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She found out why when Peter greeted them on their return and insisted that Ethan have lunch with them before he resumed his flight. Back in his suit—complete with a fresh blue shirt with an unstained cuff—Ethan was the epitome of politeness over the meal, waiting until the last minute of his departure to pause and casually ask Peter if it was all right for him to stay for a few days.
‘That was what I was trying to ring you about yesterday—I have a few back-to-back evening engagements coming up and it would suit me not to have to trek back to Waiheke every night,’ he said smoothly, with just the right touch of uncharacteristic diffidence.
‘Of course, that was before I knew you already have a—a guest…’
Peter’s face turned a peculiar shade of pink and there was the faintest trace of unease in his voice as he blustered, ‘Nonsense! You never even have to ask, you know that, Ethan—this is your second home. I’m always glad to see you or Dylan. Stay as long as you like! The more the merrier, eh, Emily?’
Oh, very merry, thought Emily, her stomach lurching as she met the bold promise in Ethan’s savagely triumphant gaze.
He intended to play merry hell with her already turbulent life, and he had just awarded himself the luxury of doing it at his leisure.
CHAPTER FIVE
EMILY put down the cotton swab and adjusted the safety goggles over her eyes. Scooting her chair closer to the bench, she bent over the hard-paste porcelain vase lying cradled in the small, soft beanbag. Despite its obvious major flaws, it was still a very beautiful object.
She studied the metal rivets with which some long-dead Chinese restorer had laced together the broken shards. Dismantling, cleaning and re-bonding the blue and white vase was going to be a time-consuming task. If the rivets had been intact there would have been a case for leaving them alone, as part of the history of the piece, but these were badly rusted and the iron stains had leached into the ceramic body, and seeped along the break-lines. As well, some of the hand-crafted metal staples had worked loose from the holes that had been drilled on either side of the breaks, compromising the entire structure. A soaking in warm water had softened the plaster filling in the rivet holes, now it was going to be a matter of carefully scraping it out so that she could extract the metal without causing any more damage to the vase.
She tested the magic tape she had used to strap the unstable body together—to prevent it collapsing when she removed the rivets—and picked up her scalpel and fine dental probe. Outside it was a cloudless summer morning, and the light that streamed in through the large windows gave her perfect clarity in which to see the fine details of her work without having to use the magnifying glass that stood beside her on the bench. In contrast to the almost soundless scratch of her blade, her rescued mini sound-system rocked the studio space with the cutting-edge playlist from the university’s alternative radio station.
When the first rivet came out quite easily with a cautious pull of her blunt-nosed pliers she breathed a sigh of relief that she was dealing with the right-angled variety. Acute-angled rivets would have meant she might have to resort to a hacksaw, and, although she was supremely confident now of her ability, she still remembered the carnage of her first disastrous attempts under her grandfather’s tutelage, when she had wrecked many a practice piece trying to gauge the angle and pressure required to cut through thin metal without damaging the surrounding material. On the principle of learning by doing, James had got her to do some riveting herself—using the same techniques practised in the hundreds of years prior to the invention of epoxy resins—so that she would better understand the whole process. He had been more rigorous and demanding of Emily than he had of his other workers but she had respected his purpose. It was Emily who carried the family name, and must always uphold the Quest reputation for excellence.
She had done that—at the risk of her liberty and enduring peace of mind—two years ago. Although it had not been her own shoddy work that had threatened to taint the Quest name, she had been responsible for getting Conrad Nichols his job at the studio. She had been the one who had been so dazzled by his handsome face and boyish charm that she had failed to notice the growing evidence that his skills did not live up to the glowing references he had flashed at the museum seminar where they had met. By the time she had realised how cleverly he had circumvented her grandfather’s stringent standards it had been almost too late to prevent a scandal.
Which made it all
the more important for her to do justice to the Quest name now, she thought as she painstakingly continued to pick apart the softened reinforcing on the first row of rivets, pausing every now and then to check on some of the items she had at various stages of soaking and drying.
It was well over a week since she had settled in at Peter’s and, although things were going smoothly for her within the familiar environs of the studio, life outside its walls was rocky. Ethan’s ‘few days’ stay had stretched into four, his daily work hours erratic and only a single ‘evening engagement’ had interfered with his mission to harass Emily with his unsettling presence and constant, intrusive offers of ‘help’ and advice. The rest of his dates had apparently been cancelled at short notice, leaving him free to wedge himself firmly between Peter and Emily every night over dinner and afterwards, in the lounge, to dominate the course of the conversation until Peter’s ‘old bones’ had taken him limping safely off to bed.
The fact that Ethan was a cynical wit and amusing raconteur only made him more dangerously fascinating to Emily’s unwilling mind, and it was hard—though not impossible—to begrudge him his uncle’s pride in his accomplishments. He was also a man of formidable energy and resources. He made no secret of the fact he had been making enquiries about her, it having taken him not much more than twenty-four hours to discover that Quest Restorations had been on the verge of bankruptcy for some months before and after James Quest’s death.
To her great relief Ethan had eventually had to leave for the South Island, but he had returned again late yesterday evening without warning, catching her off guard as she and Peter had been huddled over his collection of old family photographs, discussing likenesses, with Emily particularly interested in the boyhood photos of the harum-scarum activities of the West brothers.
She had had absolutely no reason to feel guilty and refused to act as if she did when Ethan plunked himself down beside them on the couch, his hard thigh riffling the skirt of her light summer dress as he leaned forward to look at the album open on the coffee table.
Except…
Except sometimes the way that Peter talked, and looked at her, made her feel the slightest bit uneasy.
Not in a sexual way, never that, but just with a kind of repressed elation, a smothered air of anticipation that she found difficult to fathom. As if he was expecting something from her. Something that their relationship promised, but had yet to deliver.
At other times he would seem to fall into a pensive depression, becoming choked up over trivialities—something that could be as simple as her early childhood memory of learning to play knuckle bones in an Ethiopian refugee camp.
In all other ways he seemed perfectly happy with the current arrangement and, although he had at first been a trifle ambivalent about Ethan’s probing curiosity about Emily, he had soon shaken off whatever doubts he had harboured and enjoyed the ‘buzz’, as he called it, of having other people in the house, even if they were off doing their own thing.
But every now and then, for no apparent reason, he would retreat into that fugue state, and she would look up to see him watching her with that strange, hopeful expression on his face. She was unable to shrug off the feeling that something was wrong. That perhaps Peter was suffering from more than just arthritis and an irregular heartbeat—that there was something starting to misfire in his brain. But her nebulous feelings were just that, she had no facts to support her concern should she speak out, and every reason to think Peter would be cut to the quick by any hint that she thought he was losing his mental grip.
As she teased out the last rivet and carefully turned the vase over to expose the second, more complex break, a stiff neck told her that she had been working longer than she realised, and she stripped off her goggles and pushed back her stool, rolling her shoulders to ease the muscular cramp.
She gasped when a heavy pair of hands settled on the sore spots and began a luxuriously deep, slow massage.
Tilting her head sharply back, she had a disorientating view of Ethan’s upside-down face and felt the familiar, uneven thump of her heart. Whether she saw him unexpectedly, or spent time psyching herself for the encounter, she could never avoid that initial, breathless leap of delicious fright. It came from some atavistic part of her brain that recognised a hungry predator and triggered a flight-or-fight reaction. Since flight wasn’t an option she had no choice but to stand her ground.
‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ she said shakily.
‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, reaching over to flick off her raucous radio before returning to his task. ‘You were concentrating very intently.’
Suddenly realising that the back of her head was resting against his flat belly, Emily quickly returned upright, sliding out from under his too-skilful hands. It was rather unnerving how many excuses she seemed to give him to touch her.
