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‘What?’
She swallowed, almost choking on her thickened tongue. ‘This is my property and I—I’m telling you to leave right now,’ she ordered clumsily. ‘If you don’t go when I ask, that’s trespass, and I can have you arrested. I can call the police and have you arrested on the spot. Don’t think I won’t if you try and take another step toward that house!’ Her voice rose with each progressive word in her last sentence. She must look and sound like a madwoman, she thought hysterically.
His mouth compressed, his eyes glittering slits of ice as he coldly considered the merits of her bluff. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a palm-sized telephone. ‘Here.’ He flipped it open and held it out to her. ‘Take it. Make the call, if that’s what you want to do, but while you’re doing it I’m going to have a look around.’
He tossed it at her but she didn’t even make an attempt to catch it and it spun into the grass at her feet.
‘Don’t,’ she whispered, wrapping her goose-pimpled arms around her middle as he started to walk away again. ‘What if it isn’t safe? What if something falls down and hits you on the head, or you disappear into a hole and just never come back…?’
She squeezed her eyes tight shut on the endless potential for disaster. Everything that she loved, everything that she had thought was solid and substantial in her life seemed to be developing a frightening habit of dissolving like mist before her eyes, leaving her nothing but insubstantial memories.
‘Nothing’s going to happen to me…’ Suddenly Ethan’s warm hands were rubbing up and down her cold upper arms, his moist breath a clear affirmation of life as it fanned across her worried forehead, a coating of velvet on the voice that a few moments before had been cutting and dismissive of her ridiculous fears.
‘Calm down, Emily, I’m not going to suddenly disappear on you, I promise.’ His rock-solid bulk emanated reassuring heat, his hands settling on her rounded shoulders, kneading thumbs digging deep into the stiff muscles to release the trigger points of tension.
‘I was just going to take a quick stroll around the outside of the house, well away from any overhanging bits and pieces,’ he continued in the same steady tone. ‘I wouldn’t have broken through the safety tape. I don’t take stupid risks when I’m on the job, and I’m just indulging in some professional curiosity here, OK?’
She nodded, her eyelashes still resting like thick fans against her translucent cheeks.
‘Anyway, if I did get conked on the head I would have thought you’d be glad to get rid of me!’ he taunted lightly.
That made her sniff, and jerk up her head. ‘I would,’ she said, her wobbly voice containing a trace of anger. ‘But what would I tell Peter? He hasn’t got over losing Rose, yet. He couldn’t cope with losing you, too.’
Their eyes meshed, blue-on-blue, the teasing amusement fading from his face, his hands stilling on her shoulders.
‘No, you’re right, he talks a good fight but he’s still more vulnerable than most people realise.’ His fingers skimmed back down her arms and fell away, but his eyes maintained their hypnotic contact. ‘How long is it since your grandfather’s death—about a year?’
‘Ten months,’ she corrected automatically
‘And you lived here in this house with him…how long?’
‘Since I was seven,’ she said, drawing in her lower lip.
‘What about your grandmother?’ he said curiously.
She looked away, breaking her trance. ‘She died when I was sixteen.’ Erica Quest had been a brisk, no-nonsense woman, but she had known the value of a simple hug. With her tempering influence gone from their lives, Emily and her grandfather had spent more and more time in the studio and less time socialising. Her parents’ half-hearted and quite unworkable suggestion that she join them overseas and intern with one of the aid agencies had been dismissed without regret on either side. ‘That was when I started my real training,’ she remembered. ‘There’s no formal apprenticeship, you just have to learn by watching and doing…’
She took a deep breath, forcing herself to unfold her arms and affect a nonchalance she didn’t feel.
‘Sorry, for going off the deep end like that.’ She pinned on a rueful smile. ‘I don’t know what came over me—’
‘Don’t you?’ His dark, knowing tone implied a threatening awareness of her deepest insecurities. He had no right to crawl around inside her head and rummage around in her private emotions. His encouraging empathy was probably only a ruse to make her trust him. He was a prime witness for the prosecution, she warned herself. He had tried to use sex to intimidate her and now he was turning to psychology.
She ignored the seductive invitation to offload all her troubles on his manly shoulders, and shook her head. ‘I don’t usually throw tantrums over trifles—’
His eyes expressed his disbelief. ‘You call this a trifle?’ He jerked his head towards the house.
‘I meant the prospect of you vanishing off the face of the earth,’ she said, intent on rebuilding her crumbling emotional resistance. She put her nose in the air. ‘If you want to have a look around, go ahead. Snoop all you like. The ground has been pretty thoroughly covered by experts. Fall down and break your neck for all I care!’
To her fury, instead of looking chastened at her defiant words, he merely grinned.
‘You think it’s going to be that easy for you to get rid of me, Emily? Think again.’
There was a sardonic satisfaction in his words, and as he strode away it struck her quite forcibly that he was doing exactly what he had always intended to do, probably from the first moment he had offered to help. All she had done with her emotional outburst was delay him for a few minutes. The outcome had never been in doubt as far as he was concerned. She had been ‘handled’ with superlative skill, with the result that she had ended up granting him precisely the permission she had attempted to deny!
When he reappeared around the front of the house, Emily was in discussion with a burly, bearded man, who was thrusting a sheaf of papers into her reluctant hand.
‘Problem?’
