Nobody's Child

Her shells flew, scattering on the sand. With a muffled cry, she toppled onto him.

He gasped with pain from her weight across his chest. Then he rolled over, so that his body crushed her.

His black, gritty hair dripped sand all over her pretty, pale gold face. All over her small, freckled nose.

His intention was to terrify her.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” she said and then she sneezed and dusted sand from her nose. “Sorry...”

He said, “Bless you.”

He noticed how warm she was. It was as if she’d brought summer with her.

He felt dizzy. Then he pitched forward. For a second, before he fainted, he felt the warm cushion of her breasts and the silken touch of her fingers gently stroking his hair.

When the blackness receded, he was wrapped in thick blankets. She had made a fire from driftwood and was bending over him and smiling anxiously. “Do you think you could drink some hot coffee?” she urged. “Then maybe in a minute, if you could try to walk, and I think you can...because I examined you...while you were unconscious, we could get you into the house. I’ve built a fire inside, too, and I’m sure by now it’s warm there.”

He smiled warily, teeth chattering, as she poured the coffee and lifted his head and brought the plastic mug to his trembling lips.

He sipped obediently.

When he was done, she said softly, sweetly, “Oh, good. Please, don’t be afraid. You’re hurt. And I want to help you. We have to get you out of your wet clothes. What’s left of them, anyway...”

Their eyes met again. She blushed shyly, her skin glowing like an angel’s.

He drank more coffee, the whole thermosful, and the warmth of the liquid filled him—or was it just the radiance of her smile that made winter change to summer?

He had never met anybody like her.

She was putting her arms around him and struggling to help him sit up when her sweet face blurred around the edges as once more he dissolved into a dizzying blackness.

His last pleading words to her were, “Don’t leave me.”

Cutter had never spent so much time lying down, being waited on and pampered. He had never wanted to.

For three days he had dwelt in a room scented heavily with gardenias and other summer flowers while Miss Rose had nursed him.

And he had relished every minute.

His enemy.

But, oh, how he had loved her coming to his bedroom to tend him with her gentle hands and her kind voice.

More than loved it. In his weakened state he had longed for it. Pined for the wild gardenia scent of her.

And every time she came into his room smelling of summer flowers, smiling and carrying another steaming tray of delicious, spicy hot food, he felt consumed by an inexplicable tenderness toward her. Did she flavor his meals with some magical ingredient that made it easy for her to charm him?

He had thought his beach house with its far-flung wings and modern lines too remote and boring to ever visit.

He never wanted to leave it now.

The phone was out. He found he liked feeling cut off from the world, his business, and from civilization. From the rigid rules that governed him, from the rules that made Miss Rose a highly unsuitable wife for a Lord.

The house seemed a natural thing atop the fragile dunes. It seemed to blend with the high wavy golden grasses that grew near it as well as with the salt marshes and their pungent, dank-smelling ponds behind the dunes. Each day since the storm had been warmer and more summery than the last. Now the island with its soft humid breezes and white beaches seemed to be weaving a lazy spell on both of them. Flowers bloomed everywhere. She gathered them in baskets and brought them inside.

Wrapped in a blanket, Cutter got out of bed and went to his chaise lounge near the fireplace and the window. He saw Miss Rose lying outside in the sun on his vast deck. Protected from the wind by a wall of sheer glass panels, she wore a skimpy white bikini while she pretended to read one of her grisly spy thrillers.

She had the most abominable literary tastes. She went for genre paperbacks with lurid covers that featured halfnaked people or lethal weapons, lightweight novels that always had happy endings. “Page turners,” she’d called them when he’d criticized. Page turners, hell—He knew that she was only pretending to read. He’d been watching her for an hour—indeed, he couldn’t take his eyes off her any time she was near. She hadn’t turned a single page.

He eyed the clock on the wall impatiently.

Two-thirty. Soon she would get up as she had every other afternoon.

Odd, how eager he was for her sunbath to end. For her to come back inside.

To him.

This avid craving was ridiculous.

They had absolutely nothing in common.

She read trash.

He preferred business journals, news magazines, newspapers and the occasional, really good literary novel.

“Newspapers and literary novels are depressing,” she had said.

“One should stay informed.”

“One should have fun, too.”

“Was that why you dropped out of college?”

“No. I told you. Mother got sick, and I had to help her. I wanted a degree more than anything.”

He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that his finance degrees were from the best eastern schools.

She was a struggling caterer. He hadn’t told her he was a multimillionaire. Nor had he told her his family had been wealthy and socially prominent for generations.

And, of course, he hadn’t told her he was Cutter Lord, her fiancé’s spoiled half brother.

Nor had she confessed she was a small-town bastard from Westville, Texas. That her mother had been called Alligator Girl and Witch Woman, that she, Cheyenne, had hung out in the salt marshes tending to her mother’s gators and strange wild things until she was eighteen. Then there’d been some sort of trouble, and she’d left home forever.

No, his private detectives had told him all that.

She had told him that she loved flowers and all wild things.

He eyed the clock again.