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‘As you say, he has a reputation for being the best, and I never settle for less.’ Again he switched topics to devastating effect: ‘I understand there were a few odd rumours floating around about your grandfather’s reputation at one time. About the time you and I first met, wasn’t it…?’
She stiffened, her arms dropping to her sides, fingers curling into defensive fists. ‘That has nothing to do with this—I don’t want to discuss it!’
‘Too bad, because we’re going to have this discussion whether you like it or not. Were the rumours back then true? That James Quest’s name was no longer a guarantee of a top-class job? Is that why the business nearly went under last year?’
‘I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer,’ she said desperately.
‘Would you rather I make up the answers myself?’ he said relentlessly. ‘All I have to do is collect enough pieces to make the puzzle fit. Ask
around, pay someone to do some more digging…who knows who, or what, might crawl out of the woodwork…?’
Conrad, she thought with an inward shudder. ‘You have no right—!’
‘Emily—’ He reached out to touch her shoulder and she stumbled back, knocking her elbow against the edge of the bowl in the sink and setting the plate rattling against the plastic.
‘Now look what you made me do!’ she cried, stilling the plate, angry that she could be so clumsy in an environment in which she had trained herself never to make a careless or unconsidered movement. ‘It’s dangerous to get distracted by personal conflicts in the studio—’
‘Then let’s go outside—into the gardens, where there’s no danger of breaking anything precious…other than ourselves, of course.’
When Emily opened her mouth to object he said with implacable intent: ‘We have some unfinished business, you and I—going back two years. Until it’s settled I have every right and reason to question your honesty. Trust goes both ways. If you want me to trust you, then, at some point, you have to trust me. And that point happens to be now. It’s time to stop hiding, Emily. Withholding the truth is as good as a lie, and lies have a nasty way of coming back to hurt people.’
She hesitated, knowing he spoke the truth but still torn by old loyalties.
‘The secret, whatever it is, is going to come out,’ he promised. ‘How do you want me to hear it—from you? Or from someone who might want to put a whole different slant on things?’
She thought of Conrad again. How he would love to dish the dirt, if he thought he could get away with it without implicating himself. And he would make her look like a pathetic, deluded fool…
She looked at the hand Ethan was holding out, palm up. Now he was confident he had won, she thought, trying to whip up a defensive anger, he could afford to act gracious!
‘Come on, Emily,’ he said, beckoning imperiously. ‘If you’re thinking of having another go at leading me up the garden path, why not do it in a real garden?’
Not so gracious, after all!
Knowing that she did, in the end, have little choice but to accede to his demands, she brushed past him and thrust her hands into the pockets of her jeans as she affected a cool saunter out the door. She pointedly stopped to take the key out of her pocket and turn it in the lock before following him down the side pathway to the shredded-bark paths that wound back and forth across the curving stone terraces, designed, so he told her, to resemble petals of a rose when seen from above.
‘I didn’t notice that, looking down at them from the verandah,’ she murmured reluctantly, intrigued in spite of herself, as much by the subject as the tacit offer of respite from tortured thoughts of her looming confession. Or maybe it was just his cunning way of softening her up so she would be more forthcoming.
‘I meant from directly above, from the air,’ he said, dropping back to walk beside her through the crowded ranks of bush and standard roses arranged in subtle graduations of colour, heading for the stone steps that would take them down to the lawn in front of the pool.
Emily had been refusing to look at him, but now she shot him a brief sideways glance, her breath shortening as she found his eyes lowered to the open collar of her blouse. He certainly didn’t look as if he was measuring her for a noose.
‘Why would Rose do that? I thought she was afraid of flying.’
Ethan showed no sign of embarrassment at being caught enjoying the advantage of his height, explaining that although it was Rose who had originally created the idea of stepped rose gardens, over the years her love of collecting porcelain had transcended her passion for gardening, especially after her illness had affected her stamina. Since it had been Ethan who had done hard physical labour in the garden at her direction from the time he was a teenager, it had seemed natural for him pick up where she had left off, going from merely digging holes and pruning on command, to propagation, planning and planting, and eventually redesigning the whole look of the garden. He found it a good way to relax, he said to her flabbergasted face.
‘You grow flowers?’
‘Does that make me seem less of an ogre?’ he said as they stepped down onto the emerald grass fronting the bottom terrace—a heart-stopping riot of red roses, from the tenderest bud to the most blowsy, overblown blooms trailing their petals in the breeze. ‘More like someone you can talk to?’
She glanced uncertainly at him, all her tension rushing back, and he indicated the bench seat in an open-sided arbour of climbing roses, but she shook her head, disconcerted when he sat and looked inquiringly up at her. She hovered at the entrance to the alcove, fingering the tiny serrations in the dark green roseleaves that mantled one of the trellised pillars.
‘I never thought you were difficult to talk to—’ she began.
‘Stop procrastinating. I asked Michael about you—Michael Webber,’ he added when she looked blank. ‘I rang him a few days after the party, before he ducked into rehab. He didn’t even remember you.’
‘Thank God,’ she said involuntarily, before she realised exactly what he had said. ‘W-why were you asking?’
‘My conscience, amongst other things,’ he said, not bothering to specify what those other things were. ‘I thought you might have been up to no good, and I was right, wasn’t I? Quest Restorations was doing an insurance job for Sean Webber at that time, so I understand—he told me there was some cock-up with its return but that it all turned out all right for him in the end because he eventually donated it to a museum and got a tax rebate.’
