Secret Seduction

‘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.