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nd a handful of Vegemite crackers given to her by her neighbour, who had wandered over for a gossip when she had seen Emily dealing with the parade of tradesman she had invited to provide free quotes.
While she was in the kitchen making herself a sandwich, Mrs Cooper showed her the dinner roast, surrounded with vegetables, which she had put in the oven to turn on with an automatic timer, and pointed out the snapped beans that would only have to be popped into the microwave.
She was crossing back through the hall, finishing the last of her sandwich, when she met Peter coming out of his office fare-welling a short, sandy-haired man with black-rimmed glasses, whom he introduced as Andrew Robinson, his lawyer.
The lawyer switched his slim briefcase to his left side in order to shake her hand, his green eyes chilly as he murmured her name.
She found out why when Peter, as if to mitigate the impact of his lawyer’s radiating disapproval, blurted out that he had just signed a codicil adding Emily to his will.
Emily blanched, her sandwich congealing into a doughy brick in her stomach. First the car. Now this. ‘Peter, you can’t do this—’
‘I can and I have,’ he said proudly. ‘I wish everyone would stop telling me that I don’t know what I’m doing.’ He cast a condemning look at his lawyer.
‘But…for goodness sake! We don’t know anything yet,’ she said frantically. All she could think of was Ethan’s reaction. ‘You can’t change your will on the basis of some vague hope, and that’s all it is at this stage, Peter. Nothing’s been proven, and maybe never will—’
‘I told him he would be wise to wait for a DNA test before making any hasty decisions,’ Andrew Robinson put in dourly, ‘but he insisted that he didn’t want to wait.’
‘What if I popped off tomorrow,’ said Peter, ‘and left you with nothing?’
‘But I don’t expect anything. I don’t want anything more than you’ve given me already. Even if I did turn out by some fantastic coincidence to be your granddaughter, you don’t have to do this.’
She just wanted to be plain Emily Quest, restoration artist, someone that Ethan could respect, trust, fall in love with…
‘It wouldn’t be such an unlikely coincidence as you think,’ said Peter gruffly. ‘When the Quest name was thrown up, and I found out what you did, I was the one who suggested that Rose get Quest Restorations to start handling the repair jobs she had been giving to another company.’
His behind-the-scene manipulation only seemed to make it worse. So much for his wanting to keep his wife away from his secret!
‘Peter, you haven’t even told your family yet. If you’re so certain of all this, why haven’t you told them what you told me? It isn’t fair to ambush them like this. How can you expect them to understand?’
‘They don’t have to understand, they just have to accept it. A man’s last will and testament is his own—’
‘Understand what? What’s going on?’ Ethan appeared from the lounge, pocketing his phone, frowning at the sight of the lawyer and Emily’s frozen figure. ‘Peter?’ His eyes moved to the lawyer’s briefcase and his gaze shuttered. ‘Andrew? What is this?’
No one spoke, and then the dam inside Emily burst.
‘Your uncle has decided to change his will in my favour. You’re out and I’m in!’ she announced with wild inaccuracy. ‘And because I’m nothing but a wretched little gold-digger, of course I’m utterly thrilled about it!’
‘Changed his will?’ His voice was neutral, his face solid granite as he said carefully: ‘Well, that’s his prerogative, I suppose—’
‘Aren’t you going to ask why?’ she cut in shrilly, infuriated by his restraint, when she could see the gathering storm in his eyes. He would save all that for her. He would blame her, she knew it!
‘I don’t have to—’
She gave a sardonic laugh. ‘Oh, yes, you do—believe me, you’re going to want to know.’ She swung around on Peter, for the first time bitterly angry with his meddling, with his attempt to rearrange his mistakes of the past by arbitrarily rearranging her entire future. ‘You tell him,’ she said fiercely. ‘You tell him who you think I am, or I will. I’m tired of being the pawn in a game I never chose to play. I’m not going to be the keeper of anyone’s dirty little secrets any more. I’m not sure where I belong, but right now it’s certainly not in this house!’
And with that she turned and ran out past her bedroom, out to the studio she couldn’t open because she had locked it and didn’t have the key. Locked out of her only sanctuary—except that sanctuary really wasn’t hers, either. Eyes blind with tears, she slumped against the door, arms around her middle, trying to shore herself up against the pain of her crumbling dreams.
CHAPTER NINE
EMILY lifted her face into the wind, feeling the salt spray sting her face, dashing away the last of the tear tracks on her cheeks.
‘I can’t believe I’m doing this!’ she yelled, gripping the rail and bending her knees to ride out the bumps, the orange life-jacket protecting most of her tee shirt but her white cotton capri pants plastered damply to her thighs.
‘Doing what?’ shouted Dylan from the boat’s cockpit as he turned the wheel and increased the throttle, pumping more power through the twin engines so that the white hull lifted to skim across the tops of the choppy waves in a wide, curving turn towards the green slopes of Waiheke Island rising from the waters of the Gulf.
‘Running away!’ She turned to look at him over her shoulder from her perch on the prow of the sleek launch, her hair lashing across her eyes and whipping at her cheeks.
‘I do it all the time,’ Dylan called, his wide grin slashing his face under the wraparound sunglasses. The wind ripped the rest of her words away and Emily turned back into the wind, enjoying the relentless physical buffeting as an escape from the mental roughing-up she had given herself.
