She blinked up at his face and something peculiar happened to her already unsteady heart-rate, for he was utterly spectacular.
His chiselled features gave his face a hard, auto cratic appearance, but a sensual mouth softened it. Narrowed eyes were fringed by blocks of dark lashes and his hair was jet-dark and wavy, and slightly too long. He looked rugged and powerful—familiar and yet a stranger. His skin was golden and olive and glowing—as though it had been gently lit from within. His was the face that had drifted in and out of her fevered sleep, coaxing and cooling her. A dark angel. A guardian angel.
So she had not been dreaming at all. Nor, it seemed, had she died.
Still blinking in consternation, she glanced around her. She was in a room—a very plain and simple room, containing little more than a small wooden table and a couple of old chairs. On the floor were worn floorboards, the walls were wooden, too, and she could hear the roar of waves. It was cool and dim and she was lying on a low kind of bed, beneath a tickly-feeling thing that was too thick to be a sheet and too thin to be a blanket. Her hand slithered inside.
She was wearing nothing but a man’s T-shirt!
The last of her lethargy fled in an instant and fear galloped in to take its place. Clutching the coverlet, she sat up and stared at the man who stood over her, his dark face shuttered and watchful. Was she certain that she wasn’t dreaming? Who was he, and what was she doing here?
‘Would you mind telling me what the hell’s going on?’ she demanded breathlessly.
‘I think…’ There was a pause. He watched her very carefully, like a hunter with his prey held firmly in his sights. ‘That I should be asking you that very same question.’
Her heart was pounding like a piston. His voice was soft and rich and accented. And accusing. When surely, if there was any accusing to be done… Beneath the coverlet she ran an exploratory hand down over her body, as if checking that all her limbs were intact. And not just her limbs…
Nico watched her. ‘Oh, do not worry,’ he drawled. ‘Your virtue is intact. Or at least as intact as it was when you arrived.’ Though God only knew what she had been up to with the band of drunks on board that boat.
Ella tried to will her stubborn memory into gear, but it was as if her brain had been wrapped in cotton wool. Something told her that she must be grateful to this man, but something about his dark masculinity was suddenly making her feel very shy. More than shy. ‘What’s happened?’
‘You have been sick,’ he explained, but his eyes lost nothing of their glittering suspicion.
She looked around for signs that she might be in a hospital, but there was nothing remotely medical or sterile about the place. In fact, there were grains of sand on the floorboards, and a wetsuit lay coiled in a heap like a seal skin. Some of the cotton wool cleared. ‘Where am I?’
‘Ah! At last! The traditional question. It took you long enough to ask,’ he observed, arching imperious eyebrows that shot up into the ebony tumble of his hair. His dark eyes fixed her with a lancing stare.
‘I’m asking now.’
The eyes narrowed, for he was unused to such a response. ‘You don’t know?’
‘Why would I bother asking you if I already knew?’
Unless, he pondered, she had her own separate agenda, and there was no way of finding out, not until she was properly recovered. Not when she was still…
Nico turned away from her body, its outline undisguised by the T-shirt, its firm curves spelling out a temptation that would have stretched the resolve of the most holy and celibate of men—two things of which he had never been accused.
For hours she had lain there, her tawny limbs and hair flailing as she thrashed and cried out, hot with fever and lost in the strange world of delirium. And he had bathed her. Sponged her down. Fed her with water and sat with her during the long, lonely hours till dawn.
It had been a new sensation for him—having someone reliant and dependent on him. She had been as helpless as a wounded animal, and that very helplessness had brought about a protectiveness he had never before experienced.
Until…
He had been smoothing the damp hair away from her sweat-sheened skin, murmuring words of comfort, when she had suddenly called out in alarm. And when he shushed her she had sat up, the sheet falling from her. The T-shirt he had hastily flung on her had managed to both conceal and reveal—and the hazy hint of glorious rose-tipped breast beneath had been enchanting beyond belief. He had tried to move away but she had lifted her arms and clung onto him with the terrified and irresistible strength of someone who was lost in a nightmare. And she had been close. Oh…so…close… Far too close for comfort and sane thought.
His body had sprung into instant and unwilling response as she’d pressed closer still. Nerves stretching with unbearable tension, he had stared down into her eye
s—the most green and startling eyes he had ever seen—but they had been clouded and vacant. Whomever or whatever she was seeing, it certainly was not him.
‘Lie down on the bed!’ he had ordered harshly, in English, and the still-dry lips had puckered into the shape of a parched flower before much-needed rain fell onto it.
Some men would have thought—why not? Taja ch’e e rosso, as the Romans sometimes said. To have taken advantage of what was so beautifully on offer might have been an option, but Nico was of different blood from other men. Even if his hadn’t been an appetite jaded by what had always been given to him so freely, he could not have countenanced making love to a woman unless she was in total command of her senses.
He stared down at her now and saw that the wild, febrile light had left her eyes. He felt a small tug of triumph, for she had been in his charge and now she was recovered. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked unexpectedly.
His words made Ella focus, not on the extraordinary situation in which she found herself, but on the needs of her body, and she suddenly realised that her stomach felt empty and her head light as air. Hungry? She was absolutely starving!
‘Why, yes,’ she said, in surprise.