Page 63 of Quinn, By Design

“For the love of Mary and Joseph, what the hell are you doing?” Liam pulled him tightly against his chest.

“I can’t see any other way.” Niall rested his head on his brother’s shoulder.

“What can I do?” Liam asked.

“Make it happen fast.” Niall walked back to sit at the side table.

His brother swallowed a mouthful of tea. “This is stone, motherless cold. Don’t worry. I’ll make more. Tell me what you need me to do.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The click of the frontdoor closing reverberated through the small house and into Lucy’s body. She groaned and buried her head under Niall’s pillow, seeking his scent. Decency and honour melded in the scent and the man, and she’d jumped him like he’d been a stud for hire. She’d been tipsy last night, a last hurrah for demons slayed. Or Clementine’s demons slayed. In the middle of second serves of gelato, Clem had blurted out she was going to accept Jamie’s proposal.

This morning Lucy had woken still shaken by Clem’s decision to become a wife and mother. Her world had turned upside down, and her mum’s story had stuck in her throat. Mindless sex had been an escape, andanother mistake.She’d known before Niall rolled out of bed. He’d withdrawn emotionally. She shivered.

“A goose walked over my grave.” Lucy tried to dismiss the sense of foreboding, but it followed her on her search for a towel. “If you explain, he’ll understand.”

Opening a drawer, she found flyers for a Quinn exhibition and her foreboding became real, sucking the air from her lungs and dropping her to her knees.

An hour later, Lucy spread the promotional material she’d stolen from Niall’s bedroom drawer on her office desk. The tooled, green leather of the antique desktop framed the photographs and blurb promoting a Quinn exhibition. With unsteady hands, she pinned the top of a sample website page with her grandparents’ photograph. She used her laptop to pin the bottom. Then she brought up Niall’s internet site. No change since the last time she’d looked, but the date and the promise on the sample page was for a Quinn exhibition a week from now in a top Sydney gallery.

Nausea swirled in her stomach. Her body started to tremble as she did more searches of the internet, of social media, of any account she could find where the exhibition might be listed. When she wanted to gag, she covered her mouth with her hand.

He’d cancelled it.

Pictures scrolled through her mind. She’d sat at his Huon pine table the first time she’d met him, then it disappeared from the kitchen. Kate insisting on seeing the table, then whispering to Niall. Lucy hadn’t heard the words, but she’d picked up distress, which had made no sense then. A storeroom part-stocked with Quinn creations, none of which were listed on his website. He never talked about the occasional items in the middle of his workshop shrouded in sheets. He’d been preparing for this exhibition when Lucy had burst into his home accusing him of fraud and theft and cheating her grandpa.

“What have I done?” she whispered, gripping opposite elbows to control the shaking.

When her phone rang, she checked caller ID and identified Henry Dawson. She froze, fear keeping her silent.

“Lucy, are you there?”

“I’m”—she moistened her mouth—“Lucy McTavish here.”

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