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“You don’t want to take this further?”
She stared numbly at him, hectic color burning her cheeks. “N-not now,” she said.
“What are you afraid of? It’s not like you.”
Capri tried to smile, but her lips trembled. “Isn’t it? I wouldn’t know.”
“You don’t remember ever making love?”
“No,” she admitted. “I suppose that seems silly, when you…”
Her voice trailed off. He knew her intimately, had for more than two years.
“No…it’s not silly,” Rolfe said. “Kind of bizarre, but I find it rather intriguing.”
DAPHNE CLAIR lives in subtropical New Zealand, with her Dutch-born husband. They have five children. At eight years old she embarked on her first novel, about taming a tiger. This epic never reached a publisher, but metamorphosed male tigers still prowl the pages of her romances. She has won literary prizes for short stories and nonfiction, and has also published poetry. As Laurey Bright she writes for Silhouette. Daphne welcomes letters to Box 18240, Glen Innes, Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Wife To A Stranger
Daphne Clair
IT WAS a small room. The man standing at the window with his back to her looked big by contrast. His broad shoulders hunched slightly under a crumpled white linen shirt, and his hands were thrust into the pockets of navy trousers, tautening the fabric over lean hips.
From the bed she could see only a washed-denim sky, the pale, peeling trunk of a gum tree, and a dusting of opaque clouds between the green cotton curtains. She wondered what he was looking at.
Pulling her gaze from him, she examined the room. There was a hard-looking tan leather chair, with a burgundy tie draped carelessly over its back as though the man had discarded it there some time ago. On the plain cream wall opposite the bed hung a cheap print of an English country cottage. A white-painted locker by her bed held a water jug and a glass.
It was a hospital room.
Perhaps she made some faint sound, or he heard a stirring of the bedclothes. The man turned, starkly silhouetted against the light from outside.
‘Capri,’ he said, his voice deep and unsurprised. ‘So you decided to come back.’
‘Back?’
Her voice sounded strange, scarcely more than an uncertain whisper in the quiet of the room.
Taking his hands from his pockets, the man crossed the narrow space to the bed. ‘To the land of the living. You’ve been out for some time.’
‘Out’
His quickly checked movement might have denoted impatience. ‘Unconscious. Do you remember what happened to you?’
She started to shake her head, winced. ‘No.’
He leaned forward a little—brown, enigmatic eyes raking her face, a strand of nearly-black hair falling onto his forehead. ‘I’ll call a nurse.’
He reached across her, finding the electric signal button with a decisive thumb. A whiff of his masculine scent entered her nostrils, a mixture of warmth, soap, sweat and shirting. She saw he hadn’t shaved lately; his cheeks were fuzzed with shadowy growth.
One hand on the metal bed frame behind her, he paused, his face only inches from hers, his nostrils flaring as if he in turn had been caught by her scent. She looked into his eyes, dark and lustrous, with gold flecks about the irises. His mouth, firm and hard despite the generously chiselled curve of the lower lip, momentarily quirked at one corner, and then he withdrew, standing tall and aloof and thrusting his hands back into his pockets.
She took an unsteady breath, and her parched lips began to frame a question, but then a woman in a white uniform came hurrying on rubber soles, and made for the bedside. ‘Well, well. So you’ve finally woken up!’
The nurse’s fingers closed about her wrist, found the pulse. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Not…so good.’
The man moved again, very slightly. The nurse studied her watch as she counted, then placed the hand she held back on the coverlet. ‘You’ve been knocked about a bit. But we’ll soon