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‘Save it. I already postponed the meet.’ He picked up a box under each arm. ‘Where are we putting this stuff?’
She showed him the locker. ‘I hope this won’t lose you their investment.’
‘It won’t. People who want the best are generally willing to jump through a few hoops to get it.’
‘And you’re the best, of course?’ she mocked. ‘Isn’t that rather arrogant of you?’
‘It’s not arrogance to be certain of your own abilities,’ he said, making short work of the rest of the cartons while Emily gathered the loose items from the back of the car. ‘Are you the best at what you do?’
‘I always try to do my best—’
‘Not quite the same thing, though, is it?’ he said. ‘Although I suppose gluing old china back together is not exactly a competitive field.’
She was about to flare up at him when she realised he was being deliberately provocative. As a man who had studied the structure of materials he would be well aware of the complexities involved in any kind of restoration, large or small.
‘It’s a little more complicated than that,’ she said, refusing to rise to his bait, although she couldn’t help adding blandly: ‘I actually use more sticky tape than glue.’
She gave him the keys and allowed him to back Julie’s car out of the way and park it off to one side, for the sheer malicious pleasure of seeing him at the wheel of the temperamental rattle-box. She couldn’t hear what he was saying but she could see the curses raining from his lips as the car did its usual bunny-hop between gears.
‘Not used to a manual?’ she said sympathetically as he dropped the keys back into her outstretched hand.
He grunted. ‘That thing belongs on a scrap-heap!’
‘Some people can’t afford BMWs,’ she said as they shot off down the drive in his silver bullet. ‘But I’ll be sure to pass your message on to Julie.’
‘Where does your friend live?’
She wasn’t fooled by his casual tone. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Why don’t you want to tell me?’
She realised this was the start of his interrogation—the whole reason for his sudden helpfulness—and she spent the rest of the trip trying to parry a stream of similar questions with snippy counter-questions of her own, although he did manage to tease out of her a brief history of Quest Restorations by playing on her professional pride in her grandfather’s unusual trade, and more about herself than she realised by displaying an insightful knowledge on the trials and tribulations of running a small business with clients who were frequently eccentric. Emily naïvely accepted his plausible explanation that his own multimillion dollar company had started off in a modest way, with a single commission to build a cliff-top house on a cyclone-prone island in the Pacific. ‘The Bunker’, as he jokingly called it, had made his reputation amongst a strata of super-rich to whom degree of difficulty was more important than size.
She did realise, however, that it seemed to be taking them a surprisingly long time to get where they going—mostly because he ignored her directions whenever they conflicted with his state-of-the-art GPS mapping on the dashboard screen.
‘But I know the short cuts,’ she complained as they took what she felt was another unnecessary turn.
‘Short cuts aren’t always faster. This system factors in time-of-day traffic flows. Trust the technology.’
She rolled her eyes at his reverent tone. Trust a man.
‘I work in a very low-tech, labour-intensive business. Give me hands and eyes and human judgement over soulless computers any day,’ she needled.
‘Computers help me create structural designs that would take endless hours of toiling with a pencil and slide-rule. They have a soul, it’s just that it’s incomprehensible to most—one of pure, unadulterated mathematics.’
Emily had hated maths at school. She watched his hands move on the wheel, flexing the long muscles in his forearms. The rolled sleeves had revealed that they were dusted with dark hair, which looked soft and silky against his light skin.
‘You think life can be boiled down to a bunch of numbers?’ she said, to take her mind off the ripple of his powerful flank as he shifted his foot smoothly from accelerator to brake. She already knew how strong his thigh muscles were, and when the movement pulled his soft jeans tight across the top of his leg she couldn’t help noticing the firm bulge of the fabric cupping his crotch out of the corner of her eye. And that was when he wasn’t even thinking about sex! What would he look like when he was fully aroused?
She quickly looked out her window, afraid her fevered thoughts were written all over her guilty face, the roaring in her ears drowning out his reply and making any kind of intelligent response impossible.
So preoccupied was she with trying to control her erotic imaginings that she didn’t even realise they had turned into a familiar street of shabby houses until she heard Ethan’s harsh exclamation and felt the lock of the seat-belt mechanism across her chest as he jammed on the brake.
‘Good God!’
He angled into the kerb, not taking his eyes off the blackened house, festooned with bright yellow plastic warning tape across the doors and windows, which stood in the centre of a muddy and trampled garden. The right end of the lower storey was all shattered windows and skeletons of ebony wood showing through charred weatherboards, while greasy smoke and water stains smeared across the rest of the narrow façade. The wooden garage, which had been tacked onto the house next to the studio, was a pile of blackened timber beams from which her sturdy white station wagon forlornly poked its roasted nose.
