Accidental Mistress, page 15
‘You can’t drive,’ she told him. ‘You’ve been drinking.’
He gave a short crack of disbelieving laughter and she snatched the keys out of his hand. ‘Hey!’
‘I’m serious, Dylan.’
‘Then you drive me.’
Drive the Porsche? She had a wistful image of herself at the wheel, zipping past Ethan on the motorway. ‘I’ve probably had more to drink than you,’ she said.
‘I want to go clubbing,’ he said sullenly, making a swipe for the keys. ‘Hand them over!’
‘Dylan, you told me the Porsche is only leased because you couldn’t afford to buy one. If you crash it you’ll have to pay for it. And are you really in the mood to party? Or are you just going to go to a bar somewhere and get smashed—or drive over to Carly’s and sit outside in your car, brooding?’
‘Huh!’ he muttered.
Emily didn’t know which option he was choosing, but at least his flare of temper seemed to have died down.
‘If you have to go somewhere, call for a taxi,’ she said, turning him back in the direction of the house.
‘No, I may as well just go to bed,’ he said, stomping into the hall. ‘What a bitch!’
‘I hope you’re not referring to me.’
‘I was talking about life in general…and her.’
Emily was beginning to have reluctant sympathy for Carly. Dylan was a temperamental handful, in love with a richer, classier, older woman. His masculine pride was on the line and, even though he was gasping his last, he was refusing to admit he was hooked, gaffed and landed.
She watched in relief as he vanished into his room, hoping he didn’t have a second set of keys hidden in there.
Glancing at her watch and mentally juggling time zones, she detoured to the telephone in the lounge and waited for the minute hand to tick around to the half hour before she punched in the number that she had been given. It took four re-dials before she got through and even then the interference on the satellite phone at the other end was considerable, and she wasn’t able to recognise the language of the garbled voice. Then she hit a clean patch and a new voice came on the line.
‘Mum? Mum, is that you?’
The phone roared, then mumbled, then dropped out completely, but then she heard loud and clear, at least for the first four words: ‘Emily? Right on time…Almost missed y…Dad says ‘hi’…What’s happening, Em? I haven’t forgotten your birthday again, have I?’ A familiar, faraway, tinny laugh that she hadn’t heard for several months.
‘No, it’s not for another six months, Mum. How are you both…?’
She struggled on with the usual set of commonplaces for a few more minutes, and then, conscious that the reception at the other end was getting worse not better, hurriedly told her mother about the fire.
‘Too bad, Em…wish…help…absolute chaos here at the moment…need money?’
It was always chaos, wherever they were. They thrived on it. And she knew very well that most of their money they gave away to people a lot more needy than Emily, who at least had food to eat, and a blanket at night and didn’t risk rape or mutilation or worse every time she ventured away from the perimeter of the house. She would feel as guilty as sin if she pleaded poverty over those to whom mere poverty would be a luxury.
‘No, no, I’m fine, I’m managing. But, Mum, a funny thing happened…’ she haltingly told her mother about Peter Nash taking her in, and his fantastic notion that she might be adopted, pausing between running phrases for the worst of the white noise to fade.
She thought they had been cut off when there was a long, blank pause, then she almost dropped the telephone when her mother’s voice came in thin little bursts. ‘Oh, dear…I wish…see you…. It’s complicated, Em…little point in your…so we thought…legal…adopted…not really…’
There was more but it was such a word soup that Emily wasn’t sure she could make any sense of it, not when her whole brain was screaming in denial. ‘What’s that, Mum? I can’t hear you. Am I adopted or aren’t I?’ she panicked as the white noise thickened, almost completely swamping her mother’s next sentences.
‘You’re breaking up, Mum. Just tell me yes or no. That’s all you need to say. Just Yes or No!’
‘Sorry…ring you…soon…promise…truck…we can get clear air…yes…YES!’
Emily didn’t know how long she sat in the darkened room, staring at the dead phone.
Yes?
She was adopted? A burning liquid rose in her throat and she swallowed it back.
No. She couldn’t be. Surely not. Why wouldn’t they ever have told her? As a child…or when she turned eighteen…or any other time in the past twenty-six years? Because she was the daughter of a teenage drug addict? There was no great stigma in that these days. That couldn’t have been what her mother had been saying. They had probably been talking totally at cross purposes.
Her eyes felt hot and dry. If anything she was worse off, even more uncertain than before she had made the call. The bad reception had flattened all emotional tone but her mother’s words had expressed regret rather than shock that she should ask the question. And what was so complicated? Her alcohol-slowed brain scurried round and round in ever-diminishing circles.
She looked at her watch, astonished to see that half an hour had passed. It was too late to call again. The window of satellite opportunity in such a remote area was extremely small, and who knew when she could successfully draw all the threads together to arrange another call? She would just have to hope that her mother would be able to get access to another phone and ring back soon.
She heard the faint hum of an engine and jumped to her feet. Was that Ethan back? Oh, she couldn’t bear it if he found her waiting here in the dark. He might think she was waiting for him. He might take her in his arms and it would all come bursting out, all her festering doubts and untidy emotions.
God, she might even be drunk and vulnerable enough to blurt out the fact that she was falling in love with him…and then, just to complete the farce, she could hit him with the fact that she could well be his uncle’s granddaughter!
She crept along to her room and undressed in the dark, afraid the light under the door would give her away as she heard Ethan enter the house.
She slept, but she woke up several times with nightmares. Not the smoky new nightmares but the old ones, from her childhood, the nightmares of running, running after a truck that was leaving, choking in a trail of dust as she tried to run faster and faster to catch her mother and father reaching out from the tailgate. But the faster she ran, the further the truck moved away until it was only a tiny dot in the distance and she was left behind alone.
Finally, just before dawn, she got up and went along to the studio. There at least was a world of order and certainty, where everything could be put back to rights with a good clean and the right kind of glue.
If only people’s shattered emotions could be as easily glued back together, she thought as she double-checked the pieces of the dismantled blue and white vase that had been soaked in detergent, rinsed and dried, the iron-stained areas treated with a reducing agent and a soiled crack swabbed with hydrogen peroxide.
Now came the fiddly task of filling the cleaned rivet-holes and Emily forced herself to concentrate on nothing else as she mixed up the epoxy resin, which she tinted to the background colour of the vase, having taken the care to do a number of tests before she had finally settled on the correct shade.
By the time she had done several hours’ work she felt much more like herself—whoever that was! she thought with gallows humour—and sufficiently hungry to realise she might be able to eat breakfast after all. She had already decided not to tell Peter about her phone call—she could offer to pay for it later. There seemed no point in getting his hopes up until she could tell him something more concrete. In the cold light of day the call seemed nightmarishly unreal and she found it difficult to remember the sequence of the disjointed conversation.
Since the dining room was empty she concluded that Peter had already breakfasted and the earlier rumble that had impinged on her concentration had been Dylan and Ethan leaving for work. Moving on to the kitchen she discovered Mrs Cooper muttering darkly with her head in the oven and quickly helped herself to cereal and juice and took it out onto the verandah to eat in the sunshine.
Towards lunchtime when she looked in on Peter in his office she was able to give him a cheerful smile and, remembering the message the previous day about the house, asked apologetically if he would mind if Jeff ran her down later to start to organise the site clean-up and make lists of everything she would need to have ready when her money came through.
‘Oh, no need for you to bother with that any more,’ said Peter, linking his arm with hers and walking her outside. ‘It’ll be much more convenient for both of us if you can just drive yourself.’
‘But, Peter, I—’ She came to a dead stop as she stared at the jaunty little yellow car parked in front of the portico, a shiny three-door hatchback with a dealer’s sticker on the rear window. ‘What’s this?’
But she feared she knew. Peter nudged her over to open the driver’s door releasing the unmistakable ‘brand new’ aroma of plastic and chemicals, and indicated the set of keys in the ignition.
‘It’s gassed up and all ready to go,’ he said. ‘I know you hate asking for every little thing. Now you don’t have to bother Jeff or I when you want to go anywhere. You can just hop in and tootle off whenever you like.’
This wasn’t a ‘little’ thing. Her blue eyes scolded him. ‘Peter, we’ve been through all this—you can’t just give me a car—’
‘I’m not giving it to you,’ he said, looking wounded. ‘I’ve bought a second car, a little runabout for myself, that’s all, and I’m lending it to you while you’re here.’
‘A runabout!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where are you thinking of running about to?’ Heavens, she was beginning to sound like Ethan!
His white tufted eyebrows lifted in dignified reproach. ‘I do have a licence, you know, Emily, I just find it convenient to let Jeff do most of the driving. But this’ll be handy for me when Jeff’s not around.’
She eyed him sceptically. ‘If I say no will you take it back to the dealer?’
‘Of course not,’ he said stoutly. ‘I told you, it’s bought and paid for. It can just sit there and we’ll roust Jeff out to do your driving for you, if that’s how you want to go on.’
She sighed and he pinched off a triumphant smile. ‘I don’t know what Ethan’s going to say,’ she murmured, touching the pristine paintwork.
‘What can he say? He’s got two cars, a four-wheel drive and a helicopter. He can’t begrudge me a second string to my bow.’
Oh, yes, he could. She hesitated. ‘I hope this isn’t just because of—you know, because you hope I might be your granddaughter—’ she began awkwardly.
‘It’s because I’m a rich man and I can afford to indulge my own whims,’ he said firmly.
‘Well…all right, then.’ Her objections to his happy fiction wilted in the face of her dawning excitement. She had never driven a brand-new car before. And it would mean she could get a lot more done with regard to her house. ‘But it’s just a loan,’ she reminded them both as she got in and started the engine.
By the time she turned back into the drive it was late afternoon and she was very pleased to have lined up a firm of commercial cleaners who would move in to the salvageable part of the house as soon as her funding came through. She had also been to the supermarket and chemist, and bought herself a few intimate essentials and extra studio supplies. Having full room and board meant she was able to eke out her small store of savings, which would have otherwise been swallowed up by now in living expenses and the myriad costs involved in pursuing her claim. It had been also essential for her to buy a new mobile phone to re-establish Quest Restorations with a working number, and although she had bought the cheapest on the market it had still made a dent in her limited budget.
As she passed the mirror in the hallway she noticed that she was also well overdue for a haircut, but as a non-essential that would have to wait, unless she decided to get creative herself with the scissors.
After dropping her purchases off in her room she saw the door to the room where Rose’s collection was displayed was ajar and, thinking Peter might be in there communing with his memories, she slipped inside only to see Ethan in shirt-sleeves and work boots, standing looking into one of the open-fronted cabinets.
She thought she had been silent, but Ethan said without looking around: ‘This is it, isn’t it?’
Mastering her skittering heart, she moved up to his shoulder and found herself looking at a very familiar object.
‘Yes, that’s the pilgrim flask.’
‘Pretty. Can I pick it up, or do I need gloves?’
She shuddered. ‘No gloves—too much chance of it slipping through your fingers. Bare hands are fine—as long as they’re clean.’
‘Yes, Nanny.’ He flipped his hands over for her inspection and picked up the porcelain, handling it with a confident delicacy that sent a tingle down her spine.
‘What incredibly detailed decoration—what is this, a dragon?’
‘A water dragon—there’s one on both sides,’ she pointed out, showing him the blue painting on the reverse, ‘and this pattern represents breaking waves and rocks—and here’s the clouds and flowering shrubs.’
‘They pack a lot of story into a small space.’
‘That shows the talent of the artist, one of the reasons it’s so valuable. It’s not only history, it’s great art.’ She watched him carefully set the flask back on the shelf, her voice filled with self-castigation. ‘Looking back, I can’t believe what I dared to do. Anything could have happened—’
‘Anything did,’ said Ethan, turning around. ‘You took a risk and it paid off.’
‘I’m not generally a risk-taker,’ she protested.
His pale eyes glinted. ‘I don’t think you know yourself half as well as you think you do,’ he murmured.
If only he knew how truly he spoke! Swallowing down a little hiccup of hysteria, Emily quickly focused her attention back on the shelves of porcelain and gave Ethan a sketchy tour of the contents. Then they looked at the pieces the appraiser had singled out for his thumbs-down, and Ethan studied some of the Meissen dinnerware she had formerly repaired, looking in vain for the evidence of restoration.
‘Usually if you can’t see any surface defect and you want to know if there’s a break you can find out with a flick test,’ said Emily, setting a dish down on a display table and tapping it with her fingernail. ‘If there’s no crack it should resonate with a “ting”, otherwise you’ll get a dull sound.’
They listened to the pure sing of the ceramic.
‘Hence the origin of the phrase to “ring true”,’ said Ethan, his eyes moving speculatively over her face. He tapped her lightly on the jaw and cocked his head at the soft thud of his finger on the bone. ‘Does that mean you’re cracked?’
She was certainly crazy, she thought as she looked up into his brutally attractive face. Crazy for him. And her heart would be in serious danger of cracking if she couldn’t work out some way to be with him in spite of the swirl of secrets that had engendered his wary mistrust. ‘It doesn’t work with people,’ she said huskily.
‘More’s the pity. I guess that means I have to find another way to tap your hidden depths…’ His arms slid around her pliant waist and he began to lower his head when a delicious buzz shot into her groin from his pressing hip. He groaned, reaching into his jeans pocket. ‘Sorry, my phone…I’ve been waiting for this call…’ And she had to settle for a quick tousle of her curls rather than the long, lush kiss of her desires.
His voice dropped into brisk and urgent technical jargon as he strode out of the room and not long after she heard a car leave, presuming that he had been called back to the office.
Hunger pangs reminded her that lunch had been an apple and a handful of Vegemite crackers given to her by her neighbour, who had wandered over for a gossip when she had seen Emily dealing with the parade of tradesman she had invited to provide free quotes.
While she was in the kitchen making herself a sandwich, Mrs Cooper showed her the dinner roast, surrounded with vegetables, which she had put in the oven to turn on with an automatic timer, and pointed out the snapped beans that would only have to be popped into the microwave.
She was crossing back through the hall, finishing the last of her sandwich, when she met Peter coming out of his office fare-welling a short, sandy-haired man with black-rimmed glasses, whom he introduced as Andrew Robinson, his lawyer.
The lawyer switched his slim briefcase to his left side in order to shake her hand, his green eyes chilly as he murmured her name.
She found out why when Peter, as if to mitigate the impact of his lawyer’s radiating disapproval, blurted out that he had just signed a codicil adding Emily to his will.
Emily blanched, her sandwich congealing into a doughy brick in her stomach. First the car. Now this. ‘Peter, you can’t do this—’
‘I can and I have,’ he said proudly. ‘I wish everyone would stop telling me that I don’t know what I’m doing.’ He cast a condemning look at his lawyer.
‘But…for goodness sake! We don’t know anything yet,’ she said frantically. All she could think of was Ethan’s reaction. ‘You can’t change your will on the basis of some vague hope, and that’s all it is at this stage, Peter. Nothing’s been proven, and maybe never will—’
‘I told him he would be wise to wait for a DNA test before making any hasty decisions,’ Andrew Robinson put in dourly, ‘but he insisted that he didn’t want to wait.’
‘What if I popped off tomorrow,’ said Peter, ‘and left you with nothing?’
‘But I don’t expect anything. I don’t want anything more than you’ve given me already. Even if I did turn out by some fantastic coincidence to be your granddaughter, you don’t have to do this.’
She just wanted to be plain Emily Quest, restoration artist, someone that Ethan could respect, trust, fall in love with…
