Secret Seduction

by Susan Napier

  His knees butted into the back of her thighs, pushing them up into a relaxed curl, one bare foot tucking casually between her ankles. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest against her curved spine, the thud of his heart kicking into her shoulder-blade. Already his shivers were dying away as his face nuzzled into the thick waves tumbling down her back.

  ‘Your hair is different,’ he muttered.

  He had only seen her looking like a frizzy drowned rat; Nina wished that was something that he would forget.

  ‘I brushed it dry in front of the fire.’ She had deliberately spun out the soothing task as a way of distracting herself from nature’s destructive claws raking relentlessly at the house.

  Now the raw fury of the storm didn’t sound quite so frightening. Although she was the one supposedly offering comfort, she had discovered an unrecognised need in herself. How long had it been since she had lingered in the security of a warm human embrace? Karl was too self-absorbed to offer much in the way of comforting hugs and Nina had been so busy proving her independence that she had forgotten what it felt like to share the burden of a fear. She even found that she could now admit it out loud.

  ‘I hate storms like this…especially when there’s thunder and lightning, as well—they just terrify me.’ She shuddered, the image of those death bolts slamming out of the boiling sky burned into her retina.

  His arm tightened, his palm sliding farther under the curve of her ribs. ‘I know, but you came out to help me anyway. That was brave.’

  It had been fear, not bravery, that had driven her out into the storm—fear for him. ‘How did you know I hate storms?’

  There was no answer, and for a moment she wondered whether he had drifted back to sleep, but the quickening of his heartbeat suggested otherwise.

  ‘Ryan?’ she said sharply, the muscles pulling tight in her twisted neck as she squirmed her head around on the pillow in a vain attempt to see his face. Determined to find the answer, she loosened the arm at her waist and wriggled around to face him, wincing as their knees briefly collided. She straightened out her legs against the hard column of his thighs and flattened her hands on his chest to stop herself rolling farther into the hollow he had created in the mattress. Her hips were cushioned by the hot-water bottle that lay across his lower abdomen, branding the centre of their bodies with a fiery heat.

  Their heads were level on the pillow, and as she had suspected, his deep-set eyes were open, a shimmer of blue under the heavy lids, his hair tousled dry by sleep, the short strands spraying out like fine black ink against the snowy whiteness of the pillowcase.

  ‘How did you know that I’m afraid of storms?’ she persisted cautiously, her green eyes searching for any sign of evasion.

  His face was calm, his eyes steady. ‘You were screaming your head off,’ he said simply, resettling his arm over her waist, his hand splayed over the warm patch left on her lower back by contact with the hot-water bottle.

  It was a perfectly reasonable assumption—however hesitant he was to frame it in words.

  ‘That’s because you weren’t answering me.’ She unconsciously spread her hand over his beating heart as she revisited those endless moments of nerve-grinding panic. ‘At first I—I thought that you might be dead.’

  ‘Would you have cared?’

  The breath caught in her throat, her fingers clenching convulsively in the soft fabric of the sweatshirt. ‘That someone had died? How can you ask that? Of course I would!’

  ‘I meant me, specifically. If I died,’ he murmured, increasing her agitation.

  ‘I don’t even know who you—specifically—are,’ she denied quickly, anxious not to pursue his morbid train of thought. ‘Do you realise you just remembered me screaming? Can you think back now? Do you remember what happened to you?’

  ‘I remember what happened afterwards,’ he corrected her. ‘I remember opening my eyes and seeing you.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her disappointment was mingled with an uncomfortable surge of relief. Of course it would be less hassle if she could just treat him as a ship passing in the night, but even ships, she thought, have registered names…unless they were pirates out for plunder! He certainly had the colouring to be a buccaneer from the Spanish Main, but she couldn’t detect any accent to his English.

  She saw that his eyelids were slowly sinking again and couldn’t resist the urge to test him.

  ‘Ryan?’ His lids flicked up and she smiled encouragingly at him. ‘At least you seem to be responding to your name.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know whether that’s because it really is my name or simply because you’ve told me it is,’ he said wearily, and she immediately felt guilty.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She bit her lip. ‘I know I’m not supposed to pressure you—’

  ‘No, I’m sorry…that I can’t do what you want. I’m trying to remember, but when I do…my head feels as if it’s about to explode.’

  He couldn’t have said anything more calculated to earn her compassion. She knew exactly how that felt. ‘Then don’t try. Go back to sleep. The next time you wake up, it’ll be morning and everything will be all right.’

  ‘Promise?’ His sceptical smile was extremely wry. He might be confused, it told her, but he wasn’t stupid. They both knew it was a promise she couldn’t make.

  The smile dramatically altered his face, softening the taut severity of his features, banishing the grim rigidity that had projected an impression of tightly suppressed hostility and turning him from an object of wary curiosity and compassion into a man of potentially dangerous attractiveness. His face was too lived-in to be classically handsome, but his experience would no doubt add to his charm.

  ‘Things always look clearer in daylight,’ she said, resorting to a feeble cliché.

  ‘Clearer but not necessarily better,’ he murmured. His hand moved from her waist and emerged from the covers to softly brush her cheekbone. ‘It looks like I wasn’t the only one who was caught in the wars tonight,’ he said. ‘You have quite a bump here.’

  His touch left a streak of fire on her skin and her fingers flew up to check the tender skin.

  ‘By the way,’ Dave had said as he was on his way out the door, ‘it’s probably a little late to be very effective now, but you should try some ice on that cheek of yours, otherwise you could end up with a beauty of a black eye tomorrow!’

  She felt gingerly around the slight puffiness. ‘I don’t know how it got there. I must have knocked it on something…so much was going on…’ she babbled, not wanting to tell Ryan that he had been the one who hurt her.

  His fingers lingered along the delicate line of her jaw. ‘You have lots of tiny scratches, too.’

  ‘Leaves, a-and twigs…they were blowing around like mad,’ she stuttered as his thumb gently skimmed under her lower lip.

  ‘Such smooth, translucent skin. It’s a pity to see it marred,’ he said, and she wondered if she was crazy to sense a threat in his abstract praise. ‘Do they sting?’

  If she said yes, would he offer to kiss them better? The thought popped into her head to be savagely squelched.

  ‘No…I—I can’t feel them at all,’ she said truthfully, trying to master her wayward imagination. Apart from the faint throb on her cheekbone, all she was aware of feeling was the soft friction of his cool finger pads caressing her face, slowly, as if he were a blind man shaping her image in his mind. She shifted her head back on the pillow, escaping the disturbing touch.

  There was a tiny pause as their eyes meshed, his intently curious, hers wide with dismay. ‘I’m sorry. Am I trespassing on someone else’s territory?’ he asked gravely, letting his relaxed hand drop to the pillow.

  Her green eyes flared with feminist annoyance. ‘Yes…mine!’

  His gravity turned to sleepy amusement. ‘So…you live here all alone?’

  In the unlikely event he turned out to be a serial killer, she was telling him nothing he didn’t already know. ‘Mostly.’ Let him make what he liked of that!


  ‘You and the dashing masked hero.’

  ‘Who?’ For a moment, she thought his wits had gone wandering again. ‘Oh, you mean Zorro? Well, officially he belongs to my landlord, so his legal address is next door, but Ray doesn’t seem to mind that he spends most of his time over here.’

  ‘You don’t own this place yourself? How do you live? What do you do?’

  He mightn’t be able to answer questions, but he could certainly ask them! She was tempted to tease him that she was independently wealthy. ‘I paint—watercolours, not houses.’

  A muscle flicked along the line of his jaw, roughened by a bloom of black stubble. ‘You’re an artist.’

  She watched him turning the idea over in his head.

  ‘Do you sell?’

  He obviously had a well-developed mercenary instinct. He could have asked if she was any good. Fortunately, the past nine months had given Nina a sunny confidence in her creative abilities.

  She smiled. ‘I don’t starve.’

  His eyes narrowed at her serene response, dipping deliberately to the curving outline of her body, exaggerated by the heaping of covers. ‘Exactly how well do you dine?’

  Her Mona Lisa smile widened. ‘Oh, it’s definitely champagne and caviar for breakfast, lunch and dinner around here,’ she mocked, ‘and that’s just for Zorro! I usually plump for truffles with everything, myself.’ The smile curled into an open grin as she realised she had made an unintended pun.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t call your proportions exactly Rubenesque,’ he concluded in a backhanded compliment, ‘so I take it that your truffle boat has actually yet to come in?’

  ‘Something like that. But I’m in no rush. I like the simple life….’

  Nearly three years ago, life had been so painfully different. Her widowed grandmother had died after a long, drawn-out battle against the cancer that had gradually eaten away at her indomitable strength and precious joy in life, as well as depriving her of her home and most of her life savings.

  After her death, Nina, who had tirelessly nursed her beloved Gran through all the stages of her illness, had been left feeling rootless, her talent burnt out from an endless stream of slick commercial jobs taken to earn a quick buck. She had decided that it was time to spread her wings, to escape the dingy flat in which Gran had dwindled and died, and to travel as she had always dreamed of doing, to seek new experiences that might inspire her to paint again. That decision was the last thing she remembered with any clarity.

  Whatever she had done during those two lost years in which she had apparently backpacked around Australasia, she had acquired no lasting souvenirs. But something had eventually drawn her here, to Shearwater Island, where fate had stepped in and she had found herself suddenly at peace.

  ‘I’m happy here.’ Her voice carried the lilt of unshakeable conviction. ‘Some people say that if they had their lives to live over again, they’d want things to turn out differently, but I’m glad for everything that’s happened in my life so far because it brought me here!’

  His body jerked as if a dagger had struck him square in the chest, a deep, tearing sound coughing up from his lungs, the colour draining from his face.

  ‘Ryan?’

  He sucked in a hissing breath through clenched teeth. ‘It’s nothing. I’m all right.’

  But it was clearly a lie. Whatever had hit him had hit him hard. Perspiration glistened on his brow and along his upper lip, and his eyes were almost white with a soul-searing pain that dazzled and sickened her.

  ‘Ryan!’ He was utterly rigid in the bed and she put her arms around him and discovered that he was shivering again. It had happened so fast she was stunned. Was he lapsing back into shock? ‘What’s the matter? Is it your head?’

  ‘No, I’m all right.’ His voice was raw with effort.

  ‘No, you’re not. For heaven’s sake, tell me,’ she begged, horrified by the glaze of tears in his eyes and the rictus of his face as he fought for control. ‘This is no time to act all noble and macho—’

  ‘It’s just a cramp!’ he ground out, but it was like no cramp that Nina had ever seen; it seemed to be racking his whole body. Was he having some kind of a heart attack?

  ‘Are you sure? Can I help?’ she pleaded, unable to stand seeing him in such torment.

  ‘Yes, damn you!’ The words ripped from his throat in a tortured groan of angry self-derision. ‘Hold me.’ He tore the barrier of the hot-water bottle from between them and dragged her against the full length of his shaking body. ‘Tight.’ Her head arched back as he buried his clammy face against the curve of her throat, his fierce voice muffled by her skin. ‘Tighter. Hold me, dammit—and for God’s sake, don’t let go!’

  ‘I won’t!’ she promised, contracting her arms bruisingly hard across his shuddering back, cupping the nape of his neck with one hand and feeling the opposing bands of rigid muscle writhe beneath his skin. His own arms coiled around her waist like steel ropes, sealing them together like the two halves of a whole, slowly constricting her breathing until she could only take shallow gasps that made red spots dance before her eyes. And still she made no attempt to struggle, for whatever she was suffering was mild in comparison to his elemental pain.

  He shuddered soundlessly for long minutes, but even when his rigidity began to ease, Nina didn’t dare release him from her fierce embrace. She didn’t know if she could give him what he really needed, but she had promised and she wouldn’t—couldn’t—let him down.

  Her muscles trembled from the strain and still she held on. His arms slumped over her hips, his body becoming warm, then hot as their combined heat built up within the thick cocoon of blankets, and the ragged, uneven breathing against her throat became a slow and regular sigh of sound, a tempting lullaby seducing her to sleep.

  Time became elastic. Her concentration wavered and she closed her eyes to centre her drifting thoughts, and when she opened them a scant few seconds later, it was morning. The cold grey daylight edging in around the imperfectly pulled curtains had chased the shadows from the room.

  And from Ryan’s face.

  For a split second, her sleepy brain registered the pure rightness of waking up beside him, but then her dawning consciousness slammed down the barriers.

  They were practically nose-to-nose on the pillow, his warmly exhaled breath ruffling against her soft lips, his spicy male scent a tantalising tang in her nostrils. Their bodies were still melded together, his thigh nestled securely between her crooked legs, her arms tucked like folded wings under his as they loosely encircled each other in warm bands of flesh. With one of her arms caught under his side, Nina was forced to lie there contemplating her mistake.

  She had allowed herself to get far too involved. She had allowed her fright, her fears, her compassion, to override her caution and now she was trapped by an unwelcome sense of emotional connection to the stranger she held in her arms.

  And not only emotional, she thought, as he stirred in his sleep, his long thigh flexing between her legs, his loins resettling even more intimately into the cradle of her hips. Even through their clothes she could feel the firm contours of his manhood nudging into the cusp of her thigh. An electrical thrill shot through her body, the tips of her breasts suddenly erotically sensitised to the purring vibration of his chest, and she decided that it was definitely time to stage a strategic withdrawal.

  She had begun inching her lower arm carefully out from under his body when there was a fluttering under his closed eyelids and a faint frown furrowed his brow, pulling slightly at the neat slash of stitches punctuating his left temple. She stilled, waiting for him to settle back down.

  ‘Nina?’ he muttered. He inhaled deeply and his frown was replaced by a sensuous smile of sleepy satisfaction as he identified the unique personal fragrance that spilled across the pillow. ‘Nina…’

  Eyes still closed, his head dipped and his mouth homed unerringly in on hers, parting her lips in a leisurely kiss that caused a delicious chaos in her startled senses. He made a soft
sound of lazy enjoyment as his open mouth moved enticingly back and forth over the succulent plumpness of her lower lip, taking tiny, nibbling bites along the ripe curve before sucking it into his mouth, creating an erotic, rhythmic tugging that made her toes curl inside her socks.

  His hand smoothed up her spine to cup the back of her head, holding her still as the moist string of gentle sips deepened to a slow and lingering exploration. His mouth was as smooth as silk, as slick as satin, his tongue gliding over her teeth, licking into the sultry depths of her feminine being, corrupting her with a fierce pleasure that felt both alien and scorchingly familiar.

  What had begun as a light, languorous kiss had suddenly flared into white-hot excitement. Nina was bombarded with overwhelming sensations as Ryan swept her along in his hungry passion, the intimate scrape of his beard, the taste of his spicy-warm tongue, the rasp of his ragged breathing and the musky scent of his arousal, all combining to shatter her illusion that she was safe from the wildness that stalked the darkest corridors of her imagination. Ryan’s hand slid under her sweatshirt and touched her bare skin, then, almost too late, a shocked awareness of what was about to happen crashed over Nina.

  She wrenched herself away from him, burning with shame. ‘My God, what are we doing?’

  ‘We’re doing what comes naturally…making love.’

  ‘I—no!’ She fought free of the tangled blankets and stumbled out of bed, backing away from him as if he were the devil himself—the devil in a faded sweatshirt with eyes as bright as heaven and a mouth that was pure sin.

  ‘Careful. If you go much farther, you’re going to end up in the deep blue sea,’ he said, revealing a frightening affinity with her own thoughts that made her wonder what other diabolical talents he possessed.

  ‘I’d better go and see what there is for breakfast,’ she mumbled, and fled, deciding that if they were going to eat together, she would make sure that she used a very long spoon!

  CHAPTER FOUR