Secret Seduction

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….