Susan Napier – Secret Seduction (страница 3)

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 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.