions than the deliciously soft, rounded body she seemed slightly embarrassed to possess. He had made a mistake, judging her on superficialities. Like the porcelain she handled with such sexy delicacy and patience, she had been tempered by her experiences into a vessel that was strong and practical, but at the same time brittle and vulnerable to careless treatment. One side of her personality was clever, cautious and controlled, but the secret, inner Emily was a bold, adventurous minx who rose spiritedly to every challenge, a tactile creature whose desire to touch and be touched was her downfall.
Even now she was revealing the dichotomy in her nature that had confused his predatory suspicions, her wide eyes expressing growing feminine apprehension while her supine body vibrated with excited eagerness, her hands absently moulding the bulging biceps of his supportive arms, teasing him with images of her massaging another swollen part of his male anatomy.
