‘Fine! I’d appreciate it if you also keep leaving me your little notes at the end of each day. Progress and problems.’
‘I will,’ she promised.
‘I’m glad you’ll still be around, Daisy. I would have missed you if you weren’t.’
‘Well, I’m glad I rate that much,’ she said dryly. ‘Have a good weekend, Ethan. I guess I’ll see you when I see you.’
She put the telephone down before he could say anything more personal, making it difficult to transmit to her parents that nothing out of the ordinary was going on. She knew they wouldn’t accept the deal if they knew about it. Now that it was already in train, she had to make it work right so they would never suspect what Ethan was extracting from her as his reward.
Monday was not an easy day for Daisy at Hunters Hill. While she assiduously supervised the work being done, her mind kept fretting over what was going on between Ethan and her father at their meeting. It wasn’t certain that anything would be agreed upon. Her father had always been a cautious man with money—budget-ing, saving. He might find Ethan’s advice too much of a gamble to take. In which case, she wouldn’t have to be Ethan’s mistress and there’d still be the financial problem at home.
Weirdly enough, she found herself willing the deal to go through.
And she honestly didn’t know if this was because she wanted her parents to feel secure for the rest of their lives, or because she actually did want an affair with Ethan, regardless of its being a primrose path that would inevitably dwindle out. He was, without a doubt, the sexiest man she had ever met. If she could just let herself enjoy having him for the rest of this year or until he lost interest in her…surely she could manage that if she kept her head on straight about it ending sooner or later.
Her nerves were totally strung out by the time she arrived home and her mental ambivalence was finally settled by her father’s announcement that he had placed his financial affairs in Ethan’s hands and was convinced there would soon be an upturn in their fortunes. He wouldn’t go into detail about the decisions made. Ethan had insisted on absolute confidentiality regarding the advice given. However, her father’s happy demeanour clearly demonstrated he believed in it and trusted it.
The die was cast.
Now came the waiting to see if the advice proved good.
It was a strange kind of hiatus, being at Ethan’s house each workday, watching it evolve into his personal home, yet not ever seeing him. He was gone before she arrived and she was gone before he returned. The only connection they had were notes they left for each other—all of them relating to the renovations.
Time rolled on. The games room with its bar was completed and the shelves were filled with an incredible array of board games, which Ethan must have had in storage somewhere. One morning she found a selection of carpet samples in various shades of green laid out in front of the staircase with a note attached—‘Which one would you choose to live with?’
Why would he want her opinion?
It wasn’t as if he’d invited her to live with him.
She was to be set up in an apartment, completely separate from his residence.
At first Daisy was inclined to dismiss the question, leaving a reply that read, ‘It’s up to you to choose.’
However, as the day wore on, she kept looking at the carpet samples, imagining how each one would look on the staircase. The moss green seemed more right than the others. Possibly she was drawn to it because it was the colour of Ethan’s eyes. In the end she left a note pinned to it, saying, ‘This one,’ even though it was irrelevant to her what went down in his home.
At the end of the week, the carpet-layers came in, took up the red carpet and replaced it with the moss green. It was absurd how much pleasure it gave her. Most probably her choice had coincided with his, simply reinforcing it, but she still wore a smile all day, happy that he liked what she liked. Which was true about a lot of things. And in her heart of hearts, Daisy couldn’t help wishing that Ethan might come to appreciate how compatible they were and not ever lose interest in her.
Which was dangerous thinking, she sternly told herself.
Sex with her whenever he liked was Ethan’s aim. It had been from the day they’d met. In one sense it was flattering that he should go to such extraordinary lengths to acquire her acquiescence to it. On the other hand, Daisy suspected it was in the nature of the man—a ruthless drive to manipulate circumstances so he would get what he wanted.
She shouldn’t forget that.
The friendly little notes, the carpet question, the laying off of any physical pressure could all be a softening-up process so she would be a more amenable mistress, not a grudging one who had been pushed into the position.
The whole house gradually turned into what Ethan had envisaged. Furniture arrived—the billiard table, wonderfully comfortable sofas in moss-green velvet for the home theatre section, bedroom suites for the guest rooms. Different lighting fixtures were put in to suit the new decor, plus all the electrical apparatus for the sound system and the massive television screen.
Daisy had little left to supervise. Once the renovation of the old carriage house was done she wouldn’t be needed here and still she hadn’t been able to land a job elsewhere. She began to feel anxious about everything—her lack of work to justify the salary Ethan paid her, the whole money problem, whether his side of the deal would, indeed, pay off, and how soon.
Each night her father was glued to the financial report on television news programmes. Almost six weeks went by before the item he was waiting for hit the headlines. The government had approved a Chinese corporation’s bid to invest in the Redback Mining Company, which was rich in iron ore deposits but too deeply in debt to exploit their holdings. The share price, which had bottomed out at five cents months ago, had already exploded up to a dollar.
Her father whooped with glee, leapt up from his armchair, pulled her mother out of hers and danced her around the lounge room in a joyful polka, yelling out, ‘He did it! He did it!’ in a wild version of a song from My Fair Lady.
He eventually calmed down enough to confide that, on Ethan’s advice, he had plunged everything on the Redback Mining Company. He would sell the bulk of his shares tomorrow and make a massive profit, pay off the bank, help the family out with whatever they needed, live sweetly for ever after.
So this was it, Daisy thought, dizzied by the spectacular nature of her parents’ sudden rise in fortune. Ethan had delivered. And watching her father brimming over with ebullience, her mother beside herself with happy relief and excitement, she felt a fierce gladness in the outcome of the deal, regardless of any cost to herself down the track.