She blinked, and discovered that she was lying in an incredibly soft, warm bed and the whiteness was the curving surface of a wall a few inches from her nose. She reached out to touch the rough plaster surface, using the contact with reality to push herself upright, meaning to peer out of the narrow window which broke the curve of the wall at the end of the bed. Instead she sank back on her heels with a smothered moan as her head swam horribly.
‘Poor Vivian. Head thumping like a drum?’
She opened herself mindlessly to the warm sympathy in the sugar-coated voice. ‘Umm…’ she groaned in inarticulate agreement.
The sugar melted to sickly syrup. ‘Hangovers are a bitch, aren’t they? I had no idea you were such a reckless drinker. I told you champagne shouldn’t be knocked back like water…’
Vivian swung around on her knees and froze, uttering a gasp of shock as she discovered why the bed was so blissfully warm.
‘You!’
‘Who did you expect? The faithful fiancé?’
Nicholas Thorne was sprawled beside her, his solid outline under the covers blocking the only escape-route from the narrow single bed. His tanned shoulders were dark against the stark white pillows and his chest above the folded sheet bare, apart from a thick dusting of gold-flecked body-hair that didn’t soften the impact of the powerful slabs of raw muscle. Even lounging indolently in bed he managed to exude an aura of barely leashed strength. His head was propped against the stout slats of the wooden bed-head and, with his tousled blond hair and scarred beauty, and a mockingly cynical smile on his lips, he looked to Vivian like the epitome of sin—a fallen angel begging for the redemption of a good woman…
It was a shockingly seductive thought and she wrenched her eyes away from their forbidden fascination with his body, all too aware that his expression of sleepy amusement was belied by the tension in the muscles of his arms innocently resting on top of the bedclothes, ready to thwart any foolish lunge to freedom across his body. Not that she was in any condition to make one. She could hardly think, over the riot in her head. She rubbed a hand across her aching eyes and gasped, suddenly realising what was so different about him. He wasn’t wearing his eye-patch.
‘You have two eyes!’ she blurted out.
‘Most people do,’ he said drily. ‘But, in my case, one is strictly non-functional.’ He angled his head so that she could see the immobility beneath the distorted left eyelid, the clouded iris.
‘H-how did it happen?’ she whispered shakily.
‘You have to ask?’
She closed her own eyes briefly. ‘Yes, it seems I do. They told me at the time that your injuries weren’t serious—’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
Her eyes flew open at his harsh scepticism. ‘I was only fifteen! Still a minor as far as the law was concerned—nobody told me very much of anything. The police dealt mostly through my parents—’ She broke off, realising the dangers of her impulsive self-defence. ‘But you can’t blame Mum and Dad for wanting to protect me,’ she protested quickly. ‘They were just doing what any parents would have done in the circumstances…’
In fact, they had been so anxious that she should not be traumatised by the tragedy that they had shielded her from all publicity surrounding the accident, and most of her concrete information had come from that dreadful night at the hospital where, still in a state of shock, she had been gently questioned by a Police Youth Aid officer. She was told that the pregnant front-seat passenger of the other car, Mrs Barbara Thorne, had been thrown out and killed instantly when it rolled down a steep bank. The driver, Nicholas Thorne, had suffered concussion and leg injuries. His son, who had been belted into a back seat, had also miraculously escaped without life-threatening injury.
The car-load of boisterous teenage party-goers, including fourteen-year-old Janna, that Vivian had been driving home along the gravelled country road had suffered only shock and bruises.
To her relief he didn’t pursue the point. Instead he stroked a finger across his scarred lid and said simply, ‘Fragments of flying glass. This was slashed to ribbons, although fortunately my sight seemed to have suffered only temporary damage. But an infection set in a few months later. A microscopic sliver of glass had worked its way through to the back of the eye…’
And here she was moaning in self-pity over a mere headache! ‘And…your leg?’
‘Not as bad as the limp might suggest. I can do pretty well everything on it that I used to.’
‘Except run.’
Several days after the tragedy she had overheard part of a low-voiced conversation between her parents in which her father had said it had been a twin celebration for the Thornes that night—Nicholas’s twenty-fifth birthday and the announcement that his sprinting had earned him selection to the New Zealand Olympic team.
‘Oh, I can still run. Just not like a world-class sprinter,’ he said, in a voice as dry as dust.
‘I see…’ She might as well plough on and remind him of all the dreams that meeting her on a rainy road that night had crushed. ‘And…you never married again?’
‘No.’
The clipped reply said more than all the rest. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, her voice crushed with guilt and compassion.
His expression tightened dangerously, then relaxed as he studied her gravity, the sincerity of the pain-glazed green eyes and tragic freckled nose. His gaze flickered over her kneeling figure, and he smiled with sinister intent that curled her toes.
‘How sorry, I wonder?’
‘Wh-what do you mean?’ She put a hand up to her pounding head, overwhelmed by the impossibility of dealing with his unpredictability in her debilitated state. One moment he seemed charming, almost gentle, the next he was brimming with black-hearted villainy.