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‘I’m sorry.’ She bit her lip. ‘I know I’m not supposed to pressure you—’
‘No, I’m sorry…that I can’t do what you want. I’m trying to remember, but when I do…my head feels as if it’s about to explode.’
He couldn’t have said anything more calculated to earn her compassion. She knew exactly how that felt. ‘Then don’t try. Go back to sleep. The next time you wake up, it’ll be morning and everything will be all right.’
‘Promise?’ His sceptical smile was extremely wry. He might be confused, it told her, but he wasn’t stupid. They both knew it was a promise she couldn’t make.
The smile dramatically altered his face, softening the taut severity of his features, banishing the grim rigidity that had projected an impression of tightly suppressed hostility and turning him from an object of wary curiosity and compassion into a man of potentially dangerous attractiveness. His face was too lived-in to be classically handsome, but his experience would no doubt add to his charm.
‘Things always look clearer in daylight,’ she said, resorting to a feeble cliché.
‘Clearer but not necessarily better,’ he murmured. His hand moved from her waist and emerged from the covers to softly brush her cheekbone. ‘It looks like I wasn’t the only one who was caught in the wars tonight,’ he said. ‘You have quite a bump here.’
His touch left a streak of fire on her skin and her fingers flew up to check the tender skin.
‘By the way,’ Dave had said as he was on his way out the door, ‘it’s probably a little late to be very effective now, but you should try some ice on that cheek of yours, otherwise you could end up with a beauty of a black eye tomorrow!’
She felt gingerly around the slight puffiness. ‘I don’t know how it got there. I must have knocked it on something…so much was going on…’ she babbled, not wanting to tell Ryan that he had been the one who hurt her.
His fingers lingered along the delicate line of her jaw. ‘You have lots of tiny scratches, too.’
‘Leaves, a-and twigs…they were blowing around like mad,’ she stuttered as his thumb gently skimmed under her lower lip.
‘Such smooth, translucent skin. It’s a pity to see it marred,’ he said, and she wondered if she was crazy to sense a threat in his abstract praise. ‘Do they sting?’
If she said yes, would he offer to kiss them better? The thought popped into her head to be savagely squelched.
‘No…I—I can’t feel them at all,’ she said truthfully, trying to master her wayward imagination. Apart from the faint throb on her cheekbone, all she was aware of feeling was the soft friction of his cool finger pads caressing her face, slowly, as if he were a blind man shaping her image in his mind. She shifted her head back on the pillow, escaping the disturbing touch.
There was a tiny pause as their eyes meshed, his intently curious, hers wide with dismay. ‘I’m sorry. Am I trespassing on someone else’s territory?’ he asked gravely, letting his relaxed hand drop to the pillow.
Her green eyes flared with feminist annoyance. ‘Yes…mine!’
His gravity turned to sleepy amusement. ‘So…you live here all alone?’
In the unlikely event he turned out to be a serial killer, she was telling him nothing he didn’t already know. ‘Mostly.’ Let him make what he liked of that!
‘You and the dashing masked hero.’
‘Who?’ For a moment, she thought his wits had gone wandering again. ‘Oh, you mean Zorro? Well, officially he belongs to my landlord, so his legal address is next door, but Ray doesn’t seem to mind that he spends most of his time over here.’
‘You don’t own this place yourself? How do you live? What do you do?’
He mightn’t be able to answer questions, but he could certainly ask them! She was tempted to tease him that she was independently wealthy. ‘I paint—watercolours, not houses.’
A muscle flicked along the line of his jaw, roughened by a bloom of black stubble. ‘You’re an artist.’
She watched him turning the idea over in his head.
