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‘I did.’ Liked the place, loved the owner. Hated that he her made her feel unworthy of any future with him.
She put the book into the bag and turned. Ethan moved into her path, his fingers hooking under the straps of her vest-top and stretching them lightly, pulling the ribbed fabric tight across her breasts. ‘I could make you say yes,’ he murmured seductively. He bent his head and nuzzled the side of her throat. ‘I think we both know I could very easily make you change your mind.’
She fought down her weak desire to do just that. He was trying to make this all about sex, and she couldn’t let him get away with it. ‘Yes, you could,’ she admitted huskily. ‘But would you want to, knowing what it would mean to me?’
He raised his head, arrested by the painful throb in her voice. She met his gaze proudly, her heart in her eyes. ‘So unless you’re ready to take responsibility for that, maybe you should agree that separate residences are safer for both of us…’
For a moment she almost believed—hoped—that he was going to argue, but then he inclined his head, and let the precious moment slide.
‘Of course, it’s entirely your choice. Now you have your insurance money you don’t have to accept unwelcome favours from men.’
It was a cheap shot, and from the sudden high colour on his cheekbones, he knew it, and her own wounded heart ached for him as he spun on his heel and left. But she was fairly sure that he would swiftly recover his arrogant confidence once he analysed the scene and realised that it was as a landlord rather than a lover that he had been rejected. The passion that flared so hot between them was still his for the taking, and the fact that she had obliquely warned him that she was falling in love with him might merely add an extra element of challenge to the affair. At least he would know that she wasn’t trying to line him up for an emotional ambush, or trade on his generosity.
After a few days of the new regime she wouldn’t admit, even to herself, that her home no longer seemed to fit her any more. It was as if the fire had consumed its spirit and the seismic shift that had taken place in her own identity and emotions contributed to her feelings of restless displacement. Work no longer filled the empty gaps in her life. The question nagged at her—would James Quest have left her everything if he’d known she wasn’t his biological granddaughter? She’d like to think that the answer was yes, that her life with him had more than earned his love and respect for her as a person of value in her own right, but she was no longer sure of anything. It would probably take years to resolve all the issues and conflicted feelings arising from the discovery of her birth. Each time she spoke to or saw her parents, her adoptive parents, she would undoubtedly have a long list of questions to ask them.
Apart from the inconveniences of open walls and the thick coating of builder’s dust that renewed itself every day and drifted into every nook and cranny, Emily found the stripped-down house echoing and hollow, and more than a little spooky when the sun went down.
On her first night she had been shedding a few tears into her pillow when her mobile phone screen had flashed a welcome light in the dark. She had snatched it up to hear a gravelly purr.
‘In bed yet?’
She pinched the top of her nose so he wouldn’t hear the tears. ‘Who is this?’
‘Very funny. Have you got so many lovers you can’t distinguish one from the other?’
Lovers. Tears, this time of relief, threatened anew.
‘I wish!’
‘No, you don’t.’ Oh, he had got all his arrogance back, and then some! ‘How are you getting on? Finding it a bit sad and lonely?’
It was so accurate she was incensed. ‘I was asleep,’ she lied.
‘So you are in bed. What are you wearing?’
Her nipples instantly peaked against her silk camisole. He knew she liked to wear pretty things to bed.
‘Striped flannel pyjamas.’
‘Liar,’ he chuckled. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m wearing?’
He slept naked.
‘No. Where are you?’ she asked helplessly, picturing his nude body sprawled across the big bed overlooking the secret rose garden. Perhaps he was even stroking himself as he talked to her, she thought with a shocking spurt of heat between her legs.
‘I had to fly back down to the site. I’m bunking in with one of my drainage engineers,’ he said, shattering her wicked fantasy. ‘Have you changed your mind, yet?’
So that was the way he was going to play it.
‘No, have you?’
Silence.
‘Goodnight, Emily.’
‘Goodnight, Ethan.’
He had called her the next two nights as well, and each time he had ended their long, meandering conversations in the same way. She wondered whether the fact he was choosing to taunt her with a reminder that she loved him was significant. It was another two days before he was due to return, and she found herself looking forward to two more intimate, late-night conversations almost as much as his teasing threats of a love-making marathon. Never having considered herself very highly sexed, she was disconcerted at how much she had missed the purely physical side of their relationship and how much time she wasted dreaming up torrid sex scenes in which to satisfy her craving for his erotic skills.
