Trying to disguise the little quiver of unwanted pleasure at the intimate nickname he’d given her seven years before, she pointed to the inflamed cut. “It’s infected. I was just trying to help.” She handed him the cotton pad soaked in antiseptic.
He looked at the wound, and nodded. “Thanks.”
She turned away, fighting another unwanted surge of sorrow. They’d been so happy once…now they were just awkward. “Dinner’s almost ready. Do you want it now, or after you’re cleaned up?”
“I’ll take a shower. I need to get the dirt and gravel and glass out of the cuts—and some of them are in places you don’t want to clean,” he added, with a wry grin.
“Nothing I haven’t seen or touched before,” she retorted without thinking.
He looked at her—and she could barely breathe, reading the hot, urgent man’s need in his eyes. She skittered farther across the floor. “Stupid comment,” she mumbled through stiff lips.
After a long moment he nodded. Without looking at her again he headed for the bathroom. She fled to the kitchen, needing coffee to steady her nerves, and clear her turbulent confusion.
When he came back out, she almost spilled the hot coffee all over herself. Clad only in a towel, his dark coffee skin gleamed in the firelight, his wet hair dripped rivulets down his deep brown chest, broad shoulders and muscular arms, like hot sweat.
He walked straight past her, seeming completely unconscious of her fascinated gaze on his superb body—so superb it took her breath away even with the cuts and bruises marking it. “Sorry,” he muttered as he passed, motioning to the towel, his nakedness beneath. “I should have picked up clean clothes from the bedroom first, but I was so tired I didn’t think—” He turned at her continued silence. “Tess?” He made no movement, but somehow seemed closer by the power of the heat in his deep, dark eyes.
She lost the power to breathe. She returned his gaze, licking her upper lip in a fear that was paralyzing, yet delicious…
Like the first time she’d seen him.
Her lips parted, as the sweet rush of erotic memory filled her heart. Returning home from second-year exams at teacher’s college. Attracted by the hammering and drilling, she’d walked around the corner of her house to the backyard. The carpenters her father had hired were tearing down the old gazebo to make way for a new one. Seeing Jirrah—David, as he was then—strip off his T-shirt and mop the sweat from his lithe, muscled body, she couldn’t tear her gaze away, enthralled by an unfettered portrait of masculine beauty: a glistening sculpture of superb honed muscle and warm coffee skin. A purity of grace and perfection of form that could have belonged in Michelangelo’s imagination.
Against her will, half terrified of shattering the moment, she’d kept walking to him, her heart pounding. She couldn’t breathe, or think beyond reaching him. Nothing else had ever felt like this. No man, not even Duncan’s friend Cameron, who was so handsome and so kind to her, had ever affected her this way.
He’d looked up as she reached him, with a quick half smile that froze on his face as he, too, stared. She saw then he was Aboriginal—or, judging by the lightness of his skin, of mixed Aboriginal-European descent; but her family’s prejudice against the lower classes and indigenous Australians made no difference to her heart. She stood before him, struck almost dumb, drinking him into her heart with her wondering eyes.
“Hi,” was all she could find to say, cursing her banal tongue for its stupidity; but he knew. He’d known from that first look all the need, the joy, the emotion in her heart she couldn’t hide. She was his…and he was hers.
“Tess?”
She started to the present, and tore her eyes from him. “You must be starving. I’ll serve dinner. Since I still can’t cook, it’s not much, just a canned stew on toast and coffee—”
“It’ll be fine,” he said quietly. “It’s okay, Tess. I won’t touch you.”
The words dried on her tongue.
“I know,” was all he said, his face filled with compassion. “How long have you been running from him? Did he hurt you?”
She stood frozen, rooted to the spot. Dear God, he was beautiful—but the gentle understanding and tender pity in his eyes seared her soul. Finally she turned away. “Don’t be so nice to me. Compassion doesn’t fit your new bad-boy image. It just makes me wonder when you’ll tell me what else you want from me.”
After a few moments’ silence, she heard his rolling footsteps padding to the bedroom to dress.
Over the simple meal, she found herself blurting, “Why didn’t you contact me from prison? Why didn’t you write, or see me when you got out, if what you’ve told me is the truth?”
He looked up at the abrupt tone, his bruised face filled with shadows. “Don’t ask the questions unless you’re ready to hear the answers. They’re not pretty.”
She wouldn’t turn away this time. She was tired of running and hiding and living in shadows. “I’m not stupid. Being brought up by barristers, you get to know the law reasonably well. With a criminal record you can verify your identity with fingerprints. Just by proving you’re alive you can have Cameron and Duncan on charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and complicity in committing a felony—not to mention the bigamy. So if all you say is true, why didn’t you do it?”
He looked in her eyes, hiding nothing; and in the face that made her ache with its strong, dark masculinity, she saw years of festering hate and the ugliness of betrayal chilling his soul. “I don’t think you want to know, Tessa.”
She clenched her jaw. “Maybe not—but I need to know! You of all people should understand that.”
He shrugged. “I have a family. Parents who are getting old. A brother with juvie priors. A sister with a troubled kid. A cousin who did two years in lockup for assault. They’re making a success of their lives now, but that wouldn’t mean squat to the cops if Beller and Duncan got up a conspiracy against them.”
“Oh, dear God.” She grabbed her glass of water, but gagged on the second swallow. “You must hate me for what they did to you.”
He shrugged. “Let’s just say I’ve had a few doubts about your part in things since the day you slipped into the hardware store in Lynch Hill when a car pulled up behind you.”
She lifted her face, searching for answers in his eyes.
He nodded, with a wry grimace. “Your face still gives you away every time. The fear in your eyes, the hollow look of a hunted woman, has stayed with me ever since.”
“Is that why you watched me?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t think I trusted my own instincts until you pulled the gun on me today. But when Beller torched my car, I started thinking. It’s a pretty desperate act for a respectable guy like him. I thought maybe he wanted to stop me from getting to you, to stop us from getting together and talking. I needed to get out of Lynch Hill—and—well, someone had to look out for you, get you out of his reach, give you somewhere safe to stay.”
She closed her eyes, feeling the trembling work its way up from her fingers and toes.
