by Lynne Graham
‘Something smells good...’
At the sound of an unfamiliar male voice, Pixie almost leapt a foot in the air, her head swivelling with a jerk to focus on the strange man slowly spinning round the recliner in the unlit sunroom, where he had apparently been seated unnoticed by her.
‘Heaven must be missing an angel’ was the cheesiest pickup approach Pixie had ever received, but for the very first time she was looking at a man who might legitimately have inspired such a line with his sleek dark fallen-angel beauty. He was otherworldly in his sheer masculine perfection. Her heart was still beating very fast with fright and, striving to crush those inappropriate thoughts, she stepped forward. She collided involuntarily with the eyes of an apex predator—sharp, shrewd, powerful and dark as the night sky. ‘I didn’t see you in there...who are you?’ she asked as civilly as she could, fearful of causing offence to any of Steph’s housemates or their friends.
‘I’m Tor,’ he murmured. ‘I think I must have fallen asleep before I called a taxi to take me home.’
‘I didn’t know anyone was here. I’ve just come in from work and I was making some supper,’ Pixie confided. ‘Who are you visiting here?’
His brow furrowed. Slowly, he sank back down on the recliner. ‘My apologies... I don’t recall her name. A leggy redhead with an annoying giggle.’
‘Saffron,’ Pixie told him with concealed amusement. ‘But why did she just leave you in here?’
He shrugged. ‘She stormed off. I rejected her and it made her angry.’
‘You rejected...Saffron?’ Pixie queried in disbelief because Saffron, a wannabe actress, resembled a supermodel and turned heads in the street.
‘A misunderstanding,’ he corrected smoothly. ‘I thought I was coming to a party. She thought something else. I’m sorry. I’m rather drunk, not in proper control of my tongue.’
No way was he drunk!
Pixie was accustomed to dealing with surly drunks at A & E and usually they could barely vocalise or stand without swaying or cursing. He was speaking with perfect diction and courtesy and remained astute enough to smooth over the unfortunate impression he might have made in saying bluntly that he had rejected the other woman. All the same, she hadn’t thought there was a man born who wouldn’t jump at the chance of having sex with the gorgeous redhead. Presumably, Saffron had either sought the privacy of her own room upstairs to handle such a blow to her ego or she had gone out again, but Pixie could only be impressed by a man particular enough in his tastes to say no to a beauty like Saffron.
‘What are you cooking?’ he shot at her unexpectedly.
‘A cheese toastie,’ Pixie responded in an undertone as she lifted the lid, waved away the steam and reached for her plate.
‘It smells incredible...’
‘Would you like one?’ she heard herself ask and she wanted to slap herself for being so impressionable.
He was a complete stranger and she owed him nothing but, as her brother’s partner had warned her, she was a ‘nurturer,’ the sort of woman whom men, according to Eloise, would take advantage of. And Pixie had seen the evidence for that condemnation in her own nature. She did like to feed people; she did like to take care of them. Pleasing people, tending to their needs, satisfied something in her, a something that Eloise believed she should suppress out of self-interest.
‘I’d love that. I’m starving.’ He smiled at her and that smile locked her knees where she stood because it was like a galaxy of golden warmth engulfing her, locking his lean bronzed features into shocking beauty, releasing a flock of butterflies low in her tummy. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she castigated herself with self-loathing as she reached for the bread and butter again before saying, ‘Here...have this one... I’ll have the next.’
As she pushed the plate with a knife and fork across the island, he tugged out one of the high stools and settled into it. She busied herself with the sandwich maker, her pale skin pink while he watched her, and she could feel the weight of his regard like a brand. Nothing she had felt in Antony’s radius could compare to the thrumming level of awareness assailing her beneath the stranger’s gaze.
The hair was weird, there was no other word for it, Tor was reflecting, his gaze locked to those tumbling pale green curls lying tousled on her narrow shoulders, but if a woman could rock green hair, she was rocking it. She had the brightest blue eyes he had ever seen, the softest, pinkest mouth, the most flawless skin, but she was so undersized he could barely see her behind the barrier of the island.
‘What height are you?’ he asked curiously.
Pixie cringed. ‘About four ten...no tall genes in my family tree.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Why are you asking me that?’
‘I’m in an unfamiliar house with unknown occupants. I don’t want to find out that I’m keeping company with someone’s child, and you don’t look very old...’
‘I’m twenty-one,’ Pixie provided grudgingly. ‘Almost a fully qualified nurse. Totally grown-up and independent.’
‘Twenty-one is still very young,’ Tor countered mildly.
‘So, how old are you, old man?’ Pixie enquired teasingly, putting down the lid on the second toastie and relaxing back against the kitchen cabinets to watch him eat. ‘Coffee?’
‘Black, sweet. I’m twenty-eight,’ he told her.
‘And married,’ she noted without thought as the ring on his wedding finger glinted under the light and she switched on the coffee machine again. ‘What were you doing with Saffron? Sorry, none of my business... I shouldn’t have asked,’ she muttered, backtracking in haste from that unintentional challenge.
‘No offence taken. I’m a widower,’ Tor volunteered.
Pixie turned back to him, stirring the coffee and passing it to him. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
‘It’s OK,’ Tor said with a stiffness she recognised, the awkwardness of someone unaccustomed to dealing openly with the topic of grief. ‘It’s been five years since my wife and my daughter died.’
Pixie paled. ‘You lost your child as well?’
Pixie felt even more awkward, painfully aware of how she had felt earlier that evening when she had dealt with her first death at the hospital. The finality of a passing and the grieving family left behind scarred the staff as well. For a man to have lost both a wife and a child together was an enormous double blow and her heart squeezed on his behalf at the idea of such a huge loss.
Pale too beneath his bronzed skin, Tor jerked his chin down in silent confirmation.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.
‘Nobody ever mentions it now. For them it’s like it happened a hundred years ago,’ he muttered with perceptible bitterness.
‘Death makes people uncomfortable. They avoid discussing it often out of fear of saying the wrong thing.’
‘Or as if it might be contagious,’ Tor slotted in drily.
‘I know... My parents passed within a week of each other and even my friends avoided me at school when I went back,’ she told him with a grimace of recollection.
‘A car accident?’
‘No, they caught legionnaires’ disease on a weekend away. They were both diabetic with compromised immune systems and they didn’t go for treatment soon enough. They thought they’d caught some harmless virus and none of us knew any different.’ Pixie shifted a wordless shoulder in pained acceptance. ‘My father went first and Mum a day later. I was devastated. I had no idea how ill they were until it was too late.’
‘Is that why you’re doing nursing?’
‘Partially. I wanted to know more so that I could help people when they needed it and I like doing useful, practical stuff.’ Pixie sighed, a rueful smile tugging at her generous mouth. ‘And to be frank, I was also the sort of child who bandaged teddy bears and tried to raise orphaned baby birds. My brother calls it a save-the-world mentality.’
>
‘I have a brother too but we’re estranged,’ Tor heard himself volunteer, and wondered for the first time if that old saying about alcohol loosening the tongue could actually be true because he was gabbling like a chatterbox, which he was not and never had been. He was innately reserved, rather quiet outside working hours. Or was it her affecting him? Unthreatening and studiously unsexy as she was in her pale grey pyjamas adorned with little pink flamingos? And no sooner had he thought that than he had to notice the stupendously sexy thrust and sway of a pair of firm full breasts beneath her top as she clambered up on the stool to eat her toastie.
‘You’re estranged?’ Her big blue eyes clouded with sympathy. ‘That’s sad.’
‘No, it’s not. He slept with my wife!’ Tor bit out, shocking himself with that revelation, which had never crossed his lips before, not to anyone, not for any reason, a sordid secret he had planned to keep buried until the day he died.
Pixie’s eyes widened in shock. ‘Oh, my goodness...’ she gasped. ‘Your brother did that?’
‘He and I didn’t grow up together. We are not close,’ Tor acknowledged grudgingly. ‘But I could never forgive him for that betrayal.’
‘Of course, you couldn’t.’
That first confession having leapt from his tongue, Tor was discovering that for some inexplicable reason he could not hold back the rest. ‘On the night my wife died she admitted that she had fallen in love with Sev before we married but that she fought her feelings out of loyalty to me and assumed she would get over him.’
‘She still shouldn’t have married you,’ Pixie opined feelingly. ‘She should’ve told you she was having doubts before the wedding.’
‘That would certainly have been less devastating than the end result.’ His lean, bronzed face could have been sculpted out of granite, his dark-as-night eyes flinty and hard. ‘Finding out several years down the road that our whole life together was a fake, a lie, was much worse and...and I didn’t handle it well,’ he completed in a raw undertone.
‘I should think you were in shock.’ Pixie sighed, retrieving his coffee mug and moving to refill it.
‘Still doesn’t excuse me.’ The eyes she had believed were so dark focused on her absently and she saw the gleams of gold lightening them to bronze. Such beautiful eyes, fringed and enhanced by ridiculously long black lashes. He was shockingly attractive, she thought, struggling to concentrate and avert her attention from the perfect slash of his dark brows, the exotic slant of his high cheekbones and the fullness of his mouth.
‘Why? What did you do?’ she prompted.
‘When I arrived home, she was putting cases into her car. That was when she told me about the affair...at the very last minute. I had no suspicion that there was another man in her life but, after three years of what I had believed was a happy marriage, she was just going to leave me a note.’ His nostrils flared with disgust. ‘We had a massive argument. It was...chaotic,’ he selected roughly. ‘I barely knew what I was saying.’
‘Shock,’ she told him again. ‘It intensifies everything you feel but at the same time you’re not yourself. You’re not in control.’
‘I said a great deal I regret... I was cruel,’ Tor admitted unevenly, biting back the final shameful admission that Katerina had made, which had torn him apart: her insistence that the daughter he loved was not his child but had been fathered by her lover.
‘You weren’t prepared. You had no time to think.’
Warmed by her compassionate need to console him, he reached for her hand where it rested on the counter and squeezed it gently before withdrawing his touch again. ‘You may be able to save the world, but you can’t save me from a world of regret. Katerina raced upstairs to lift our daughter out of her cot. My wife was very worked up by that stage and in no condition to drive. I tried to reason with her, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Sofia was screaming and upset...’
His voice had become gruff and he lifted his hands to scrub at his face, wiping away the dampness on his cheeks, and her heart went out to him in that moment because she knew that he was recalling the guilt and powerlessness that grief inflicted. ‘It was all madness that night, madness and chaos,’ he continued. ‘Katerina drove off far too fast and the car skidded on the icy drive and careened into a wall.’
‘So, you saw it happen.’ Pixie was lost for words, full of sympathy for him, able to see that he was still torturing himself for what he had said and done that night in his own shock and distress.
‘And it was too late to change anything,’ he completed in a curt undertone.
Her eyes connected with his, awash with fellow feeling and understanding. ‘You recall every wrong thing you ever did or said to the person. Every emotion is exaggerated. When my mother was passing, I was beating myself up for being cheeky to her when she had told me to clean my room. That’s being human.’
Tor sat back tautly. ‘I don’t know why I’ve told you all this. I’ve never talked to anyone about it before.’
‘No one?’ Pixie pressed in surprise.
‘I didn’t want to tell anyone the truth about what happened that night. I didn’t want anyone judging Katerina or thinking less of her. The truth wouldn’t have eased the shock of her death and my daughter’s for anyone, least of all her own family. It would only have caused greater distress.’
‘But staying silent, forcing yourself to go on living a lie made it harder for you,’ Pixie slotted in with a frown.
‘I’ve got broad shoulders...and I really don’t know what I’m doing here,’ Tor confessed, the smouldering, breathtaking appeal of his bemused eyes and drowsy smile washing over her, imbuing her with a sense of connection she had never felt with any man before. ‘It must be true that it’s easier to talk to a stranger. But I think it’s time for me to order that taxi.’
‘Possibly,’ Pixie muttered self-consciously, scrambling off the stool in haste and beginning to tidy up to keep her hands busy. She stacked the dishwasher, darting round the island at speed to gather up the dishes before opening the tall larder cupboard to stow away the clutter of condiments that had been left sitting out.
‘What’s the address?’ he asked her as he paced several feet away with his phone in his hand, a deprecatory smile of great charm curving his mobile mouth at his having to ask that basic question that divulged the reality that he truly didn’t know where he was.
For a split second she couldn’t drag her eyes from him, that half-smile somehow enhanced by the black shadow of stubble framing it and defining his strong jawline, his eyes gleaming a glorious tigerish gold. There was a condensed power to him, a leashed energy that sprang out at her.
Pixie had to think for a second before trotting out the address in a rush, stumbling and correcting herself with the number, and she was already scolding herself for her reaction to him. He was a very, very good-looking guy and naturally she had noticed, but she had also immediately recognised that he was way, way out of her league. She was ordinary, he was something far superior, not only in the looks department, but also with his instinctive assurance and ingrained courtesy.
‘The taxi will be here in five minutes.’ Tor dug the phone back into his jeans and walked towards her.
‘I’ll wait outside. Thanks for feeding me...and for listening,’ he murmured ruefully. ‘I didn’t even ask you for your name.’
She laughed. ‘Pixie...’
His brows pleated as he stared at her. ‘Pixie?’
‘I was a very small, premature baby. Mum thought it was cute.’ Pixie wrinkled her tip-tilted nose, eyes blue as cornflowers gazing up at him.
Marvelling at the truth that she was barely tall enough to reach his chest, for he stood over six feet in height, he extended a lean brown hand. ‘I’m Alastor Sarantos but I’ve always been called Tor.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
As he swung away to leave, he walked head first into th
e larder cupboard door and reeled back from it, sufficiently stunned by the blow to his temple to grab the edge of the island to steady himself and stay upright. Pixie gasped and rushed over to him.
‘No...no, stay still, don’t move,’ she warned him. ‘You hit your head hard.’
His hand lifted to his temple in a clumsy motion and he blinked in bemusement. ‘That hurt,’ he admitted.
Guilt assailed Pixie as she glimpsed the still-swinging door, which she had neglected to close. It was her fault that he had been injured. ‘Can I check your head?’ she asked.
‘I’m fine,’ he told her, even as he swayed, and he frowned at her because, she reckoned, he was having difficulty focusing on her.
‘No, you’re not. Nobody could be fine after smacking their head that hard,’ she declared, running light fingers across his temple, feeling the bump in dismay while being relieved that he hadn’t cut himself and there was no blood. ‘You’re not bleeding but you are going to have a huge bruise. I think you should have it checked out at A & E because you probably have a concussion.’
‘I will be absolutely fine.’ Tor swore impatiently as he attempted to walk away and staggered slightly.
‘You’re still very dizzy. Take a moment to get steady. You can lie down in my room until the taxi arrives,’ Pixie murmured as she planted a bracing arm to his spine and directed him down the hall to the room next door. He towered over her, his big powerful frame rigid as he attempted to put mind over matter.
‘Are you feeling sick?’
‘No,’ he told her very drily.
No, big masculine men didn’t like to be knocked off balance by any form of weakness, she thought, feeling guiltier than ever about his plight and his doubtless aching head as she pushed open the door of her room and guided him over to the bed.
He lowered himself down and kicked off his shoes. Pixie set them side by side neatly on the rug. ‘You can nap. You seem to be thinking coherently.’
From his prone position, Tor rested dazed, long-suffering dark golden eyes on her anxious face. ‘I don’t want to be saved right now. Go save someone else,’ he urged.