was nothing to disguise the animal-like sleekness of his body, streamlined with lithe and sinewy muscle, the thick tangle of hair on his chest tapering down to a narrow line where the broad band of elastic dipped low across his slim hips, the thin, stretchy, grey boxers softly clinging to contours of his masculinity.
Nina could feel her cheeks warm. She cleared her throat. ‘I was just saying goodbye to the doctor.’
His intent stare didn’t shift from her face. ‘I need to use the bathroom,’ he said bluntly.
‘Oh…’ Her blush deepened. ‘It’s straight down the hall, first on the right,’ she said, pointing, and as he pushed himself away from the wall and shambled stiffly off in the right direction, she looked anxiously over her shoulder at Dave.
He grinned. ‘His kidneys are working—that’s definitely a very good sign.’
She decided that the psychiatrist was an incurable optimist by nature. ‘Will he be all right by himself?’ she worried.
He pursed his lips. ‘Would you like me to check before I leave?’
‘Yes, please. And then could you show him across the hall to the spare room? I’ll make up the bed in there. It’ll be much more comfortable than the couch.’ If the storm was going to keep her awake, she didn’t want to have to spend all night watching her uninvited guest sleep. Briefly looking in on him once every two hours would be much less taxing on the nerves!
CHAPTER THREE
A REVERBERATING crash wrenched Nina upright in her chair, her hand flattened against her pounding chest, a scream hovering in the back of her dry throat.
She blinked around the dimly lit room, half expecting to see that the roof had fallen in, but everything looked reassuringly normal. The fire had been reduced to glowing embers, and shifting her cramped legs under the mohair rug, she was surprised to realise that she must have nodded off despite the gale still rocking the house on its foundations.
At least the thunder and lightning at the leading edge of the storm had passed over. But the rain had barely eased, driving horizontally against the front of the house and drum-rolling across the roof to overflow the gutters in a noisy tattoo on the wooden decking below.
Perhaps the noise that had woken her had been a loose branch smashing against the creaking weatherboards. Zorro wasn’t in his usual sprawl in front of the fire, and for a moment she was concerned until she remembered that he had surprisingly chosen to sacrifice his comfort to keep vigil over the stranger, curled up on the floor on the worn piece of sheepskin he used as a portable bed.
It was still pitch-black outside the rain-streaked window, and Nina turned her wrist, squinting down at her bare arm before she remembered that she wasn’t wearing a watch. She hadn’t made that slip in a very long time. She had broken her watch in her companionway fall on the ferry that had first brought her to Shearwater and in the months that followed had never taken the ferry company up on their offer to replace it. Only people who had to live to a schedule needed to carry around a constant reminder of their next appointment. Time was relative, and Nina preferred the more flexible version: island time. ‘She’ll be right, mate,’ an islander would chuckle if someone missed the late-afternoon ferry sailing. ‘There’ll be another one along tomorrow!’
Nina looked over at the small driftwood clock on the stone mantelpiece above the sluggish fire. Barely 4:00 a.m.—still a little too soon to wake Ryan up again, she decided conscientiously. She picked up the book that had slipped off her lap and fallen face down on the floor. So far he had passed all the little tests that Dave had suggested with flying colours, and as the hours crept by, she had begun to rationalise her previous worries as absurdly excessive. Of course he would be all right. And in the clear light of day, they would establish exactly who he was and he would be happily, if not entirely healthily, on his way!
Suddenly, there was another crash and the unmistakable sound of shattering glass from along the hall, and she realised that the noise that had startled her out of her sleep had come from the same direction. The accompanying hoarse cry of her name galvanised her into action and she dashed down to the spare bedroom, her heart in her mouth.
Her hand scrabbled for the light-switch, and as the overhead light blazed into life, her gaze cut to the figure standing by the narrow single bed pushed against the far wall.
‘Ryan, are you all right?’ She didn’t need to ask what had happened. The rudimentary lamp, made of a sand-filled chianti bottle topped off with a bare light bulb, was lying on the wooden floor, along with the upended pot plant that had sat next to it on the bedside cabinet, concealing the electric flex. Nearer to the edge of the bed lay the remains of a tall glass, the broken shards glinting wickedly in the widening pool of water seeping across the waxed floorboards. Zorro was warily skirting the debris, sniffing at the encroaching water.
‘Nina?’ Ryan lifted his hand to shade his eyes, narrowed against the sudden glare. ‘It was dark…I couldn’t find the lamp…I was thirsty.’ His body swayed in her direction. ‘Where were you?’
‘Don’t move!’ Nina yelled as his bare foot left the ground and Ryan instantly froze in place, his eyes widening on her alarmed face, his pupils shrinking visibly to accommodate the light. ‘Sorry,’ she said, tempering her voice though still keeping it firm. ‘But you might cut yourself. I don’t want you to move until I clean up this broken glass.’
Well, he was certainly able to obey simple commands, she thought with grim amusement as he stood like a statue while she bustled around him with a dustpan and brush, pushing Zorro firmly away and sweeping up the glass and soil, mopping up the remains of the water with an old towel.
‘I didn’t know where you were,’ he murmured as if it explained the mayhem, and perhaps it did. His mind had obviously fixed on Nina as the one constant in a dismayingly unfamiliar world. He must have woken in the dark and reached out for the reassurance of her presence, only to find that it wasn’t there. She guessed from the husk of resentment in his voice that he didn’t like being reliant on a stranger.
‘I was only out in the living room,’ Nina said as she put a fresh glass of water into his hand. ‘Do you know where you are?’
‘With you,’ he said, giving her a look that was simultaneously sly and triumphant.
‘No, I mean this place?’
He rubbed his head. ‘That doctor with the needle—he told me about a bird—no, an island—a little island near Auckland. But the bird was important, too….’ He trailed off, and Nina supplied the detail that had eluded him.
‘Shearwater Island.’ At least he still vaguely remembered Dave amongst the jumble of half-finished thoughts.
‘Shearwater Island,’ he repeated in a dutiful monotone that gave her no confidence that it would stick in his mind.
He raised the glass to his dry lips and drank greedily, the strong column of his throat rippling, drawing Nina’s fascinated gaze down to the hollow just above his collarbone where she could see the steady beat of his pulse.
Karl’s faded, V-necked Auckland University sweatshirt was loose on Ryan’s spare frame, sliding off one shoulder, and the soft, tan corduroy trousers were baggy in the legs and a few inches too short, but instead of making him look comical, the sloppy clothes seemed only to accentuate his air of natural arrogance. He was a man who was comfortable in his own skin, whatever he wore over it.
At
