Secret Seduction

Instead of answering her, he rolled over onto his side and began to struggle awkwardly to his feet, hampered by the long, wet coat flapping around his legs. Nina hovered nervously, hoping that his movements weren’t exacerbating a chest or back injury. He would be extremely lucky if he escaped with only minor cuts and bruises. As he straightened, he moaned and she slid her arm around the back of his waist, grateful that he appeared to be relatively steady on his feet. She prayed he would stay that way.

Man’s best friend, satisfied that he had fulfilled his doggy duty, was already skittering back to his domain, his jaunty flag of a tail proclaiming that he confidently expected to dine a hero. Nina urged her companion in the same direction by pointing out the rectangle of light projected by the back door, which she had left open.

‘Do you think you can make it that far?’ It had really been a rhetorical question and she was startled to hear a low, sardonic rumble float over her head.

‘Do I have a choice?’

If he could manage sarcasm under these conditions, then he couldn’t be that badly injured, she reasoned.

‘Well, yes, you could just stand here and wait for lightning to strike twice!’

Ten minutes later, Nina was perched on the edge of her couch, icy bare toes curling into the sheepskin hearthrug under her feet, her wet clothes steaming in the heat from the fire as she gently mopped at the blood that streaked one side of the injured man’s face. The continual washing of rain had obviously kept the blood from clotting, and she was worried that it was still seeping in a steady flow from the gash just above his dark hairline.

Fortunately, he had managed to remove his muddy shoes and shed his heavy black coat in a sodden puddle on the floor before he had gracefully keeled over onto the oversoft couch. The rest of his clothes appeared only mildly damp, except for the muddy lower half of his black trousers.

He had lain sprawled on his back, his eyes closed, his breath coming in a harsh rattle between tightly drawn lips, as Nina had raced for a bowl of hot water, disinfectant and towels—one of which she had tucked under his wet head. He hadn’t moved when she had gingerly checked him over for other obvious wounds and started to clean his face, and at the moment she wasn’t quite sure whether he was unconscious or merely limp with pain and exhaustion—but either way it gave her a chance to study him unobserved and soothe the nerves that had been jangling discordantly since she had first looked into his face up there on the hill.

There was nothing familiar about him to disturb her now. Nothing to make her heart quicken with uncomfortable anxiety. He was simply a stranger. A dangerously good-looking stranger, it was true—perhaps that was where the feeling of threat had sprung from.

Nina estimated him to be in his mid-thirties and even in repose his face had a kind of lean and hungry look to it. His fine-grained skin, which had merely been a pale glimmer out in the darkness, was actually a burnished gold beneath the surface chill, the olive undertones allied to the jet-black lashes and flared brows.

His hair fell back from a slight widow’s peak above the faintly lined forehead, the wet strands melting into the white towel under his head drying to a natural blue-black sheen that made her guess that his eyes would be similarly dark.

His classic bone structure was the kind that would age well, she thought, the blade-straight nose perfectly proportionate to the wide-set eye sockets, high forehead and sculpted jaw. His smooth-shaven cheeks were faintly concave, his upper lip a thin, barely shaped line while the lower was pulled into noticeable fullness by the slashing indentation in his chin, far too masculine to be called a dimple.

His dark colouring was accentuated by the fact that he was dressed all in black—a knitted rollneck sweater tucked into the flat waistband of his pleated trousers, both closefitting enough to reveal a body that was long and rangy, the lean, triangular torso tapering to narrow hips and long-boned thighs.

Here in the light, his colour of choice threw him into sharp relief against the ivory throw rug. Her artist’s imagination visualised him as a thin streak of black over a ripple of changing textures.

Shadow man…

To Nina, black was a symbol of complexity—a subtle, sensuous, secretive colour. She never bought it in a tube, preferring to mix it up herself on her palette, so she knew that there were many shades of black, rich with the potential to refract just a tiny portion of incidental light and thereby alter the viewers’ perception of what they were seeing from moment to moment. Black was an optical trick, an illusion.

But the man on her couch was no illusion. Nina shivered as she leaned forward to dab at a fresh welling of blood, her trembling fingers almost dropping the crimson-stained towel.

He winced, his head rolling to the side, knocking her hand away, his eyes flicking open. It gave her an odd shock to see they weren’t the dark brown suggested by his swarthy colouring, but an extremely light blue, like floes of ice packing in around his shrinking pupils, and her heart accelerated unevenly in her chest.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said thickly, his voice as surly as his frown.

‘Who did you expect it to be?’ Nina resumed her dabbing. ‘Your guardian angel?’

‘I don’t believe in angels.’

Somehow she wasn’t surprised by the flat pronouncement. The faint tracery of laughter lines at the outer corners of his eyes suggested that he was capable of good-natured whimsy, but the cynical brackets that had appeared around his compressed mouth revealed a more dominating trait.

‘Then you shouldn’t tempt fate when God is flinging thunderbolts about,’ she told him. ‘You could have been badly injured.’

‘Tempting fate is what I do best,’ he murmured.

She wasn’t impressed. ‘Well, miracle man, you certainly came off second-best this time, didn’t you?’ she pointed out, removing the towel and carefully parting the matted hair at his temple.

He moaned at the slight pull on the edges of the open wound. ‘What are you doing?’ His head winced away from her on the cushion and he put a hand up to his forehead.

‘That falling tree gashed your scalp,’ she explained, wondering how much of the accident he actually remembered. ‘I’m cleaning it up so I can see how deep the cut is.’

He lowered his hand and stared at his stained fingertips. ‘I’m bleeding like a stuck pig,’ he groaned.

‘Scalp wounds are like that,’ she said bracingly. Men were such babies when it came to their physical hurts. ‘From what I can see, the cut’s shallow but it’s quite long. You may need a few stitches to hold it together.’

His eyes had fluttered closed. ‘Bitch!’ he muttered.

‘I was only offering an opinion.’ Nina tried not to take the insult personally. If his mind was suffering the lingering effects of a blow to his head, she couldn’t expect him to obey the usual rules of polite conversation. Perhaps his comment had been aimed at some other female who had suddenly flitted into his hazed brain. ‘I wasn’t threatening to darn you up myself. How are you feeling…apart from the head, I mean?’

‘You were copping a free feel a few minutes ago. You tell me,’ he said without opening his eyes.

She flushed at his raw imagery. So he had been fully cognisant all along…thank goodness she hadn’t lingered over her task! In the circumstances, it had been the practical thing to do, but it had still seemed uncomfortably intimate. Moulding the stranger’s muscles through his chilled clothes, she had found it impossible to remain as detached as she would have liked.

‘I was just checking to see whether you had any obvious broken bones,’ she defended herself. Since his eyes had been closed then, too, he couldn’t have possibly known her eyes had strayed where her touch had dared not….

‘I’m never obvious. Discretion is my middle name.’ He made it sound like a sinful accomplishment.

‘What’s your first?’

‘Hmm?’ His thick lashes rose to half-mast, showing a sliver of blue bemusement. ‘My first what? First woman?’

Nina felt a surprising kick of fury. She flicked back her heavy mane of wet hair in a gesture of haughty disdain. She didn’t know why he thought she might be interested in his sexual peccadilloes.

‘No—your first name. Who are you? My name is Nina—Nina Dowling,’ she repeated emphatically, anxious to extract a response before he lost the thread of the conversation again. ‘What’s yours? What are you doing in Puriri Bay? Is there someone who’s going to be worried if you don’t turn up?’

‘Nina?’ He seemed confused by her string of questions, unable to concentrate sufficiently to answer any of them. She placed a flat hand against his hard cheek and moved her face closer to his, silently demanding he give her his full attention. He blinked up into her worried green eyes, his pupils visibly expanding, melting the circles of blue ice to a silvery rim of frost. ‘Nina…’ His gaze sank to the tiny mole just above the neat pink bow of her mouth. ‘It’s you,’ he said in a tone of deep satisfaction.

Except for his lack of surliness, they were right back where they had started, Nina realised in exasperation. He was looking at her as if he expected congratulations for his simple act of recognition. ‘Yes, that’s right, it’s me, Nina—I just told you that. But who—are—you?’

She separated each word to stress the vital importance of the question.

‘Who am I?’ he repeated equally slowly, a disturbing blankness beginning to steal across his face, wiping it clean of all expression.

Her fingers tensed against his hard cheek, keenly aware of the strength—and the terrifying fragility—of the skull beneath the skin.

‘Don’t you know?’ she asked, trying not to let her panic leak into her voice.

His silence was echoed in his empty eyes, and her hand flew up to cover her appalled mouth.

‘Oh, God, you have no idea, do you?’ she said in a shattered whisper. ‘You can’t tell me who you are because you don’t even remember your own name!’

CHAPTER TWO

THE stranger’s eyelids drooped and Nina’s stomach hollowed with fear. Wasn’t excessive drowsiness supposed to be a bad sign? What if he lapsed into a coma?

‘Hey!’ She shook him by the shoulder, trying not to jar his head. ‘Open your eyes—you can’t go to sleep now!’

‘Why not? You planning on turfing me back out into the storm?’ he roused himself to challenge, still wearing the alarmingly vacant expression that persuaded her it would do little good to keep pressing him about his identity. At this point, it might even be dangerous to get him overagitated about his condition.

‘Of course not, but you could have a bit of concussion,’ she told him. She had been far too ready to assume that because he was walking and talking after the accident his injuries were superficial. But what if she was wrong? She, of all people, should know how unpredictable a seemingly minor bump on the head could be….

Unfortunately, as far as getting help was concerned, her options were severely limited. Emergency services were out; there were none on the island—not even a practising GP—and for the duration of the storm they were effectively cut off from the mainland. Even the rescue helicopter would be grounded. Ray had left her his key so she could dash over there and use his telephone, but she didn’t like the idea of having to leave the injured stranger alone in unfamiliar surroundings. Besides, whom would she call?

Who amongst her other close neighbours was likely to be useful? It was no use running off to beg help from someone who was just as ignorant as herself. But at this time of year the candidates were pathetically few.

Almost all of the houses in Puriri Bay were weekenders, and when the weather forecast had been so wretched, most of the owners would have flagged away their weekly pilgrimage to the island. During the winter, the neighbourhood was frequently reduced to a few hardy old-timers and some casual renters with whom Nina had only a nodding acquaintance.

But the Freemans were here! Her back straightened as she recalled seeing their distinctive, shiny green four-wheel drive roll off the ferry the previous day when she had walked over to the jetty to wave Ray off and pick up a mail-order package from the post-box at the store.

Although Nina didn’t know Dave Freeman particularly well herself—he was only an intermittent visitor to his bach—he was a long-time fishing buddy of Ray’s and she knew that he freely gave the older man advice on his arthritis. He was actually a psychiatrist, but shrinks were medical doctors in the first instance, weren’t they? Just because she had been stand-offish to him in the past was no reason to be reluctant to approach him now. While Shearwater Islanders were fiercely respectful of each other’s right to privacy—that was why the island was such a haven for social misfits—in a crisis their community spirit was invariably staunch.

She jumped up and found herself tethered to the couch by a hand that had shot out with surprising speed to fist in the saturated denim bagging around her knee.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere,’ she soothed, easing the bunched fabric out of his grasp, taken aback by the raw suspicion in his voice. ‘But I’ve just thought of someone who can give me some advice about that gash on your head.’ She raised her voice. ‘Zorro, come here!’

The little dog came trotting out of the kitchen, dragging the discarded soup bone that Nina had used to distract him from chewing on the stranger’s muddy shoes.

A faint, choking sound floated up from the couch. ‘You’re going to ask a dog for a medical opinion!’

His incredulous outrage sent a buzz of amusement humming through her veins, easing the pressure of her intense anxiety.

‘Unfortunately, he’s not licensed to practise.’ Nina removed the bone from the dog’s mouth and picked up the gnawed handle of an expensive fishing rod from the bookcase, holding it out for Zorro to sniff.

‘You know where you got this, don’t you, boy?’ she said encouragingly. ‘Dr Freeman—Dave—gave it to you after you kept stealing it off his back porch at Christmas. You take it along with you when Dave takes you and Ray out fishing on his boat, and he throws this in the water for you, doesn’t he?’

Nina was scribbling a brief line on a scrap of paper and taping it to the stumpy rod as she spoke. ‘You like playing fetch with Dave, don’t you?’ She mimed a throwing action and the terrier began to prance energetically. Nina crouched down and looked into the beady masked eyes as she placed the piece of rod firmly between his jaws. ‘I want you take this along to Dave’s place now. I want you to fetch—Dave! Understand?’

Zorro pricked up his ears, his whine mingling with a sleepy snort from the patient.

‘Of course he can’t understand—he’s a dog!’

Nina bristled in defence of her companion. ‘Zorro is extremely intelligent. He knows what I’m saying, don’t you, boy? You’re going to play fetch with Dave.’

The Jack Russell barked excitedly around the edges of the rod and took off at his customary velocity.

As his claws clicked across the kitchen floor, Nina remembered to call out, ‘Uh, Zorro, just don’t forget that the rod may not—’ There came a sharp rap and a pained whine, followed by a furious rattling and growling. ‘—fit crossways through the cat door.’ The fight sounds rose to a crescendo of frustrated snarls and Nina was about to dive to the rescue when there was a scraping pop and a series of muffled, triumphant yips diminishing into the distance.

‘Extremely intelligent, huh?’

Nina ran her hands through her wringing-wet hair, scooping it off her clammy neck. ‘He tends to leap before he looks sometimes, but even intelligent humans do that,’ she pointed out.

‘You really expect him to do it?’ he wondered.

Rather than following the upward movement of her arms, the blue eyes had drifted in the opposite direction. Nina looked down to see her drenched sweatshirt plastered to her uplifted breasts, shaping their modest fullness and explicitly revealing her lack of a bra. She hastily plucked the wrinkled fabric away from her unpleasantly chilled skin. ‘I know he will. Zorro’s very dedicated when he thinks he’s on a mission,’ she said more confidently than she actually felt. She wouldn’t relish going back out into the storm herself. ‘In the meantime, I’m going to get into some dry clothes.’

‘Don’t bother on my account.’

His mocking drawl made her cold nipples tingle with embarrassment. She had taken her body for granted for so long that it was a shock to find it responsive to a casual male comment, particularly in such inappropriate circumstances.

‘Just keep that towel pressed against your head until I get back!’

She would have liked to have a shower, but the thought of standing naked under a steamy flow of water with the silver-eyed stranger just the other side of the wall made her insides turn over. Instead, she managed to change top and bottom without ever being completely nude, towelling herself roughly and pulling on dry underwear, including a sturdy white cotton bra, woollen stretch pants and a roomy checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She blotted her hair and rubbed it with a towel before fastening it high on her head in a loose ponytail that would enable it to dry naturally without getting totally out of control.

She needn’t have worried about her unexpected guest wandering in on her shower. When she returned to the lounge after dumping her wet clothes in the laundry tub, he was still lying on the couch in exactly the same position, eyes closed, towel obediently clamped to his temple.

She felt a brief tremor of uncertainty at his stillness but relaxed when she picked up the steady rise and fall of his chest. The battering gusts of wind and roaring barrage of rain on the iron roof masked her movements as she quietly picked up his bunched coat from the floor, surprised at its weight, the musty smell of wet wool clogging her nostrils as she carried it into the bathroom and draped it over the curtain rail of the shower.

Turning to leave, she hesitated, then, feeling guilty, explored each of the pockets in turn. She found no wallet, but in one of the deep side pockets she found a bunch of keys, and from the breast pocket in the grey silk lining she drew out an elegant silver cigarette lighter, sculpted in voluptuous lines that stressed art over pure functionality.

It was agreeably heavy, fitting perfectly in the hollow of her hand, the smooth metal cool to the touch as it rested on her open palm. Her fingers closed possessively around the curving shape and she battled an unexpectedly compelling urge to slip it into her own pocket.

Appalled by her unaccustomed craving, Nina hurried out to rid herself of the temptation, dropping the keys quietly onto the table by the couch and placing the cigarette lighter carefully beside it.

She glanced over at the recumbent figure as she did so and her heart jerked in her chest as she found him quietly watching her, his narrowed blue eyes moving between the articles on the table and the naked oval of her face.

She moistened her dry lips. ‘Uh, I emptied the pockets of your coat so I could hang it up to dry,’ she explained, inwardly squirming at the lie. ‘I found these….’

As her fingers reluctantly withdrew from the seductive contours of the lighter, her thumb smoothed over a slight roughness in the casing. It could have been the jeweller’s mark, but Nina knew with a hitch in her breathing that it wasn’t a silver stamp the sensitive pad of her thumb was identifying. Sure enough, when she tilted it to the light, she found herself looking down at a brief inscription in flowing letters, too small to read at arm’s length.

‘What’s the matter?’ In spite of his air of exhausted confusion, he was alert enough to notice her subtle change of expression.

‘There’s an engraving…’ she began, torn between her intense curiosity and the need to deny the powerful allure of the silver talisman.

‘Is there?’ No spark of enlightenment ignited his gaze. ‘Well—what does it say?’ he prompted, struggling up on one elbow as the seconds ticked by and she made no attempt to read the tiny inscription.

She bit her lip as she held it up, her dark lashes fanning down like sable brushes over her troubled green eyes, painting out his view of their expression.

“‘For Ryan, the bright foreigner in my life,’” she read, and frowned as she tried to make sense of the cryptic words, grappling with an elusive sense of familiarity. The inscription was put there by a woman, she was sure, but its meaning continued to lie stubbornly just beyond her comprehension.

‘What does it mean? Foreigner in what way? Do you think it means that you’re not a New Zealander?’

She was aware of him slumping back against the cushion. ‘I have no idea,’ he murmured, his voice so flat with disappointment that she knew he spoke the absolute truth.

But at least she now had one clue as to his identity. ‘Ryan…’ She tested it out on her tongue, hoping the sound of it might trigger his memory. ‘Ryan must be your first name—does it ring any bells?’

‘I…my head…’

‘Is it hurting more?’

She broke off, relieved by the thumping on the back door, which heralded the arrival of an oilskin-clad Dave Freeman with a rather subdued-looking dog tucked under one arm and a briefcase under the other.

‘Oh, God, Dr Freeman—what happened!’ she gasped.

‘I thought that was my line,’ he said, smiling wryly, handing Zorro over as the wind whisked the door out of Nina’s hand and slammed it shut with a violent bang behind them. ‘He’s okay. He just got bowled over by the wind when he jumped out of the Range Rover. It’s only his pride that’s hurt,’ he explained.

‘Good boy, Zorro!’ Nina praised him extravagantly as she put him down on his wobbly legs and patted his wet head. She was so grateful that he had fulfilled his urgent commission that she didn’t even chide him when he shook himself violently, splattering muddy water over her stretch pants. ‘I was a bit worried that with the racket going on outside you might not hear him barking,’ she admitted.

‘We didn’t at first, not until he jumped up onto the front deck and attacked the French doors. Persistent little beggar, isn’t he? I know he’s not too keen on storms, so I figured that it wasn’t his idea to play fetch in the middle of a gale!’

‘I’m sorry to drag you out on such a filthy night,’ Nina said anxiously as her visitor briskly shouldered out of his hooded coat and hung it on the back of the door, ‘but I couldn’t think of what else to do.’

She hastily explained what had happened while Dave Freeman washed his hands at the kitchen sink. He was not much taller than her, but broad and stocky, still physically vigorous in his mid-fifties. With his balding grey head, chubby round face and neat silver beard, he had the look of a kindly teddy bear, but Nina had always found his rock-steady brown gaze uncomfortably penetrating.

Now, she was grateful for their unwavering calmness as she recounted her tale.

‘His clothes are a bit damp, but I didn’t like to move him around too much while his head was bleeding. He seems to have no idea who he is and that made me worry that he might have some kind of skull fracture or something.’

He dried his hands on the clean towel she handed him from the airing cupboard.

‘Well, there’s not an awful lot we could do about that right now except keep him under observation until the weather clears enough to get him to a hospital,’ he said gravely. ‘But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The worst-case scenario is often the least likely.’

He opened his briefcase and took out a stethoscope, his gravity lightening when he saw Nina’s expression of ill-disguised relief.

‘It’s not exactly the traditional black bag, but I always carry a very well-equipped first-aid kit around with me.’ He looped the stethoscope around his neck and patted it against his chest. ‘My badge of office—reassurance to the patient I’m not just any port in a storm—even though in this case it’s literally true. Do you think I look enough like a real doctor?’