‘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