Ethan turned away and began heating some olive oil at the base of a large pan.
‘I am sorry though,’ she was starting to say, as she wiped frantically at her mouth with one of the paper towels.
He turned towards Hayley and reached out for the onions.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I’m intrigued by the idea of a wedding photographer who doesn’t believe in marriage.’
Hayley shrugged but didn’t explain any further. The conversation had become intimate enough already, considering it was between two people who were not going to mean anything to each other in the future. It wasn’t like this was a date or anything, like they had any obligation to get to know each other.
Once the onions had browned, Ethan threw in the tomatoes and then a few handfuls of basil.
‘How does this taste?’ he asked, passing her a little of it on a wooden spoon.
Hayley sipped the hot sauce gingerly. It was delicious.
‘Mmmm,’ she said. ‘And it’s so simple!’
‘The nicest things usually are,’ said Ethan.
Then he leaned forward suddenly, one finger outstretched, and touched it against her lip.
When he moved back she saw his fingertip was streaked with red. Sauce. Ethan moved it to his own mouth and sucked it in. Sauce from her mouth, to his. The gesture seemed small but also almost painfully intimate.
Hayley felt her knees grow weak and had to lean against the bench to steady herself. What on earth was she getting into? As though aware of her discomfort, Ethan backed off.
‘The pasta’s just about ready,’ he said, pointing to the largest of his saucepans. ‘Do you want to set the table while I drain it?’
Hayley opened one of the glass-fronted cabinets behind him and pulled out some chunky white dinner plates.
‘Three?’ Ethan asked, apparently puzzled.
Hayley nodded. ‘Won’t Katy want to eat?’ she asked.
‘Katy,’ Ethan repeated. ‘Oh yes. Of course. I’ll keep it in the fridge until she wakes up.’
***
As they ate quietly, Hayley found herself looking around the room. Like the rest of the house, it was simple but beautifully decorated. The walls had been freshly painted in a shiny white, the floors were bare boards polished to a dull sheen and covered with Persian rugs in surprisingly subtle colours. Everything from the light fittings to the silverware at the table was at once obviously expensive and elegantly unadorned. Whoever had decorated had very good taste.
She looked from the place setting to Ethan’s face and regarded him for a moment. He was eating with relish, obviously appreciating the simple, tasty food as much as she did.
‘You look like you’re sizing me up,’ he said, noticing the direction of her gaze.
Hayley rested her knife and fork together on her plate and touched the corner of her linen napkin against her lips.
‘I’ve been wondering about a couple of things,’ she admitted.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, there’s your piano. Do you play?’
‘It was my mother’s. And her mother’s before that. Do you play?’
‘When I can. Like photography, it’s a hard skill to earn a living from. And I’ve wondered who did the rest of your interior decorating. Everything else here looks a lot more modern than the piano.’
‘Interior decorating?’ Ethan repeated, sounding surprised. ‘You mean who bought my furniture? I did that myself.’
‘You have good taste.’
His surprise intensified. Apparently, this was something he had never thought about before.
‘I just bought the furniture I needed. I like to surround myself with things I like.’ He turned his head to one side, looking at her speculatively.
Hayley felt herself blush again. It was as though he were sizing her up, working out if she was something he might feel he needed and liked. The feeling of attraction between them, a feeling that had sizzled outside, and begun to send out sparks in the kitchen, was making her decidedly uncomfortable.
She was not ready for heat like this, not with a man who she had only just met, who she still had lingering feelings of resentment towards, because he might be one of those men who had ruined her father, and whom she was never likely to see again.
‘I think it’s time for me to go to bed,’ she said, standing. She didn’t generally like doing what she was told and it was important to her that she did something, even if as small a thing as choosing a bedtime of her own volition.
‘The room on the second floor? Just past Katy’s?’
He had explained to her that the little girl was still asleep, and often had early nights.
‘I’ll walk quietly.’
He stood, gentlemanly, and held the dining room door open for her.
‘There’s a bathroom next door with fresh towels and a spare toothbrush in the cabinet,’ he said as they began to climb the stairs. ‘Help yourself to anything you need.’
They paused at her door, Hayley’s hand on the knob. She was acutely aware of Ethan standing before her so closely that her eyes were level with his shoulders. He was warm and at once strong and secure, at home in this place that she had already realised was the perfect setting for him.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Goodnight.’
For one stupid, long moment she was sorry she had insisted that her agreeing to stay was not the same as her agreeing to sex. Life had been a bit dull recently and if she was honest with herself, in coming here she had been after adventure as much as she had been after money to help with her father. If she had said something else, might she and Ethan be about to walk into this room, together?
She swallowed. Why was she allowing these thoughts, here where some trace of them might appear on her face? She wasn’t the sort of woman that had one-night stands, and with her imminent departure back to Australia, and Ethan’s pressing need to remain here, there was nothing else that they could have.
Ethan leaned towards her. She smelled his aftershave. Tangy and slightly woodsy, reminiscent of the cypresses through which she had prowled this afternoon. He brushed his lips against her cheek.
‘Goodnight,’ he murmured.
Against her wishes, Hayley felt her body shiver, a movement that started in her cheek where Ethan touched her and spread down her throat and through her body until she swayed. She closed her eyes and gripped more tightly onto the doorknob. She did not like this. She did not like this control that Ethan seemed to have over her — or rather, that Ethan’s body seemed to have over hers.
She did not like it at all.
She loved it.
No, she didn’t.
‘Goodnight,’ she said again, unnecessarily, as she twisted the doorknob around and pressed into the darkened room beyond.
A moment later, the light was on, the door was closed, and she was alone. Hayley leaned back against the wall and drew a deep breath as she considered her surroundings. It was a rather small room, built to the same dimensions, she suspected, as Katy’s room, immediately downstairs. The walls were as white as in the dining room, and as freshly painted.
A wide, soft bed with fat welcoming pillows was covered with a throw of rough-woven white and pushed against the wall behind a spongy cream rug. There was a fluffy bathrobe draped over the end of the bed and a bookcase at its foot, once shelf bare apart from a clean glass and a bar of soap resting upon a fluffy green towel.
Ethan had obviously set this room up for guests, not necessarily for her. There had not been time today for all of this. Perhaps he was used to having people come to stay. Perhaps he was less of a recluse here than her experience so far had suggested.
Whatever it meant about his familiarity with guests, the details meant she could be comfortable.
Hayley was grateful for that as she slipped out of her skirt and blouse and into the bathrobe provided. Then she opened the door a crack and peeked out. There was no one around. Half-disappointed, she collected the towel and soap and made for the bathroom.
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Only ten minutes later she was clean and ready to climb into bed. The room was warm, the window open. It was barred of course — Ethan was the most security-conscious man she had ever known, and now that she had heard the story about Katy, she understood why — but the shutters behind had been left open and, through them, moonlight streamed in widely over the floor. Far away, the ruins of an ancient amphitheatre were illuminated. She imagined the plays that would have been staged there once upon a time. All that ancient drama about good and evil and fate. The fate that Ethan said he didn’t believe in.
Hayley had just pulled back the bed covers and felt that the sheets were indeed as soft as they looked when a piercing alarm rang out, splitting the evening.
Thump.
That was her foot on the floor. She span around, wide eyed and quickly retying the cord of the bathrobe that she had been about to let slide down off the bed. Then she ran for the door.
The light in the hall had already been turned on and was a straight, bright line beneath her door as she ran for it and flung it open.
There were footsteps, heavy ones, sounding on the stairs, going downwards and away from her. Ethan, going down to make sure Katy was all right.
Hayley darted along the hall, following.
She could hear the heavy footsteps moving on before her as she ran. Ethan wouldn’t mind if she checked too, Hayley reasoned. He could hardly expect her to stay in her room while this was going on, still less that she might actually be asleep.
In a moment the footsteps would stop and another light would be switched on and she would hear the heavy wooden sound of Katy’s door being opened.
But then the footsteps reached what must have been the landing below, and kept on going. Hayley paused at the lower, still dark hall, puzzled.
Katy’s door was still closed. Katy’s father was continuing to run.
It could only mean he had more information about the source of the alarm and was going there instead. Hayley regarded the closed door for another long moment. Ethan had said Katy was uninterested in coming down for dinner and that she was having an early night. The alarm was still shrieking. And the door was still closed.
The girl was some sleeper.
Or was she? Unbidden, an image came to Hayley’s mind of a young girl in the dark room just on the other side of the door; a young, frightened girl sitting up in bed with her feet pulled up, her arms wrapped around her legs as she stared at the closed door and shivered.
This was a warm house but it was a big one and Hayley imagined it would be very easy for a young child to feel lost and alone here. Especially a motherless child, who must be aware of some of the danger her father said she faced. And especially with that alarm sounding and with her father’s attention obviously centred elsewhere.
Hayley pressed the nearby switch so that the hallway filled with light. She did not want to startle the girl if, by some chance, she should happen to be asleep. Then she took a deep breath and pushed open the door next to her.
It swung open to reveal a room that, as she had suspected, was pretty much a copy of her own room, directly above. It took her eyes a moment to become used to the dark. Then she realised there was no little girl sitting up, huddled in bed. There was no child still asleep. There was no child, raised from bed and shivering, frightened in the corner.
There was nobody in there at all.
***
Hayley turned and ran.
What could this mean? Was everything Ethan had told her about a daughter a lie? She realised now that despite her strong instincts to trust Ethan and to distrust Tomasi, all she had to go on were the two men’s opposing statements.
But no… She knew there was something wrong with Alvaro Tomasi. She had known that before she caught him lying the first time, before he changed his story. Invented the second lie.
She remembered how Ethan had looked when he was talking about Katy. His emotions had been too raw, too real, too similar to what she remembered from her own father’s emotions when the two of them had been alone together. He could not be lying.
So, where was Katy? Could she have been sleeping elsewhere? Had Ethan somehow managed to raise her and taken her with him as he ran downstairs?
With or without her, where had he gone? Fortunately, the house was built around long halls, as Hayley sprinted and threw doors open, looking through them to see if Ethan was in the room beyond. Each room she passed that was empty could only mean that he had gone further in the direction she was already moving.
She passed the sitting room where they had spoken earlier, and the dining room, and the kitchen. As she ran, she tried to remember more about the state of Katy’s room.
Had there been some sort of struggle in there? Had Tomasi or one of his men managed to get in after all? Hayley didn’t think so. There was nothing she could remember that had looked out of place or in disarray. In fact, as she far as she could tell, the bed hadn’t looked as if it had been slept in at all.
Ethan had lied to her about Katy being in there for an early night. Did that make a lie out of everything he had told her about his daughter? Did Katy even exist?
That alarm certainly existed. As Hayley made her way closer to the heart of the household, it seemed to grow even louder.
‘Ethan!’ she cried out, her sense of mystification and distress growing as she reached the last door in the hall and threw it open.
Beyond was a brightly lit office with a bank of television screens along one wall and a large timber desk at which Ethan sat before two giant computer screens. His fingers were raised to a keyboard before him and he continued typing as he turned and raised his eyes to her face.
In her panic, the movement looked painfully slow. Despite the ear-piercing shrillness of the alarm, it was as though he didn’t realise anything was wrong.
Hayley felt a fierce clenching in her stomach. If she called him out on lying about having a daughter, then what danger would she be placing herself in? She couldn’t even begin to guess what a man might be capable of if he was also guilty of inventing an entire tragic family life.
There was a photo behind the desk. A large one. It showed Ethan with a beautiful dark haired woman — Erica, it must be — and a beautiful, dark haired young girl. If Ethan had invented Katy, she was not a new invention.
Of course he hadn’t invented Katy. She had felt his love and anxiety in everything he had told her about the little girl. She was not a bad judge of character. She could not have been fooled by that.
Katy was real. She was real and in danger and that made the news Hayley had to share all the more devastating.
‘Ethan,’ she said again. ‘I have to tell you —’
‘I’ll have this solved in a minute,’ Ethan said. Then he frowned and, finally, his fingers paused. ‘What is it?’ he asked, standing.
‘It’s Katy,’ Hayley gasped.
She ran towards him and threw herself into his arms, ready to be the emotional support that he was surely going to need.
‘She’s gone!’
Chapter Five
Ethan looked up at her. His expression was not the shock or the panic Hayley had expected. He was still typing away, glancing down at the computer screen again.
‘Did you hear me?’ Hayley demanded, certain that he must not have. He always spoke as much with his hands as with words. It was his Italian heritage, she guessed. And now it felt like he wasn’t paying her attention, even if the reason for that was that he was typing.
‘I said Katy’s not here!’ she repeated. ‘She’s gone!’
‘I heard you.’ Ethan cocked his head to one side, watching her closely as he tapped more emphatically on the enter key and then stood.
‘There’s something you need to know,’ he said, too slowly.
‘There’s something you need to know! You’re not listening to me. It must be shock or —’
‘I know Katy’s not here.’
‘What?’
‘I said I know Katy’s not here.�
� He walked towards her and took her elbow in his hand. ‘Come and sit down over here.’
Hayley stood still. She didn’t want to sit. She was tired and she was in a foreign country and she was staying with a man she barely knew and she had been shot at.
‘That alarm?’ she asked. ‘Was that the sound of Katy leaving?’
‘That alarm, thankfully, was false,’ Ethan said. ‘We get those from time to time. I have the sensitivity of the alarm system set to very high. For obvious reasons. Sometimes it’s an owl that sets it off at nighttime. Sometimes just the wind.’
Hayley considered this. Finally, she allowed him to lead her towards a couch that rested against a side wall.
He gave her a glass of water as well. ‘You look exhausted,’ he said.
She sipped it. ‘I’ve had quite a day.’
He sat beside her. He looked exhausted, too, as he gave a dry laugh. ‘Welcome to my life.’
‘You often have your alarm going off in the middle of the night, and guests who are shot at?’
‘I’m always waiting for Tomasi’s next trick. At the moment, I’m worried because he seems to have become so unpredictable. I’ve heard rumours that the family might be in even more trouble than I thought. Alvaro Tomasi is new to power.’
‘I don’t understand. Why would that matter?’
‘There are rivals in his family. He might feel he has to prove himself.’
Hayley took a moment to consider the fact that she had been caught up in someone else’s power game. This did not sit well with her idea of herself at all.
‘So where’s Katy?’ she asked at last.
Ethan regarded her for a long minute.
‘Is she okay?’ asked Hayley, feeling a tightening in that knot of anxiety in her chest.
Ethan stood. ‘We need to go up to your room before we discuss this.’
‘What?’
Truly, he was the most astonishing man she had ever met. There seemed to be so little connection between the information she was requesting and the demand he was making.
‘Your bedroom,’ he repeated. ‘Do you mind?’
Trusting a Stranger Page 5