Secret Seduction

by Susan Napier

  Nina’s feet unfroze and she dashed out into the maelstrom. She had barely gone a few steps before she was soaked to the skin, the rain drumming savagely down on her exposed head, the punishing drops beating into her eyes and mouth so that she could scarcely see or breathe as she splashed through the rivers of water, gravel and mud streaming down the road.

  She could see Zorro, still barking fiercely, his scrawny flanks wet and heaving as he dashed up and down, making little darting forays at the fallen tree, clearly trying to get at the motionless bundle of clothes barely visible beneath.

  Nina yelled at him to keep out from under her feet as she panted to a halt and began hauling on the tangled treetop, fighting against the wind and the sheer weight of the densely matted branches.

  ‘Hey—can you hear me? Are you all right?’ she shouted, tearing frantically at the barrier. ‘I’m going to get you free. Can you move?’ There was no reply, but she didn’t give up, screaming a barrage of questions as she worked, hoping that the sound of her voice would jolt the trapped figure into a fighting awareness of what she was trying to do.

  The coarse central trunk was thicker than her thigh and she found it difficult to get a grip. The wet bark kept slipping through her clumsy fingers as she tried to wrestle it aside, spiky stumps rasping and cutting at her hands, leaving dark trails of blood against her white palms. Bent twigs jabbed and scratched at her exposed skin and clusters of leathery leaves slapped against her face as she squatted low and edged in under the dripping mass, wedging a shoulder into a V-shaped fork in the trunk in the hope of being able to lever up the lighter end and roll it away.

  Through the foliage that was whipping dangerously close to her eyes, Nina was able to catch an occasional glimpse of a pale, oval blur, reassuring her that at least the victim wasn’t pinned facedown in the mud and in imminent danger of suffocation or drowning.

  Spitting out mouthfuls of rainwater, Nina gritted her teeth and bent to her task with renewed urgency. Zorro skittered between her braced legs, squirming under the thicket of branches as soon as they began to lift off the ground, emerging backwards with the hem of a thick black coat gripped between his teeth. As he stretched the trapped fabric taut, Nina heard a harsh, masculine groan emerge from the depths of the tree. A burst of adrenalin gave her a moment of superhuman strength and she arched upright in a heaving twist, rolling the heavy trunk clear of the man sprawled on the gravel.

  Nina fell to her knees beside him, catching his hand as it rose to waver in the air in front of his face as if groping for something that only he could see.

  A sharp tingle shot up her arm and into her chest when their wet fingers touched, and she wondered whether his body had been harbouring some residual electricity from the lightning strike. She fought the desire to recoil, her hand tightening around his as she looked down into his square-jawed face, his features barely distinguishable in the rain-blurred darkness. There was nothing familiar about him. Nothing at all. The contraction in Nina’s chest increased, her breath squeezing painfully through her lungs as she was stricken by a nameless terror.

  She tried to push it away. Whoever the man was, he was undoubtedly dazed and in pain, his eyes slitted against the rain, dark rivulets of either mud or blood, or a mixture of both, pouring down from his left temple to drip off his jaw into the upright collar of his thick coat.

  Lightning bolted out of the sky again, providing Nina with a convenient justification for her mindless panic, and she threw herself across the man’s torso in an instinctive attempt to shield him from fresh harm.

  His sharp groan of agony wrenched her back on her heels, her hands quickly searching over the front of his coat, the thickness of the dense weave frustrating her attempts to find the source of his pain. It was impossible to tell what his build was beneath the bulky coat, but he was certainly over six feet tall, and Nina knew that if he couldn’t get down the hill under his own steam, she was going to have to go for help.

  She put her mouth close to his ear, the fat, wet tails of her hair briefly pasting themselves against his lean cheek. ‘Can you tell me where you’re hurt?’

  His head whipped around towards her voice, his hard temple colliding painfully with her high cheekbone.

  ‘Ouch!’ She cupped her eye, involuntary tears mingling with the raindrops on her lashes. As if she wasn’t wet enough!

  ‘What happened?’ They were the first words he had uttered, and to her relief, his deep, harsh voice sounded thankfully lucid.

  This time, Nina pulled back to where he would be able to see, as well as hear, the words on her lips. ‘You were hit by a tree. We really need to get out of this storm and take a look at your injuries,’ she told him. ‘Are you able to move? My house is just down the hill.’

  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 clas
sic 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 inj
ured 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!’