Wife To A Stranger. Daphne Clair

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       CHAPTER ONE

      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 СКАЧАТЬ