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‘What was it about?’
‘Not handbags,’ she said. ‘Or shoes.’
‘I didn’t imagine for a minute it was.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No. It’s my fault for making uncalled-for comments on your handbag choices. Tell me about it.’
‘It was all tied up with one of Belle’s pet causes.’ He waited. ‘Street kids…’
‘The unwanted. You’re sure this was your sister-in-law’s pet cause?’
He was too damn quick…
‘She and her sister spent some time on the streets when they were children. Their stories put my pathetic whining in its place, I can tell you,’ she said quickly. ‘How’s your head, Jago?’
‘Still there last time I looked, Miranda.’
‘Your sense of humour is still intact, at least. Let me see,’ she said, cupping his face in her hands so that she could check it out for herself.
It had been so long since she’d touched a man’s hand, his face in this way. His lean jaw was long past the five o’clock stubble phase and she had to restrain herself from the sensuous pleasure of rubbing her palms against it. Instead, she pushed back his hair, searching out the injury on his forehead.
He’d really taken quite a crack, she discovered, remembering uncomfortably how she’d taunted him about that.
‘I’d better clean that up,’ she said, taking the last wipe from the pack.
‘I can—’
‘Tut…’ she said, slapping away his hand as he tried to take it from her.
‘I can do it myself,’ he persisted. ‘But why would I when I have a beautiful woman to tend me?’
She stopped what she was doing.
The crack on his head must have jarred his brains loose, he decided. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he wasn’t given to living dangerously, at least not where women were concerned.
Keeping it light, keeping his distance just about summed up his attitude to the entire sex, but ever since he’d woken to the sound of Miranda Grenville screaming in the dark it was as if he’d been walking on a high wire. Carelessly.
Maybe cheating death gave you the kind of reckless edge that had you saying the most outrageous things to a woman who was quite capable of responding with painful precision. A woman who, like a well-known brand of chocolate, kept her soft and vulnerable centre hidden beneath a hard, protective sugar shell.
‘You have no idea what I look like,’ she said crisply as she leaned into him, continued her careful cleaning of the abrasion. Enveloping him in her warm female scent.
Would her shell melt against the tongue, too? Dissolve into silky sweetness…
‘I know enough,’ he said, taking advantage of the fact that she had her own hands full to run the pad of his thumb across her forehead, down the length of her nose, across a well defined cheekbone. Definitely his brains had been shaken loose. ‘I know that you’ve got good bones. A strong face.’
‘A big nose, you mean,’ she said as, job done, she leaned back. ‘How does that feel now?’
That she was too far away.
‘You missed a bit just here,’ he said, taking her hand and guiding it an inch or two to the right. Then to his temple. ‘And there.’
‘Really?’ She slid her fingers across his skin. ‘I can’t feel anything. Maybe I should have the light.’
‘We should save the battery,’ he said. ‘You’re doing just fine. So, where was I? Oh, yes, your nose. Is it big? I’d have said interesting…’
‘You are full of it, Nick Jago.’
‘Brimful,’ he admitted, beginning to enjoy himself. ‘Your hair is straight. It’s very dark and cut at chin-length.’
‘How do you know my hair is dark?’ She stopped dabbing at his imaginary injuries… ‘Did you take a sneaky photograph of me?’
‘As a souvenir of a special day, you mean?’ It hadn’t occurred to him down in the blackness of the temple when his entire focus had been on getting them out of there. Almost his entire focus. Miranda Grenville had a way of making you take notice of her. ‘Maybe I should do it now,’ he suggested.
‘I don’t think so.’ She moved instinctively to protect the phone tucked away in her breast pocket. ‘Who’d want a reminder of this to stick on the mantelpiece?’ She shivered. ‘Who would need one? Besides, as you said, we need to conserve what’s left of the battery.’
His mistake.
‘I was talking about the light, not the cellphone but I take your point. But, to get back to your question, I know your hair is dark because if it had been fair then the light, feeble though it was, would have reflected off it.’
‘Mmm… Well, Mr Smarty Pants, you’ve got dark hair, too. It’s definitely not straight and it needs cutting. I saw that much when you struck your one and only match.’ Then, ‘Oh, and you’re left-handed.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ he demanded.
‘There’s a callus on your thumb. Here.’ She rubbed the tender tip of her own thumb against the ridge of hard skin. ‘This is the hand you use first. The one you reached out to me when I couldn’t make it across that last gap.’ She lifted it in both of hers and said, ‘This is the hand with which you held me safe.’
It was the hand with which he’d held her when she’d cried out to him to let her fall because she was not worth dying for. Because once, young, alone, in despair and on the point of a breakdown, she’d considered terminating a pregnancy?
Had she been punishing herself for that ever since?
‘You are worth it, Manda,’ he said, his voice catching in his throat. Then, ‘No, I hate that. You deserve better than some childish pet name. You are an amazing woman, Miranda. A survivor. And, whatever it is you want, you are worth it.’
‘Thank you…’ Her words were little more than a whisper and, in the darkness, he felt the brush of silky hair against his wrist, then soft lips, the touch of warm breath against his knuckles. A kiss. No, more than a kiss, a salute, and something that had lain undisturbed inside him for aeons contracted, or expanded, he couldn’t have said which. Only that her touch had moved him beyond words.
It was Miranda who shattered the moment, removing her hands from his, putting clear air between them. Shattered the silence, rescuing them both from a moment in which he might have said, done, anything.
‘Actually, I’m not the only one around here with an interesting nose,’ she said. Her voice was too bright, her attempt at a laugh forced. ‘Yours has been broken at some time. How did that happen?’ Then, archly, deliberately breaking the spell of that brief intimacy, ‘Or, more interestingly, who did it to you?’
‘You saw all that in the flare of a match?’ he asked.
‘You were looking at your temple. I was looking at the bad-tempered drunk I was unfortunate to have been trapped with.’
‘I was not drunk,’ he protested, belatedly grabbing for the lifeline she’d flung him. Stepping back from a brink far more dangerous than the dark opening that yawned a few feet away from them.
She shook her head, then, perhaps thinking that because he couldn’t see, he didn’t know what she’d done—and how had he known?—she said, ‘I know that now, but for a while back there you didn’t seem too sure.’
‘A crack on the head will do that to you.’
‘Concussion?’
‘I hope not. The treatment is rest and plenty of fluids.’
‘Thus speaks the voice of experience?’
‘Well, you know how it is.’
‘Er, no, actually, I don’t. I suspect it’s a boy thing.’ Then, presumably because there really wasn’t anything else to say about that, ‘And, actually, no, I didn’t see your nose. I felt it.’
‘Yes…’
That was it. How he’d known she’d shaken her head. He could feel the smallest movement that she made. Without sight, every little sound, every disturbance in the air was heightened beyond imagining and his brain was somehow able to translate them into a picture. Just as every tiny nuance in her voice was amplified so that he could not only hear what she was saying, he could also hear what she was not.
The air moved and he saw the quick shake of her head, the slide of glossy, sharply cut hair. He touched her face and saw a peaches and cream complexion. Kissed her and—
‘I felt it when I cleaned the dust from your face,’ she said, her rising inflexion replying to some uncertainty that she’d picked up in his voice. It was a two-way thing then, and he wondered what image came into her mind when he moved, spoke. When she touched him…
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