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‘Not so young in my case—but surely you can’t be older than thirty,’ Ethan said to Emily.
‘I’m twenty-six,’ she snapped, and saw from his smirk that she had reacted precisely as expected to the dangled insult. Why couldn’t he have asked if he had wanted to know her age?
‘I hope you found Dylan before he fell into mischief,’ Peter continued.
‘Dylan doesn’t fall, he jumps,’ said Ethan drily. ‘As it turned out Michael had lent him the Webbers’ Ferrari to take a girl out for a spin around town. Luckily I was able to get the cops to pick him up for me.’
His own brother? ‘Wasn’t that a bit extreme?’ said Emily, shaken at this evidence of his ruthlessness. Even Peter looked taken aback.
‘It was a night of extremes,’ Ethan commented, more truly than he knew, his deep voice gentling in a way that wrapped around Emily’s senses as he said to his uncle, ‘It was the night that you called me from the hospital to say that Aunt Rose had suddenly deteriorated, and was being transferred to the hospice.’
Peter blinked, remembering. ‘That’s right…and she died just a couple of days later.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I remember you and Dylan turning up at some ungodly hour to sit with us and talk…you in a fancy black tie because you’d been at some swanky opening—how Rose loved that…That was the same night?’
Ethan nodded. ‘The tail-end of it, anyway.’
‘Oh, God,’ murmured Emily, impulsively putting her hand on his forearm. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said on a surge of empathy. No wonder he had been so granite-faced at the party, impatient with the noisy frivolity and contemptuous of the self-destructive behaviour on display, when he had known that his aunt was having to fight for every precious extra moment of life. He must have been deeply worried and every bit as intent on his completing his mission as Emily had been on hers. And she had c
hosen that moment to prowl up to him like a cat in heat!
He looked down at her hand lying against the lightweight wool of his jacket. It was as contradictory as everything else about her so far—delicate yet strong, soft yet not pampered, the fingers scattered with tiny, old scars, the short, unpainted nails all symmetrical and obviously cared for, but rimmed with black grime. Not the hands of a typical vamp. And yet…
‘How awful for you,’ she was gushing. ‘If I’d known—’ she stumbled to a halt as his hand clamped over hers, his ruthless mouth denting with a sardonic twist.
‘You would have…what? Offered me comfort?’ He turned aside from his uncle and lowered his voice for her ears only. ‘A soft bosom to cry on?’ His arm was like iron under her crushed fingers. He obviously didn’t need or want her sympathy. ‘You didn’t seem like the kind of woman who was looking for the sensitive side of a man.’
‘Oh, what did you think I was looking for?’ she said, realising it had been a mistake to touch him, for it intensified her over-awareness of his innate masculinity.
His eyes glinted through his lashes, which were every bit as lush as her own.
‘Discipline.’
Her nude mouth rounded into a shocked ‘O’, her eyes shading to an outrageous blue as her creative imagination leapt into over-drive. Visualising herself at the mercy of his strict sexual discipline was wickedly arousing. He would relish giving the orders in bed, and demand her eager compliance to his every whim. Her fingers involuntarily contracted, digging into his sleeve as she tried in vain to dampen down her forbidden fantasies.
Perhaps he had just meant that she needed to learn to behave properly in public, she told herself sternly…Or perhaps not, she thought, seeing the fiendish satisfaction in his gleaming eyes as he watched her suffer her hot flush. He had expected her to leap to precisely the conclusion she had, proving to himself, no doubt, that she was no innocent where sex was concerned.
Nor was she—but her sexual experience was restricted to the exploratory fumblings of a young boy and the shattering manipulations of a smooth-talking con man, and in the last two years she had been far too busy caring and then mourning for her grandfather and trying to keep the business afloat to worry about her exercising her libido. In truth, she had never found anything that could quite match the intense physical awe and exhilaration she had felt when she had been allowed to handle an exquisite piece of rare, Chinese porcelain that had survived over four hundred years of continuous human ownership!
She tried to pull her hand free, but this time Ethan wasn’t co-operating and rather than get involved in a losing scuffle she just lifted her chin and gave him a disdainful look out of her faintly up-tilted eyes.
‘Well, whatever the unwelcome circumstances of your meeting the first time round, this has turned out to be a happy coincidence, hasn’t it?’ Peter inserted blithely into their unspoken war of words.
Emily had another name for it.
‘Telephone call for you, Mr Nash!’ The housekeeper’s sing-song call echoed along the hallway.
‘I thought I’d switched the answer machine on.’ Peter frowned. He popped his head out the door. ‘Take a message for me, will you?’
‘It’s Mr Robinson, from the lawyers’—he says he’s just answering your call. Do you still want me to deal with it?’ came the crusty reply.
‘Oh!’ Peter’s shoulders stiffened and he hesitated for a moment before swinging around, a nervous smile twitching at his mouth as he deliberately avoided his nephew’s gaze and spoke to Emily: ‘Look, I really need to take this, my dear…Why don’t you and Ethan go and have a chat in the lounge where it’s more comfortable? I shouldn’t be too long.’ His smile brightened as he continued in a rush: ‘Or, better still, go and sit out in the sun on the verandah and enjoy the view, and I’ll send Coop out with another plate of muffins—with a black coffee for you, of course, Ethan, I know how you like to swim in the stuff…’
In other words, he didn’t want to risk them wandering within earshot of his telephone call, thought Emily as he limped hastily away.
Ethan was obviously thinking the same thing. ‘What’s he suddenly want with the family lawyer?’ he murmured, pinning Emily with a suspicious look.
‘How should I know? It’s none of my business,’ she told him, trying another fruitless tug of her arm.
‘Isn’t it? You seem to have made quite a business of cosying up to him, my dear.’ His cruel mimicry dripped with menace.
